Well, once you’ve got systems and processes clarified in your business (which you’ve hopefully read about) you’ve created the opportunity to begin to automate those processes.
Adding automation to your business is like hiring a bunch of really smart robots: They’re smart because they get designed and programmed by you!
Consider this very article as an example.
I’m the CEO of a 100+ person company that’s growing very quickly and has a whole lot of moving parts. The demands on my time are kind of insane.
But today, I’m writing this article. To some people, that may seem like a poor use of my time. I must have more important things to do with this hour than writing this article, right?
Well, clearly I disagree (or I wouldn’t be doing this today). Why?
Sharing what I know about running a business, how Ontraport can help, and saying it all in the way I say it is, well … something only I can do.
I wish I could clone myself and have a copy of me sit down and have this conversation with every single entrepreneur who ever visits our website or, better yet, every entrepreneur in the world. Obviously, I can’t do that. What I can do (as Taki Moore suggests) is “work hard once.” And then automate.
In this case, I noticed that none of our blog posts really do a great job explaining why business systems are important, why automation is important, why “all-in-one” is important, and so on. I thought we could do a better job.
So, I set aside some time and sat down (today) and wrote this article.
What will happen next is that my team will take what I’ve written, proofread it, turn it into a blog post or email or even expand it into an ebook, link it all up, plop it into our Ontraport account and automate it all. Starting in a few days, every future blog subscriber and Ontraport prospect — thousands a month — will see this article I wrote. Forever.
To me, that’s the next best thing to having 100 Landon clones. That’s working hard once.
Let me share one more thing: even at 100+ employees, this is a big part of what I do all day. Not usually writing articles (I haven’t done this in a long time) but reviewing and improving systems and processes.
We have systems in place for just about everything: how our sales team handles a lead, how our Client Success team handles a new client, how our Support team handles a customer ticket, and how we do (literally) thousands of other things.
One of my main jobs (and yours) is to look for opportunities for improvement all over the business.
Because our business is built on systems and backed by automation, researching and changing things is easy.
For example, I recently noticed that our sales team wasn’t getting ahold of as many people who requested demos as I thought they could. So, I took a day to review the process and noticed some specific steps in it that I thought we could improve. I suggested some changes, which the team implemented in our Ontraport account, and within a couple days, we’d doubled the number of conversations we were having with prospective clients.
That’s a really big deal.
It was only possible because we had a system, backed by automation, that could easily be looked at and edited. Things weren’t all random and willy-nilly before. There was a way we did things, and I could quickly review and change it and see what happened. That’s an incredible advantage that only systems and automation offer.
You constantly scan for opportunities to improve things — anything — and then test some ideas and see how it goes.
Sometimes my brilliant ideas flop. Lots of times they don’t. Over the course of weeks and months and years of doing this (and not just by me, but by many team members), Ontraport has become an incredibly strong company that doesn’t count on me to manage anything day to day. (Yes, I’m at home today, writing this from my office. I haven’t had to answer a single question from my team; they don’t need me. FYI, it wasn’t always this way.)
Just about everything that can be automated at Ontraport is, leaving our amazing team members to focus on their unique skills such as writing code, talking one-on-one with our clients, designing, writing and so on.
Your business can and should be built on the same foundation. Designing and automating and improving your business systems is the only path you can count on that will inevitably lead to success.
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If you think it’s time for you to get serious about systematically improving your business, consider getting on the phone with one of our amazing Business Solutions Advisors. They are seriously awesome and, whether you become an Ontraport client or not, it’ll be worth your time just to expand your vision for what’s possible. Book a time here.
