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If you want to build a company that gives you the freedom you long for, you have to start thinking about systems. You might be have to befriend a robot or two. All organizations not matter the size, live or die on their ability to take daily, reputable tasks and systematize them. As we have already established, many people hate doing drudge work. Fortunately, that is no longer necessary. You do not need to put a bunch of people on an assembly line or in a phone center anymore. You can let computers and machines do a lot of the heavy lifting and save the real genius work for people.
Everything in your business that is tedious needs to be automated. And if you cannot automated, try harder. Look around. Make sure you are not just creating more work for yourself than necessary. Most of the stuff I stared doing manually in our businesses’ was eventually automated, not because someone invented a solution but because of already existed. I just had to find it or occasion create one.
In our business where we do personalization there was one step where a human literally had to click on our website and cut and paste the personalization to another computer program. I never thought in a million years that there was a way to automate this until I started looking. Ultimately, I found a computer program that will move and click a mouse for you automatically and do the cut and paste. This ended up saving us four hours a day. Sometimes, you’re most strategic solutions are not anything fancy or world shattering. They are just more efficient way to solve a problem.
Every problem you face is probably not as new as you think, someone somewhere has already dealt with it and already found a way to solve it. Find them, a tool they have created or someone who already knows. And if you absolutely cannot aromatic it, create a replicable system that anyone can use. Take out all the guesswork so that you can focus on solving other problems.
Whoever possible, work a machine, not a human? They are more reliable. If you do need to work with people, you must make sure everything is documented so that it can be estimated and wherever possible, automated. This is the stuff that either sets you up for long term success or will be the cause of your demise.
