Several successful entrepreneurs often talk about the idea of building a system to make your business successful.
What they call systems is what I see as automation.
Probably systems and automation aren’t exactly the same thing.
But they rely on each other – they are interdependent.
If I build a standardized system, I can automate (or outsource) the tasks which are needed to run the system.
If I automate tasks as early as possible I am able to build a system, which runs without the need to invest much of my personal time.
Either robots or other humans will do these standardized tasks eventually.
Automation and Systems: Purpose
The primary goal of automation is not to make something as profitable as possible.
Automation is rather meant to keep up a current state or a certain kind of momentum for as long as possible.
Hence the focus of automation and systems is clearly to achieve consistency.
You simply want to be able to keep up producing a similar kind of output as long as possible in a certain area.
Optimization, improvement and customization comes afterwards.
Start Business manually?
After years of thinking about ways to build wealth quickly, I am meanwhile quite an advocate of building businesses manually in the beginning.
You are very close to your (prospect) customers and learn about their needs, wants and behaviors perfectly.
So that you can eventually create the perfect product for them, which fulfills their loveliest dreams.🙌
(Not all of their dreams, but rather one very particular kind of wish – keyword: niche.)
After you put a lot of effort, time, ideas, listening and pivots into the creation of the perfect service, you’ll eventually be able to break down that business into chunks of work (aka. tasks).
Once you identified the crucial tasks, you can standardize them.
Once you standardized the tasks, you can outsource them – so that someone else fulfills them.
Or you can finally automate these tasks – so that no human effort is needed anymore.
(Absolute automation is of course limited to certain technical areas, but will certainly enter more areas of life then we expect.)
However you may encounter incidences in which you are very clear about what you want to do.
Or there may just be cases, where you know:
“If I was only able to keep this particular thing up for as long as possible, there would simply be no chance that I don’t become successful.”
So again: Automation is about keeping it up, because you know that it works – not about improving something.
Automation is about Time
In the end automation is about time.
If you have the time to do something manually and consistently for years, you’ll likely achieve a very high skill level.
But as we all know: Time is often the limited factor.
How often do we discontinue things, because they become boring or we simply change our priorities (often without noticing)?
The things which we don’t keep up doing, although we know that they’d eventually lead to great success in some way, are often those which we regret most.
Simply because we know: If we just kept up doing that thing since 10 years ago consistently, we’d be very successful today.
But usually we didn’t keep them up.
That’s what we regret.
What’s the one thing you regret not having done?
— Sam Hartmann (@SamHartmannCom) May 29, 2022
Build Systems to stay consistent
What if we could build systems of automation, which allowed us to keep up a foolproof way to success?
The most interesting part about this, from my point of view:
If you can come up with one automated system, what keeps you from implementing the same pattern to realize other business ideas in a similar way.
I think that’s one very crucial capability, which many successful entrepreneurs acquire once they crack the secret of building successful businesses.
The ability to build systems is what often makes successful business owners ever more successful.
Those who eventually build systems, which enable them to basically copy and paste, usually run several profitable companies.
Automated Systems unlock Opportunities
I met many people who built successful businesses because they put in a lot of manual effort in the beginning.
Starting with a lot of your own, manual labor is probably inevitable.
But once you built one automated system, you’ll achieve a phase in which your company keeps running “infinitely” with little effort.
By achieving this phase of automation, you unlock interesting new states:
- time to focus on improving the profitability of your system
- time to focus on building new systems
- option to sell your company (to someone who makes it more profitable)
These states in turn may eventually unlock time and money.
Depending on the amount of money, you’ll gradually become more free to decide whether you want to keep up building such systems or rather focus on other parts of your life.