Business owners would love the opportunity to have a business that runs successfully without them. Your business runs without you. That’s the holy grail, isn’t it?
The ideal that many business owners hold is to have time and money freedom. Meaning that they’re able to choose how they spend their time and have the money to do as they wish. To have the ability to go away for something like a month or even three months and live a remote lifestyle, maybe in a villa on the Mediterranean for the summer, cruising the world on a yacht, or living in the winter sun. And you get to enjoy your business, check in with it, and see that it’s still running successfully.
So, if you are thinking to yourself that your business wouldn’t survive without you being there for three months, or even one month, then your business can’t run without you.
A well-run business runs on systems. Well-established systems mean that your team knows what to do and how to do it. When you have systems in place—well-documented procedures, job descriptions, accounting, and marketing systems—these systems run the business. You are no longer the bottleneck—the only person who can make a decision or who knows what’s going on.
In this video, I look at a framework for thinking about this. Systems run the business. Your team runs the systems. You lead the people.
Let me reframe this another way. How do they get those fries in those burger franchises to taste so good? Whether they’re made in London, New York, Hong Kong, or your home city, those fries are made by a 16-year-old whose parents can’t get him or her to clean up their own bedroom. How do they do that? Well, they have great systems. They say, here’s the step-by-step process for how we make our fries. Here’s the recipe. Here’s step number one; here’s step number two… Because if on the other hand, you had people figuring this out every day, every fry and every shift would have a different colour, different quality, and different quantity of fries in those boxes…
