What does it really mean to thrive in business? Nikki Rogers asked this question when she created the Women Thriving in Business podcast, and she has a few solo episodes where she discusses her career, becoming a business owner, and how her definition of success and thriving has changed.
For many people, thriving means reaching a certain revenue goal, building a team, and filling your calendar with meetings, networking events, and exciting opportunities. For others, thriving means becoming the entrepreneur everyone recognizes as successful.
Those accomplishments can be exciting, but they don’t necessarily mean you’re thriving. Let’s discuss the major themes I learned from when I am calling Nikki’s Guide to Thriving.
Get Clear on Your Purpose Before You Focus on Growth
When was the last time you sat down and thought about why you started your business? Not your upcoming deadlines, outstanding invoices, or the emails waiting for your attention. Your actual purpose.
As entrepreneurs, we spend so much time meeting our business’s immediate needs that we can lose sight of the mission and vision that inspired us to begin.
In Reconnect, Re-engage and Reenergize, Nikki encourages business owners to reconnect with their mission and vision on purpose. Why? Thrivers, success is personal.
Building a successful business requires more than finding customers, increasing revenue, and developing great products or services. It requires understanding what you want your business to accomplish and making intentional decisions that move you toward those goals.
As a transformation coach, author, and business consultant, Nikki believes that your business is an asset that can support a thriving life. In her solo episodes, Nikki encourages entrepreneurs to reconnect with their purpose, understand the activities that drive business success, and build a future that reflects their priorities.
You can build a profitable business and still feel disconnected from your purpose if your business goals do not reflect your priorities. You can have an impressive client list and spend every evening wondering when you’ll have time for yourself. You can even accomplish the goals you set when you started your business and realize those goals no longer reflect the life you want.
Your mission explains the work you’re doing and the impact you want to make. Your vision helps you understand where you want that work to take you. Both are essential when you’re making business decisions.
Think about the last time someone asked what you do:
- Were you able to clearly explain your business and the value you provide? Or did you give a complicated explanation that left the other person smiling politely while trying to figure out what you actually sell?
- We’ve all heard an introduction that required a follow-up explanation!
Nikki emphasizes that clarity matters not just to the entrepreneur. It’s also important for the people who want to support your business.
When you can clearly articulate your work and its impact, other people can confidently introduce you to potential customers, partners, and opportunities.
However, Nikki also makes an important distinction between what your business does and the vision you have for its future. Your services describe the work you provide today. Your vision describes the impact you want that work to create over time. For example, Nikki runs a coaching and consulting business, but her vision goes beyond those services because she her vision includes generating revenue, creating jobs within her own organization, and helping the businesses she serves create additional opportunities.
That vision guides the decisions she makes about her business.
Think about your own company:
- What do you want your business to accomplish over the next five or ten years?
- How will your customers, employees, community, or industry benefit from the work you’re doing?
Nikki describes vision as the North Star that holds your business activities together.
In the solo episode called “How To Move Your Business Forward”, Nikki discusses reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber, which explores three roles entrepreneurs must balance: the technician, manager, and entrepreneur.
Many business owners begin as technicians, performing the work they enjoy. However, as their companies grow, they must also develop systems, manage people, and establish a strategic direction.
Hiring additional employees without developing management processes may simply create a larger team without effective leadership. Nikki’s major takeaway is that business owners must learn to work on their businesses, not exclusively in them.
To hear more lessons, listen to Reconnect, Re-engage and Reenergize featuring Nikki Rogers and How to Thrive in Business featuring Nikki Rogers.
Build a Business That Supports Your Life
Imagine building a business that generates impressive revenue but leaves you exhausted, disconnected from your family, and unable to enjoy the opportunities you’ve created.
Nikka asks the audience, ” Would you consider that business successful?
In the episode called Build, Grow and Thrive in Business, Nikki identifies three components that help entrepreneurs determine whether they’re truly thriving.
First, you understand the activities that create predictable and sufficient income. Second, you’re working in your purpose, and your business supports the life you want. Third, you enjoy the people you work with, including your clients, partners, and vendors.
Together, these components provide a more complete picture of business success.
Understand What Actually Generates Revenue
Every entrepreneur needs to understand which activities generate revenue and how they contribute to the business’s financial health. Nikki describes these activities as the levers that create predictable and sufficient income.
For some businesses, those levers might include sales calls, email marketing campaigns, customer referrals, or recurring contracts.
The important question is whether you understand what works in your business.
- Are you generating revenue through a reliable process, or are you hoping another customer will appear before the next invoice is due?
- Nikki recommends regularly assessing your business activities, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
- Which activities consistently lead to new opportunities? Where are you spending time without seeing meaningful results?
However, Nikki makes another important distinction. Predictable income isn’t necessarily sufficient income. Sufficient income covers your business expenses and allows you to live your life freely. Your revenue goals should reflect both your business’s financial needs and the personal goals you’re working toward.
Recognize Your Early Harvest and Late Harvest
In another solo episode, Nikki introduces a memorable way to evaluate business growth: the difference between an early harvest and a late harvest.
Think about the agricultural calendar: Different crops mature at different times. Some fruits and vegetables are ready in summer, while others take longer to harvest. Business growth often follows a similar pattern.
