Put Your Business On Auto Pilot

Last Updated on March 26, 2013 by Owen McGab Enaohwo

If you spend too much time working in your business, then this post is for you. You’ll learn a 3 step system for work avoidance that will reduce your need to be in the office. Put your business on auto-pilot and start enjoying your life!

Note to the self employed:This system will reduce your office time too. Don’t use your lack of employees as an excuse for spending too much time in your business.

Measure what you do

You can’t improve upon what you don’t measure. So let’s start measuring what you spend your time on!

1. Buy yourself a small notepad and pen;
2. Write down the activities you did during the day; and
3. Do this for a week and you’ll see where your time is going.

Here are some examples:

• Monday: Replying to suppliers by email
• Monday: Weekly meeting with senior staff members
• Monday: Handling a customer complaint
• Monday: Designing the stall at a trade fair
• Monday: Speaking with Aaron about baseball
• Tuesday: Approving a purchase order

Cut the things that don’t make you money

How does your business make money? And how do you fit into the revenue making? Businesses all break down into a pipeline. Browsers are converted to customers, who purchase a quantity of goods who then repeat purchases in the future.

On an admittedly simplistic level – your activities should be directed at increasing:

1. The total number of browsers;
2. The number of browsers that become customers;
3. The amount customers spend per visit; and
4. The number of times customers keep coming back.

Look at the activities that you wrote down. Try to allocate them to a revenue making or cost saving activity. You’ll find that some of them don’t fall into part of your long term strategy to boost one of these areas.

Don’t do those things anymore.

One by one, make a concious effort to stop doing things on your activity list that don’t contribute to growing your business.

Stop coming into the office

Having saved some time by avoiding work. Don’t come into the office. If you used to work 5 days at 10 hours per day, cut those days one by one down to 7 hours. Then cut one of the days to a half day. Progressively reduce your physical presence in the office.

Avoiding work is great, but it will only take you so far

Anyone can avoid work, its pretty easy to do. Sometimes we avoid important work by doing other unnecessary work. Your measurements will form a baseline for you to decide what to spend your time on.

You have taken the low hanging fruit: Unnecessary work. Avoiding work alone will not put your business on autopilot. Coming up, we’ll be addressing some serious auto-pilot strategies with practical how-to advice. Don’t miss the next post in the series on “Serious Strategies for Putting your business on Auto Pilot”