I have a cool idea to share with you today…
It’s the concept of building a business, not a job.
So, I’ve been thinking about how to make my business an asset… just like I think of these as assets:
- equity in a house (the house, with its debt, is NOT the asset)
- cash in the bank
- ownership in another business
See, our business should be able to run without us being there. It should allow us freedom… not be a job that requires 60 or 80+ hours a week.
And that’s what my business is doing… it’s doing deals without my constant work and attention.
How did I do it?
I keep overhead low and trained a few good people to work for me. I have a team that runs most of it. When I’m not there, I’m still available by Slack and text and phone and email… but my business is running for me in spite of me.
I’m doing deals from anywhere in the world. It’s pretty great. 🙂
So, you need to have a vision of what you want your life to look like, and then design a business around that. Not the other way around. Don’t fit your desired lifestyle into your business.
Grow only in ways that don’t conflict with your lifestyle.
So, how do you build a business?
Borrowing from the genius Rob Swanson: use simple, systems, scale as a guide for your business.
That order is really important. You can’t build a system if it’s not simple. You can’t scale without a system.
Here’s an example… let’s take marketing and simplify it:
- Marketing
- Direct Mail
- Yellow letters to landlords on an eviction list
- Direct Mail
Let’s build a system for that:
- Go to the court website weekly
- get addresses of the property owner and put them in a spreadsheet
- pull a list of evictions, put the plaintiffs and defendants in a spreadsheet
- Send your yellow letters to those
BTW — your VA can and should do ALL of that.
Then, you can scale… from sending 1 letter a day in 1 market to 25 letters to 50 letters… then scale to more markets sending 1 letter a day in an additional market to 50 letters to 100 letters in 2 markets… you get the idea.
And, do the same for other marketing strategies — simplifying them and creating systems for them.
Then, scale into acquisitions, for example. And, as you bring on new hires, tell them it’s part of their responsibility to scale it eventually.
You want to do NONE of the $5/hour tasks. Outsource those, then create simple systems to scale.
That’s how you build an asset that generates cash flow… which is not a J.O.B.
