I ran a Q & A Skype session with a few of my liber8yourbusiness clients the other day. I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought I’d share a couple of the key questions and the answers discussed. One was around the right time to enlist help with admin when cashflow is tight. The answer actually came from another client, not me. It was that the sooner you can get someone else doing the admin work that allows you to focus on income generation the better. You can use business services these days that allow you to bring on help whenever you need it, for as many hours a week as you can manage, without the commitment and worries of employing someone. The point to bear in mind is that your primary focus needs to be on growing your business and every hour you spend doing administrative work that someone else could easily do is another hour you could have put towards the important strategies that will see your business prosper.
Another question asked was around what to do today, right now, towards systemising your business in the future. This particular client has seen the value in developing a system around what she does so that she can sell the license to that system in the future. “But what,” she asks, “should I be doing now towards that goal?”. My answer came straight from my recent interview with Mike Brunel. Start looking at what you do now on a daily basis and document the elements that are key to your success. Mike suggested you get yourself a dictophone and follow yourself around, talking through all the steps you take when delivering your core services. Turn what you do into a system, write it down and begin to form the manuals that someone else could follow… it is the manuals and the system that you will ultimately be able to sell.
Turn yourself into a product. This is one of the keys to a business in the future that is not dependent on you!