How do you measure success?
Success – what does the word mean to you?
Do you imagine your product for sale in trendy boutiques?
OR
Your blog making the top 100 list in your industry?
OR
Is success simply the ability to spend time with your kids while still paying the bills?…..
Figuring out how to define it for yourself is a key to growing your business and measuring how far you’ve come.
To help tease out just what makes a business successful, we’ve taken a look at two women who own similar businesses, but have traveled wildly different paths to success.
Allisa Jacobs has been designing and selling handbags under her AllisaJacobs label since 2005, as a way to stay creative while being at home with her two young sons. She sells almost entirely through Etsy, and has built her business around custom orders for weddings. Since starting an Etsy shop in 2008, she’s made over 3,800 sales, slowly growing her business to be noticed by magazines like Better Homes and Gardens.
On the other end of the spectrum, since RuffleButts founder Amber Schaub first had the idea for ruffle-covered baby bloomers in 2007, she’s built it into a 15-person company worth over 5 million. The mother of two recently went on the reality show Shark Tank looking for funding to help take RuffleButts to the next level.
Although the two women took wildly different paths to success, both have said in interviews that they know they’ve reached it by the fact that they’re doing what they love, and have carved out a life that lets them spend time with their families.
How will you measure your success?
Do You Want to Stay Small or Ramp Up Production?
Growth is necessary to keep your business healthy, but not all of us want to become CEO of YourCompany, Inc.
In The Boss of You, authors Lauren Bacon and Emira Mears urge each entrepreneur to define what growth means for them personally.
To plan for growth that’s both sustainable and in line with your dreams, take into account:
- your goals
- your lifestyle
- your aversion to risk
- your financial needs
Big Growth for RuffleButts
Since the beginning, Amber Schaub’s sights were set on becoming the next big thing. Early on she went to work on a press campaign to get RuffleButts noticed by magazines and celebrity stylists, and it paid off. As she told Lori Weiss at the Huffington Post, those phone calls secured her an invitation to be part of a gifting suite just before the Golden Globes – which catapulted her brand into the Hollywood limelight.
In the beginning it was all Amber, but after the birth of her first daughter, her husband quit his job to join the team – and now they manage over a dozen employees.
An intimate business for AllisaJacobs
Allisa Jacobs’s business, on the other hand, is built around an intimate connection with her customers. She began as many crafty moms do – by making things for friends who admired her own bags – but she soon discovered that her joy didn’t come from simply mass producing items for her shop.
As she told Tania Wojciechowski at Manusmade “My sales were great but I lost a bit of the joy in some of these creations. […] I decided to relaunch my business and focus solely on handbags and custom wedding bags. It’s the smartest (and happiest!) business decision I’ve made.”
What’s your metric?
Skyrocketing sales figures may be the validation you need, or you may look for your measures of success in how creative you feel, or how many people your business helps. The point is to decide for yourself what metrics you want to use, and slant your business accordingly.
Which leads us to the next question:
Do you prefer to keep control, or outsource?
A great part of how you plan to grow stems from how much personal control you want to keep.
For Allisa Jacobs, keeping control of the production process is part of her business plan. She drafts her own patterns, handmakes each bag, and often even uses fabrics she’s designed herself. This allows her to work with each bride to create a custom bag – a process that on her website she says is “my way of sharing bits of happiness.”
Educate yourself
Because she knows she needs to rock every role from from CEO to seamstress, Allisa has taken the time to educate herself by reading business books and taking professional bag design courses.
But even if you plan to outsource aspects of your business, you need to know your stuff. Amber Schaub never planned to sew her RuffleButts herself, but even so she took a sewing class so she’d know the terminology and understand the construction when dealing with manufacturers.
Outsource what you’re not great at
If keeping creative control is important to you, consider outsourcing tasks like bookkeeping and marketing, or other tasks you’re not in love with doing. If you’re doing consulting or freelance contract work, raising your rates is a fantastic way to grow without outsourcing work. Or maybe you’ll find it’s time to take on a partner or hire an assistant.
Which Direction Should You Grow?
Back in The Boss of You, Bacon and Mears caution that “Growing doesn’t always need to entail hiring staff or getting swish new digs. Sometimes your business will grow in ways that are more interesting, like offering new services or products, or expanding and shifting your client base.”
Growing your company’s production
RuffleButts has grown far beyond the original ruffled bloomer that Amber Schaub first began producing. With the birth of her son she introduced a boy’s line, RuggedButts, and now both lines offer onesies and other clothes for kids.
Rather than resting on a good thing, Amber then launched RufflyRumps, a lower price point brand that met the demand for adorable kids clothes that were affordable for everyone.
Growing your company’s return on investment
If hiring staff or outsourcing creative work isn’t in your measure for success, don’t worry. There are plenty of ways to grow your business without cloning yourself or inventing a time machine. Can you add on new services, or take on projects that command a higher price tag? Raise your rates to attract new clients? Add a new product line?
Allisa Jacobs only has a finite number of hours to sew, which means that doubling her number of orders is an impractical way to grow her business – but it doesn’t mean growth is impossible. She’s started to expand her business into offering informational products, like sewing patterns and an e-book, that can bring in revenue without requiring her to find more hours in the day. She also offers coaching sessions to other creatives.
Photo courtesy: freedigitalphotos.net
