How to work on your business, not in it

A guest post from contributor Becky Crouch, author of the Lifestyle Ninja Blog.

Entrepreneurs and business owners from all walks of life are streamlining their companies digitally – taking advantage of technology to run their business from anywhere – from the couch at home, from foreign countries, from cruise ships and from the beach. It’s more possible than ever to run your business remotely, and your business is no exception.

If you’re like many business owners, you set out to create something that you could run, and unfortunately for most, the business has ended up running you. You wear so many hats – CEO, marketing, accounting and sales that if you weren’t there, the business would fall apart.

Maybe it would, as it stands now – but it’s not too late.

My name is Becky Crouch. I work online and leverage technology to run my business from my laptop and iPhone while travelling the world, living with only a laptop and a backpack. I use a combination of apps and outsourcing to automate various parts of my business and build my work around my lifestyle. For this reason, I’m able to work and make money from Chiang Mai Thailand, Edinburgh Scotland and Auckland New Zealand….all while setting my own hours, doing what I love, and learning languages on the side.

How can you use Technology to Automate your Business?

First, think about what you’d do if your business was running itself? What could you achieve? Would you spend time actually growing it? Would you seek out partnerships to grow the company? Would you start another business? Would you start a business related to a hobby, become a consultant or speak at events? Would you travel?

When you’re clear on what you actually want to spend your days doing, independently of working in your business, you’ll have your goal. Now let’s talk about how to achieve it.

The trick is to build your business around your lifestyle. Work on your business, not in it.

This can be done in three ways.

1. Look at the systems you’ve created so far.

If you have no systems, create some. What gets done every day? Write down what you do over and over again. Believe it or not, you can write a process for everything that gets done in the company.

What online systems do you currently use?

Who is currently doing what?

Write everything out as a Standard Operating Procedure. What happens when you have to do a tax return? What happens when a customer has a problem? What are the most common questions? Write a procedure for everything. If you lose a staff member or anything goes wrong, every step is written out so anyone can go in and do it.

2. Use technology to streamline those systems

We’ll get to some tools in our next post – it can take some work to set these up, but it’s a lot easier than you think and can be done very quickly. Isn’t it worth doing some work on this, to propel you towards that dream day we just talked about?

3. Outsource the systems that remain

You started the business to get freedom and be your own boss. If you want to take a vacation, you should be able to. Do you have employees? For some it’s as easy as passing them the lists of systems you have. Some people choose to take a weekly call with the person that’s running their business – perhaps to get the numbers, or to deal with a few questions of things that didn’t quite make it into the written systems.

Will this really work?

People often hit mental barriers when doing these exercises. The idea of being free of the business can be quite overwhelming at first. You might have trouble letting go of the feeling that nobody will do as good a job as you will. THIS IS PROBABLY TRUE.

You’ll find that people will make mistakes, and things might go pear shaped every now and again. But in that case, your job has changed – your job is now to manage that as best as possible, while enjoying the fact you can now enjoy a good lifestyle as well.

It’s about being an owner, not a manager.

Watch out for the next blog from Becky, where she will recommend her top online tools that make this amazing lifestyle possible!