I believe at the end of the day everyone wants to achieve a better life. But the idea of “success” is highly individualised. This article touches on ways we might define and work towards achieving a better life from your business.
If we focus only on business performance, the risk is we reduce our view of what success means to us as individuals. We get stuck discussing specific ‘smart’ objectives rather than the broader vision of success we have for ourselves and our life.
This is why in my consulting work, whether it’s focused on strategic planning or business improvement, my standard first question with a potential new client is what does success look like to you.
With some prompting and probing – see How to Enrol More Clients with A Simple Laddering Conversation for more on that – we can get to the bottom of the bigger vision of your business in terms of how you want your life to be.
I believe broad business objectives are really very personal and quite different for everyone.
Success to you might be a broad goal such as having a bigger house so you can start a family, from where we’d look back to what’s needed financially to make that better life milestone happen then work forward again from there.
Or success might be a specific financial target such as 20% revenue increase, from where we’d look forwards towards how that would impact your life so we’re clear on the bigger goal too.
So how clear are you on what “a better life” means to you? How would your business need to operate? How would it need to perform? How quickly do you want that to happen? And what support do you need to make it happen?
Once you have that dialled in, even if just a little, work back from that.
Defining how to achieve a better life from your business means setting out the short, intermediate and long term indicators of success, so you can see the progression towards your bigger vision.
This are the foundations we lay down in our iSuccess Achiever programme with the additional option of mentoring to help you work through each milestone, one step at a time.
