There’s plenty of measures you can measure in your business. And only one of them is money. And, in fact, if you’re smart you actually know that it’s never about ‘the money’, it’s about profit which is the money left over after you’ve paid for everything else. So for sure, measure your profit (and make sure you have some!) if you want to see how your business is doing.
But there are other measures too:
- There’s time
- There’s enjoyment
- There’s results
- There’s connection
- There’s influence
- There’s impact
- There’s all sorts of things
And you’ll know what measures are important to you. Some people really aren’t interested in world domination and they just want to get results each and every time they work with someone, no matter how small a scale that is.
You may just want to serve the perfect cup of coffee to every single customer... brilliant–keep doing that and people will be delighted (and come back).
You might want to enjoy your business and so you only ‘do’ and ‘sell’ ways of doing your Thing that you enjoy doing, or you’re happy to make less profit by delegating the bits you don’t like to other people.
Perhaps time is your most precious commodity–you want to spend your time away from the business as much as you want to have a business that works–so your measure of success could be about how automated and hands off you can get your business to be (while you take time off to do what it is you want to do instead).
But you must know your measure. So often I see people pick the measure of money (hence so many marketing headlines are focused on that as the draw card). But money might not be your measure. And you’ll know that if you make the money you set out to and you’re still not happy. It might be you traded off more time to make more money, so in fact in your measure you’re worse off...
**think about that for a minute** you might be working towards a goal in your business that’s actually going to make your real measure worse! That said, there isn’t always a straight trade off, but without knowing what measures you want to measure and what measure signals success to you then you’ll have no way to factor that in...
If you know having lots of time off and getting results are the best measures for your business working brilliantly for you, then you’ll build a business model that supports that. If it’s all about the money, you’ll not worry about the time you invest. If everything is about the results, you’ll probably invest a lot of time, money and energy in new learning, trying out and testing new things and perhaps make less profit in the end... but you’ll get better results.
So don’t just measure your business success in terms of the money it makes unless that is your measure of your success. When you know your measures you know your goals and you won’t ever compromise to get them.
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