7 Ways to Measure True Success

 

1. Profitability

While it's clear that when your business is making money - it means some measure of success, especially if there is money left over after you cover all your expenses. You may have even turned the corner from months of being in the red. However, your true measure of success will be being in the black, for a year or longer. From there, your true measure of success will be creating sustainable profitability that continues long into the future.

2. Number of Customers: 

Every company needs customers. There's no point in time when I've decided I have enough customers. Your measure of success should show a growing customer base with a steady stream of leads in the pipeline. Those pioneering customers were exciting to me, but when I began to see more and more people show an interest and buy what I was selling, I knew that what I created was successful. The countless hours of research and marketing had finally paid off.

3. Satisfaction Level of Those Customers

Beyond the quantity of customers, my true measure of success was really more about how happy I was making the customers I had.

Their satisfaction would mean that future customers might come from what they had to say to their friends, family, and colleagues rather than from my research and marketing. The ability to satisfy my customers meant that what I learned about them and their needs was being applied correctly to the service I was offering them. It's vital to also create customer service policies for your company so that everyone that works within the organization understands the role they will play in fulfilling the needs of customers. It only takes one negative customer experience to immediately put the skids on that true success number you built up and were having in terms of customer satisfaction.

4. Employee Satisfaction

Happy, motivated employees tell you a lot about your real success. When they are satisfied, they are busy working hard. After all, their productivity is the engine that fuels the business. If employees are smiling at customers, then the customer feels good. If each employee is working beyond their role, then the business flourishes.

5. Your Satisfaction

This is a tough one for me because my entrepreneurial spirit and personality are basically never satisfied. This is because I have often paired satisfaction with settling. In actual fact, I've learned over the years that I can be satisfied and still pursue more.

It has been a good lesson for me to realize it's good to feel satisfied with the results of the business as it develops and celebrate those "wins" along the way. I love to work. It was a learning curve to find out how to balance satisfaction with results, and with my burning desire to do more.

6. Level of Learning and Knowledge

While it may seem like a strange way to measure success, it's really not -- given the fact that it's this learning and knowledge that provide you with the market, customer, competitor and economic intelligence to help shape your strategy. This continual learning doesn't just come from what I've read or observed; it's also about practical experience that I've gained by putting my strategy to work and witnessing the outcome. That means that even failure is necessary in order to achieve a certain level of learning and knowledge..

7. How You Spend Your Time

The reason determining how you spend your time each day is a real measure of success is because this tells you if you have been able to delegate, create an efficient organization, and it determines what your main priorities need to be as the leader of a company. I tend to work all the time, but what I realized is that I could be more successful by prioritizing tasks and letting go of some of the less important tasks. I could let others take the lead, which builds them into a fantastic, trusted team.

SOURCE:inc.com