When a Successful Business Isn’t Enough
When a Successful Business Isn’t Enough
There are some conversations that stay with you long after you’ve forgotten most of the detail around them. During the three and a half years I spent researching what eventually became The Minerva Manifesto, I spoke to many women about their experiences of business, work, money and success. One particular conversation still comes back to me.
The conversation I never forgot
I was talking to a woman who had been running her own business for around eighteen months. She was doing well. The business had customers, there was demand for what she was doing and nothing she was telling me suggested that it was struggling commercially.
Then she told me she was closing it.
I was genuinely surprised and wanted to understand why. As we talked, it became clear that there wasn’t really a problem with the business at all. The problem was what her working life had become.
She lived alone and didn’t have family nearby. Many of her friends were people she knew through her previous working life and, of course, they were still at work during the day. She had gone from being part of a workplace, with people around her and all the everyday conversations that come with that, to spending most of her working days by herself.
She missed people. So much so that she had decided she would rather close a business that was working and return to employment.
When business success doesn’t feel successful
I remember thinking about that conversation afterwards because it challenged the way we tend to talk about business success. If I had asked only the obvious business questions, I might have concluded that she was doing rather well. The customers were there. The business was viable. She had done the difficult bit of getting something established and making it work.
Except it didn’t work for her.
I think that’s an important distinction, and one we don’t make often enough.
We have plenty of ways of measuring whether a business is successful. We look at turnover, profit, customers, growth and all the other things that tell us whether the business works commercially. They matter. Of course they do.
But there is another question alongside them: does the business work for the person who is running it?
What does the person running the business need?
When we start a business, quite rightly, we spend a lot of time thinking about the people we’re going to serve. What do they need? What problem are we solving? Will they pay for it? How will we reach them? We work out our costs and prices and hopefully pay attention to whether the thing we’re creating has a realistic chance of making money.
What we don’t always consider with the same care is what the person running the business needs.
I don’t just mean how much money we need to earn or how many hours we want to work. I mean the much more ordinary things that affect how we experience our days. Do we like working alone? Do we need people around us? Do we enjoy having somewhere to go in the morning? Do we need stimulation and conversation? Do we want collaboration? How much variety do we need? What makes a working day feel good?
These can seem like small considerations next to revenue forecasts and marketing plans, but they aren’t particularly small when they make up your life.
One of the promises of self-employment is freedom, although I’ve become increasingly interested in what we actually mean by that word. Working from home might be one person’s idea of complete freedom and another person’s idea of misery. A diary with very few appointments might feel wonderfully spacious to one person and unbearably lonely to someone else.
Neither person has designed business incorrectly. They simply need different things.
Self-awareness changes how we design our businesses
That is why I keep returning to self-awareness when I talk about business. The better we understand ourselves, the more intelligently we can design the way we work. Not according to somebody else’s picture of the perfect business, but around the reality of who we are and the life we want to have.
That doesn’t mean every preference has to dictate every business decision. A business still has to function commercially. There will always be things we would rather not do and compromises we have to make.
But there is a difference between compromise and repeatedly building ourselves out of the equation.
For me, this is where self-awareness becomes practical rather than something abstract. Understanding ourselves gives us information. We can use that information when we decide how we want to work, who we want to work with, how we structure our days and what kind of business we actually want to build.
It also allows us to notice when something isn’t working before we assume the whole business must be wrong.
Why connection matters in self-employment
The woman I spoke to had built something customers wanted, but somewhere in the process she had lost something she needed: people.
I suspect this is one reason conversations have remained such an important part of Minerva. The original research began with conversations over coffee, and over the years I’ve seen again and again what happens when women have somewhere they can talk properly about business. Not simply exchange business cards or deliver a polished explanation of what they do, but actually talk.
A conversation can give us an idea we hadn’t considered. It can lead to a recommendation, an introduction or a collaboration. It can help us see a problem differently. It can also do something much less measurable but equally valuable: remind us that we aren’t sitting in our respective businesses figuring everything out alone.
Connection doesn’t look the same for everyone either. Some of us want lots of interaction; others want much less. The point isn’t that there is a prescribed amount of connection we all need. It is knowing enough about ourselves to recognise what we need and creating space for it in the way we work.
Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life.
The phrase that eventually came to express so much of The Minerva Manifesto was Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life.
I don’t see those as three separate ambitions. The interesting part is the relationship between them.
A business needs to make money if it is going to survive. It needs customers and a commercially viable proposition. But it also creates a working life for the person who owns it. Understanding what we need from that working life is therefore not separate from building a successful business. It is part of designing one that we might actually want to keep.
I don’t know what happened to the woman after our conversation or whether she ultimately returned to employment. But I have never forgotten what she taught me.
A business can work perfectly well on paper and still not work for the person running it.
And sometimes the thing that needs changing isn’t the business idea at all. It is the way we have built our life around it.
Explore The Journey
The Journey is an opportunity to explore your own relationship with business, money, success and life, beginning with greater awareness of yourself and the choices you are making.
