At some point, success stops being a number you’re responsible for delivering and becomes a word you’re responsible for defining.
We know what a trillion dollars is worth.
A trillion dollars.
The math is unusually cooperative.
A billion-dollar company is worth more than a million-dollar company. Fifty million dollars in revenue is more than five million. Twenty percent growth beats ten. (Here endeth the math lesson!)
Business has given us a wonderfully precise vocabulary for describing more.
It gets considerably less precise when we ask what constitutes better.
Better for whom?
If you’re running a public company, managing other people’s money, answering to a board, employing thousands of people, or responsible for somebody else’s capital, you don’t get to answer that question entirely for yourself.
Nor should you.
There are shareholders. Employees. Customers. Partners. Families whose livelihoods depend upon decisions you make.
Success comes with a scoreboard, and part of accepting the responsibility is agreeing to keep score.
Revenue matters. Profit matters. Growth matters. Enterprise value matters.
That’s business.
But consider this:
After spending 20 or 30 years operating against somebody else’s scoreboard, it’s remarkably easy to forget that it was ever somebody else’s scoreboard.
More becomes better.
Bigger becomes more successful.
Growth becomes the objective rather than an objective.
And we carry those assumptions with us even when we finally arrive at a point in our lives where we don’t have to.
What if you changed the scoreboard?
Imagine you’ve spent years building a business.
You found customers. Increased revenue. Added people. Took on more work.
And then one day you realize:
You’re not sure you want it to get any bigger.
Not because you’ve lost your ambition. Maybe you’ve simply become more specific about what you want that ambition to produce.
Maybe you want a smaller, more profitable company. Fewer clients and deeper relationships. More intellectual property and less headcount. More time doing the work and less time managing the people who do it.
Or maybe you absolutely want to build a billion-dollar company.
The point isn’t that smaller is better.
It’s that bigger and better are different questions.
There’s also a difference between fiduciary responsibility and profitability.
If you’re responsible for other people’s capital, you have obligations that don’t disappear because your priorities change.
When you’re building something of your own, profitability can remain non-negotiable without perpetual growth being the objective.
A business can be serious without aspiring to become enormous.
It can create wealth, jobs, impact and freedom. It can support a family, change an industry, fund something else you care about, or simply let you spend your working life doing something you believe is worth doing.
Those are business outcomes too.
Eventually, the question may not be how to score higher.
It may be whether you’re still playing the right game.
We know how to measure size.
Revenue.
Valuation.
Headcount.
Market share.
Locations.
Followers.
Assets under management.
All useful measurements.
But how do we measure an enduring lesson?
A big impact?
A life changed?
An idea that alters how an entire profession thinks?
A business that gives its owner exactly the life they wanted while providing a terrific living for everyone involved?
A body of work that your grandchildren can point to someday and say, That’s what she believed. That’s what he built. That’s why it mattered.
The answer isn’t always obvious.
And maybe that’s uncomfortable for people who’ve spent successful careers working with scoreboards.
Because eventually you may find yourself with enough experience, resources, relationships and runway to choose what comes next.
And suddenly nobody is handing you the KPI.
You have to decide what counts.
That’s a different kind of responsibility.
Maybe even a harder one.
This advice isn’t for billion-dollar businesses.
It’s not for million-dollar businesses either.
It’s for the people inside them.
The founder.
The CEO.
The attorney.
The physician.
The executive.
The entrepreneur running a one-person company from a spare bedroom.
At some point, success stops being a number you’re responsible for delivering and becomes a word you’re responsible for defining.
That doesn’t mean abandoning ambition.
It means getting considerably more precise about whose ambition you’re pursuing.
We know what a trillion dollars is worth.
Or at least we know how to count it.
But a business you actually want to wake up and run?
An idea that changes something?
Work that matters to people you care about?
Something profitable that couldn’t quite have existed without you?
We don’t have a universally accepted unit of measurement for that.
Maybe that’s the point.
Your next thing doesn’t have to be bigger.
It has to be yours.