How Do You Define Success?

When you are new to business it is important to know how you are going to measure your success. We all have this theory, or belief, or hope, that we will make lots of money but the reality does not always reflect this in the early stages of business, especially if your business is you, your hands, your knowledge, your time. In the health service industry all of the above applies!

So I think it is important when we are starting out, to create some measures around success so that when it all gets too hard and we want to pack up and leave our business dream we have a tool that we can look at and rate ourselves against.

The obvious first calling is money. We always want to measure ourselves as successful against the money we earn. While I can agree it is a valuable tool, I do not like to use it as the only tool (I would have given up years ago if I used only money as a guide to my success!). We all dream of being a Millionaire, I suspect, and when it got too hard for me I decided that I would have to marry a millionaire if I could call myself that! I was advising a friend today that if she wants to be a millionaire, being a massage therapist is not going to cut it! I suggested she marry two half-millionaires to increase her chances of success!!

So have a think about what other measures you could use to gauge whether you are being successful or not and make a list. Stick it up on the wall if you like and whenever you sit down to evaluate your business (a good regular habit to get into, be it monthly or quarterly) take it down and rate yourself against it.

Here are some measures I like to use:

Happiness Scale - Rate myself Happy from 0, Not Happy to 10, Best Ever Happy. If I find myself scoring 5 then I can ask myself why that is, or what do I need to do to be higher? Sometimes I have had to compare my 3 rating to the question "if I worked full time for someone else, 9-5 Monday to Friday, how happy would I be?" Often that minus 10 score would make me feel better about the 3!!
Am I paying my bills as close to their due date as possible. While this is related to money it is not about my drawings/pay or my profit margin. It is about bottom line scraping through! I recall a time maybe 11 years ago when the only money I had on me could afford 2 rolls of 1 ply toilet paper. I cried. In a couple of days after seeing a client or 2 I could have done better, but needing toilet paper that day and able to afford only 1 ply was a heartbreaker. Every time I now purchase 3 Ply toilet paper in bundles of 20, I sigh a relief of how far I have come in business!
How many positive comments have I had from clients or colleagues? The odd thank you card, the pot plant my cleaning lady gave me because I gave her a free massage, the comment someone might say to your face or tell someone else and you hear it 3rd party ... These are all good. Keep evidence of this as it is very easy in the hard times to forget the good times! It is sometimes automatic for people to complain about things, but they don't always think to be thankful. I was at breakfast at the Waterside Cafe last Summer and there was a family with 12 children (12 children!!) ranging in age from 3 years to about 12. I guessed they were cousins and their parents sat on a separate table nearby with one eye on the kids and one on their breakfast. I was so impressed by the good behaviour of these children I felt compelled to commend the parents for their great parenting skills. They were respectful of each other, talked quietly amongst themselves and even shared (both boys and girls) the chasing after the 3 year old who couldn't sit still as long as they could. Now, I do not have a lot of patience when it comes to kids in cafes or restaurants, so I really had to thank them for their good training;

So take some time to sit down and look at all the different variables you could use to measure your success against. Then create some way of measuring it.

Important above all of this is knowing what it is you want. Do you have a 10 year goal, a 5 year goal that is half way there, a 2 year goal and a one year goal? I find it useful to start in the future and then look back. Standing in the accomplished goal, what did you have to achieve to get there, and then create that as the Milestone Goals. If you do not know where you are going, how can you know if you are succeeding or not? I laugh when I say to people "how are you" and they respond "I'm getting there". Like, getting where? Closer to death or do you have a goal to reach before that?

Sophia Cull, Practice Manager, Massage Therapist for 16 years, second year student of a 3 year Advanced Diploma Ayurveda (at the time of writing 2016)