TLDR (too long didn’t read): What you need to know
Many business owners measure success through profit, cash flow and growth, but some of the most meaningful indicators of success are harder to see. Strong relationships, positive impact, loyal customers, thriving employees and a clear sense of purpose all create powerful feedback loops that strengthen a business over time. When you recognise these wider forms of success, you often create more of them, benefiting both your business and the people around it.
About the author: Deborah Edwards
With over 20 years’ experience, Deborah Edwards is a Chartered Accountant, business mentor and Practice Director at Harland. She works closely with purpose-led business owners to help them build financially healthy businesses, make confident decisions and create lasting impact through profit and purpose.
For many business owners, success is measured through revenue growth, profitability and cash flow. While those metrics matter, they rarely tell the whole story. The most successful businesses often create value far beyond the numbers. Through trusted relationships, meaningful employment, positive customer experiences and a clear sense of purpose, business owners can have a much greater impact than they realise. In this month’s article, Deborah Edwards reflects on why some of the most important signs of business success are often the hardest to see.
If you run a business, at times you might recognise a certain kind of exhaustion. It’s not from overwork or failure, but from a success that goes unnoticed. You might have a good month. A long-standing customer renews without hesitation, there’s no major drama in the team and cash in the bank looks strong, and yet something still feels off. Time goes on, we go again and continue to measure progress by sales, profit, cash, jobs completed… yadah yadah yadah.
But there’s another success that you’re probably building around you, quietly and steadily, in ways that are genuinely difficult to see because we are too busy being, well, busy.
Earlier this spring I attended a talk at The Lost Gardens of Heligan by Professor Thomas Crowther, whose work focuses on ecosystems and what he calls “feedback loops.” Feedback loops are defined as a process where an action produces a result that amplifies the initial action. Nature, he explained, often restores itself remarkably quickly once given the opportunity and that opportunity often exists when businesses are optimised for both profit and purpose.
Fast forward to May and that same sense of optimism came through for me again in the David Attenborough film currently being shown this summer at Real Ideas Organisation in Plymouth. (We highly recommend taking the trip to view the film for yourself in their experiential dome). Rather than simply focusing on the scale of the challenges facing the natural world, the underlying message is one of human capability and our remarkable ability to adapt, innovate and solve problems together when we choose to. This was swiftly followed by a glorious day at the Chelsea Flower Show. Many of the gardens had only been constructed days earlier and yet the bees had already moved in, collecting nectar, instinctively responding to what had been created for them. The new space was quite literally alive and buzzing. Nature had not waited for a formal declaration of success before beginning to respond. And The Times newspaper declared the event as being a hive of activity for business & networking… Sorry for the puns!
The hidden success most business owners overlook
We tend to expect success to arrive in one clear, visible moment. In reality, it is usually building around us long before we recognise it. A trusted relationship develops through years of small consistent moments. A team grows stronger through hundreds of small conversations and decisions. A reputation forms gradually, through reliability and care, in rooms you were never in. Customers return not simply because of price, but because of how your business makes them feel.
None of this shows up cleanly in a set of management accounts. But these are often the very foundations upon which your commercial results are built and as business owners, puts a spring in our step.
What success already looks like in your business
So consider, for a moment, what success already looks like in your business beyond the numbers.
- Does your business create stable employment for local families?
- Perhaps you have given someone their first real opportunity, or watched a younger team member grow in confidence in a way that will shape the rest of their career?
- Do you make products or provide services that genuinely improve people’s lives?
- Do your suppliers rely on the consistency and fairness of your relationship with them?
- Have you created the opportunity for the community to feel connected in some way; the chat in a queue, or across a café table?
- Have you built something that solves a real problem, or innovated in a way that raised the standard for everyone around you?
If any of that is true (and for most business owners reading this, much of it will be) then you are already succeeding in ways that matter enormously, even if they rarely appear on a dashboard.
Why these ripple effects matter more than you think
The reason these things are hard to see is not because they are small. It is because their impact tends to be gradual, cumulative and sometimes geographically removed from us. A customer leaves a conversation feeling more capable. A supplier gains stability and peace of mind from a long-standing relationship. An employee carries skills and confidence into the rest of their working life. These ripple effects spread often invisibly but they are no less real for that.
How positive feedback loops strengthen your business
And here is why this matters practically, not just philosophically: once you begin actively noticing these wider forms of success, you tend to create more of them. Attention shapes behaviour. Businesses that connect with their purpose become more consistent. Teams that feel the significance of their work become more engaged. Customers who sense that a business genuinely cares become more loyal.
This idea can be visualised as a simple feedback loop:
The feedback loops strengthen, just as the bees showed us how nature does it too.
This is not simply an encouraging thought. It is a practical one. Businesses that understand their wider impact tend to attract people, whether that’s clients, employees, suppliers, who share their values. Those relationships become more resilient. That resilience creates better commercial outcomes. And those outcomes create more capacity to act on purpose. The loop reinforces itself, quietly and continuously, whether you are watching for it or not.
Building a business with both profit and purpose
Entrepreneurship is built on belief. The belief that effort creates opportunity, that investment made consistently and carefully eventually creates momentum that becomes impossible to ignore, and that small actions repeated over time compound into something significant.
What is harder and yet more valuable, is taking the time to look back at what those actions have already built. Not instead of pursuing financial success, but alongside it, because the strongest businesses are usually those that recognise success in its fullest sense: commercially healthy, yes, but also deeply connected to the difference they make for the people around them.
At Harland, we spend much of our time helping businesses improve profitability and performance but the business owners we most enjoy working with are usually those who can already see, when they stop long enough to look, just how much they have built and what impact they are having because the signs were there all along.
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