7 Secrets to Designing a
Business That Gives You Ultimate Flexibility
We live in unprecedented times. Any
entrepreneur today can develop or source products from one of thousands of
manufacturers and suppliers, open an online store and reach a global audience
of buyers -- from anywhere in the world!
Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? It is,
but it’s a dream come true if you know how to design your
business for maximum flexibility and leverage.
The following are seven secrets my
colleagues and I have used to build businesses that give us the ultimate
flexibility to decide when, where and how we want to work.
1. Choose
your business wisely
Certain
business models allow for much more freedom than others, so you must choose a
business model that matches your desired level of freedom.
Many entrepreneurs start their business
with freedom in mind, but then choose a business model that gives them anything
but.
After three years of hard work, they
are miserable because they feel like they can’t step away. The easy-to-grasp
example here is the person that opens a restaurant with the conflicting goal of
being able to travel the world whenever they’d like.
Sure, there are globetrotting chefs
that live a glamorous lifestyle of travel and celebrity parties, but that’s
very rare. Most restaurant owners are there at 6 a.m. to receive the morning
delivery of food, and there at midnight to finish cleaning and close the place
down.
Be careful to choose a business that
has the ideal characteristics to provide the lifestyle you are after.
2.
Automate everything
The
software that is available to help you run your business today is like magic.
Software systems such as Infusionsoft
have eliminated so much manual work and cost from building and running a
business that it almost feels like cheating when you know how to use it to your
advantage.
Consciously work to find how you can
automate every task possible at your business.
3. Only
use online systems
When
it comes to creating a lifestyle business, nothing has done more to make it
possible than the Internet. To completely leverage the potential of the web,
you should only use business systems that live on the Internet and can be
accessed from anywhere in the world.
Not only does this allow you to operate
from any place with an Internet connection, but it also makes it much easier to
integrate your business systems together, and integrate with your various
suppliers and vendors.
Doing so means less manual tasks and
processes, faster communication and increased flexibility.
4.
Outsource instead of employ
Not everything in every business can be
automated (wouldn’t that be nice?). For those things that still need to be done
by a living, breathing human being, you should be aggressive about outsourcing
everything that doesn’t absolutely, positively need to be done by employees.
Employees are expensive, can require a
lot of hand-holding and are hard to get rid of once you have them. You can find
outsourced help for every imaginable task, at prices that will shock you.
5. Empower
front-line decision-making
If you want to truly have a sense of freedom from
your business, you can’t be glued to your email and phone all day long
answering basic questions for your team. You must learn to delegate the
“front-line” decision-making -- things such as customer support, refunds, minor
operational changes, etc. -- as effectively as possible.
We give everyone on our team three
simple guidelines to work from when making a decision. We have them ask the
following:
- 1 Is it good for the company?
- 2. Is it good for the customer?
- 3. Are you willing to be held personally accountable for the decision you are about to make?
If they can answer "yes" to
all three of these questions, they should go ahead and make the decision.
6. Market
and sell online
There is
nothing cooler than the first time you wake up to a customer order from
someplace on the other side of the world. Marketing and selling online makes
this possible.
By being able to market and sell
online, you give yourself the gift of a much, much larger potential customer
base, and the ability to reach them at a cost that is unheard of in history.
If you master marketing and selling
online, you’ll never have a shortage of qualified prospects and customers in
your sales pipeline, which means more consistent revenue for you.
7. Create
recurring revenue
The ideal
business doesn’t just sell something once to a customer and then say goodbye.
The ideal business creates revenue that comes in multiple times, and ideally
very consistently.
It takes a lot of hard work to find a
new customer, so once you do, you want to make that relationship as lucrative
as possible. There is nothing more liberating than knowing that you have
predictable income coming in, month after month.
In some businesses, this is more difficult
than others and you have to get a little creative to generate a recurring
relationship, while others are naturally recurring in nature.
But you’ve no doubt seen businesses
that have taken normally one-off purchases and turned them into recurring revenue
models. Businesses such as Dollar Shave Club and MeUndies.com come to mind as
two recent and successful examples. If underwear can be turned into a recurring
revenue model, just about anything can!
Get creative with your business model.
Recurring revenue is quite possibly the best thing you can do for your
business, so make this a priority.
I’m a big believer that building your
ideal lifestyle doesn’t have to wait until you are done building and selling
your business. Follow the seven secrets outlined above and do both at the same
time!
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