When you start a business, no doubt you have several goals in mind: profit, volume, brand recognition, more family time, automation, etc. This is pretty universal, no matter what line of business you're into but what happens when you want to take a two or three week vacation?

Sure, you could put off the technical details until the time comes and it may or may not work. Chances are, it won't. So my advice to you is to move automation into the first slot in your goal list.

The reason for this is that automation comes packaged with several of those goals already covered, most notably profit and family time. Without profit, it doesn't make sense to have an automated business. So while family time is a benefit, profit is a sub-point to automation.

What Is Automation?

Essentially, if you can walk away from your business tomorrow, not check on it for a couple weeks and when you return, everything is running smoothly, then your business is running on auto-pilot. If not, you need to figure out what it takes because life happens and you should be prepared.

In order to put your business on auto-pilot, there are several key factors you need to take care of:

1. Payments (will they get deposited and cleared without you?)
2. Employees (will they get paid and will they work without you around?)
3. Shipments (will the product get delivered properly while you're away?)
4. Customer Service (will your customers' questions get handled efficiently while you're away?)
5. Products (will they stay in stock if you're not around?)

Making sure payments get deposited automatically is somewhat simple: set up direct deposit with your merchant account or the entity where your payments come from and let the payments take care of themselves.

On the other hand, making sure employees get paid is another matter. There are companies you can hire to outsource your payroll to that will ensure that your employees get paid on time, every time. Knowing that your employees will continue to get paid even while you're away will ensure that they're able to keep working and to keep the business running smoothly. This ties directly in with #3, #4 and #5 -- shipments, customer service and product stock. As long as your employees work well without your supervision, you should be OK.

What helps the process along is outsourcing employees from an overseas outsource firm. This way, you can test numerous individuals and use those employees that benefit your company most, and as a side benefit -- they work while you sleep and you can arrange for them to work while you're awake as well. And the best part is that you can hire them for a fraction of the price you'd pay for such an employee in the United States. It's truly beautiful. Look for outsourcing firms on sites like www.elance.com.

Once these things are taken care of, you should be able to walk away from your business tomorrow and know it's in good hands until you return. Not to mention, now you can decrease your overall workload by more than half by delegating to your new, more cost-effective overseas employees. And that, my friends, is why automation should be goal numero uno in your business model.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Affiliate Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.