Hey there! James Schramko here. And today, I’m going to address something that could actually have a profound change on the rest of your life.
And what I’m talking about here is, preparing to have time away from your business. A lot of entrepreneurs are so baked into their business, they’ve actually become a prisoner of it and they can’t have time off. In fact, a lot of entrepreneurs work a lot harder in their own business than they would have when or if they ever had a job.
When I was traveling, some time I went to the Dominican Republic and at the hotel there I realized the internet was so poor that I couldn’t even check in with my team. I mean, it was like 0.01 of an Mbps. In fact, I had to go to the reception at like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning when everyone in the resort was asleep just to use my phone to upload a message to my team, to say, ‘Team, I’m not going to be available because there’s no internet. Can you also advise customers and just do your best.’ And I remember that was a turning point because I couldn’t do the payroll, I couldn’t send out the emails, for example, that would have to go out. And it was after that trip that I started making significant changes with who does what in my team, because I couldn’t put myself in that position again.
Years later, I started traveling to the Maldives and I’d heard that there’s virtually no internet out there on the boat, in the water, and I started to sort of plan for that. When I’m away, what am I going to do? So, that’s when I started handing over things like my podcast editing, video editing. So, now in my business, my team does all the things that a lot of entrepreneurs who are online still hang on to. They do all the website development, they send out all the broadcast emails, they do all the editing and the uploading. Even when I make videos like this, my job is to make the video and then I push it up to the Internet into my drive folder. That’s it. I don’t touch it again. After that, my team will edit it, transcribe it, caption it, distribute it across the various Internet, and it all happens.
And that allows me to actually have time away from the business. So, recently, a client asked me, how do you prepare to be away? They’re going to go on a six-week travel tour. And my advice is, start small and start now. So, have an afternoon off from your business, take a whole day off from your business. In fact, book a week. So, do a half-day, a full day, a couple of days. Have a week off and see what breaks and see what changes need to be made if you’re away from your business for a whole week. If you can do that, take a few weeks off. By the time you get to your five-week trip, if you’ve done the preparation, it’s probably a little bit like how vaccinations are supposed to work – just a little test here and there, it starts to create the antibodies that kick in that will help protect you from when you have more time off.
So, take a little time off now and see what things need changing. You will get to the point where you can actually be liberated from your business. And I’m at a stage now where I tend not to do much on Fridays and Mondays. So, I put most of my work week to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. But even then, using tools like schedulers, you can block out things. Having a team will allow you to move most of the tasks to your team so you just do the bits you want to do and then you can control that.
So, I hope today has been a productive discussion around how you might free yourself up from the business. Now, if you’ve got a question, I’d love you to ask where you see this video, because I’m happy to answer it. And of course, I’ve created entire trainings around this, about how to find and build your own team, how to set up all your systems, what sort of emails you can systemize and turn into more of a machine. I even share the SOPs for how my team make videos like this, all inside SuperFastBusiness Membership. So, if you are shackled to your business too much, then I suggest you get in there, let me help you free yourself up from the business. But start small and start now.
I’m James Schramko. This is jamesschramko.com.
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