So it’s my birthday month. And I call it my birthday month because I get to celebrate it all month, since my birthday is at the end of the month. I figure if I can do this for lil’ old me, then why wouldn’t businesses want to celebrate business success too?!
There are many milestones that come up for businesses and they are a generally under-utilized avenue for shameless (or not-so-shameless) self-promotion, awareness creation, a marketing angle, or just generally a good reason to have a party. Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar business with a broad customer base and a community presence or an online business with a national reach, your stakeholders want to know when things are going well for you.
I often personally celebrate business success by getting the hell out of dodge and hiding on a mountain or a beach somewhere, but hey, that’s one of the perks of freelancing. There I go, celebrating myself again. It’s okay. I’ve got all month!
Borrowed from the Indiana Small Business Development Center, here is a nice Top 10 list of ways to celebrate business success, with commentary and editorial from your favorite PhD. If you like what you see and want to use any or all of them for your small business, have at it!
Top Ways to Celebrate Business Success:
1. Share the news with friends, colleagues and family.
This is an easy one, but we don’t always ask our closest allies for help. Make sure everyone you speak with knows the news you want to promote. Public Relations professionals have a particular way of doing things to promote good messages without necessarily paying for the message to be put forth.
One of PR’s textbook moves is a strategy based on working with thought leaders in industry. Who do you know well who is a thought leader? Consider stakeholders in your business who are the closest to you—people that you’ve developed not just professional relationships with. These are your business’s best friends and they know your business because they are likely to be key end users of your product or service and it’s for a good reason.
Some call PR folks spinmasters. Others call them smart. Make the people around you thought leaders for your cause.
2. Thank everyone who supported you and your team.
First of all know that no one ever does anything alone, no matter what they think they are doing. So it’s good to check in with the ego on how and where things actually are and at least mentally acknowledge the people around you. Then when you go to publicly thank them, you’ll be really stoked about it. Being generous is doing well and doing good, another key PR principle. You invest in the people around you, they invest in you, and then you publicly thank them and show what a humble and great business person you are. And it’s 100% authentic. You really are that great and so are the people who support you.
3. Write your success story, then share it in an email newsletter and on social media.
There’s another key PR principle at work here: tell your story. Tons of businesses send out a weekly or monthly newsletter. How many of those do you read? I bet you read the ones that know how to tell a great story. Everyone loves an underdog and everyone loves a success story that is relatable. As soon as you share yours, people will want to be on your team!
4. Write a blog post to celebrate business success.
And hire a good content writer to do it for you (wink, wink), because it can really become a pain in the butt to do when you’ve got a million things to do that seem much more important. Really, all those things are important. But so is having a good blog archive and solid organic SEO. Just sayin’.
5. Have a party (when you reach a big goal!).
Don’t just have a party. Earn your reward through your own reward system. Set it up ahead of time, knowing what’s possible and what’s feasible for you. Make the party part of your long term business goals. When you achieve your milestone, invite some of your key stakeholders to take a weekend work retreat to the beach or mountains (Can you tell that I’m a little obsessed about getting out to the beach next month?). Or, just have a party to celebrate business success. Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a working break and have fun.
6. Treat yourself.
You have to. If you don’t, you’ll burn out. When was the last time you treated yourself? Come on now, go ahead and buy yourself a present for my birthday. Let me know about it. You deserve it.
7. Give your goals a one-day break.
You probably won’t be able to summit Mt. Everest today if you’re tired. Wait until tomorrow when you are fresh and ready to do it up. This applies to your mind, body, emotional, and spiritual capacity. You need it all in order to function.
Don’t let your pride get in the way of your intelligence. Do something else for a day that you find to be a productive task, but that doesn’t cause you anxiety to complete. Then when you get back at your big task with some clarity, energy, enthusiasm, you’ll be even more productive.
8. Start a success journal and share it.
Another key element of PR is transparency. When you mark your situations, you become straight lovable. Seriously! People love to hear your stories and it makes them feel like they want to support you and what you do.
Passion is always what leads the way, so if you write about it, you’re sure to attract more goodness to all that you do. And that’s the point. Get more people to notice why you are so special. Not out of a gimmick, not lacking in anything. Just proudly show who you are to everybody. Especially when what you’re doing is particularly awesome!
9. Share your daily successes.
Really, this is the original concept from which social media began: how to shamelessly promote good karma! We used to do it with post-it notes on bulletin boards near the water cooler and now we do it on the Internet so that it is public to everyone, all the time, anywhere in the world. But what if every day, you actually wrote down and affirmed the successes of the day? For one, you’d probably find a lot of gratitude, and two, you’d probably reflect on your days with more clarity and focus.
10. Support someone else in reaching his or her goal.
It’s part of success. At some point, people are going to want to learn from you, and it’s a good way to both pay it forward and to shift your position to being able to pass down your knowledge as a legacy. Somebody was your mentor and you will become someone else’s, if you are good at what you do. Take on a mentorship role and it will help someone else as well as provide a constant challenge to continue to move forward in your own work.
This all sounds well and good, right, and super important (it really is.) but you don’t have time to do this. That’s what everyone says. But hey, we all have 24 hours in a day and it’s all in how we choose to use it. If you want the goods on celebrations of success, give me a call. It’s pretty much the only way I spend my time…celebrating the good life and writing all about it.
Give me a call and wish me a happy birthday! We’ll talk about your business needs too if you want. ;)
Photo credit: warrengoldswain / 123RF Stock Photo