In the business world, everyone likes to stay free and run business in autopilot mode. Imagine the situation –
What would happen if you took a week off or a month off or even three months off, away from your business, what would happen?
Will you come back to find your business more profitable? or will you come back and say, where is my business?
My business is gone, just complete chaos.
But my dear friend, you can overcome the above situation and run your business in auto-pilot mode and even scale your business. Let me share with you what I learned from one best-selling book – The E-Myth.
How can your business run in Auto Pilot mode and scale?
The world’s number one small business guru and the author of the book “The E-Myth”, Michael Gerber, talks about it. He shares insights into why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it.
He says that –
- Most entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs.
- They are technicians with an entrepreneurial bent.
It means all of a sudden they’re working a job, they’re doing something, and then the entrepreneurial bug just bites them, and they’re like, you know what, I can do better than that, that I should go out there and start my own business.
And what happens is then you have a plumber who starts a plumbing business, or a chef who starts a restaurant business.
So they understand the technical aspect of a business, and how to do the technical work, but they actually lack the necessary skills of a business owner or an entrepreneur on how to actually run a business.
So then what ends up happening is they get busy and busy, busy, busy, and do this, do this, do this, do this.
And they never understand how to build a business.
What Michael is talking about is that most entrepreneurs spend far too much time in their business, but not on their business.
To build a business that runs without you, on day one, your intention must be to build a business to sell.
Even though you may never sell the business, on day one you have to plan to sell, you have to structure your business so that, hey, if I were to sell it one day, what would it look like?
Right, what else should I do?
Well, one thing you know for sure, you can’t just be the one doing and doing and doing.
It just drives the business.
Yes, in the beginning you have to be the driver for the business, same as me, but later, what does it actually look like?
- What does the end product look like?
- You mean what your business looks like when it’s done?
That’s right, you need to have a picture, what does your business look like when it’s complete?
When that’s done, when someone can step in and actually take over, even though you might never sell the business, but what that means is if you can build your business like that, it automatically makes your business more valuable.
So when you do want to retire, when you do want to have a successful exit, cash in, you can do it, even if you never do it just by thinking and structuring and building your business in a marketable way , it makes the business more scalable, it makes the business more efficient, it gives you more freedom, freedom to do what you want.
Maybe you want to use your free time to start another business, maybe you are a serial entrepreneur just like me, who started several brands or businesses.
You know after I quit my job in 2021, I made 5 brands. All of them make money. I went from a single source of income to 2 sources of income and now enjoy 6 different streams of income.
Brands I own that make me money are Finxdata, SK Motivational, RR Media Net and Shitanshu10x.
If you want to make your brand by starting an online business, you can contact me or attend my live webinar. You can get more details at https://shitanshu10x.com.
Another thing you can do is focus your time on building your investment and taking some of the profits and growing your portfolio, or maybe you just want to spend more quality time with your family, but now you have a choice that you work in the business. not because you have to, but because you want to because you enjoy it.
But you know you can walk away if you want too, that’s what we have to do.
You see the nature of business, technology and people and the world we live in, it means there is always a degree
of unpredictability that is very, very normal, but most challenges, most problems in business are usually not one-time events.
So if you find yourself solving the same problem in a business again and again and again and again, this is usually a sign of a lack of business system in your company.
As a CEO of your company, you don’t want to confuse what you don’t want to do with what you have to do.
Yes, I’m a visionary like you too, I like the big picture, I get it.
But someone, it could be you or someone within your organization who knows better how to create systems.
One of the most powerful mindset changes you must have is instead of asking what should I do, ask yourself, how do i solve this problem not once but forever?
You must realize that business is an intellectual sport.
To create a different result, we need to think differently.
This means we have to ask ourselves a different set of questions.
So let’s talk about exactly what a system is.
No matter what business you are in, there are best practices,
these are the best ways to do something that has the greatest chance of producing a specific result that you want consistently.
