From Burn-Out Entrepreneur to Automating My $4M Company

- If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business — you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

I disagree with this. I have a SaaS that depends on me and I have never gotten so much satisfaction from work before. It's not only because I'm making more money than I would ever make as a salaried engineer or because I have a super flexible schedule, but because I have the autonomy to say no to clients and decide in which direction the product goes.

Long story short: Document everything in step-by-step guides, then delegate to other people. No earth-shattering advice here. The author also wants to convince you to use Pipefy for that, apparently a Trello for company processes.

I did this with my service business.

However, I did it by developing a custom rails app, and have recurring rails tasks that generate lightweight todo items for my staff based on various triggers.

I think most business owners don't really have the time or capability to do this, so solutions like SOP SaaS tools work well. You can also use Salesforce which has a lot of this capability. It also takes a lot longer.

But, as a service business, trained and consistent staff are core to your value proposition, so your SOP is often your secret sauce. So, it's worth investing in.

The upside for me, is that I have complete control and have a highly integrated workflow that can be a lot smarter than a SOP workflow. I can run a lot of reports against my postgres database and find out what's going on.

It also makes it very measurable, who's doing what, when.

Ah, not the kind of automating I was expecting.

When your business owns you more than you own it, time to automate.