Achieving Business Success Through Your Team
What does it mean to achieve business success through your team?
A lot of small business owners often feel the pressure to succeed is all down to them no matter what.
Ultimately, yes, the buck does stop with the business owner – however business success is something that everyone in the business could be progressing and striving for.
Achieving business success through your team is about surrounding yourself with the right people, harnessing their strengths and ensuring that you’re creating frameworks that support them to succeed.
It’s also about letting go of the misconception that you always need to be on the ground in your business for it to be successful. The biggest key factor to making this a reality is hiring the right people who you can trust to be there when you’re not and keep your business goals tracking.
How do you measure business success?
Measuring business success is integral to understanding what’s going well and what needs to be improved.
Most small businesses don’t have a firm process for measuring business success in a holistic way and rely on the profit margins to guide them.
Business success is most useful when measured to the values of the business owner because we all have different interpretations of success. Asking yourself questions can be helpful to get a clearer picture of how you could measure business success more holistically. What do you value, and how does your business support you to live your life? Does your business allow you enough quality time with your loved ones or does it suck up every available hour of your day? Business success is most obviously and commonly measured by profit, revenue and sales, but should also include client satisfaction and internal satisfaction.
Revenue, profit and sales
These are key pillars that indicate business success and important ones to consider as without cash flowing into your business, it’ll be a challenge to last the long haul. Revenue, profit and sales are important indicators but they’re only one of three main elements that add up to your business success.
Client satisfaction
Client satisfaction is becoming increasingly more important as a key pillar to measure business success – how happy and engaged are your clients with your business and services and/or products? Do they recommend you? Will they come back? What is it that they love (or don’t love) about your business? Listening to your customers is one of the simplest ways to keep tabs on how your business is tracking.
Internal satisfaction
This is such a crucial measure for your business success and it’s all about how your team feels about the work they deliver. Do they feel connected? Do they feel supported? Do they feel like they’re doing a good job and making the impact they want to through your business? Often a strong values alignment between you, your business and your team will help elevate your team to strive for the same success that you also desire through your business.
What’s the cost of success?
Most small business owners will know the tension between saying yes and no to opportunities and the fine line, especially in the early days, of saying no while you’re trying to break even and then turn a profit.
Knowing what the cost of success is in your life can help you navigate how often you say and, even more importantly, how often you say no.
I know this experience firsthand having founded and rapidly scaled a successful HR consulting business from the ground up. My business grew year on year with a growing team and if we had stayed on that trajectory, we would have hit seven figures in no time. But what was the cost?
My wake-up call came from my team who saw me heading straight for burnout. Both my children went from being born in the hospital to my office – not home, to my office. That’s how all-consuming my business had become and the cost of success for me was being present and attentive to my personal life – to the people in my life outside of my business.
I did experience burnout eventually and even though my business success was feeding my business success it wasn’t feeding success in any other area of my life. It was actually taking from other areas of my life, leaving them depleted.
Self-care is something I had to learn the hard way – I’m no good to my business if I’m not functional. Self-care wasn’t selfish, it was actually vital and the only person that could prioritise that was me. Mental health is much more openly spoken about than it was back then, but it can be one of the first things small business owners can sacrifice in the pursuit of success.
So, while you’re striving for business success through your team, be really clear on understanding what the cost of success is for both you and your people every time you create a new goal and exceed it.
The key elements to team success
There are a few key ingredients to achieving business success through your team.
- Plan
Planning should underpin everything you do even if there are still lots of unknowns or variables.
If you're not planning towards what success looks like, you’ll achieve a different version of success than the one you're aiming for and might end up somewhere else altogether. Planning doesn’t have to be in isolation. Being able to tweak and be responsive to the feedback you get in real time allows you to leverage opportunities to succeed – but you need a plan first to know where you’re going.
- People
Bringing the right people into your organisation is a fundamental part of achieving success that a lot of small business owners miss or rush, often hiring out of desperation because they’re so overwhelmed rather than hiring with intention and anticipation as the business grows.
- Timing
You can hire the best person for the job, but if it's the wrong time for your business, if you don't have the workload for them, if you don't have the time to onboard them properly if you don't have anyone to train them or you are not going to spend the time training them, then it's going to be the wrong time.
The right people won’t stay in a business that isn’t ready to receive them, onboard them and support them – so that’s on you to really step into a leadership headspace and take responsibility for your team. The right people also won’t stay if the role isn’t right for them – so be crystal clear on expectations.
So, it comes down to planning well and getting the right people into the right roles at the right time.
Once you've got them there, knowing how to leverage and get the most out of them, if you do all those three things well, you will build a team that is going to drive your business success.
An invitation to join a thriving business community
If you’re ready to achieve business success through your team with the right structures, I’d love for you to join us in our free Facebook Group where you can connect with other like-minded business owners, leaders and managers to discuss all things HR: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hrsupportaustralia