Wouldn’t it be cool for your business to run on autopilot? Imagine being able to take a four week vacation and know that you are still going to make a strong income from your business. Nothing falls apart when you step out of the driver’s seat. Instead, everything keeps on moving forward and moves forward even faster when you go back to the driver’s seat. However, that four week vacation was definitely nice. In order to have more four week vacations by having your business run on autopilot, these are the five things that you need to do.
- Make sure you don’t have to ship out anything. If you have to drive to the post office to ship out your product to a customer, then you are never going to have a business that runs on autopilot. You need to have other people take care of the shipping for you. If you have an eBay business, hire someone to look after it while you are gone. If you publish your own book, self-publish it on CreateSpace or get it published by someone who will take care of the shipping for you. If you have a training course, make sure the technology involved with making the sale runs smooth enough that you don’t have to intervene in order to make the sale. You should be able to make the sale, and the customer should be able to get what he wants without you doing anything.
- Hire assistants to do the hard work. If you self-publish 1 Kindle eBook every month, hire a ghostwriter for that month. You still get the final say and get to edit the book so it reflects your style. However, hiring the ghostwriter saves you the time of writing the manuscript. How else can you use assistants to save you time?
- Schedule content in advance. I schedule my blog posts weeks into advance. The reason I do this is that I have more time to write longer blog posts (like this one). However, I take multiple vacations in the summer (including a two week vacation). It is at these times when having scheduled blog posts is really helpful. Instead of rushing to write a blog post so I can enjoy the vacation, all of my blog posts are already scheduled for that entire week (or two).
- Don’t work alone. This is why hiring assistants is very important. If you work alone, then you will never be able to have your business run on autopilot. It’s okay to ask for help. In fact, it’s also okay to ask for a lot of it. I’m sure you would save hours of time every day just by hiring 10 assistants.
- Be very effective when you are in the driver’s seat. If you are an effective leader for your business, then your assistants will know exactly what to do when you take the four week vacation. In addition, the more productive you are when you are in the driver’s seat, the less you will have to worry about during that vacation (hopefully nothing at all).
An autopilot business is the entrepreneur’s dream. Hours that could never be opened up before will suddenly become open for you to interact more with the most important people in your life. What would an autopilot business do for you? Do you have any additional tips on turning a business into an autopilot business? Please share your thoughts and advice below.