It’s also very important to think about your personal life. What you want your daily, weekly and yearly routine to look like. Your hopes, dreams and aspirations, now, in the near and not too distant future, and after you ‘retire’.
This should start to tell you some very important things. How much money do you need now, and into the future? What income and assets are going to allow you to achieve your goals?
How much will your business earn and be worth? If you don’t know, you won’t be able to build it.
Do you want to work 100 hours a week? Most people don’t, but many self-employed people end up doing so.
To avoid this you need to be clear about two things:
1 – exactly what you are prepared to do;
2 – exactly what needs to be done.
Somewhere mixed into all of this is (and it’s a good idea to write lists of these) are what you can do, what you’re good at, what you like to do; what you can’t do, what you’re bad at, what you hate doing.
Only one of these hints you’re not better off paying other people to do it. After will come the detailed systems to allow that.
First, though, you need a strategy. You need a strategy to carry out your mission, and people to carry it out.
You need goals, and you need to break down all of the tasks that need to be done to achieve them and give them to people. The people implement the systems.
You may well start off doing all of the tasks yourself, but it should be your ambition to delegate. If you don’t know what the tasks are, how to perform them and who will do them, this will be impossible.
If you are already working and you’ve followed the blog this far, you probably need to tear up what you do now and start from scratch (you always need to start from scratch, but that’s a story for another day), because you’re likely in a mess and wasting your time doing things you should delegate.
You’re probably not doing everything wrong, but likely didn’t plan it all and lack structure.
So, you need an organisation chart.
But where to put yourself?
We’ll look in detail next time.
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If you would like help systemising your business or anything else, please get in touch.