Celebrate Success!

I was just reading an interview Online Marketing/Metrics rockstar Dan Martell did with a Canadian business blog and wanted to share his great thoughts on the importance of celebrating your success.

We do not celebrate our successes enough. When your moving quickly to create something big and meaningful, you sometimes forget to celebrate along the way. I am constantly looking at ways to reinforce the good work done by our employees. For example, if a customer has said something positive about the company, I take it back to the employees. I explain to them how their work furthered the company strategy. If an employee or team was singled out, then I make sure I talk to them and again relate it back to our strategic goals. Talking about current successes and relating it back to strategic goals is a great way to reinforce the belief in the company’s vision. People need to be constantly reminded that their work contributes to the company achieving its strategic vision.

This might same like stuff from the first lecture of Obvious 101 but when you’re in the middle of a startup and you have 50 things to do every day and more coming in every day you often forget to take a step back and really think about what you’ve accomplished. Additionally, the type of people that startups often attract are so focused on their work and just doing a great job that they don’t realize the importance of what they’ve just accomplished. At Apture we bought Champagne for celebrating our “official launch” (the one with lots of press) in June 2008 and it’s still sitting in the office unopened because we spent that entire day fixing bugs and revving the product and the same happened with every other release we do.

Dan is exactly right in pointing out how important rallying around a success is for your team spirit (and your own) and taking the time to celebrate is (almost) as important as releasing awesome products that people love. Oh, and Dan thanks for taking us all out to lunch this week, I think we came up with some great ideas!