Redefining Success

Businesses evolve.  Clients change.  Strategies shift.  What was yesterday is gone, today is a new day and tomorrow is unknowable.  It is the nature of things.  In a perfect world, we would all let go of the past instantly, embrace today’s reality fully and allow the future to unfold in its own accord.  The multi-billion dollar pharma/psychological industry is a lovely reminder of just how far we are away from the perfect world.  Letting go is far more a process than a choice, a daily call to consciousness, mindfulness of where you are and intend to head more than anything else.

So in the vein of letting go, cut yourself a break when you find yourself in a tailspin because the old measures of success no longer validate your new business model/strategy.  When you say it out loud, it is obvious – you cannot ask the old to define the new.  Yet, we all do it to find some reassurance that the new version of ourselves, our art, our creative business is the right one.  As if there is such a thing.

Here is an example:  An interior designer wants higher-end clients.  She redoes her website to show off her highest end projects. Instead of a percentage, she decides to charge a (very large) flat fee so that she actually gets cheaper the larger the project.  Hers is a retro/vintage/Steampunk style and that is the only client she seeks.  In the past, she cast a very wide net, had a cutesy/shabby chic site with no prices and a blog to match.  She used to get ten inquiries a week with one right client (maybe).  Her projects used to range from one room to a whole house.  She was doing forty projects a year and frying.  Her stated goal now is ten projects a year with these projects being the entirety of a space (i.e., whole house).  Few months go by.  Only five inquiries.  Three clients.  Panic.  This time last year she had thirty inquiries and ten clients.  Few more months go by.  Another five inquiries.  Four clients.  Sheer terror.  By this time last year she was almost fully booked with tons of inquiries piling up.  Now, seven projects?!?

By almost any definition, the changes the interior designer made are successful.  She is getting meaningful inquiries by clients who understand and value her art and her creative business.  These clients provide her with the right projects and the money she needs to sustain herself.  No doubt, she is not all the way there (she needs ten clients), but everything indicates she will get there and beyond.  Why the panic?  Because she is swimming in an entirely new ocean of her own making, cannot yet see the land ahead, so looks back to reassure herself that there is, in fact, land, no matter how irrelevant that land is to her journey.

Regardless of how much outward change you make to your creative business, your work has to be to commit to a new definition of success.  You must embrace that there may be no discernable answer to your new strategy, no absolute measure of success.  Gary Vaynerchuk is a vocal leader of the power of social media despite there being (still) very few external indicators of that power.  While I might say, “Awesome, seven right clients in just a few months.  A seventy percent conversion rate, crazy!”  You might say, but it is not close to what it was.  Such is the nature of faith.

You must seek validation of change with different eyes looking in a different direction.  See trends instead of facts.  Movements instead of statistics.  Just because you cannot see the land ahead does not mean it is not there.   If you can work to redefine success then you might also be able to have a little more faith in the changes you have made and are making.  You can believe in your own evolution and can know in your belly (and your head) that the land is in fact there.  You can then set about enjoying the mystery of when and where it will appear.  You will, of course, be tickled when the land looks nothing like what you thought it would, but thrilling just the same.