The Secret To Building a Successful and Lasting Business

This might be the most useful post you read all year

image by freepik

“How useful is what I do?”

It’s a question that is so simple on paper, yet so freaking difficult to answer in real life.

The usefulness of your product or service is a metric that’s difficult to quantify. As a result, a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders don’t bother trying to measure it at all. Instead, they’ll substitute a backward looking statistic like revenue, or worse, they’ll rely on vanity metrics that don’t mean anything.

Then they’ll find that revenue can suddenly evaporate one day with no explanation. Or they’ll use false positives as justification for poor decisions on spend. Either way the money goes net negative real quick.

Let me assure you that in over 20 years building and growing companies, I’ve learned that there is no single answer to any other question that’s going to more accurately predict the success of your business.

So how do you answer it?

The Question Is Really About Your Business Mission

Last week, I talked about mission startups versus machine startups. This is my own terminology, but basically a machine startup is…