Business success can look very different from company to company. And each entrepreneur will have a slightly different definition of what it means to achieve it. For Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Olipop, “The best innovation is made around solving human problems.”
Many successful businesses focus on scaling, achieving high net profits, and going viral. Others might look to create social impact, support local communities, or build a healthier work-life balance for employees.
Whatever success looks like for you, there are a few common tips that thriving businesses leverage to reach it. Here are 12 keys to finding business success.
What is a successful business?
Typically, a successful business generates a net profit through the sale of goods or services. And while the universal goals for a business generally revolve around units sold, dollars earned, company growth, repeat sales, and brand recognition, there are myriad other ways a business owner might measure success.
Beyond profits and growth, key performance indicators (KPIs) measure metrics such as customer loyalty and website traffic to assess how effectively you’re reaching different benchmarks on the journey toward business success.
12 tips for business success in 2025
Here are 12 tips to help you scale and grow a successful business:
- Identify your mission and vision
- Create goals and set KPIs
- Craft a solid business plan
- Build a strong team
- Prioritize customer satisfaction
- Make standout products
- Implement marketing strategies
- Build a strong and adaptable brand
- Get organized
- Prioritize self-care
- Give back to the community
- Leverage AI to stay ahead
1. Identify your mission and vision
“We’ve been indoctrinated into thinking that success is scaling, and you don’t have to do that,” says business coach and mental health advocate Nora Rahimian. “You can choose what success looks like for your business.”
So, what type of business do you want to be? Use your mission and vision to guide your business plan, the type of brand you create, how you speak to your customers, and how you define success.
For example, Passionfruit, an inclusive clothing brand, dedicates its mission statement to celebrating LGBTQQIA people:
“Being proud shouldn’t be an annual affair. We are passionate queers that believe in the power of togetherness, a colourful and bright future for all LGBTQQIA youth and visibility. Our mission is to create inclusive clothing and accessories that enable you to show your pride all year round while giving back to our community.”
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Use your mission statement as an opportunity to create a blueprint for your business that defines your road ahead. Similarly, writing down your vision—or aspirations—will help guide the decisions you make and the avenues you choose to follow.
✨Resources:
2. Create goals and set KPIs
As part of an effective strategic plan, come up with SMART business goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Create both short- and long-term goals and be clear about the reasoning behind each. They can be financial, operational, or even growth-related.
A goal for one business owner might be to sell a specific number of units per month over a year to drive up sales. Another might strive to ramp up marketing efforts and gain a target number of social media followers.
Successful entrepreneurs monitor progress and look at the numbers behind their business to analyze the data and check if they’re making progress toward their goals.
💡Tip: You can always reassess your goals. Stay flexible and adjust your business goals as you go.
Aside from goals, you’ll also need to set specific, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand how your manufacturing, marketing, and sales are progressing, and the overall financial health of your business.
3. Craft a solid business plan
A cohesive, thought-out business plan is the foundation for many successful businesses. Business plans guide you and provide step-by-step actions for you to take, especially as you’re first starting out.
They help you avoid the dreaded “What do I do now?” that plagues many new entrepreneurs.
Your business plan should include:
- Executive summary
- Company overview
- Products or services offered
- Market analysis
- Marketing plan
- Logistics and operations plan
- Financial plan
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Free: Business Plan Template
Business planning is often used to secure funding, but plenty of business owners find writing a plan valuable, even if they never work with an investor. That’s why we put together a free business plan template to help you get started.
4. Build a strong team
A strong team is inclusive, collaborative, and reliable, and is essential to building a successful business. Research from a McKinsey & Co. report, Diversity Wins, shows that assembling a team diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity, among other factors, increases productivity.
The most effective teams encourage feedback and welcome a diversity of opinions, which can spur creativity and help with problem-solving. It’s also useful to have members with unique sets of skills that can contribute to your business’s growth.
Your team members aren’t just providers of skills and ideas; they’re real people. Future-of-work expert Connie Steele recommends getting to know them “as people in addition to the roles that they have and the pressures that they might be facing.” According to Connie’s research, 70% of US workers think it’s important to have a “sense of community and connection” at work.
