EP # 207 - How to Build a Business That Runs Without You (Even on Vacation)

Here's the reality: Most business owners are trapped in their own success. 

You've built something that depends entirely on you being present, available, and "on" all the time. But what if I told you that the most successful, scalable businesses are designed to run seamlessly whether the owner is in the office or on a beach in Bali? 

In this episode, I'm sharing the framework that transforms owner-dependent businesses into systematic, profitable operations that actually give you the freedom you started your business to achieve.

What You'll Learn:
• Why separating your personal identity from your business operations creates exponential growth
• The systematic approach to building predictable revenue streams (with real client case studies)
• How to train your clients to follow your processes from day one
• The framework for creating team independence that reduces your daily workload
• Why 90% structure + 10% flexibility is the sweet spot for scalable operations
• The connection between documented processes and building a sellable business asset

Key Insights:

1. Professional Boundaries: Clear processes prevent you from making emotional business decisions that compromise results
2. Revenue Predictability: Systematic client management creates consistent cash flow patterns
3. Client Education: Establishing expectations upfront eliminates pushback and creates smoother operations
4. Team Empowerment: Documented processes build confident, independent team members
5. Asset Building: Structured operations create tangible business value beyond just revenue

Real Business Transformations:
• Home services entrepreneur who learned why skipping proven processes costs time and money
• Virtual assistant who stabilized unpredictable income through systematic client renewals
• Team leader who reduced daily interruptions by implementing clear operational guidelines

Your Strategic Next Steps:

1. Audit one key business function where you're currently improving
2. Document your actual process (not your ideal process)
3. Test and refine with your next client interaction
4. Measure the consistency of results

Professional Insight:
"The freedom you're seeking as a business owner isn't found in flexibility—it's built through intentional structure and systematic processes."

Ready to implement freedom systems in your business and start scaling sustainably? Book a  complimentary consultation with Maggie here - https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

EP # 207 - How to Build a Business That Runs Without You (Even on Vacation)

Audio Only - All Participants-1: [00:00:00] You want to grow and scale your business. You even want the freedom of time and schedule and flexibility it gives you, and ideally where you would like to build an asset that down the line you could sell. Yet, when it comes to setting up your business this way, creating processes and structures and automations, hiring the right staff that will take you there.

You think it's boring, you procrastinate, you resist to it and think that somehow there is another way. There isn't. And today in this podcast, I wanna show you the benefits of sitting a processes in your business as soon as possible, even when you are a solopreneur. Even if you haven't started hiring yet.

When you have a team and you start hiring 2, 3, 20, 50 people benefits.

[00:01:00] Process in the business don't have to be boring. And instead of resistance, you can get to love them and not the processes themselves, but the results that they're creating for you. Like the freedom to take vacation, like amazingly performing stuff and happy clients. Who wouldn't love that? And if the processes can help you, why not?

So today in this podcast, I wanna share with you the benefits of setting up processes in your business and maybe change your mind about them and start to appreciate them more, and also your perspective and when to set them up. And that the really important part of a sustainable growing business that down the line you could sell.

So the way I divided the benefits are in the first part of the podcast. We'll talk about the benefits of business processes [00:02:00] for you as a business owner, the CEO, no matter where you are in your business growth. And then the second part, I'll talk about the benefits for your team and overall for your business.

So the first trio is that when you have business processes, meaning certain way you do certain things in your business and it's consistent, it takes away you attaching the identity of who you are to how you do things in your business. In a way it also creates certain boundaries.

And frameworks that are predictable and therefore give you predictable results. And even if there is a challenge, you can go back to something that set up and look where things didn't work. What can I improve? Whereas if you do things from the kind of [00:03:00] seat of your ponds and from your brain, you don't remember the steps you took, you don't remember what led to what.

So then it's very hard to pinpoint the root causes of the challenges and then fix them. And then an additional thing is that it presents you as a professional in front of your clients because they get same experience with you every time. Different clients get same experience. So it shows your professional, it shows you care and you think through stuff.

