Some business owners are all about making more money, while others are obsessed with making sales goals. Have you ever thought about making it your main goal to set up your business so it can grow and do well even without you?
The best asset to own is a business that doesn’t depend on its owner. You have full control over how you spend your time. You can choose what projects you work on and when you go on vacation. When it’s time to sell, a business that doesn’t depend on its owner is much more valuable than one that does. So with all this in mind, how can you get to this point? How can you ensure that your business really does work without you? Read on to find out.
Write A Manual
You can’t step away from the day-to-day operations of your business until you’ve written down everything that needs to be done. If you write down all the important steps in standard operating procedures, anyone can run your business by just following the instructions. When you’re not around, your staff will know what rules and guidelines to follow because you gave them instructions. And when someone leaves, it’s easy to get their replacement up to speed on their part of the process. And once you’ve taken yourself out of the day-to-day running of your business, you can start working on your business instead of in it. That’s where you’ll really add value as a business owner.
Want to know if your manual for employees is up to par? Take a break and let your team handle everything. If something goes wrong, fix it and make sure the process that went wrong doesn’t happen again. Keep doing this until there are no more problems, and then you can be sure that your business can run on its own.
Delegate More
Business owners like to be in charge. Since it’s your business, you should, of course, be in the middle of everything. But is making, delivering, and selling all of your products and services the best way to spend your time? Not if you want to get more money when you sell your business.
This is why it’s important to delegate and reduce your workload when you can. For some business owners, this is not going to be easy. As we said, they like to be in charge, and it can be a challenge for them to let go of some processes. However, think about the future. Think about how great it will be when you can step away from the business and simply enjoy the profits without having to put in any more work (you will have paid your dues by then). Keep this in mind and start to delegate more.
Begin with the tasks that you know your team can handle and keep the others to yourself to start with. As time goes on and your staff get more confident – and you know you can trust them more – you will be able to delegate more and more. Not only will you gradually have less to do, but your staff will get used to the idea that you’re not in charge of everything in the business – they will be less reliant on you. This is a key part of having a business that runs without you.
If you don’t have any staff and aren’t planning to hire any (now or in the future), then you might think you’re stuck and that you have to keep doing it all yourself. Maybe you think you’ll never be able to step away from what you’re doing, and this can lead to feeling as though it’s just not worth growing the business any further.
Don’t worry – there is a solution. In this situation, you can outsource processes. This might include marketing, accounting, or even sales. It could be that you find someone to answer emails for you or to respond to people on social media. Whatever it is, you can start small and outsource more and more as time goes by, and that will give you the same results as if you have a team of employees behind you.
Let Your Marketing Speak For Itself
If there is one thing that’s guaranteed to help you get a good business that works without you, it’s your marketing. Let your marketing speak for itself, and you’ll find that your business will make sales and make money even if you’re not there to helm the ship.
If you really want your marketing to do what it’s supposed to do, it’s a good idea to find experts to help you rather than trying to work it all out for yourself. A good marketing campaign could be what you need to take your business to the next level and to start stepping away because sales are coming in no matter whether you’re at work that day or not.
Ideally, you should find specialists for whatever it is you need to be done rather than marketing generalists. So if you need a YouTube ad campaign developed, finding experts like Linx Digital will help you the most, for example.
In the end, the most successful companies take their marketing seriously and reinvest their profits into this where possible. This will increase sales and eventually give you a business that works without you, which is the ultimate goal of so many entrepreneurs.
Embrace Technology
Technology is something that all business owners need to understand and embrace as much as possible. Not all tech is going to be relevant for your particular business, which is why research is needed, but the things that are should be used to their best advantage to help you automate and/or streamline as much of your business as possible.
The more technology you can implement, the easier everything will be. This is particularly true when it comes to automation, as it means you are one step removed from what is happening. If you also have a team you can trust (or some excellent outsourcing partners), this means that you are going to be able to step away much more quickly than you might have thought.