Building a strong team isn’t a one-and-done process––it takes time to find, hire, and train the people who will help your business thrive. But if you commit to nurturing the relationships you have with them, and that they have with each other, you’ll set a solid foundation for the long term.
🤝Resources:
5. Prioritize customer satisfaction
Happy customers often become repeat buyers, spreading the word about their favorite stores, designers, apps, platforms, or services.
Besides the value proposition of well-crafted and useful products and services, it’s often great customer service that keeps customers returning.
Here are a couple of ways to make customers happy:
- Create a simple returns process. Explicitly stated policies reduce confusion and unsatisfactory customer experiences.
- Be honest with customers. Honesty goes a long way in building trust and customer loyalty. When a business makes a mistake, it’s best to accept responsibility and be honest about what you can do to fix the problem in a timely manner.
- Stay solution-oriented. When customer conflicts arise, remain polite, patient, and use positive language to help de-escalate the situation so it’s easier to find a resolution.
- Set expectations and meet them. Let customers know how long it’ll take you to get back to them, and consistently meet those deadlines.
- Leverage automation and AI. AI and automation tools can help you get back to customers quickly, and answer questions by sending pre-written responses or even interacting like a human agent would.
6. Make standout products
There’s no real substitute for quality offerings. Whether you’re selling practical rain gear, wearable fitness tech, or tickets to a concert, make sure your products or services are well-crafted and do what you claim. Focus on using quality raw materials and ingredients, having a user-friendly design, and serving the needs of your target audience.
For example, hummus shop Little Sesame takes a “quality-over-everything” approach, sourcing chickpeas from organic, regenerative farms in Montana. They also take pains to ensure their products are always fresh and their crew “soaks every chickpea, juices every lemon, and freshly spins every batch of hummus.”
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7. Implement marketing strategies
Marketing is key to growing your business. It tells your customers who your brand is and why they should buy your products over those of your competitors. This brand awareness is a core driver of sales.
“If you understand who your target audience is and what set of experiences they have, you can relate to them through shared experiences,” says marketing expert Ezra Firestone.
According to Olipop founder Ben, it’s also essential to understand the category you’re operating in. “The vehicle we’ve chosen is soda, that’s the category where we’re operating in,” he says.
“That’s the occasion base we’re marketing to, that’s the consumer motivation that we’re targeting as well. That category is about refreshment. It’s about fun. If you’re not doing those things, then people are not going to want to buy your soda.”
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Once you know your category and your market, there are many channels and strategies you can use to get the word out about your brand. You can use digital ads and social media advertising, partner with influencers, open pop-ups, or attend conferences and industry events. There’s so much that goes into a successful marketing strategy, but the key, over everything else, is to have one. Sit down and determine where and how you plan to market your brand.
Document how you’ll tackle things like paid ads, organic search, influencer partnerships, and social media. Then, make sure you’re up to date on current marketing trends to stay ahead of the curve.
8. Build a strong and adaptable brand
Businesses constantly face challenges—from waning market demand and competitive new businesses to difficult clients and point-of-sale (POS) system problems. However, embracing change and being nimble, adaptive, and willing to pivot can lead to success.
Part of being adaptable as an entrepreneur is building a resilient brand that can grow with the business over time. Here are some tips to consider:
Don’t be bland
According to brand expert and co-founder and CEO of Compound Studio Shane Vitaly, many businesses are “blanding.” Essentially, they’ve attempted to create brands that please everyone, and as a result, appeal to no one.
“When we start thinking about a brand, we really hyper-focus on the identity. I find that a lot of people go out, and they just want to reach everybody,” he says.
Create a strong vision
For Emily Miller, founder of cereal shop OffLimits, the branding came before the product. “It was never just about starting a cereal brand, it really started with the mascots and pouring my own emotions into their extreme personalities,” she says.
Get creative and think about what you want your brand to be from an aspirational perspective. Put together your thoughts in one, central place, and don’t be afraid to let your imagination run wild. It’s often the most unique brands that stand out among the rest.
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Craft a compelling story
What makes your brand special? Creating both a written and visual brand story that explains who you are and why you do what you do. Have a style guide on how you use imagery, fonts, and written text, and use this to guide your website, packaging, and marketing materials.
