What Is Entrepreneurial Success? Depends on Who You Ask

By Mike Miliard
At the end of the day, a business owner's success may have nothing to do with dollars and cents -- that's according to a study published recently in the Journal of Small Business Management.

For the survey (called "Small Business Owners' Success Criteria: A Values Approach to Personal Differences"), researchers polled 150 small business owners in the Netherlands about their personal values and their ideas of what it means to be successful. They found that entrepreneurs can be divided roughly into two camps: business-oriented (those who see profitability and growth as the key goals) and person-oriented (those who value their own satisfaction as much, if not more, than wealth).

Marjan J. Gorgievski, an assistant professor at Erasmus University and one of the study's authors, says that long years of academic research and real-world experience led her to the conviction that "business owners can only be really successful if they work with passion [and] intrinsic motivation." In other words, they follow their hearts.

After several in-depth interviews revealed just how differently business owners approached their work, she decided to undertake this study.

For instance, she got different answers when asking restaurateurs and florists what success looked like. "The entrepreneurs in gastronomy answered that they were aiming to give their customers the best time of their lives," she says. Meanwhile, the florists "were aiming for a good reputation for unusual creations."

In fact, some entrepreneurs even took pains to prevent their businesses from growing. Gorgievski cites cases where owners would only accept new customers' orders by fax or would charge exorbitantly high prices. These results fly in the face of traditional wisdom -- namely, that the acquisition of profit, power, and prestige define business success.

When the 150 business owners ranked their top 10 success criteria, personal satisfaction topped the list, followed by profitability and satisfied stakeholders. Public recognition and growth ranked last.

The study's authors argue that building one's business in accordance with his or her values is essential. Doing so, they found, was a predictor for well-being and satisfaction. On the other hand, a mismatch between those values and one's business strategies can lead to "internal conflicts and distress," which in turn can impair financial performance.

The researchers hope the study will lead to better advice for business owners on how to attain and sustain satisfying careers.

Moreover, their findings could have implications for the encouragement and engagement of future small business owners. After all, if the goal is to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs -- which is key to any healthy economy -- providing students with a wide range of role models might prove fruitful.

Although the study focused on small business owners in Holland, Gorgievski suspects the relationships would hold true in the United States. In her experience, the "importance of different values on a personal level was found to be quite similar across many cultures," she says. Simply put, she says "people need to line up their goals with what they find important -- what they truly value."

Readers, what does success mean to you?