So I'll give you an example from one of my clients. That we coach recently in her sales process. So part of her sales process is actually a visit to a homeowner. She's in a home services industry to not only identify proper match and qualify the leads, but also be able to provide really accurate quote to, for her services and her team [00:04:00] services to what the client needs.

She had a client on the phone who was really resistant to the site visit and just wanted to book the service, right away. And she agreed and cave in to the client and did that. And the result was that when her and her team showed up to deliver service, the client wasn't really ready.

It wasn't the ideal client for them. They would not allow them to do service. They had, all the resistance. In the end, after an hour, she fired the client and let go without charging, but at this point it was already an hour of her and her team members and really a unnecessary trip for all of them.

Had she followed her process, she would've quickly realized that this client wasn't a great match either because she would've have gone there, talked to the client, and realized that, or the client would never agree to the. Site visit, and then [00:05:00] that would be the end of the relationship. But the way she explained it to herself is oh, I am organized and I always need to be prepared.

So maybe it's a great way to challenge myself and not over prepare and just. Do what the client is requesting. So she attached her identity of who she is, how she operates, to how she runs business. And that, in this case was not the best thing because she. Didn't follow her process. That's why having processes set up allows you to detach your identity from how to run business and when you have a clear reason and a strong why I.

I have this process in place, why my sales consist of a phone conversation and a side visit and so on, and I know the results it produces. Then it's easy to follow because this is how we [00:06:00] do things, not is this is who I am and maybe I should challenge myself and grow in one way or another. This is not to say that for certain things you wanna be flexible with the client's request and so on, but that flexibility should come from your best clients when you know the circumstances are exceptional and really afterthought for consideration, not just relenting to a proven process and proven strategy.

Just because you think.

Not just relenting to a proven process and the strategy, especially where that process is to uncover red flags in potential clients.

Another benefit that I touched upon is that having a process allows you to create consistent results, whether it's results in your cash flow and how the money comes in. If it's a process of client payments or client onboarding, [00:07:00] whether it's the results of actually signing clients, your sales process, or even.

Customer journey process where the client receive the same quality, high quality of service every time, even if you know it happens at a different place or a different time of the year, or somebody else is doing it.

So another example from a client of mine was their way or renewing the client's engagement. This client is a virtual assistant, so the way the clients worked with her or at a certain frequency of hours that they buy and when they're hours with my client as a VA are coming short. My client has a process to renew them.

However, so far, the way she would renew 'em, it was inconsistent, she would reach out to the clients when they had an hour left or 30 minutes left, or five minutes [00:08:00] left and so on. She would have one consistent process of every week reminding them what they have. But in terms of actual renewal, it has been inconsistent, which then creates.

Unnecessary instability in her cash flow. And also that unknown is like how much I'm gonna make this month because I don't know, right? I can't predict that. So recently I've been coaching her on one of the months that was turning out to be lower in income that she hoped for.

And as we coached, I realized that her process wasn't consistent. There wasn't a point in the client engagement when once each client got to that point, she would. Offer the renewal of her services, right? It would be different for every client unnecessarily. So now we're implementing very standardized renewal process, which then [00:09:00] will allow her to be, to predict more the income she's gonna make to each month, and also help her with her cash flow.

The thing is, client will not know how you operate unless you teach them, so they also won't have objections about how you operate. If from the beginning you set up the expectations of this is how I run my business, those are the processes for working with me, renewing my services, coming back to my location, however you run your business.

So it's better for you to teach them and train your clients in certain ways than them coming up with their own sort of solutions because you don't have a process in place, right?

Without a predictable process, it's very hard, actually impossible to automate anything in your business. Now, with that virtual assistant client, she could actually [00:10:00] automate client renewal process. Not only the reminder, but actually the payments and so on.

Another example was that if coach to client who had challenges with some of her clients paying on time for her services, but it was because she did not. Have an established process that she reinforced. She had a guideline, but then she wasn't reinforcing it and some clients took advantage of it.

