Would you like to wake up every day, knowing that your business is running along very nicely — WITHOUT any input from you?
One of the best tests of business freedom is if you can take a break and know that nothing is impacted and everything runs smoothly and as it is supposed to be, even if you are not there!
As a speaker, author or coach, whilst you are a key part of the business, running yourself ragged by building the business around you so that you constantly have to be in it, or burning out as a result is a trap many can fall into.
Yet, it is more than possible to set up your business so that you are not the lynchpin or bottleneck to living the life of your dreams. To do that, you need to ask yourself some questions. Grab a sheet of paper, and get thinking about how you want it all.
Two questions to get you thinking:
- How do you define a business that runs without you?
We do know that this is a bit of a trick question — you’ll need to be present some of the time, but that doesn’t mean the business can’t run without you most of the time. So you need to define what that means for you.
Have a first go at answering this, don’t just go with the first thing, really think about it. Here are some questions to get you thinking:
– Is it you on your own, fully automated?
– Is it a team effort, that runs in the background whilst you are away?
– Is it that the business is run by someone else?
– What’s your role in the company?
– How often do you check in with the business?
2. Now to get motivated, if you did run a business that runs without you, what does that make possible for you and your family? And what about the world?
Take some time out to really think about the impact of running a business that frees you up to spend time doing what you love to do. Who are you spending time with, what are you able to do as a result of not being fully tied to your business. The clearer you get this, the easier and more inspired you’ll be to set up a business that runs without you. (Because getting that set up is not always easy — so you need to know it’s worth the effort!)
Some things to consider:
To set up a business that runs without you, you need to consider a few things:
- How your products can be sold (automated online courses, evergreen webinars, a sales team that does the work for you?)
- What systems and teach that needs to be place to do the heavy lifting for you, based on your business model
- How you plan and allocate time — of yourself, the team and any outsourced support you might be using
- What checks and measures you put in place — and who does them?
- How often you’ll review and revise what’s happening, so you can make changes or shift the direction of the business with the trends that are happening in your industry or indeed in the world
So you see, setting up a business that runs without you, isn’t about leaving the business; it still requires you, but in a different way. It’s about freeing you up to create even more in the business — as well as having a great life of course! It’s not just about ‘not just working’ — because as an entrepreneurial speaker, author, coach, we know you’ll just turn your hand to something else that you want to contribute!
You have to get your business model right:
It’s about doing it On Your Terms™, so you can really support yourself to do the things you love doing, without getting bogged down in the ‘job’ of running the business. We find this when we are helping speakers, authors and coaches to set up their business models — challenging you to make it work for you, and understand the answers to some of these questions is exactly what’s required to decide how your business will best run, for you.
You have to get your mind around it
It requires a shift in thinking, and a set of values and qualities that you may need to develop, as well as some skills around outsourcing, delegation and asking for help. It’s definitely not an overnight thing either, it takes work up front, and planning.
If you do the thinking on the questions we’ve presented you, we know you’ll have a ‘gap’ between where you are and where you want to be. That’s ok, don’t judge it, get to work. And if you need a little more inspiration, have a listen to this interview to see how one of our Authors made this work for him and what it took for him and his family to spend a year away from the business sailing around the world. He even wrote the book on it! You can check out the interview with Caspar here: https://www.facebook.com/speakerinsight/videos/167138034214084/
Let us know how you get on.