How Do You Know If Your Business Is Truly Successful?

Since we launched Mindshift.money in November of 2016, I’ve received quite a few questions from members asking how we did it. “How do you go from a standing start to having a successful business?” It’s a great question, but one that will take more than a few sentences to answer. In fact, we have an entire portion of our website to helping business owners do just this!

Starting a new business adventure is both exciting and terrifying. You’re often building something that’s never been done before or has never been done before by you. The learning curve is steep, but the rewards are worth the effort. Here’s how we successfully launched MindShift.money.

Applying a key principle

For Mindshift.money, our success comes from applying a key principle to three areas of our business.

First, we focused on creating measurable progress in a reasonable amount of time. We knew sustainable growth would take time, but we needed to make sure we actually made forward progress towards our goal.

Next, we looked at applying this principle to the impact we wanted our business to make, how to meet the needs of the owners and team members and how to create Financial Freedom outside the business.

Being able to consistently track our progress over time in these areas allowed us to quickly respond to challenges that came our way as we launched. That process continues to shape the decisions we make on a daily basis. And it will continue to influence our choices in the future.

What impact is your business making?

At Mindshift.money, we started with the goal of impacting the lives of 20 million people around the world. We want to teach people how to buy back their time and stop the stress around money — despite short-term governmental or economic changes. To get there, we need to measure the impact of our business.

Your decisions either bring your business closer to the impact you want to make or move you further away. But you won’t be able to know how you’re doing unless you measure.

We have a lot of content that we make accessible for free. And we provide more advanced content that requires a subscription to access. To evaluate whether our programs create an impact in the lives of our clients, we ask some very important questions:

• How many clients are signing up for our (paid) program and communities?
• What is the program completion rate?
• If clients are leaving, how many? Why?

Understanding and recording these numbers lets us see if we’re moving closer or further away from our impact goal. Asking clients why they no longer use your program can give you some great insight as to how you can improve. It’s also a great way to determine if you’re having the impact you thought you would.

As I said, our goal is to impact the lives of 20 million people. Today our membership is just under 25,000 people although that number continues to grow rapidly. We have a specific, measurable goal and can use our subscription numbers to ensure we’re making measurable progress over a reasonable period of time toward that goal.

Meeting the needs of you and your team

While I personally don’t need the income from this business to fund my Financial Freedom, I’ve invested a significant portion of my income to get us up and running. While this was helpful to get Mindshift.money launched, over time this creates a weakness in our business.

The business is limited by my ability to fund it.

The pivot we are now working through is for the business to become self-funding and self-sustaining. This is excellent news, because Mindshift.money will no longer be limited by my intervention. What many business owners forget is that profitability is important to fund future programs and the expansion of your team. As your business grows, you need more team members, more resources and more funding.

If you don’t work to make your business profitable and self-sustaining, you can’t survive long term. You won’t have the income to take care of your team or yourself.

Getting value from the Quarterly Business Review

I’ve worked closely with my team to help build Mindshift.money to where it is today. To ensure our continued sustainability and expansion, we regularly ask ourselves these questions about our programs.

• Which program is most profitable?
• Where is our energy best spent?
• How much is it costing us to obtain new clients?

Our team reviews our performance results every 90 days. We look carefully at where we are now compared to what our projections were for the same time period.

Monitoring our numbers allows us to see what we planned to have happen versus what actually happened. If we fail to reach the goals we set for ourselves, we can correct course over the next 90 days to see if we bring those numbers closer to our desired results.

We knew from the beginning that our actual performance was going to be slightly below our projections for revenues and subscribers, and that’s exactly what happened. But because we were measuring our progress in a reasonable amount of time, we could take corrective action quickly.

Your business may be doing extraordinary amounts of revenues right out of the gate, but that’s not the case for most businesses. What’s important is that you monitor performance in the first place so you can change how you operate and bring your business into alignment with your end goal. Remember, your business needs to be profitable to be sustainable. Sustainable businesses continue to meet the needs of both you as the owner and your team members.

To keep your business performing at its best, you need to consistently monitor your progress over time.

Freedom lies outside your business

We started Mindshift.money to help people stop trading their time for money. That includes us as business owners and the people that are on our team. You’re no different. You also need to stop trading your time for money within your business and plan for a life of Financial Freedom. From day one, plan to secure Financial Freedom outside your business. You don’t want to lean solely on your business to survive.

You’re not going to live forever. There will come a time when either through your own choice or the circumstances of life when you’ll no longer be able to work in your business as you do now. If your entire financial life is built on a foundation of constantly working for money rather than sending your money out to work for you, your life will come crashing down the moment you stop.

Take a moment and consider these questions for you and your business:

• How can I create financial freedom that is not dependent on my business?
• How can I secure freedom for people within my business in the future?

Set a specific timeline to consistently review all of these questions so you can monitor your progress creating Financial Freedom independent of your business.

Measure what matters

So many business owners go through life without taking the time to see if they should even be in business in the first place. They think if any sort of money is coming in, their business is doing well. But you and I both know nothing could be further from the truth.

If I asked you today “How well is your business impacting the world around you?” would you have an answer ready? Or “How is your business taking care of you and your team members?” Would you have an answer then?

You worked too hard to get where you are today to simply make educated guesses about how your business is operating. It’s just as absurd as trying to lose weight, but never stepping on a scale. How do you know if your efforts are working unless you measure them?

This week, take some time to sit down with your team and lay out your long-term blueprint for how you want your business to operate. Then work out specific projects that will make forward progress toward that end goal. Set a specific date to revisit your efforts in a reasonable amount of time and evaluate what changes are needed.

Measure what matters to you. Integrate the concept of measurable progress in a reasonable amount of time into your current business model and see how that transforms how you operate.