Do a quick Google search for business success and you’ll find many articles and courses breaking it down to a simple formula. Follow this pattern, they argue, and success will follow.

If it’s really that simple, why isn’t everyone heading up a portfolio of unicorn start-ups?

What does ‘success’ look like?

There are a few elements that most people would agree constitute a successful business:

Profit: The most common measure of success is usually defined in terms of profits: how much money does it make? If business can support itself, pay its staff and give money back to its investors then it can be counted as a success.

Purpose: How well does the business succeed in what it set out to do? Does it fulfil its promises?

Longevity: This is an indicator of stability – which suggests that the business has a solid structure, is following good practices and can be relied on.

There are many more indicators, but a balance of these three is important. If a company focuses on profit above all else then the chances are it will fail at some point. Especially if its purpose also becomes ‘make as much money as possible – never mind how’ – this leads to unethical practises and profiteering often by exploiting suppliers or workers. There are also zombie companies that linger on (and on) but without showing any other sign of success.

No simple recipe

As good practice, business leaders need to aim for balance in business, and there are many frameworks and strategies to follow. However, this isn’t the same as a recipe for success. There are too many variables for each industry, business model and scenario for it to ever be that simple.

According to an article published on resolvefinancial.co.uk, 20% of startups in the UK fail after one year, and 60% don’t last beyond 3 years. The top reasons listed vary from not being able to raise capital, tough competition, poor timing for the product through to disagreements in the team and burnout.

Basically, starting and building a business is difficult no matter the level of planning you put in because there are so many elements out of your locus of control.

What’s luck got to do with it?

Being in the right place at the right time, or having an idea at a particular time, is often more behind the success of businesses than many are comfortable admitting. We like to think of a great business leader as great because of their actions, insight, and abilities – we don’t want to admit that maybe they were just lucky.

Believing that these people have some special quality allows us to hope that we can learn from them, emulate them and become successful ourselves. But if the success was even partially down to luck, then success seems more arbitrary: like entering a lottery. What is the point of putting in the long, hard hours, attending courses and seminars, pushing to be your best possible self when success is either going to be something you achieve, or not – no matter what you yourself do? Perhaps success is nothing more than a worldly version of Calvinistic predetermination where the elect are set apart by divine providence rather than any intrinsic abilities.

Lessons from evolution

However, I’d argue that it’s more likely that success for individuals and businesses is due to a mixture of luck plus hard work and innovation. Putting in the groundwork means you’ll be in a situation to take advantage of an opportunity when it comes around.

Looking back at evolution, we see a clear story of how life developed from one point to another, almost as if it was planned. Actually, what we see now and in the fossil record is the result of many millions of tiny mutations and changes which turned out to be beneficial allowing the individuals to breed and pass on the characteristics. Many billions of others turned out to be dead ends.

What proved to be successful depended more on the surrounding circumstances than the nature of the change itself. The large scale of time also helps as some mutations may appear and die out several times before finally the circumstances are right for them to succeed.

These ‘evolutionary iterations’ also happen in the case of business. Charles Goodyear triggered a commercial revolution when he discovered the process of vulcanisation to create stable rubber from latex. However, the Aztecs had been using this process for thousands of years to create many rubber products: the reason it didn’t lead to worldwide commercial changes back then was simply that the time and external circumstances weren’t right. It was the combination of technology and the wider situation that allowed it to be commercialized. (We’ll ignore the wider view of how rubber tyres fuelled the growth of petrol engines leading to a whole host of other issues…)

A new formula for success

There are no hard and fast rules to help you or your business achieve success, although there are lots of good models and business practices that will help get you on the right track. However, there are too many external forces and unknowns for anyone to be able to promise a sure-fire path to success: the actions of previously successful leaders or businesses only show what worked for them at that time.

One possible formula to keep in mind when planning is:

Hard work + Innovation (Right Place + Right Time) = Success