Valuing Small Business Success

Small business success happens in degrees and pockets. For example, some leaders who own a business only build companies that achieve success during their physical experience. This is seen with family owned businesses that disappear like a vapor after the person who founded the company is no longer on earth. Other leaders build a foundation for their companies so the enterprises endure for decades, generations.

Small Business Success over the Long Term

Leaders who want to do more than own a business that yields them financial, social and community notoriety, leaders who establish businesses to last for generations, sit down and develop business succession planning strategies. They accept that their companies may exist on earth longer than they will. It’s a reason influential leaders seek out other up-and-coming leaders to recruit and hire into their organizations. Over time, their efforts position their companies as more than industry leaders, but also as organizations that will offer hundreds, perhaps thousands of people the chance to get hired, to sharpen their own skills while working at a respectable firm.


This might be one of the greatest values of small business success. After all, several large corporations that employ tens of thousands of adults started out as a small business. As Dave Thomas said, “Share your success and help others succeed. Give everyone a chance to have a piece of the pie. If the pie’s not big enough, make a bigger pie.”

It’s then that a leader’s dream to own a business becomes a shared achievement. In fact, leaders who achieve small business success often reap fewer benefits from their efforts in the long term than other people who partake of the gains their focus, efforts and commitment helped bring about.

But, it takes work. As Harland Sanders said, “I made a resolve then that I was going to amount to something if I could. And no hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me. And I have done that ever since, and I win by it. I know.” It also takes patience. Herb Kelleher put it this way, “You must be very patient, very persistent. The world isn’t going to shower gold coins on you just because you have a good idea. You’re going to have to work like crazy to bring that idea to the attention of people. They’re not going to buy it unless they know about it.”