For example, olive oil shop Graza uses hand drawn characters to bring its brand to life, while its brand story tells shoppers what makes its products stand out.
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🎨 Resource: How To Build a Brand Marketing Strategy
9. Get organized
When financial records, business licenses or permits, tax forms, or other documents (whether digital or paper-based) are difficult to locate or go missing, it can be frustrating and distract from time spent on your business. It can also cost you billable hours.
Keep a close eye on routine administrative, financial, and operational tasks. If you don’t have in-house departments or expertise, consider hiring an office organization consultant Similarly, you may largely do your own bookkeeping, you may want to hire a part-time bookkeeper to help you balance your accounts and improve cash-flow management. You can also use software like QuickBooks, which can integrate with Shopify to pull in orders and payouts from your Shopify store display them in one convenient dashboard.
📖 Resources:
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10. Prioritize self-care
“The more passionate and dedicated you are, the more mindful of burnout you have to be because you’re not necessarily going to put up those guardrails,” says Chivon John, Wellness Program lead at Shopify.
For many business owners, it’s easy to slip into the 24/7 work cycle. But resting, sleeping, exercising, eating well, relaxing, and spending time with friends and family are all forms of self-care essential for mental health—especially for entrepreneurs.
Studies show that you can achieve even more when well-rested. A recent US Chambers of Commerce article shares the importance of a good night’s sleep for entrepreneurs.
Here are a few ways to prioritize self-care. Focus on one or two every day to maintain a healthy work-life balance:
- Stay active. Take a work phone call while walking around the neighborhood or sneak some simple exercises in between blocks of work.
- Get enough sleep. Power down your devices an hour before bed and aim to get in bed around the same time every night if you can.
- Fuel your body with nutritious food. Keep your favorite fruits, nuts, veggies, and dips handy for a quick, energizing snack.
- Be proactive about staying social. A quick phone call or text exchange with a friend can go a long way to stay connected.
- Engage with your hobbies. Even when you feel like you have no time for non-work-related activities, a half hour of knitting, cooking, or video games can do wonders to boost your mood and creative energy.
- Take care of small stressors. When the dishes or the laundry pile up, it can be difficult to focus. Allow yourself the time to let your mind wander while you take care of household chores—or hire someone else to help.
- Curate a workspace you love. Ideally, it’s as separate from your living space as it can be.
11. Give back to the community
Business success isn’t always defined by profitability. Even with minimal cash flow, there are ways to give back and lift others within the community. Volunteering at a business-related event, donating a product or service for a raffle, speaking at a school, or mentoring young entrepreneurs are all ways to give back. Businesses can also make a positive impact by committing to using only ethically sourced materials in their products or following sustainable practices.
Increasingly, impact is at the core of mission-driven startups. Social ventures are for-profit businesses that are also socially responsible companies that give to certain groups or causes.
For example, Sweet Beginnings is a Chicago-based social enterprise that offers training programs and employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to become beekeepers and harvest honey for their products.
“Sweet Beginnings began because a lot of the people that are served in nonprofit are people that have had a history of incarceration. We began as a social enterprise to help people who were previously incarcerated and were having a difficult time finding a job,” says Daphne Williams, chief growth officer.
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12. Leverage AI to stay ahead
AI tools are more effective than ever, and you can use them to catapult your business ahead of the competition.
You can use AI tools to:
- Upsell and cross-sell product recommendations at checkout
- Generate accurate product descriptions
- Answer customer support tickets
- Create answers to frequently asked questions
- Interact with comments on social media
- Write first drafts of blog posts to jumpstart your content marketing strategy
Shopify Magic, an AI tool designed for commerce, can automate time-consuming tasks like generating SEO optimized product descriptions. And, Sidekick works as an AI Shopify expert that can answer questions and support business growth.
Measuring business success
To truly understand how your business is performing, you need to keep track of several KPIs. Here are some crucial ones:
Financial metrics
These metrics can give you a snapshot of the financial health of your business:
- Gross and net profit margin. Your total profits over a given time period, and your profits minus expenses.
- Cost per order (CPO). CPO calculates the total operational cost to fulfill a single order, including labor, packaging, shipping, and other overhead.
