5 Ways to Get Your Business to Run Without You

Some owners focus on growing their profits, while others are obsessed with sales
goals. Have you ever considered making it your primary goal to set up your business so that it
can thrive and grow without you?

A business not dependent on its owner is the ultimate asset to own. It allows you complete
control over your time so that you can choose the projects you get involved in and the
vacations you take.

When it comes to getting out, a business independent of its owner is worth a lot more than an
owner-dependent company. Here are five ways to set up your business so that it can succeed
without you.

Give Them a Stake in The Outcome

Jack Stack, the author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in The Outcome
wrote the book on creating an ownership culture inside your company: you are
transparent about your financial results, and you allow employees to participate in your
financial success. This results in employees who act like owners when you’re not around.

Get Them to Walk in Your Shoes

If you’re not quite comfortable opening the books to your employees, consider a simple
management technique where you respond to every question your staff brings you with the
the same answer, “If you owned the company, what would you do?”

By forcing your employees to walk in your shoes, you get them thinking about their questions as
you would, and it builds the habit of starting to think like an owner. Pretty soon, employees are
able to solve their own problems.

Vet Your Offerings

Identify the products and services which require your personal involvement in either making,
delivering, or selling them. Make a list of everything you sell and score each on a scale of 0 to
10 on how easy they are to teach an employee to handle. Assign a 10 to offerings that are easy
to teach employees and give a lower score to anything that requires your personal attention.
Commit to stopping to sell the lowest scoring product or service on your list. Repeat this
exercise every quarter.

Create Automatic Customers

Are you the company’s best salesperson? If so, you’ll need to fire yourself as your company’s
rainmaker in order to get it to run without you.
One way to do this is to create a recurring revenue business model where customers buy from
you automatically. Consider creating a service contract with your customers that offers to fulfill
one of their ongoing needs on a regular basis.

Write an Instruction Manual for Your Business

Finally, make sure your company comes with instructions included. Write an employee manual
or what MBA types called Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are a set of rules
employees can follow for repetitive tasks in your company. This will ensure employees have a
rulebook they can follow when you’re not around, and, when an employee leaves, you can
quickly swap them out with a replacement to take on duties of the job.

You-proofing your business has enormous benefits. It will allow you to create a valuable
company and have a life. Your business will be free to scale up because it is no longer
dependent on you, it's a bottleneck. Best of all, it will be worth a lot more to a buyer whenever
you are ready to sell.

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