Yesterday I received an email from a woman that I went to high school with. That, on its own, was not unusual because I have reconnected with many of my former classmates through Facebook. What surprised me is that she asked me about my baking business, and how I started it.
I bake twice a week and usually while I am baking, I post a message or two on Facebook about what I am baking, how much I love baking, or something else related to baking. My friend must have seen those messages, and now that she is interested in learning more about home-based food businesses, she would like to know how I started mine.
As I read the email, I was flattered and a bit surprised. It dawned on me that although I don’t think that what I do is anything extraordinary, someone out there thinks that I am successful enough that they are interested in learning how I do what I do. Then I began to think about success. What is success, anyways, and who decides how it is measured?
After a bit of thinking, I decided that in my opinion, success in any business is defined by the person or people that own the business. Personal success is a more, well, personal matter and is defined by each individual. Since I work from home and run my own businesses, my personal success is affected my businesses’ success but it is affected by many other things too.
I think that on the most basic level, a business is succeeding if it is open for business. Of course, most of us want much more than simply to have our businesses exist, we want them to do well. I first realized that my baking business was doing well when I noticed that many of my customers were repeat visitors that had bought my cookies and cakes before. That and I began bringing home more money than it took to buy the ingredients to bake the things that I was selling.
While I am glad that my baking business is succeeding in its own, small way, I would like to achieve more than this. As the fall season approaches, it is time for me to redefine success for my business by coming up with a strategy to keep it going through the winter months when the outdoor markets are closed for the season. I look forward to this challenge, and to achieving another level of success.
How do you measure your success?