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Imagine you are away from your business. No laptop. No cellphone. No dodgy internet café in sight. No way to check in on clients, send emails, do work of any kind.

How long would your business be able to survive without you?

A day? A week? A month?

I was listening to a famous South African venture capitalist the other day and he said that the true test of freedom for an entrepreneur and business owner is 90 days. If you can completely unplug from your business for 90 days and find it still standing. Still paying bills, serving clients…then you are a business owner. If you’re not there yet…your business owns you.

It’s obvious that most entrepreneurs and business owners are in fact not business owners by this standard. There are very few business owners who can leave their business for 90 days without everything falling apart.

Many business owners cannot even break away for a weekend, let alone a month or more. 

Here are three of the biggest obstacles for why this is the experience of most owners:

• Number One: You are thinking it’s not possible to design a business (especially as a solo entrepreneur or as a business with a small team) to run without you. It can feel impossible because you are the expert in the thing you are selling and you don’t have someone else in the business with the same skills that can do the work in your absence. It can also feel impossible when your team doesn’t have the experience and skill they need to take care of things without your constant oversight, or you may know that you need help but think that you can’t afford to hire right now.

• Number Two: You LOVE what you do and you WANT to work IN the business. For many owners their business is more like a calling than work. And for this reason it doesn’t feel like a drag to go and work in the business. It actually energizes and lights you up.  

• Number three: You’re overwhelmed and you don’t know where to start.. If you’re the one wearing all the hats or taking on all the responsibility inside the business, your head is stuck in the day to day and finding time to implement systems and processes so that your business can run without you can be very daunting. 

All three of these obstacles can be overcome. They are simply smaller problems that we need to find solutions for.

So where do we start? How can we overcome these obstacles and design your business so that it works FOR you. 

Here are four tips you can implement now that will help you shift from BEING the business to LEADING the business:

Shift Your Mindset: Transition from the “I am the business” mindset to viewing yourself as an efficient CEO who has lots of time to enjoy life outside work. In order to make this mindset shift you need to start reimagining your role within the business. You need to let go of the idea that you can do it best. Or that your clients ONLY want to work with you. If you see yourself AS the business you will always BE the business. A great question you can ask yourself to shift your mindset here is: If I couldn’t do this, who else (or what else) would?

Track Your Time: when you understand exactly where your time is going it will give you the information and insight you need to unchain yourself from the day to day - or at least the things you don’t want to do in your business. I recommend that you track your time for 3-5 days every quarter to check in on where your time is really going and whether what you’re spending your time on is actually worth your attention. It’s a great place to spot the inefficiencies inside your day to day operations. If you have a team, let them track their time as well. 

A Process For Everything: Anything that happens more than once in your business needs to have a documented process for how it’s done. It makes it easy for new people to join your team and so that all the “how to” information isn’t living in one person’s head.

Ask WHO, not How: instead of asking “How will I find the time to do this” ask “WHO can do this?” It is crucial that you’re freeing up time in your schedule so that you can focus on growing the business and the only way to do that is to delegate work off your plate. That can be to a full time employee, a contract worker or freelancer or an agency that specializes in whatever you’re sourcing out.  

Designing a self managing business should be at the top of your priority list and here’s why:

• your business is a living breathing entity that has very specific needs. You cannot give what it needs if your head is always down and focused on the doing. 

• A business that can run without you gives you freedom to choose. What you want to do. So that you’re always doing your best work that you love doing.

• it puts you in the position to see opportunities, to anticipate changes and to prepare your business dor the future. 

You may listen to this episode or watch this video and nod your head like yes…this is exactly me. Where have you been all my life, Ilonka?  Maybe this is the first time you’ve ever even considered that a self-managing business is something that you want. Many of the business owners who reached out to me for help didn’t realise just how chained they were to their business until a family member got sick…or a partner asked for a divorce. 

Regardless of how you got here. If you have a business it deserves to be independent from you. You deserve a business that works for YOU. 

Implementing any of the four tips we covered today will put you on the path to owning a business that can run without you.

Learn more about the EffortLESS CEO Program HERE

You can watch the video of this episode HERE

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