Automating Your Business
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Talk about a good way to “run” a business!
First off you have to have a clear idea of the results you would like to get with that business! Is it just to earn a couple hundred dollars per month, or you’d like a full-time income?
Either way, automating your business will surely make your life easier!
So how can you automate your business?
One thing you have to know about automation, is that you CAN’T let your busiiness run without having a look at it from time to time! You certainly don’t want to end up paying more for your advertising that you should, or find out there’s something wrong with this or that when it’s too late, so you have to monitor your business. Don’t spend 12 hours a day monitoring it.. or else you might just not automate it at all! You want more spare time, and don’t want to spend all your free time monitoring your business, don’t you?
Take blogs for exemple…wordpress installed, it’s way easier to update than the old “html static website”.. so of course you save time but it’s still “partial-automation”! Hey you gotta write the posts! Unless you hire somone to write them, but i believe outsourcing is not really a good idea. You probably want more “personalized” work with that! But still you save time, so it’s good!
Affiliate programs are a good example of automation. Say you write an ebook (sell it for something like say $34.00 thru clickbank), then write tens/hundreds of follow-up newsletter e-mails that will be sent out to your newsletters subscribers.. in fact you do all the grunt work first! But after that, affiliates will promote your stuff, you pay them a commission, and there you go, you then have to monitor and tweak your “system”!
Imagine a big telecom company like Cingular or Rogers, where the president or CEO answers all the calls! That’s not likely to happen! That’s why they have customer service reps to answer the phone calls and deal with the customers, and pay them a salary.
Of course automation will not apply to every single business there is, say you’re a musician (like myself) :)
You have to compose, go to the studio, record, and then you’re not done, gotta do the shows. But reason why musicians don’t care about automation is that it’s their passion, and they like what they do! (oh yeah!!) Creativity, expression.. in fact every “art form” like, music, sculpture, painting, can’t really rely on automation, cause without the painting, there is no business! But what comes after can be automated, the sales process, marketing, advertising! All that can be automated!
But if you are in the affiliate marketing world, in sales, or in anything related to marketing, advertising and selling a product, you can easily automate your business!
Adwords, pay-per-click, link exchanges, seo, hire profesionals to market your stuff and advertise it. Those are some options that can help you automate your business, there’s a lot more options than that, but you get the idea. Of course automation can cost money, unless you’re willing to do all the work yourself, but then you can’t really call that automation! :)
If you want your business to run 24/7/365, have more free time, earn potentially more revenue, then automation is the way to go! Even if your business is the traditional “shop” or “store”, you can automate it, by hiring employees, and/or set up ads on the net that will attract customers when you sleep! Sounds good huh?
I’d be interested in knowing what other people think about that, what can you do to automate your business, share your experiences and ways of doing things! Any ideas?
Thanx!
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5 Responses to “Automating Your Business”
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Nice post Jonathan!
In fact, lot of people do not realise that they can automate their business. Some of them don’t know how and most of them don’t even have the time to do it cause they are busy working “in” their business!
I my opinion, if you want to automate your business, you MUST have a hardcore, bulletproof, mega efficient SYSTEM. Yes, a System. Imagine that you run a restaurant: You are originaly a cook, a good one. Are you only going to be the cook when you run your business? Hell no! If you don’t have a system, you might end up doing some finances, marketing, accounting, customer serving, dish washing, floor cleaning and cooking…lots of cooking. Even if you get yourself people to work for you. Are they going to be as good as you? Cooking like you? Cleaning like you? Talking to your customers like you do? The real problem with small business owners is that if they are not there and they don’t have a good system, the business falls appart! You know why? Besaus they ARE the system, they work “in” their business, not “on” it. They cannot think outside the box because they are stuck inside the box.
When you go to Subway, what do expect? A new experience each time? NO, you expect to see a guy or gal that will Hi and ask what sandwich you want, then what bread, extra cheese? Toppings? Trio? $10 please, thank you. You always know what to expect because they have a solid system in place that permits the owner to hire almost anyone on the street to work for him without worrying to much because they will apply the SYSTEM. Do you often see the owner of a McDonald flipping burgers? Nope, cause he’s got the system. A good system will permit you to give the explicit manual of your business to any Investor or business acquirant and he would know that there is good chances he can trust your efficiency cause everything is organised to a standard that can propel your business from $500 000 to $100M just by using your system.
Automation is very interesting in business and even in everyday tasks. If your automation involves more people than you, you want a system.
long live smartwealthyrich!
Good answer Matthew! A system should be somewhat “predictable”. I like your example of Subway restaurants. Most business could profit a lot from having a duplicatable system, that is predictable. Even in network or affiliate marketing (which to a certain extent is kinda similar) businesses would benefit from having a automated system that could run all day long. In the end we want to be wealthy, and earn money by doing so, and wealth also meanss more free time, having fun working “on” our business (as opposed to “in” the business).
Looking foward for more replies from you Matt! By the way i checked out you website and i must say it’s really well-done, read most of it, pretty in depth stuff on there! Good job! (could probably benefit having a blog attached to it :) )
Thanx
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