As you are building your brand, you don’t think about how to manage success in your small business.
You struggle, sometimes for years, to get your small business off the ground. You plan, market, sell, schmooze. You spend long hours with little rest.
Then suddenly it comes: Success!
Do you have a plan for managing your success?
Success brings with it another set of problems. Too much paperwork, too many customers wanting products and services quickly, too many prospective clients tugging at your sleeves. Never enough time to sit back and create a strategy or direction for the future.
As you grow and become successful, if you don’t have a strategy for how to manage success in your small business, you’ll lose all the momentum you’ve built. Whether you’re already successful or moving rapidly toward success, you need a strategy for dealing with the demands.
Here are 11 tips for managing your success wisely:
- Celebrate your success. Big or small, each success must be celebrated. It doesn’t matter if you shout out a little “Whoopie!” or if you call your best friend to share the news. Just take time to celebrate each success which will help build the momentum for more success to come.
- Don’t choke. Choking is an emotional reaction to success. It’s a subconscious sabotaging of your success because you believe at some level you don’t deserve the success. Instead, express gratitude for each small success and admit that the success came because you stepped into the arena, not because of luck. Sometimes you choke because of fear: can you keep up the pace? (Read my blog post, Let’s Talk About Fear.)
- Don’t become complacent. Just because you’ve had one small success doesn’t mean you can sit back on your laurels. Stick to your plan for growth and the dream of the business and lifestyle you’ve always wanted. Part of managing success is taking time to learn new things about your industry, or learn new business skills that will take you into the future.
- Learn from your success. We are all told to learn from our failures. Now is the time to manage success and take time out to learn from your successes. What did you do right that got you where you are today? Which pieces of your success brought you the most fulfillment and happiness?
- Decide if you want to stay at the present level or grow your business further. Once you’ve had a big success it’s time to decide if you’re finally at the level where you’ve always wanted to be, or if there’s still another goal you want to go after. Sometimes we just pile success upon success without realizing that we created the life we wanted 5 years ago and the rest has just been “busy work.”
- Take stock of the balance between your personal life and your business life. Often success comes with a lot of personal sacrifices. Take time now to see where your whole life might be out of balance and make a commitment to have a whole, complete, successful life, not just a successful business. What’s the point to manage success in your small business if you don’ also manage success in your personal life, too?
- Choose only the real opportunities that come across your desk, and avoid the “good ideas” that won’t help you maintain or grow your business. With a high level of success, the panic that you’ll never have enough tends to recede into the distance. Once this fear subsides, you can take a look at the offers that come your way and decide if they are a “true opportunity” that will take you forward or just a “good idea” that doesn’t need to be acted upon by you.
- Share your success lessons with others. Take time to share your story with others so that they can learn from your successes and failures. Give back to the community and to the people who are just getting started as a way to share your wisdom and belief about abundance.
- Take a look at how your office runs. Is there any process that should change? Is there anything that can be automated? Now is the time to put some energy into the administrative side of your business so that it can continue to run smoothly into the future.
- Create a new business plan and 3-year goal. What’s next for you and your business? Is it time to grow to a new level? Or perhaps move in a different direction? Offer new products and services to diversify your revenue stream? Stop selling products and services that are underperforming?
- Watch out for saboteurs. Some people in your life will not be happy about your success because they feel threatened or jealous of it. Sometimes people are both pleased about your success but unhappy because it shows them that they have not achieved that level of success themselves. Pay attention to how people react to your success and surround yourself with people who are truly happy for you and what you’re creating in your life.
Sometime handling success is harder than handling failure. By taking time to celebrate your success and pay attention to the lessons it offers, success can be more deeply meaningful and fulfilling than you can ever expected.
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