So another thing is about when you have a process that you reinforce, the client really follows what you want them to do, and it's easier for you to run your business.

Now let's talk about three main benefits of having processes for your team once you have a team. When you have processes established, it's easier for them to be trained or to learn from your training and to [00:11:00] do a good job faster because then they don't have to rely of months or years of experience on learning everything in their head, how we do things.

They have something to rely on to refer to.

So then also when you bring in new people, they can start functioning independently much faster to when you are trying to teach people by just following somebody else and figuring it out on their own because they should know. It also creates less stress for everybody, I promise. I have another client who just onboarded somebody into the sales team.

My client, of course, is very experienced in their industry. They're an expert, and they have that expert bias where they think that a lot of things in their industry is just common sense, whereas it's really coming from their years and years of experience. So [00:12:00] then the new salesperson they hired.

Was asking questions. And they're also more of a black and white person, right? Not great. Think, okay, when do I, how do you do this? My client would tell them, okay, this is what I do. But then they would ask, okay, how do I know when to implement that? And my client couldn't comprehend, like, why are they asking it?

So we started digging deeper and realized she does not have processes to set up where processes, not only that, tell the employees what to do and when, but also when, right? So when this situation happens, here are the options, or you implement this rule when there are certain circumstances.

Not everything in business is black and white either, and you can't over process your business, right? It's impossible to put everything in the process. However, majority of things are right. [00:13:00] 90% of what your team does or what you do in your business should be structured, put in the step-by-step process, because then you can automate it, grow it, and scale.

And then there is a 10% for exceptional circumstances, for proper, for people to use their judgment, their expertise, and so on. But it's shouldn't be the other way around. It shouldn't be. 10% of the processes are there and somehow existing, and then we're reinventing the wheel 90% of the time.

It's also very hard to find people who could actually function in such an environment. Another benefit is that predictability of outcomes. When I have a process that I know if I go start here and take these steps in there, there are certain results I can expect. There is also less opportunity for mistakes.

[00:14:00] So again, your. Team members are trained faster, they're faster independent, and also they end up making less mistakes because they have reference points. It's easier for them to learn, or if they're not sure, and that also reduces your workload, right? So if the team member is not sure, they can always refer back to the process to read through things and remind themselves rather than.

Coming to you with every little questions all the time because it's gonna take them longer to retain the information that's not documented and set in the process.

I remember when as a team manager, I came into the team that was dysfunctional and not because people weren't good. It's because, first of all, they didn't have some continuity of management. There was many managers in a very short period of time, but also because they did not have guidelines, they did not have processes to [00:15:00] fall onto.

So there were. Coming up with new ideas as they went. It created a lot of mistakes, a lot of complaints from the clients, and also that uncertainty, lack of confidence, and team members themselves did not have confidence when they were doing, and a lot of work for the manager when they would reach out with every little thing.

So as we started implementing the processes, creating some frameworks, creating guidelines. My team members knew what to do. They started feeling more confident in their own decision making and serving the clients, and not only the quality of their work would improve, but also my workload would decrease because they were coming to me less and less because they had answers in the frameworks and guidelines we created.

Last but not least, without proper processes, you have no [00:16:00] foundations to scale your business without proper processes. There's no selling your business, there's no asset you could sell because if everything is your brain or brain of the employees, the risk is if you leave or a key employee leaves, nobody knows how to do some key.

Some key things in your business that generate income, that retain clients and so on, right? So in order to scale and build a sellable asset. You need processes, and that structure also creates freedom for you to go away and let your team run the business when you're on vacation and not be in it 24 7. So the freedom you crave is in structure and processes.

Don't resist it, embrace it, and I promise you'll love it. Like many of my clients. So if you would [00:17:00] like to start implementing these in your business, I can help my top CEO formula and especially continuous success recipe is designed for it. All you need to do is reach out to me, let's do a complimentary initial consultation, talk about it, and I'll show you exactly how your business can scale.

With proper structure, and processes, have a fantastic week.