Your long term goal in having your own internet business is so you can spend less time working and spend more time doing what you want to do, right? You don’t want to just shift from a job working for someone else to your own job that consumes even more of your time, right? Too many times that’s exactly what ends up happening. Sometimes it can be even more of a burden having your own business because you are the head honcho and have to make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible. You could end up being a slave at your own business. You don’t want to end up like that.

In the early years of my internet business, I just wanted customers and would bend over backwards to get them. I would promise them the world on their website and then spend 10 or so hours a week working on their site for a whopping $50 per month. Let’s see, that works out to about $5 per hour. Not even minimum wage….. That’s not a very good business model. After a while, I slowly started picking up more customers and learned how to better value my time and adjusted prices and more importantly my hours accordingly.

The key to being able to spend less time on each customer’s site was setting up a business system. A good business system allows you to accomplish tasks with little or even no time involved (or at least not YOUR time). For my particular case, I wrote software that would create websites automatically based on some simple customer input. You could think of it as an automatic template. I would plug in the customers information into my software and the software would create the website with the customers data, set up their email accounts, update the DNS entries, configure the database, load up the site on the webserver, and turn the site on. Everything would be complete in just a few seconds. This process would have taken several hours to do manually (and it did until I wrote the software). This software and the process of using it became one of my business systems. Business systems are essential to a successful business so you can devote your time to growing your business. I did not set up business systems for some of the processes that were essential to the growth of the business in the beginning and I am still paying the price to some degree for not implementing a business system earlier.

I would recommend that you document your processes that you do to run your business. Then, take each process and see if you can create a business system that can do the task for you whether it is a software program that does it or you outsource the task to someone else. Either way, do what needs to be done to get the same tasks completed without you having to spend your time on it. This will allow you to spend your time on other important tasks. If possible, do this with all parts of your business as you grow. You will compound your time and efforts this way. Your business will get closer and closer to running without you. It will begin to take on a life of it’s own so you can have a life of your own.

- Hill Robertson