When it comes to building a business, most entrepreneurs focus on factors such as increasing customer base, broadening product range and driving up profit. While all of these are important, it’s often easy to forget how key your own freedom is. Setting up an enterprise that can remain profitable while you take time off can change your life. It means that you aren’t trapped in a 100-hour working week and struggling to take even 10 days off for your annual break. And yet so many owners still fail to establish a business that is profitable without their input – so how do you do it?

Building the right team

It goes without saying that your business will only be able to continue to move forward without you if you’ve got a strong team in place. This means finding people who understand what the business is about and who are self-motivated enough to be able to take decisions and move forward without your constant input. This applies to employees at every level – being able to attract, retain and engage your staff is key.

Strong foundations

If your finance strategy is wobbly, or your delivery mechanisms are hit and miss, this could create serious issues if you ever want to step back from the business and still expect it to function. It pays to take the time to invest in strong foundations for the business, from strategy to finance and the processes and systems that you have in place.

Sales and marketing expertise

If you take a step back from your company that should not mean that sales and marketing activities grind to a halt. It’s important to ensure you have effective and scalable sales and marketing systems in place within the business that can continue to drive predictable cash flow for the company regardless of whether you’re there or not.

Creating unique leverage

If your business is always struggling to compete with competitors – and is unable to distinguish itself – then the moment you step away from it could trigger disastrous consequences. If you’re able to establish some leverage then you can give your business a competitive advantage that will be crucial to sustaining it, whether you are there or not. Key to this will be ensuring that you have ultra efficient systems and forward thinking processes in place to help generate that essential competitive advantage.

Passive income generation

One of the most effective ways to ensure that you won’t return from time off to depleted sales is to integrate passive income generation into your business. This essentially means setting up systems so that the business simply continues turning a profit whether you are there driving sales etc or not. This type of revenue can help to keep a business ticking over and also create essential income for other investments.

 

Although many view the key to business success as profit or financial results, being able to step back from the business without any reduction in performance is often the more accurate metric.