How To Build Your Small Business To Run Without You

This may be a hard pill to swallow, but your small business is better off if it can run without you.

Some business owners love to be on the ground every day supervising and monitoring everything that goes on in the business, while others like to get involved in every aspect of the business.

But building your business to run without you as the owner is one of the best things you can do for the business.

That does not mean that you’d have to stop coming into your business premises, or monitoring your business activities – it just means that your business would no longer need your presence to operate effectively.

And that is a great thing because many great businesses have shut down just because their owners never built them to run without them.

In other cases, many small business owners could not exit or sell their otherwise wonderful businesses when the need arose because they never set them up to run without them.

How To Build Your Small Business To Run Without You

1. Clarify Your Business Goals and Vision

It’s not enough to have the goal and vision you have for your small business in your head, you have to make it clear to your team.

Building a business is hard work. Making sure that all employees understand the objectives, visions, and purpose of the business is one way to make the work easier and more successful.

That means you have to write it down and share it with every new hire before they start any other work.

Setting up SMART goals and communicating them is essential to aligning your team’s efforts and ensuring that every member of your staff understands the vision and goals of the business, both in the short and long term.

You also have to clarify the role of each employee in the vision and objective of the business.

Show them how they fit and their roles and responsibilities – show them why they matter to your success.

2. Build A Stellar Team

Small business owners often build their businesses to depend on just one individual.

Besides the fact that it is such a risky move for your business, it also stunts your growth.

As a business owner, one of the ingredients to building your small business to run without you is to build a team of incredible people to run the business on your behalf.

Building a team to help you run your business does not stop at hiring the best talent or culturally fit candidates you can find, it also extends to creating an environment that would help them succeed, training and retraining them, so they can be an even greater asset to your team.

3. Be Replaceable

For some business owners, being involved in every aspect of running their business is their goal.

But for those who want to build businesses that run themselves, who want true freedom, then making sure that you’re replaceable is a must.

Because the true test of a small business that can run without you is in its ability to run without you.

To help you do that and still keep your business running, you have to:

Hire and train the right employees so they are competent to handle business operations without running to you every time for directions.

You can gradually remove yourself from your business by delegating more tasks and core activities you perform as a business owner to your employees.

Documenting processes and creating systems would make it easier for your staff to handle key operations without you, so create detailed documentation of the tools, steps, and required outcomes for each process in your business.

A good hack for easing yourself from your business is to track where you are currently spending time in your business and take steps to delegate and outsource those tasks where you can.

4. Create Standard Operating Procedures

Business runs on processes.

Whether written or unwritten.

For most small business owners, much of what it takes to run their business is unwritten – stuck somewhere in their heads.

But that is another obstacle to building your small business to run itself.

If you want your business to run without you constantly telling employees what to do and how to do it. You need to create a standard operating procedure for every aspect of your business.

I know you might think– that’s some work.

But to get started, all you have to do is pick a simple process and create a step-by-step procedure and expected result.

Then make them accessible to your employees.

Your business can’t run without you if your sales staff runs to you every time a customer has an objection.

You need to create checklists, explanatory documents and workflows that explain in excruciating detail how to perform every task your business needs to run effectively – without you.

Pro Tip – Leverage technology

Many small businesses cannot afford to hire as many people as necessary to make their business independent of their owners.

That is why leveraging technology offers a cost-effective alternative to utilizing software, automation tools and outsourcing roles to experts.

Have you tried building a business to run without you? What steps did you take?

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