Part 5 of 9 in a series about ZENTX’s history and company values.

How do you define success? Especially success in business. Is it about making a profit? We like doing that, for sure. But is that all success is?

Not quite, according to our definition.

We do want to succeed in the usual sense of earning money. As one of our core values says, “We are all in this to improve our lives financially and make a profit.” (That’s why people get jobs, after all.) But it’s not about earning money for the sake of money. We also want to earn it the right way — by working hard, committing to quality products, and so on. Greedily trying to earn as much as possible is never the point.

Doing good work. Tackling exciting, challenging projects. Making it possible for employees to provide for their families. Helping our customers succeed. Those are all part of ZENTX’s definition of success.

Want to hear more? Mike and Mark Wenz, our two founders, dive deeper into their take on “success” in the video at the bottom of the page. You can scroll to watch it, or read the full transcript below.

How Do You Define Success?

Mark Wenz: Success is quite different for a lot of different people. I don’t consider [it] success as far as how much revenue we’re bringing in or… I mean, you could be bringing in millions and millions of dollars and still not be successful.

Mike Wenz: Success is a hard thing to define. For me, it’s never been about money. It was about trying different ideas and being successful at that. And so in a lot of ways, I think we are successful because of things we’ve built through the years and, you know, maybe we’ve changed some lives here and there or whatever — I would say that’s probably more successful than anything. You’re always going to have financial challenges, and I think that gets easier with time.

Mark: Success to me is if we’ve completed our projects that we need to do to get done in time, that we have a customer that’s very satisfied with the products, the services that we’ve offered, with no issues.

And that to me is a success, that we’ve helped someone achieve what they wanna do, and we’ve made it easy for them to do it.

Improving ZENTX’s Processes for Success

Mike: So we’ve had a saying the last couple years, like “We really need to figure out how to work on the business instead of working in the business.”

We have worked on the business; we have tried to better our communication with people and have the Monday morning meetings [to go] over jobs with everybody in the company, you know, starting a supply area — just all sorts of things that we’ve done to work on the business.

There’s some things that I’d say we’ve been successful at. There’s other things that we haven’t been so successful at, that we’re still trying to figure out. You know, that may be little easy things.

Taking Responsibility for Success

Mark: I look at the employees, the team members, [and] I feel a big responsibility in [the] sense that, when we hire people, they are relying on the business in order to maybe put food on their tables, as an example. So I take it very seriously as far as how we conduct business or {laughs} that we have business, that we have work to do. Some places don’t look at it like that. You know, it’s all, “What’s the bottom line? What’s our — ”

Yeah, you wanna be profitable, you wanna have revenue, you wanna have — cause all those things are important, and we don’t take it lightly that the people that work for us — it’s a big responsibility. Everyone’s counting on us to come into work, and to make sure that the lights are on.