Defining Success for Yourself

First, if you are running a firm that makes money, does good work, with people you (usually) enjoy being around, the odds are stellar that you are a remarkable human and my hat is off to you.

For the rest of you, I wonder if we each need to rethink our own definition of success every once in a while. And by the way, if you don’t define it for yourself, there are plenty of people writing books or posting all over LinkedIn who will define it for you.

If you let the client define success for you, it’s adding service offerings to expand their relationship with you, and hiring more and more people to do the work that they gladly want to pay you for.

If you let employees define success for you, it can look suspiciously like solving each individual problem as it comes up rather than doing the hard work of standing on their own by learning and following processes and being accountable.

If you let peers define success for you, it may look like hockey stick growth curves on your way to a (hopeful) marvelous exit.

You’re in Charge

So when did you exercise what economists call “agency” and then suddenly hand it over to other people?

Hey, I think you ought to listen carefully to the signals the market is sending, be responsive to your team, and learn from peers, but my goodness, people.

You are not running an orphanage and this is not a democracy. Your little band of merry warriors came together to solve a specific thing:

“We are here to do [some expert thing] effectively for [a specific] type of client. In that pursuit, we will build a team of people who can pull that off and earn a handsome reward with integrity. And our experience working together will be formative.”

Defining Success

Let me take a stab at this. You’ll probably define success a little different, and that’s okay. I don’t care if you agree with my definition as much as whether or not you have your own.

Success is doing honest work that impacts our clients and pays us well to reward that and to keep us engaged and be around for the future. That work is best done by a team of often very different people who are united by that same desire and who want to support each other with effort, honesty, and integrity. Furthermore, success comes with a fence around that effort, and yields extra profit, so that we don’t have to think too much about work when we aren’t working.

I just wrote that out without much thought and without any edits, so I know it can be tweaked into a much better statement.

Your Role in that Success

Here’s where it gets tricky, too, because the goal of success can be the same whether you are a small firm or a larger firm. But your role in that success is going to look very different.

In a bigger firm, your job is monitoring financial performance, solving the new business problem, innovating for the future, and embracing the fact that you are in the people business.

That’s your mission, whether you accept it or not, and if you don’t accept it, your firm is going to flounder, you aren’t going to love going to work, and however much money you’re making is not going to buy enough drinks to smother the whining.

I’d whisper this in your ear: “decide what you want for next year, be willing to make the tough choices that will often make things worse before they are better, and try to shape your life as an actor rather than an acted upon.”Buckle up for next year. The thundering hooves you hear might be the calvary coming to rescue you, or it might not be. Either way, define success on your own. You’ve already built something that very few people are capable of building, and so the odds are good that you can make whatever course corrections make sense.