Six years in. The business is nothing like I planned. The life is exactly what I needed.
Planned a SaaS company with 10,000 users. Got a consulting practice with 26 clients. Planned to hire a team of twelve. Have two contractors and a part-time VA. Planned to be in an office with exposed brick and a ping pong table. Work from the bedroom my daughter outgrew when she started school.
Revenue is about 70 percent of what I projected for year six. Hours worked are about 60 percent of what I projected. Which means the per-hour math is actually better than the plan even though the headline number is worse.
My daughter and I walk to school together three mornings a week. I coach her football team on Saturdays. I was at every single school event this year. My wife and I had dinner together at a normal hour more nights than not.
None of this was in the business plan. All of it is in the life the business made possible.
The plan measured revenue and headcount because those are the numbers you put on a spreadsheet. The life measures time and presence because those are the things you feel when the spreadsheet is closed.
If your business is smaller than you planned but your life is better than you expected, that's not underperformance. That's a different kind of success that nobody teaches you to measure because it doesn't fit in a cell.