We interviewed three women entrepreneurs in the Houston area and asked them to define success in their own terms. Funny enough, none of them mentioned anything regarding money, salary, or meeting financial goals. Something that is often wrapped up in the ideology of success, right?
These business owners look at success in a drastically different way. Hopefully after reading this article, you can too.
Khaliah Guillory — owner and founder of Nap Bar
Khaliah Guillory established Houston’s first Nap Bar in April of 2019. Owning, running, and managing your own business takes a lot of hard work and — as Khaliah stated — preparation. Success to Khaliah is always the result of extensive preparation.
“There’s really no such thing as luck. And it’s really the ideology that I’ve adopted because that’s really what success is. Are you prepared? There’s a saying, ‘You don’t have to get ready if you stay ready,’” Khaliah expressed.
Although preparation is the driving force for success, there are so many “things that come into the fold,” according to this Houston business owner. However, none of these facets of success is related to money.
“There’s so many different ways that we can quantify success but when you really get down to the bottom of it, you notice I never mentioned anything about money. I didn’t mention anything about that because that doesn’t matter. In my eyes, I’ll make the money because I’m going about it the right way. With integrity. With honesty,” Khaliah wisely conveyed.
Hannah Kirby — business developer of Excel Title Group
Hannah Kirby focuses on creating a positive work culture that allows her and her coworkers to do their best work possible. She voiced, “I’m very big on creating a happy office atmosphere. I don’t care how you get the work done. Just do it. We can go home early. I’m big on putting your head down, work, work, work. Play hard.”
Alike Khaliah, Hannah spoke about the common misconception between success and money, “When I was younger, I thought that success was money driven. And I think it came to a point in my husband and my career when we realized that we reached our monetary goals but we were so obligated to our responsibility. We had more obligations and problems with more money than we did with less money.”
Having moved from job to job, success to Hannah entails learning something from every job and situation she goes through. “This is a rule I adopted when I was 15 years old and working as a hostess at a Chinese buffet for minimum wage. It was $5.15/hr. I told myself no matter what I do, or where I go, the one thing I’m going to do is learn something new from every job, and take that and utilize it for the rest of my life.”
Shavonnah Roberts Schreiber — owner and founder of SNR Creative
Shavonnah Schreiber started SNR Creative, a Houston-based marketing firm, in 2012. She attributes much of SNR Creative’s success to using their resources to the best of their ability.
Shavonnah emphasized that making the most of your resources is key to being successful. “No matter who it is: Tiger Woods, Oprah, The President — you name the person — they have 24 hours in a day. They don’t have any extra time, and every day they get up and they have to make the best of whatever resources they have. Making the best of what you have is fundamental.”
In other words, regardless of the amount of resources (money) that you have, you can be just as successful as the next person. Like Shavonnah said, we all have the same amount of hours in a day, so do the best with what you got!
Shavonnah is proud of the small, yet mighty staff size. In under two years, the company has gone from one to six colleagues — not including paid interns that work each semester. She is committed to hiring high-quality candidates that can add value as soon as they start. Success to her is about building the right team — not necessarily a large team. It’s not a numbers game.
She emphasized, “I never ever want to go in reverse. So, I would rather us all max out our capacity here and just be busy busy busy versus hiring a bunch of people and then praying the work comes.”
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What each of these women said could not be more true. Success is not all about the money, the numbers, or the size of your company. We wish we could proclaim this from the rooftops! As you can tell, there are many different ways to define success for yourself or your business. Let us know what stood out to you in this article or how you define success.
Written By: Intern Julie Phillips
