Wise Startup Blog

Every business’ goal is to make more money. Make more money than yesterday, make more money than last money, and make more money than last year. But why is it that businesses are so stupid?

Work Smart, Work Less

Say we want to double our revenues from $10,000 to $20,000. We have 2 employees right now, so to get to $20,000, we should double our employees to 4.

This is the typical model for growing a business. Double your staff, double your revenues. And it works.

This is stupid. Let me tell you why.

At the end of the day, if I want to double my revenues from $10,000 to $20,000. Not only do I not want to have to hire another employee, over time, I want to be able to work less than I am today.

So how do I do this? I put the right systems in place.

The main way to grow your business without working more is automation. Is there a manual process that’s in your business you can automate? Here are some examples:

- My company is taking orders over the phone. Setup an automated checkout on your website. Get a merchant processor and run credit cards while you sleep.

- We have a 119 item completion report that needs to be reviewed manually by hand before we can send it to the client. Use Mechanical Turk to pay someone $.05 per line item, and pay them $5.95 to do a job that would have taken you 1 hour to do.

- I have to constantly add new content to my site which takes a lot of time. Use RSS automation software to import giant XML feeds into your site so that you don’t have to do the work by hand anymore.

This is going to be a series of posts where I go over how I’m working less and making more money, I hope you find it useful. Let me know your tips for automating your business in the comments.

-Andrew