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On Their Own Terms
How do you define ‘success'? Area businesswomen offer candid, though divergent, points of view
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Business New Haven
4/6/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
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No one starts a business with the intention of failing. But business owners vary widely in how they define and measure success.
Last year, Fast Company magazine asked 15 business leaders and thinkers to define success - with markedly mixed results.
Bonnie St. John Deane, author of Succeeding Sane, offered the narrowest definition, one in which personal values “like integrity, family or quality of life” have no place. According to her, “Success should be measured by objective standards of competitive achievement. That means for runners: How fast are you? For business people: How much profit did you earn?”
St. John Deane's conviction is clearly formed by personal experience: She's a disabled athlete who won skiing medals at the 1984 Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
A quick sampling of local female business owners found none who shared her belief.
Many base their definitions of business success squarely on their personal goals and values - and even those for whom financial success is paramount focus on long-term profitability, supported by enduring personal and business relationships.
Take Cathie Reese, president of Geomatrix Productions on the New Haven/Woodbridge line. Says Reese, whose video production company specializes in corporate and industrial communication, “Success means being profitable, while keeping customers happy.” Since “Repeat business is critical,” she says, “we have to make the numbers and do well for our clients.”
While Reese views customer satisfaction as a necessary component of business success, she does not view personal fulfillment - her own or her employees' - in quite the same light.
Her family's financial security is important to her, as is spending time with her child. Yet to an extent, she mentally separates her personal life from her business, perceiving Geomatrix as a separate entity that must succeed on its own terms. Similarly, Reese wants her five employees to find satisfaction and fulfillment in their work - “but the numbers have to be there.”
By contrast, Deborah Werksman defines a successful business as one that supports all her commitments, “providing financial independence for the company and for myself while allowing me the time to be the mother, friend, wife and community participant that I'm committed to being.”
Long before founding Hysteria Publications and Rose Communications, Werksman envisioned entrepreneurship as a means to an end: living the kind of life she wanted to live. “When I thought about having children I always felt that I wanted to have my own business so that I could be the master of my own hours.”
She adds, wryly, “Of course, come to find out that you actually work more hours when you have your own business, because you're responsible for so much.”
Still, she likes the fact that she can take the occasional day off to go on her kids' school field trips. “I may be up working until one in the morning to make up for it,” she says, “but I don't have to get anybody's permission to live the life that I want.”
Werksman publishes women's humor and inspiring books by women writers out of her companies' headquarters in the Bridgeport Innovation Center. Many women business owners go a step further in their desire to combine business and personal goals: They start home-based businesses.
Elaine Bridges runs Bridges & Brown Enterprises, a full-service print shop, out of her West Haven home. In business for eight years, Bridges says success means, “I can work at home and be my own boss, do what I want to do.”
Growth plays no part in her definition of success. “I'm at an age where I don't really want to grow,” she says. “I just want to stay where I am and make a living.”
Even Bridges believes, however, that “real” business owners - whom she differentiates from “hobbyists” - put the solvency of their companies before the material trappings of their personal lifestyles. She sees too many new business owners drain their companies' coffers to finance a new wardrobe, car, home, and so on.
Bridges cautions that you cannot build a successful business if you have “too many bills on your back.” Especially at start-up, Bridges says, “You need to put everything back into your business.”
Implicit in her comments is the notion that business owners have to create some separation between their business and personal goals. According to the conventional wisdom, women are less likely than men to compartmentalize their lives in this way and more likely than men to perceive their companies as extensions of themselves.
Yet business owners' sense of their companies as distinct entities may owe more to industry group than to gender.
For example, many owners of service businesses and professional firms earn their livelihoods largely through hourly billings, or did so earlier in their careers. For them, personal and business success may appear identical.
Eva Wieczorek founded EHW Consultants 14 years ago to provide computer-training services. “For much of that time,” she says, “I was my business” - i.e., the business had no value without her. In the past couple of years, however, Wieczorek has made “a very intentional shift” to create “a business that will outlive me.
“I started out as a consultant,” she says, “and became a businesswoman.”
Like Wieczorek, Barbara Levine has noted a change over the life of her business in how she defines success. Levine founded MicroServ in 1984. The New Haven company now specializes in custom database design.
“When I started out,” Levine remembers, “the bottom line was the big deal: Can I survive the growth period of this business - which I did,” she says. Success was all about “surviving and thriving.”
Unlike Wieczorek's definition of success, Levine's has drifted more toward personal values. With two very young children, Levine says, “The bottom line is only a partial motivator of success. I could obviously increase my bottom line if I put more hours into this business.” If she did so, however, “My business would be successful, but my life would not.”
Like Reese, Levine sees long-term client relationships as both a measure and a foundation of business success. Business success, she says, is “about relationship-building - the clients I've had with me for more than a decade. It's about delivering a service in a way that works for the client and works in an ongoing way.”
All the business owners interviewed for this story hew to a long-term view, with Levine particularly adamant that entrepreneurs must occasionally sacrifice short-term profits for the sake of long-term relationships.
Moreover, several of these women measure the success of their own enterprises at least in part by their customers' or clients' success.
Wieczorek, for example, began by defining one measure of success as meeting her annual goals in terms of clients, revenues, etc. She quickly adds, “Another really big gauge of success for me is the kind of contribution that my business is making in general to my clients in their ability to integrate technology into the workplace.”
Long-term financial health, like long-term relationships, is key to these women. Peg Wesley and her partner recently relocated their firm, New England Business Communications, from Cape Cod to Stratford. She defines a successful business as one that regularly has “lots of attractive options to choose from,” along with “a steady growth rate based on profit” rather than revenue.
Like Levine and Wieczorek, Wesley plans to add “resources” - subcontractors and strategic partners - as her business grows. Her vision doesn't include traditional full-time employees. Reese, on the other hand, expects success to lead to further staff increases.
For Laurie Kendall-Ellis, the ability to attract quality employees is actually a measure of her company's success. As owner of Allied Health Rehabilitation, Kendall-Ellis currently maintains a staff of 13 workers at her West Haven out-patient rehab facility, plus close to 80 additional subcontractors who fulfill Allied's contracts with various other agencies and institutions throughout the state.
Her four-part definition of success? “To build an organization that is respected; that people want to work [for]”; one that provides excellent service; and with which people want to do business.
Would these business owners define success any differently if they were men? Most agree with Reese that “the definition of success should not be gender-driven.” Levine, thinking of both male and female business owners that she knows, says, “I certainly see some difference in how driven some men are for bottom-line success, but I also know women whose ambitions are very much stronger than mine and different than mine and whose businesses will find a different level of success.
“Someone who's finished raising her children is going to have a different approach.”
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