- Cost of goods sold (COGS). The total manufacturing cost to make each item you sell.
- ROI (return on investment). How profitable the sale of a product or services is relative to how much you paid for it.
Customer metrics
Customer engagement metrics like social media engagement or newsletter open rates are great indications of how active and interested your customer base is. Aside from those, there are a few key customer support metrics to track:
- Average review rating. Five stars or three? This is the average review of each product you sell.
- Referral rate. How many new customers have been referred by existing customers?
- Net Promoter Score (NPS). Calculate NPS by sending out a survey that asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service on a scale of one to ten. Then, calculate NPS by subtracting detractors from promoters.
- Repeat purchase rate. This is how many customers have purchased more than once from you within a given time frame.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the estimated value of each customer to your business over time.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). CSAT measures how happy customers are with your products or services, based on a numerical scale based on survey results. Customers rank your business on a scale (e.g., 1–5 or 1–10), and you then aggregate those results.
Operational efficiency metrics
Knowing your fulfillment, shipping, and return metrics can help you catch problems with quality and accuracy:
- Order fulfillment time. The time taken to process an order, from the moment it’s placed to when it’s shipped. A shorter fulfillment time indicates a streamlined operation.
- Order accuracy rate. This tracks the percentage of orders fulfilled without errors, such as wrong items or incorrect quantities.
- Inventory turnover ratio. This metric indicates how quickly inventory is sold and replaced over a period. A high turnover ratio suggests efficient stock management, whereas a low ratio may signal overstocking or slow-moving products.
- Return rate. The percentage of orders returned by customers. A high return rate may signal product defects or issues with fulfillment
- Shipping time. Monitoring average shipping times helps assess the efficiency of your logistics operations.
Marketing performance metrics
Knowing whether your marketing messaging is reaching the right audience to the desired effect is crucial to the success of your business:
- ROAS (return on ad spend). The revenue you make from ads divided by the cost you spent on them.
- Click rate. The percentage of people who clicked on an ad relative to how many people viewed it.
- Conversion rate. The percentage of people who completed a desired action (like a purchase or an email signup), from the total that interacted with your marketing materials or website.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC). How much it costs to acquire a new customer through marketing and advertising.
- Cart abandonment rate. The percentage of users who add items to their cart but don’t complete the checkout process.
Business success FAQ
How can I measure the success of my business?
Start by defining what success means to you and what takes priority: Is it sales, growth, customer satisfaction, or brand recognition? Besides running a profitable business, do you value a collaborative and engaged workforce? Then, measure success through data collected via A/B testing, customer reviews, and email open rates, among other metrics.
How long does it take to achieve business success?
There is no set timeline for achieving business success. However, you can start by creating a business strategy to reach your goals. By mapping out the incremental steps to reach certain benchmarks—from units sold to new hires—you can develop a general timeline to achieve success based on your experience and industry standards. Keep in mind, your timetable could change or take longer than estimated due to the ever-changing commerce landscape.
Is there one formula to achieve success?
No, there’s no single formula for success, or every business would succeed. While owners of small businesses have different goals and priorities, there are some key markers that make a business successful. These include having an excellent business idea, vision, and passion, and a solid business plan. Understanding marketing, operations, finances, and your competitive landscape are all crucial. Additionally, if your business has even a single employee, it’s crucial to be an effective leader—responsible, empathetic, and one who can get the best from their team.
How do I make my business grow?
You can achieve business growth by identifying your target audience and tailoring your products or services to meet their needs. Leverage digital marketing strategies such as social media, email campaigns, and SEO to increase your reach and drive traffic. Invest in tools and technologies, like AI-powered solutions, to streamline operations and make data-driven decisions. Build strong relationships with your customers through excellent service and engagement, as loyal customers are crucial for long-term growth. Analyze performance metrics and be willing to adapt your strategies to stay competitive in a dynamic market.
Is it necessary to invest in marketing for business success?
Marketing helps you reach your customers and convince them that your product or service is worth buying. While word-of-mouth referrals can expand your base, marketing is the most significant way to get the word out about your business. You can invest in multiple marketing strategies depending on your product, industry, and target customer. These include paid advertising, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and SEO to drive sales.