In the business world, everyone likes to remain 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?

Would you come back to find your business more profitable? or would you come back and say, where’s my business?

My business has 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 have learned from one bestselling book – The E-Myth.

How your Business can run in The 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 that. He shares insights about Why Most Small Business Don’t work and what to do about it.

He says that –

• Most entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs.
• They are technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure.

Meaning suddenly they are 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 this, that I should go out there and start my own business.

And what happens is then you have a plumber starting a plumbing business, or a chef starting a restaurant business.

So they understand the technical aspect of a business, and how to do the technical work, but they actually don’t have 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 doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it.

And they never understand how to build a business.

What Michael talks about is that most entrepreneurs, spend way too much time working 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 need to plan to sell, you need to structure your business in such a way that, hey, if I’m going to sell it someday, what would that look like?

Right, what do I need to do differently?

Well, one thing for sure that you know, you can not just be the one that’s doing and doing and doing. 

That’s just driving the business.

Yes, in the beginning, you have to be the driver for the business, same as me, but later on, what does that actually look like?

• What does the end product look like?
• Meaning what does your business look like when it’s done?

That’s correct, you have to have a picture, what does your business look like when it’s completed?

When it’s finished, when someone can step in and actually take over, even though you may never sell the business, but what that means is if you could build your business in that way, that 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 could do that, even though you never do that just by thinking and structuring and building your business in a way that is sellable, it makes the business more scalable, it makes the business more efficient, that gives you more freedom, freedom to do whatever you want.

Maybe you want to use your free time to start another business, maybe you are a serial entrepreneur just like myself, who started multiple brands or businesses. 

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 just want to spend more quality time with your family, but now you have a choice you’re working in the business not because you have to, but because you want to because you enjoy it.

But you know that you can also step away if you want to as well, that’s what we need to do.

You see the nature of business, technology and people and the world that we live in, it means that there’s always a degree of unpredictability that is very, very normal, but most challenges, most problems in business usually are not one-off events.

So if you find yourself solving the same problem in a business again and again and again, and again, usually it is 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 need to do.

Yes, I am a visionary like yourself as well, I like a big picture, I get it.

But someone, it could be you or someone within your organization better know how to create systems.

One of the most powerful mindset shifts that you need to have, is instead of asking what I need to 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 have to think differently.

That means that we have to ask ourselves a different set of questions.

So let’s talk about exactly what is a system.

Regardless of what business you’re in, there are best practices,

they’re the best ways of doing something that has the highest chance of bringing about a particular result that you want consistently.

So if you look at the best practices and you identify those steps and you break it down into things and in ways that could be written down, that could be illustrated, that could be documented, that could produce those results again and again, that is a system, it’s that simple.

Think of it like baking a cake, right. 

If you want to bake a cake, you want to have the same flavor and same taste all the time, right. There is a recipe that you know exactly what ingredients and how much ingredients and how long you want the cake to be in the oven, right?

There are steps into doing this and you could illustrate the whole process in a recipe, in a checklist, or maybe even a grocery list of where to get those ingredients in order to create that cake consistently, you to have that consistent performance and outcome.

Well, that is 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 in-depth because that 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, if 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.

If you are a web designing company, your template, is your hard system.

If you are a digital marketing company and you built funnels for people, that funnel template, that is your hard system.

Something that you could replicate and duplicate for other clients.

#2 Soft System

Then number two, you have what I call soft systems.

Soft systems mean what something sounds like (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 do you cross-sell, how you communicate with your prospects,

your closing script is a soft system.

Now, every single time your salesperson gets on the phone and just says whatever he feels like, aah, I’m just, he’s just winging it, well, that is not a system and depends on his mood, someday he closes well, someday he doesn’t close so well.

That is because you’re not giving him a system to follow.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to give him a script to follow word for word, and he’s talking 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 single time he gets on the phone and closes somebody, that’s a soft system, that’s how you get predictable sales.

You don’t want, if you have a team of salespeople, you don’t want all of them close differently.

Yes, they have their own little style, but they should all 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 is a form of soft system, your training program, that is a form of soft system.

For example, with any organization, there is a process of onboarding like training. Additionally, there is a process, any new hire go through a process that immerses them into the culture, core values, mission, what are products, how the department operates, and how we do things so that we don’t have to manually train someone all the time.

They’re going to go through this process, there are different assignments and they get themselves trained.

Because think about this, people come and go and that’s life.

But the jobs that people do will remain even though 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 could hit the ground running, versus what most business owners do and this is what I used to do, I made that mistake?

That when someone leaves right, their capabilities, their skill sets all go with them, and now you have a void.

Now you need to start from scratch, you hire the person, you spend a lot, a lot of time training that person, right, very, very costly, versus every single time someone leaves your company, it creates a huge burden, it creates a massive amount of chaos, that you got to clean up that mess and you got to go in every single time to be the hero to save the day, you do not want to do that.

Think about this, how most business owners operate.

Think – How Mukesh Ambani operates its business? 

Reliance – Reliance is a big giant.

All big business operates through a system. That’s the reason if the owner of the business goes on leave for a few days still business runs.

How? The system would run the business and people would run the system, that’s how you build a business that runs in autopilot mode without you a business that scales.

Building a system, and establishing a process is a challenge for every aspiring entrepreneur. 

They don’t know how to shift from an entrepreneur to a CEO.

If you want a proven path of exactly what you need to focus on at every stage of your business growth, and also, how do you shift from the entrepreneur to the CEO?

How do you wear the CEO hat? Get in touch with me at contact@moneyexcel.com.

I have proven steps, processes, and systems for every business owner. I am sure I can help you to run your business in autopilot mode.