So if you look at the best practices and you identify those steps and you break them down into things and in ways that can be written down, that can be illustrated, that can be documented, that can produce those results over and over again,
it’s a system, it’s that simple.
Think of it like baking a cake, right.
If you want to bake a cake, you want the same flavor and the same taste all the time, right. There is a recipe that you know exactly which ingredients and how many ingredients
and how long do you want the cake to be in the oven, right?
There are steps to do this and you can illustrate the whole process in a recipe, in a checklist, or maybe even a grocery list of where to get those ingredients to consistently create that cake, to have that consistent performance and outcome to have
Well, it’s a system, it’s that simple.
Don’t overcomplicate it.
And in business there are many, many, many forms of systems, I don’t want to go into too much depth because it would be a long post.
I’m just going to give you the most basic level, three types of systems.
#1 Hard system
Hard System means something visual. (Things you can see) Your logo is a hard system, right, when you walk into a store in McDonald’s, you see a certain theme, the decoration that is a hard system, a uniform that is a hard system system is.
If you are a web design company, your template is your hard system.
If you’re a digital marketing company and you’ve built funnels for people, that funnel template, that’s your hard system.
Something you can replicate and duplicate for other customers.
#2 Soft system
Then number two, you have what I call soft systems.
Soft systems mean how something sounds (things you can hear), for example it could be how you greet a customer,
how you handle complaints, how you sell, how you upsell, how you cross sell, how you communicate with your prospects,
your closing script is a soft system.
Now, every time your salesperson gets on the phone and just says whatever he’s feeling, aah, I’m just, he’s just winging it, well, it’s not a system and depends on his mood, one day he closes well, one day he doesn’t close so well.
That’s because you don’t give him a system to follow.
Now, I’m not saying you have to give him a script to follow word for word, and he talks like a robot, but there should be some standard questions, some standard script that you know,
kind of an outline that he’s going to follow every time he gets on the phone and closes somebody, it’s a soft system, it’s how you get predictable sales.
You don’t want, if you have a team of salespeople, you don’t want everybody else closing.
Yes, they have their own little style, but they all have to follow the same soft system.
#3 Information Systems
And third, you have information systems. When I say information systems, I’m referring to your standardized processes and reports.
So if you have your KPI report, your key performance indicator report, that’s a form of soft system, your training program, that’s a form of soft system.
For example, with any organization there is a process of onboarding such as training. In addition, there is a process, any new hire goes through a process that immerses them in the culture, core values, mission, what are products, how the department functions, and how we do things so that we don’t have to manually train someone constantly.
They are going to go through this process, there are different assignments and they are getting themselves trained.
Because think about it, people come and go and that’s life.
But the works that people do will remain, even if those people are no longer with you.
Isn’t it a lot easier to find someone to fill that position, if you have systems in place, someone can hit the ground running, versus what most business owners do and that’s what I used to do, I made that mistake?
That when someone goes right away, their abilities, their skills all go with them, and now you have a void.
Now you have to start from scratch, you hire the person, you spend a lot, a lot of time training that person, right, very, very expensive, versus every time someone leaves your company, it creates a huge burden, it creates a great deal of chaos,
that you have to clean up that mess and go in every time to be the hero to save the day, you don’t want to do that.
Consider this, how most business owners operate.
Think – How Mukesh Ambani runs his business?
Reliance – Reliance is a big giant.
All large business enterprises operate through a system. This is the reason if the owner of the business goes on leave for a few days, the business is still running.
How? The system will run the business and people will run the system, that’s how you build a business that runs in autopilot mode without having a business that scales.
Building a system and establishing a process is a challenge for every aspiring entrepreneur.
They don’t know how to change from an entrepreneur to a CEO.
If you want a proven path of exactly what to focus on
at every stage of your business growth, and also, how do you move from the entrepreneur to the CEO?
How do you wear the CEO hat? Get in touch with me at [email protected]
I have proven steps, processes and systems for every business owner. I’m sure I can help you run your business in autopilot mode.
