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Business success is dependent on a solid financial foundation & success looks different to everyone & there is a lack of equity of access to resources and information for small business owners and independent contractors & there is a societal narrative making us believe “balance” is our ultimate goal & … There are so many “&”s that impact being your own boss. Let’s have some frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success.
Molly Beyer: Hello, hello, I am Molly Beyer, host of The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond, a podcast where we have frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success. There are so many ands that impact being your own boss. Join us as we explore all these ands and more. Like, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts and let's explore these ambiguous ands.
Molly Beyer: Hello and welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. I'm your host, Molly Beyer, and I'm here to lead you through frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Today we're going to talk about success. What is it and why is it important to running a business? The dictionary definition of success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. There are tangible metrics we can use to determine success: a financial goal, a time goal, or the completion of a degree or certification of some of these. But intangible, intrinsic. These are the metrics we use as humans to know we have truly reached our success goal. In this vein, success is truly relative. For each undertaking, each goal we set out to accomplish, we have a vision of what we will look like on the other side. Sure, there's a view of a finished product, a presentation given, a home constructed, a savings built, a vacation earned, a family created. Whatever the outcome of the goal, we see ourselves in the finished space. We start to tell ourselves the story of what we look like as a person in that end goal. That vision is what we see as a successful outcome.
Molly Beyer: The hardest thing about the idea of success is that it is not static, but fluid, meaning there are so many variables on the journey to the goal that by the time we reach it, success looks and feels very different. I feel like success is one of the things we think we can control as people, but there are so many things that are out of our control. Still, we tell ourselves that if we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, work hard, keep our eye on the prize, and push through no matter what, that we achieve that absolute look and feel of success. The reality that success is fluid and that the outcome may look different than we imagine is hard to get our heads around. Not just hard, but sometimes truly painful, especially when there are familial and societal aspects that we measure ourselves against.
Molly Beyer: One thing we hear a lot is the idea that at the end of life, what will feel important to us is not what is important today. That at the end we won't say, I wish I had spent more time at work. Conversely, it seems that many of them at the end wish for more time with loved ones, more time pursuing passions that were not related to vocation. As a young person these are hard concepts to grasp. We think there is so much time and that just pushing hard now will get us to that payoff in the end. But life is seldom so fair. My journey with success is as chaotic and messy as so many of my other journeys. From a familial expectation to attend college out of high school, to the idea of having kids by 28, many of my visions of success did not come to pass as planned. I also tend to be a workaholic, and have often given far more of myself than my employers have ever compensated me for, and at great cost to avocation or my hobbies outside of my occupation. I always felt like the job I had was going to turn into a career with full and beautiful visions of what my life would look like, but that never panned out.
Molly Beyer: In my early 30s, I started getting sick a lot. It took me two years of multiple specialist visits, testing, missing work, and almost losing my job to get diagnosed with Crohn's disease. By the time I was diagnosed, I was in such a massive flare that it took four years to climb out. Those four years included lots of medication, including high doses of steroids, an extremely limited diet that did not include my generally paleo type diet, and an inability to exercise due to anemia and general ill health. By the time I was diagnosed, I was working on contract for Target Corporate in Minnesota on a path to backfill a position of a near-retiree and move into many career possibilities. And then Target Canada folded and almost 3000 corporate employees were laid off. That fact made big news. What did not make big news was the contracts not renewed or canceled, adding many more to the unemployed pool, including me. Finding a job was incredibly difficult, and I no longer had retail or food service as an option to fall back on because I was too sick. The following elevens months were unpleasant. I had a consulting partnership that was struggling to get off the ground, but did not pay the bills. I was struggling to find work running on very little unemployment because of the short length of my contract before cancellation, playing 0% interest balance transfer bingo on credit cards to avoid bankruptcy, all while managing my physical and subsequent mental illness struggles.
Molly Beyer: Something you need to know about me. I am a recovering control freak. That moment in my life was the start to my recovery. I could not support myself for the first time in my adult life, and was relying on my partner in a very young marriage. I could not eat or move how I was used to, and I gained a significant amount of weight. I lost my hold on my mental health and had to get on medication and work through DBT and therapy just to learn how to function. I had hit rock bottom and the only way out was to let go and be peaceful. Now to that point in my life, being the breadwinner, rising to a high level in an organization, making my grandfather proud, being the picture perfect, do it all with a smile, strong enough to take care of myself and everyone else who comes along person was the picture of success. The house in the suburbs with the white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog was the image. Even my generally rebellious self had bought into that picture of ultimate adulthood. But when brought to my knees, when stripped of all of my beautiful control, I finally realized that success is changeable and that I can control my happiness and that is all.
