The secret to a successful business isn’t your management skills, marketing savvy, or even your amazing ideas. It all comes down to the systems you build. A sustainable business runs like a well-oiled machine — so efficient that you can take your hard-earned money and go on a much-deserved vacation without worrying about it! Otherwise, you’ll probably find yourself showing up every day, which leads to burnout and yes, lower profitability as well. So, how can you stop being a slave to your business and create a turnkey operation that keeps rolling even when you’re out of the office?

Step 1. Identify Your Goals

The first step toward building a turnkey business is to know why you’re building a business in the first place. Before you start talking about the benefits of your big idea or how you help your customers, stop and ask yourself the real question: what do you want for yourself and your family? More time to watch your kids grow up? The freedom to pursue your hobbies? The opportunity to earn more money? A chance to be your own boss?

Once you have those goals in mind, you can see where your business is supporting your dreams — and where it isn’t. Obviously, working 24/7 on your company doesn’t leave much time for anything else! yet many entrepreneurs find themselves in that trap: they end up having another stressful job with an over-demanding boss: yourself!

To break free of that cycle, you must consider yourself a replaceable founder of your company. This doesn’t mean you’ll become irrelevant or redundant, but rather that your business keeps running smoothly even if you’re out living your life. And that requires some good systems to be in place.

Step 2. Know Your time Drains

There are five main elements that your business requires to operate efficiently and sustainably. Any one of these elements can suck up your valuable time and money, which is why it’s so important to refine and streamline the work into reproducible, automated systems.

Leadership: The better you communicate your vision to your team, the more you can trust that things will get done even if you’re not directly supervising every task.

Marketing: It’s a lot of work to attract prospects to your business. Automation can help you keep that wheel turning and continue to nurture leads so you don’t have to constantly do outreach or engagement.

Sales: When you first started out, you likely had to close most of your sales yourself. Once the business starts to grow, be sure to train a sales team who can keep that cycle going even if you’re out of the office.

Service and Operations: Ideally, you have systems in place to automate and streamline your customer service and how you run the business, whether that’s a self-service platform, an outsourced call centre, etc.

Administration: If you let it, the administration will take over your entire schedule. From responding to emails to onboarding new hires, you should have a well-trained team in place to reduce the time and effort needed to handle that — and task automation to handle everything else.

Step 3. Create Your Business’s Systems

Once you know what your business needs to achieve its goals and decrease its costs, you can start developing systems for each of those five elements described above. This doesn’t have to be super-complicated — in fact, the simpler, the better. You want to be able to make your business “turnkey”: so easily operated that all your tasks can be done like clockwork.

Think of your systems as a series of checklists for launching a plane. Your team, the flight crew, knows what they need to do. Your customers have procedures to follow. And you pilot the plane, but you’ve got people to step in when needed — and an autopilot system to make sure the plane stays in the air if you’re pulled away.

To craft these systems, you must understand what your business requires to function. Automate those tasks whenever possible. Then, look for ways to reduce your time and expenses. Create procedures and automations that keep things running even if you and your team are out of the office. Your goal is to have everything be easily learned and reproducible, so you don’t have to be there all the time, telling people what to do.

Wrapping Up

Strong business systems are no substitute for your expertise and innovation, so don’t feel guilty for relying on them! The whole point is that you stop being a slave to your business and start enjoying the freedom and flexibility you initially wanted as an entrepreneur. Let your systems keep the company running so you can have more time for relaxation, family time, and growth — or even to create your next enterprise.

This blog is based on an interview with entrepreneur and business systems expert Howard Patridge on Episode 15 of the Simplifying Entrepreneurship podcast. You can listen here.