Being a business owner carries a lot of responsibility and risk. It may feel like if you’re not there, nothing will get done, and you’ll lose money. That is likely true if you’ve not created and established systems to work for you so that you can work on your business instead of at your business. After all, wasn’t the entire point of starting your own business to have more freedom? Money is great, but it only goes so far to creating happiness if you’re always at work.
Create and Establish Systems
Every successful business has something in common with another successful business. That’s organization. Every business from a restaurant to a multibillion dollar corporation has systems in place that they use like clockwork. It might seem boring, but if you have a system for everything, not only will you get better at doing whatever it is you do, but you’ll also get faster at it. It’s the main driving force behind manufacturing. Those systems can be put in place for whatever it is that you do, too.
Hire, Train, and Empower a Team
If you have good systems in place, it’s also simpler to hire a team. By providing your team with training on your systems, and having checklists in place to help them stick to your systems, you’ll be able to create a team that can get things done without having to talk to you about anything. The key to this working is also to empower your team. Since you can’t possibly foresee every single contingency, give your team the power to handle things within a certain dollar amount without your permission.
Write and Schedule Blog Posts
The greatest invention to come to pass for online marketing is the ability to schedule blog posts. You know you’re going to be gone for a specific amount of time, so just pre-write or have written blog posts based on whatever it is you’re promoting and pre-schedule them for delivery while you’re away. To the world, it’ll look like business as usual.
Write and Schedule Social Media Updates
The same thing can be done for all your social media marketing. The truth is, you should be using these automation techniques at all times anyway. If you’re a month ahead on blog posts, social media updates, and so forth, almost anything could happen to you and the money would keep flowing for some time.
Automate What You Can
There are so many things that can be automated, from bookkeeping to the entire ordering process. If you’ve not already automated everything that you can, seek more information until you have many processes on automatic. For instance, you can hire someone to write, edit and post blog posts for you on a regular basis. You can also use software to automatically update your bookkeeping by connecting it to your bank account. In addition, if you sell digital or even physical products, there is always a way to automate the entire process.
Finally, it’s important to simply let go. You’ve trained and empowered your team, scheduled social media and blog posts, automated what you have, established excellent systems, and you’ve been open with your clients. You might consider conducting some test runs with your team before you’ve really left to find out how it works. You may be surprised at how well it goes and start taking even more vacations than you thought you ever could.
