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Hey there! I am so excited to have an incredible guest post today by Jomie Casas. Jomie helps mission-driven entrepreneurs create automated businesses they love. She is an expert at building teams and systems to create more passive income streams. Jomie is a nomad entrepreneur, travelling one country a month, while scaling the change she wishes to see in the world, one CEO at a time.

To learn how you can transform your mission-driven brand into passive income with Jomie, apply for a Free Strategy Session: http://jomiecasas.com.

You can listen to her podcast episode where she shares how to created an automated business. 

You started your business for freedom and fulfillment but the more money you make, the less time you have. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a company, the bigger you grow, the more you find yourself stuck to your desk, plugging in 14 hour work days. You can’t even remember the last time you actually did something you enjoyed in your business.

With the limited free time you have, you find yourself daydreaming about:

* having adventures every weekend because you travel full time

* working a day or two a week, from anywhere in the world, while your business explodes and improves the lives of more people

Lori Greiner from Shark Tank says entrepreneurs are the only people in the world who would willingly work 80 hours a week just to avoid working 40 hours a week.

I laughed so hard when I heard that one, my belly hurt! It’s absolutely true, especially when getting a business off the ground.

But I know many freelancers, agency owners, and ecommerce CEOs who have several successful years in their business and are still working the same ungodly hours.

At a certain point, you have to ask yourself – when does this change? When does it get easy? When does “freedom” actually happen? DOES it actually even happen at all?

I struggled with the same questions myself, when I built my $6-figure company. Before I was working a day a week (true story), I was working 7 days a week and had no vacations in over 10 years. Before I had a dream team who helped me grow and run my business, I was a toxic micromanager. I was definitely the queen of workaholics before I transformed my company into a remote business.

And I 100% know for a fact that every single business owner struggled with the same problems.

The question now is… How do you make that leap into small business automation?

Before I outline simple steps you can take RIGHT NOW, this is the first thing you have to do:

DECIDE that business can be easy, and that is how you are going to continue building your business, from this day forward. It doesn’t matter how you’ve done it in the past and how that resulted in what your business looks like right now. What matters is that moving forward, you decide that it CAN be easy.

Debbie says it brilliantly herself with the concept she calls “Lazy Entrepreneurship” where you work hard with the end goal of eventually working a lot less.

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Once you make that decision that it CAN be easy for you, then you’re ready for the first steps I took to Small Business Automation:

Set Boundaries.

Derek Sivers says life should either be a “HELL YES” or a “NO”.  Meaning, if I don’t absolutely love it, don’t take on opportunities just because they’re available to you.

Learn to set boundaries with your time and energy, so you can LASER FOCUS on the activities that bring you the most results. The 80/20 rule applies here as well.

Be honest about what makes you the most money, and focus your efforts there. I’m a fan of scaling the one or two things that you do REALLY well. List down 100 ways to make money out of this one thing, and focus your energy there.

Everything else on your plate can be done later or by someone else. Which brings me to the next step:

Get the Right Support Team Around You.

I can write an entire article just around this topic. Once you’ve set boundaries for yourself, it’s time to hire other people to do the things you don’t want to do, or can’t do.

For a remote business, there are 2 ways to go about this, and most people like myself, do a mix of both: 1. Start with a VA or Assistant.This will involve a bit more time on your part, to train and onboard a person onto your team. That’s absolutely ok, and that’s where I started as well.

After a couple years, I’ve since become a fan of 2. Hiring specialists and experts who can do their thing with their eyes closed. Doing this has cut my team’s training period to two weeks, and it’s how I’ve set up high-performing teams for my clients too.

And know that Option 2 doesn’t have to be expensive! You don’t have to hire full-time experts. I am an advocate of entrepreneurship, so I have always preferred to hire solopreneurs to be part of my team whenever possible, on a part-time basis, or project basis.

Whichever method you choose (VA vs experts), effective delegation starts with hiring the right people. And you can only hire the right people if you have a full understanding of your values, and what you and your business believes in.

Which brings me to Step 3:

Start building a Brand Aligned with your Vision.

To be honest, most entrepreneurs who start a business are mostly in the experimentation phase, trying to see what fits and what works. Over time, you become clearer about your personal beliefs that formulate your vision of an “ideal” world, and then you start building a brand and business that resonates with who you REALLY are.

And this is where the magic happens.

For example, if you’re aiming to build a remote business to live the freedom lifestyle, it’s safe to assume that FREEDOM is a key belief of yours. This means that being a micromanager and hovering over your employees goes against the principles of your business. I can guarantee you 100% that this will only lead to more headaches for you.

If you believe in freedom, then give your team the ability to grow, make mistakes, and correct their mistakes. At a certain point, once you’ve decided to place your bets on this person, you have to let this person do her thing. You can only achieve massive growth through effective delegation i.e. harnessing the strengths of the people around you.

This is just one example of how your values can dictate not just what your brand is about, but also how you build your business moving forward.

Know that building your brand is a process, and you don’t get it “perfect” the first time around. It is never finished. It always evolves with who you are, and keeping your brand and business aligned with your values and vision/mission allows you to grow through the years, and have your tribe grow with you.

With the right team behind you, backed by an awesome brand built on your values, you can then:

Build Systems aligned with your Brand.

Start with what you know is aligned for your brand. Every SOP you build must be aligned with your own personal and business values, OR IT WILL NOT WORK. There are 1 million strategies out there on how to build systems and automate your business, but not everything will fit your scenario. Choose the most aligned systems and support for you.

Get your processes documented in an easy-to-understand sheet, and be as visual as you possibly can. For more complicated processes, supplement with video demonstrations or explanations, because some people learn faster through either visual, auditory, or verbal cues.

Systems come AFTER you have the right support, because I am also a firm believer of having your team refine your systems for you.

You can build it, but give your team ownership of the processes they execute. You then create an environment that encourages ideas and experimentation; and this is where small business automation starts to happen.

Automation happens when your team comes up with ideas that only YOU could come up with in the past. It’s when they start thinking ahead, start taking ownership of your growth, and rally together towards a common goal that benefits you all. And that’s where the magic is! You’ll see your business moving forward with a life of its own, with minimal input from you, and that’s when your company truly becomes a remote business in every sense of the word.

Small business automation does not have to be hard, but it IS a process, and it starts with making the first few steps in the right direction.

Build the right foundations for your business, and see it evolve from just being a remote business to becoming a business that runs on autopilot, generating passive income streams for you.

After all, isn’t that the end goal?

Building an automated business you love, to have more adventures in life, all while your brand brings your vision of the perfect world to life.

Sounds awesome? Yup. It’s totally possible.

 

 

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