Automating Pure Adapt
Can a business really be automated? To what extent? From what I've seen, that depends on the foresight of the owners. There are founders of companies who work 70 hours/week and every second is vital to the success of his/her biz. There are also founders who can work whatever number of hours they want and the biz won't suffer either way.
Everything I built on SportsLizard was designed with automation in mind - some functions were automated from the get-go, and others have the potential to be. Now that things are going well and we've got a solid long-term plan in place, I'm going to begin working to automate the crap out of the site. Then I'm going to start automating everything else in our company. Sound crazy - I don't think so. I know it's possible and I think I can make it happen in the next few years.
One eventual goal of every entrepreneur should be to remove yourself from the business so that it can run without you. This frees you up to focus on the high level decision making, and also frees you up to take a vacation without seeing your company collapse. Our first (and easiest step) will be SportsLizard. With another week of programming I can get the day-to-day stuff can be 99% automated (there will always be a few legit customer inquiries) and I can spend my SL time writing interesting articles and marketing the price guide.
From there we'll have an interesting task of automating the monster that is Detailed Image - a much more traditional retail business. It will take 2-3 months to build a new site that automates credit card processing, inventory, and accounting - things that right now take a few hours a day. Next up will be hiring a $10/hr level employee to handle packing and shipping. I envision us hiring a full-time programmer by 2009 so that all four owners can be "removed" from the day-to-day operations.
Some companies never get where I want to take us. We all have this end goal in mind, but I'm really taking the lead here and trying to initiate the change and make sure my partners put a high priority on this as well (so far they agree 100%, and why wouldn't they?). We already see SportsLizard starting to run like a well-oiled money-making machine, and to be quite honest it's getting addicting. A well built system with intelligent processes requires very little maintenance.
It will be the greatest feeling in the world when I finally am able to say that my business doesn't need me to be successful.
Everything I built on SportsLizard was designed with automation in mind - some functions were automated from the get-go, and others have the potential to be. Now that things are going well and we've got a solid long-term plan in place, I'm going to begin working to automate the crap out of the site. Then I'm going to start automating everything else in our company. Sound crazy - I don't think so. I know it's possible and I think I can make it happen in the next few years.
One eventual goal of every entrepreneur should be to remove yourself from the business so that it can run without you. This frees you up to focus on the high level decision making, and also frees you up to take a vacation without seeing your company collapse. Our first (and easiest step) will be SportsLizard. With another week of programming I can get the day-to-day stuff can be 99% automated (there will always be a few legit customer inquiries) and I can spend my SL time writing interesting articles and marketing the price guide.
From there we'll have an interesting task of automating the monster that is Detailed Image - a much more traditional retail business. It will take 2-3 months to build a new site that automates credit card processing, inventory, and accounting - things that right now take a few hours a day. Next up will be hiring a $10/hr level employee to handle packing and shipping. I envision us hiring a full-time programmer by 2009 so that all four owners can be "removed" from the day-to-day operations.
Some companies never get where I want to take us. We all have this end goal in mind, but I'm really taking the lead here and trying to initiate the change and make sure my partners put a high priority on this as well (so far they agree 100%, and why wouldn't they?). We already see SportsLizard starting to run like a well-oiled money-making machine, and to be quite honest it's getting addicting. A well built system with intelligent processes requires very little maintenance.
It will be the greatest feeling in the world when I finally am able to say that my business doesn't need me to be successful.
posted by Adam McFarland at
6/03/2007 03:51:00 PM
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