For your business to keep going without you, and to scale as your business grows, you only need two things…
For your business to keep going without you, and to scale as your business grows, you need only two things:
- Systems and Processes
- Team
With those two in place, your business can continue servicing your clients without you. Business development, strategy and goal-getting might slow down while you’re out of action, but if I think about the clients we work with who have taken time out, the two resources above have meant we could continue for a while without them.
The third way to scale your business that made such a difference for me was having coaches and mentors who push and encourage you to continue your journey forward. Sometimes a second pair of eyes helps to see what you can’t see and accountability is never a bad thing!
Time Out Tips
Some pre-planning is involved here if you’re responsible for one-on-one services or content creation.
If you personally service your clients, start to systemise what you do. When I mean systemise I’m talking about using tools and processes to take out a lot of the manual cogs of your business.
Think about bringing on a second person with the skills needed who could jump in while you’re absent … you should be doing this in terms of growth and scalability anyway.
Everything you do should be documented. Your appointments, your processes, your quality control … IP won’t do your business any good if it’s all in your head. Over the next month start to screenshot or note down everything you do.
Batch your content in advance. If you run challenges, newsletters, membership content, blog, video, podcast … have a backup of content you’ve batched to draw from.
Don’t micro-manage! Empower your team to think for themselves and for your business. If you’re employing the right people and training them to meet expectations, you won’t have to worry when you are out of action.
Ask yourself … if I was to be absent for a month what would suffer?
Based on that answer you can be proactive and start to plan … because crap happens!
There will still be problems, that’s business! I’ve had a couple of complaints to deal with in the last two weeks and no time is a good time for complaints. But I have a team I trust, I have systems that work (when we follow them!!!) and I’m so so glad I’ve changed from my micro-managing, ‘no one can do it like I do it’ days! If I hadn’t, I’d be a lot more stressed. And right now having that space to concentrate on my family is priceless.