Molly Beyer: My idea of success today is fluid and focuses around a few key goals. First, I want to support my family, but that does not need to mean being the breadwinner. Support is offering the means for my partner to control their destiny, which is not just financial, but emotional. My husband was diagnosed at 43 with autism, and he is learning to live life differently while also trying to build his own business. And today I get to show up and support and aid through that process. Secondly, it's my time to take care of my parent, the one who raised me and a sister as a single mom and worked hard to make sure we had everything we needed and that we always felt supported and accepted. She now lives with me and I get to have a new relationship with her, which is not always easy. The last time we lived together, I was a child under her roof. Developing a relationship as cohabitating adults is totally different. She has also had a number of health issues over the past couple of years, and I've been able to take an active role in supporting her health. Third, my own health is an ever-evolving enigma, and having the flexibility to manage it while keeping an active brain and spirit of helping others is incredibly important to me. Autoimmune is insidious and it doesn't travel alone. My struggle to a Crohn's diagnosis was difficult, but I've also recently been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis and am now grieving an idea of health that will never be. Instead, I'm having to redefine what healthy looks like and chart my own course to achieve and maintain it.
Molly Beyer: Fourth, I want the financial ability to make a difference in the lives of others. I have spent so much of my life in a space of need, and have had so many people there to help me. I want to focus now on abundance and in sharing that abundance with others as it has been shared with me. And finally, my kid is my full-time job and it is my responsibility to make sure she grows up to be a good, kind, tolerant, helpful, self-aware, self-sufficient human being. And that takes time. I love my work and it helps me be a better person and a better parent, but my full-time expectation is 25 hours a week so that I can homeschool and help her be the best she can be. And I want to talk about that last piece for a second, because I get some interesting looks when I announce my full-time expectation, which is not just that for me, but also for my employees within my business.
Molly Beyer: For me, the expectation is about output and not time. I think that is the intention of most employers when they start out. I need you to get X, Y and Z done to be successful in this role. But I have never worked a full-time job where it took me 40 hours to get the work done that I was hired to do. Either I finished around 20 or 25 hours and just fill the seat for 15 to 20 hours, doing more tasks that were not part of my own job, and essentially got my employer one and a half to two employees for the price of one. Or the job that I was hired to do initially was more than one person should have had. Now, I never got the pay of the additional person, only my own. And I bought into this for a long time. This idea that time spent and extra work done was the key to success. And I guess maybe that is the definition of success for some. But for me, that only ever led to being tired, overworked, and never actually getting ahead in life. As long as I make sure I am focusing on my job and letting other people focus on theirs, I can accomplish a full-time output in 25 hours. These are my guidelines, but the image of the end goal is wavy, fluid, ever-evolving and changing.
Molly Beyer: One of the first places I start with clients, whether bookkeeping or coaching, is why did you start this business? This is the first question to helping somebody define success. There are business plan pieces of this question, those factual pieces, those tangible metrics that help determine the success of the business. Or maybe a better term would be the viability of a business. But I spend a lot of time on this question because I want the journey story. I want to know how they got here, why they decided to do this, and what outcome they want to see. We all need to make money so we can live. But after the basic needs, what do they want that money for? What made them decide to move from the greater security of a W2 job to the unknown of running their own business? What makes it worth it to them every day? This is the start of our journey to define success. After this, we move to what sort of life they want in the early stages of the business and what the long-term goal is. Is the plan to sell the business to invest in another? Is it to sell for retirement money? Is it to have the business run itself and reap the financial benefits while having the freedom to travel? Is it to remain a solopreneur, controlling all the aspects and supporting their day-to-day needs while saving for the future? Or is it like I started, to give me something to do while home with my new child because daycare is too damn expensive and I would lose my mind just watching PBS Kids and cutting the crusts off sandwiches all day.
Molly Beyer: On this journey we sight their goalpost in the distance, but I remind them that as we get closer, there are a number of things that can happen. We could encounter obstacles that slow our progress, needing to go over or around, or to pause and regroup. We could realize that it's farther away than we thought it was. We could get closer and realize it wasn't actually ours, and that we need to search the horizon for another. We could get almost there and decide we don't actually want this one anymore, or any number of other outcomes. The reason I use the word journey so much is because that's all life is. Ultimately, the destination of life is death, morbid as that sounds. I'm not ready to reach that destination. So I continue to journey and continue to define success for myself in this ever-changing world.
Molly Beyer: Thanks for hanging out with us today. We would love to hear your feedback on today's episode as well as requests for future content. Drop a comment or suggestion and join us next time for more frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Until then, I'm Molly Beyer and this has been The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. Have a wonderful day.