Documenting all of the steps that go into marketing, creating new products, sales, book keeping, everything.

The systems need to guide every aspect and stage of the business including solutions to problems that might arise. The model must provide consistent value to your customers. It must be operated by people with the lowest necessary level of skill. You have to make people expendable. Including yourself. Everything that you do in the business must be documented in the operations manual.

Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician. The entrepreneur is the visionary who thinks ahead and makes plans for the future, the manager, establishes order in the workplace, trying to create consistency. And the technician, the worker and the doer, is the person who does the technical work. Most people are technicians turned business owners.

A business owner needs to be all three. In different ammonts depending on the maturity of the business.

A business should grow through the following stages.

• Infancy
• Adolescence
• Maturity

The infancy stage is where the business operates on what the owner wants rather than what the business needs to grow and succeed. The owner does most of the work himself. This stage ends when the owner can’t keep up with demand and supply or quality drops. The end of this stage is where businesses either fail or succeed. Infancy ends when the boss realizes things cannot continue the way they have been. If you’re still only a technician, this is where many people decide to walk away.

The adolescence stage is where you’ve decided to let your business grow and it begins to reach outside of your comfort zone. For the The work becomes too much for a single technician to handle and the business can grow to the extent that subordinates can be managed. For the entrepreneur it is how many managers he can keep motivated to heading towards the vision.

If you can expand your comfort zone to increase your ability to handle the expansion, you will enter into the maturity stage.

The ultimate goal of any entrepreneur. The maturity phase means your business has a clear vision and purpose. The owner must handle the entrepreneurial aspect of running a business by hiring managers to follow the vision of the company and to manage the technicians who are doing the work.

Figuring out exactly who your customers you serve are and how you can add more value to their lives. When you have a mature business you can really focus on creating an impact.

In order to run a successful business, you can’t remain just a technician. You can’t hire people to build your business for you and hope they get it right. You need to focus on making the business everything you want it to become. You need to take the time to make it systems dependent so you aren’t relying on any one person.

The idea is to be able to step out of your business with the knowledge that the business will be able to opperate as you intended without any further input.