For entrepreneurs across industries, every decision can carry significant weight – and time is a precious resource. To help achieve sustainable and profitable growth within this pressure cooker, aligning personal visions of success with concrete business objectives can be key. Because the definition of success is subjective, unique to each individual, it might center around financial stability, personal contentment, meaningful community impact, a mix of these, and more. Here, several experts share insights and tools to help you integrate daily actions with your grand vision for life and work as you navigate your own path to business success.
Defining Success: Crafting a Clear Vision
Tracy Candido, a New York City-based career development and leadership coach and founder of Wavemaker Coaching, observes that entrepreneurs “often fall into the trap of holding onto big assumptions about traditional markers of success and long-held beliefs that success ‘should’ look a certain way.” She coaches clients to dig deep with honesty and courage, ask themselves tough questions about what their own version of success really means, and grow beyond their comfort zone.
“Are they upholding family norms from their childhood? Are they comparing themselves to friends? Are they feeling worthy of a different definition of success?” she asks. “These questions help them to shed ideas that conforming to conventional or normative definitions of success – like wealth, power, or position – is their only option.”
This process helps pave the way for tangible and achievable goals aligned with their core values. “Finding out what truly matters to you is the only way that taking the risk of business ownership and leadership will feel worth it,” she says. “Unless you care deeply about the outcome you are striving for, motivation might be lacking, and staying in the game when the going gets tough will be very challenging.” With that clarity, her clients are empowered to set goals, make decisions, navigate challenges, build adaptive skills, and take focused actions day-to-day.
Setting SMART Goals: Transforming Visions Into Tangible Objectives
Ashley McLemore, an Atlanta-based HR consultant, leadership coach, and founder of Begin With Ashley, also challenges individuals to redefine success beyond societal norms. "Success can look like so many different things," she says. “That might mean enjoying slower mornings, or having the financial freedom to treat loved ones without any constraints.” To achieve these more meaningful goals with clarity and purpose, she highlights the value of SMART goals – specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound – and underscores the necessity of concrete goal-setting around specific actions and company policies.
To avoid the pitfalls of ambiguity, she offers a six-week Equity Diagnostic tool for companies that want to create a positive and inclusive company culture – for the well-being of their existing employees, and as incentive for recruiting. That process includes a data-heavy staff assessment and analysis of company policies, including mission statements and job descriptions. Through this audit, she encourages business owners to identify areas for improvement, break down tasks into manageable steps, estimate the timeframes needed for each, and commit to a measurable action plan.
Aligning Daily Activities: Ensuring Every Action Supports the End Goal
Once her clients have established specific goals and concrete plans, New York-based management consultant and executive coach Liz Kislik advises, “Now you need to book time with yourself or others to get it done." Although many people like to work from to-do lists, she prioritizes calendar-blocking: “Unless you actually allocate time, it can be very difficult to keep yourself on track.”
"Success can look like so many different things. That might mean enjoying slower mornings, or having the financial freedom to treat loved ones without any constraints.” —Ashley McLemore, founder, Begin With Ashley
For big or complex projects, in particular, she has clients use sticky notes on a door or wall. “You move the note over to one side when the activity is completed – that way, you can actually see what you've done. It’s so easy to think about how much more there is to do and to feel dissatisfied with your progress, so watching that buildup of your completed calendar items can be very satisfying.”
In her work, Kislik aligns these daily activities with exploration of bigger questions. She asks entrepreneurs, “What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want people to remember about you? What stories do you want to tell in 30 years?” With these answers top of mind, you can weave together aspirations and actions, helping to make long-term goals more meaningful and achievable.
Measuring and Tracking Progress: Navigating a Path to Sustainable Success
Cynthia Pong, JD, is founder and CEO of Embrace Change, a New York City-based career coaching and training firm for women of color. Once she helps to establish her clients’ purpose – the “why” behind their business – she supports them in determining precise metrics for goals and targets.
"There's a huge difference between feeling like we're making progress, but not having the numbers to back that feeling, and actually being able to say – to ourselves and others – that we are, for example, 72% of the way to our annual goal,” she points out. “When we can break down our annual goals or KPIs into quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily goals, we're more likely to succeed.”
Pong’s approach isn't just about setting benchmarks. It’s also about fostering adaptability and resilience in the face of evolving challenges. In her small cohort programs for women of color entrepreneurs, Pong prioritizes quarterly goal setting and tracking progress on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Outcomes from this work have included increased revenue, increased levels of confidence, flexible strategies to adapt to changing economic landscapes, and evolving team structures to support long-term growth and sustainability.
According to all of these experts, entrepreneurs who take time to define success authentically, set SMART goals, align daily actions with vision, and track progress meticulously can be more likely to achieve sustainable success. It's not easy to prioritize this work consistently, but the payoffs for your well-being, your business, and your stakeholders can be profoundly rewarding.
