Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself

A business owner’s job is to create jobs. Your role is to produce the opportunity for people who want a good job with a good company. If you are doing the work, you are not creating jobs; you are stealing them.

By definition, a niche is a very narrow group with very consistent needs.

You need to identify a homologous community that connects repeatedly at one or more congregation points to address their specific needs and wants.

Your job is to scale your business. Your challenge is to think accordingly. Thoughtful, calculated design work is the hardest and most important work of all. Right now. Stop growing. Start scaling.

To get to the point where you aren’t the workhorse inside the business, you need to slowly and surgically extract yourself. The process to make your business run itself two months, two years, or two decades from now starts today. Deliberately. Consistently. Relentlessly.

Calling yourself an entrepreneur can be unhealthy. The word is too strongly (and too wrongly) associated with work more, work harder, work endlessly. Instead, starting today, call yourself a shareholder of a business. Or a major shareholder of a small business.

You do your QBR to deliver on your Big Promise.

definition, only one activity can be the most important. You can use the sticky-note exercise to employ deductive logic to find the QBR among all the others. To do this, write each activity on a sticky note. For example, if your Big Promise is extraordinary support, you may have answering phone calls, responding to chat messages, answering emails,

The thing is, even though it seems like the four-week vacation is all about you getting a vacation from your business, it isn’t. It’s about your business getting a vacation from you.