
From Burn-Out Entrepreneur to Automating My $4M Company - allenleein
https://medium.com/@neocody/how-i-went-from-burn-out-entrepreneur-to-automating-my-4m-company-and-10x-my-productivity-45cefcbcac0c
======
PerfectElement
\- _If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business — you have a
job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a
lunatic!_

I disagree with this. I have a SaaS that depends on me and I have never gotten
so much satisfaction from work before. It's not only because I'm making more
money than I would ever make as a salaried engineer or because I have a super
flexible schedule, but because I have the autonomy to say no to clients and
decide in which direction the product goes.

~~~
mhluongo
The second bit clearly depends on the person / company, but the first is a
gem.

This last year, I've been automating myself out of the company. It's hugely
liberating, better for investors and employees, and means I can spend more
time focused on what's next rather than day-to-day ops.

I love what I do, but it shouldn't disappear if I do.

------
Mahn
Long story short: Document everything in step-by-step guides, then delegate to
other people. No earth-shattering advice here. The author also wants to
convince you to use Pipefy for that, apparently a Trello for company
processes.

~~~
billmalarky
>Document everything in step-by-step guides, then delegate to other people. No
earth-shattering advice here.

As silly as it sounds, this advice really struck a chord with me though. It
makes delegation seem much less overwhelming.

~~~
revicon
I would really recommend the book "E myth revisited" it digs into this a lot,
I found it very helpful to my thinking about building a business.

------
tarr11
I did this with my service business.

However, I did it by developing a custom rails app, and have recurring rails
tasks that generate lightweight todo items for my staff based on various
triggers.

I think most business owners don't really have the time or capability to do
this, so solutions like SOP SaaS tools work well. You can also use Salesforce
which has a lot of this capability. It also takes a lot longer.

But, as a service business, trained and consistent staff are core to your
value proposition, so your SOP is often your secret sauce. So, it's worth
investing in.

The upside for me, is that I have complete control and have a highly
integrated workflow that can be a lot smarter than a SOP workflow. I can run a
lot of reports against my postgres database and find out what's going on.

It also makes it very measurable, who's doing what, when.

~~~
tapatio
What service business do you have? Curious.

~~~
tarr11
I run an after school program in the bay area teaching kids to code. Link is
in my profile.

~~~
tapatio
Cool!

------
kelh
Ah, not the kind of automating I was expecting.

------
Mz
When your business owns you more than you own it, time to automate.