You invest time, energy, and resources into activities that may not produce immediate financial results.
Perhaps you’ve started publishing articles, attending networking events, building relationships, or creating educational content. Those activities can produce an early harvest.
You may notice increased website traffic, social media engagement, podcast listeners, or recognition within your industry. Nikki encourages entrepreneurs to think beyond the early harvest.
The late harvest is where those initial efforts begin producing qualified leads, sales conversations, and revenue.
If your ultimate goal is predictable income, you need a strategy for turning that visibility into business opportunities.
- Are potential customers requesting consultations?
- Are those conversations leading to sales?
Nikki’s advice isn’t to ignore visibility or engagement. It’s about understanding how those activities support the larger goal of building a financially sustainable business. Visibility creates opportunities, but sustainable revenue lets your business keep supporting your life.
Develop a Healthy Relationship With Money
Nikki also encourages entrepreneurs to examine their relationship with money because understanding your revenue activities is only one part of building a financially healthy business.
- Are you comfortable discussing pricing?
- Reviewing financial statements?
- Collecting payments?
- Or do you avoid those conversations because they make you uncomfortable?
If you’re uncomfortable discussing your services’ value, you may hesitate to charge appropriate prices. If you avoid reviewing financial records, you may overlook important information about your profitability.
Nikki encourages entrepreneurs to recognize how their relationship with money appears in everyday business decisions. Financial confidence doesn’t require you to become an accounting expert. It requires understanding your numbers, establishing processes, and making informed decisions.
Remember, financial success is only one part of thriving. If your goal is to take Fridays off, your business model should support that priority. If your goal is to build a larger organization, your operational and financial decisions should reflect that ambition.
Business goals will look different for every business owner, and that is okay. Nikki has given us permission to build a business that supports your life, which also means creating professional relationships that support your well-being.
Thrivers, design your business around your goals, not someone else’s expectations.
To understand more about visibility and planning to a harvest, listen to Focused on the Future featuring Nikki Rogers and Build, Grow and Thrive in Business featuring Nikki Rogers.
Focus on the Future Without Competing Against Your Time
As a woman thriving in business, you have a business to run, customers to serve, relationships to maintain, and personal responsibilities that don’t disappear simply because you’re an entrepreneur. And somewhere in the middle of those obligations, you’re supposed to find time to plan for the future. Sounds easy, right?
In Focused on the Future, Nikki explains why entrepreneurs need to create space for activities that move their businesses toward long-term goals.
It’s easy to spend an entire day responding to immediate needs without making progress on the work that matters most. You answer emails, attend meetings, solve problems, and complete tasks.
By the end of the day, you’ve been incredibly busy. But have you moved closer to your goals?
Turn Your Vision Into a Strategy
A vision is important, but without a strategy, it can stay an idea that never becomes reality. In Focused on the Future, Nikki Rogers describes strategy as determining how to move from where you are today to where you want to be.
She breaks that process into three components: goals, assessment, and planning.
- Your goals establish measurable milestones. Your assessment helps you understand your business’s current condition. Your plan identifies the actions required to close the gap. Nikki calls this process minding the gap in the podcast episodes called How To Move Your Business Forward. You might establish a recurring revenue target, determine how many clients you can serve, and identify your most profitable services.
- Assess your current business: How much revenue are you generating? How many hours are you working? Which services require the most time?
- With all of this information, you can develop a plan to adjust your pricing, improve processes, or change the types of clients you pursue.
Each decision should move you closer to your vision.
Protect Your Time and Pursue the Right Opportunities
Nikki explains that a major challenge of entrepreneurship is that opportunities always outnumber available hours.
- You could launch another product
- Create a marketing campaign
- Attend a conference, expand your services, or
- Pursue a partnership.
Those opportunities might all be worthwhile, but you don’t need to pursue them at once. Thrivers, Nikki encourages every woman thriving in business to decide what to focus on right now.
Prioritizing doesn’t mean abandoning your ambitions. It means creating a sequence that lets you achieve them, with boundaries and dedicated time for strategic thinking.
Nikki also encourages entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities they may have previously overlooked, including larger corporate clients, government contracts, and strategic partnerships. Small business owners sometimes assume they’re too inexperienced or too small to pursue larger contracts.
Instead of automatically disqualifying yourself, Nikki encourages you to review the requirements and explore potential partnerships. Working with established organizations can provide valuable experience and create opportunities for future growth. Of course, larger opportunities should align with your vision and your business’s capacity.
Build, Grow and Thrive in Business feat. Nikki Rogers, How to Thrive in Business feat. Nikki Rogers, and Focused on the Future feat. Nikki Rogers.
Thriving Is a Business Decision
Thrivers, take time to evaluate where you are, what you’ve accomplished, and what you want to harvest from your efforts. Then make the decisions that will move you toward that future. Because thriving isn’t something that happens only after you’ve achieved every business goal.
In every podcast episode, Nikki Rogers encourages guests to share their incredible insight, and this blog reminds us that Nikki knows a lot about thriving as a woman in business. Each episode is packed with information and insight to help you keep thriving in business.
Listen to the Women Thriving in Business podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts for more insights from Nikki Rogers on building, growing, and thriving in a business that supports the life you want to live.
Keep thriving!