When Carl Taylor was just a teenager, he learned an important fundamental truth about business. Success, he was taught, should be defined by how much of your business could work without you.
What exactly does that mean? Most of us might have a more traditional view of work. We get a degree, we get a job, we work and make more and more money as we get older. Then we retire and live a free and happy life.
Others see business as a key to personal freedom. They start a business and spend 70 or more hours a week making sure that things run smoothly. The business becomes their life and, when they’re old enough, maybe they can sell it and then live a free and happy life. What would happen if a CEO told his workers that he was going on two-month sabbatical and wouldn’t have internet? If the business imploded because he was holding the whole thing together, that wouldn’t exactly be success.
Even at a young age Carl has a slightly different definition of what business success was. He thought a business is only truly successful if it can run on its own.
Let’s say you run an online marketing agency, like Carl does. Are there people you pay to pick up the phone and greet clients? As a CEO, you obviously shouldn’t be spending your time at the front desk. Past that, do you have project managers that you can trust, that can keep your clients happy and your projects running smoothly if you were to skip town for the month? That’s a little bit trickier. Do you have upper-level managers who could essentially run the whole operation for you?
So you might get the point now: you’ve really made it when your business will run without your input. Making that happen, however, is a whole other beast. It requires things called processes and automation. These may seem like vague terms, and that’s because they are. They’re going to differ depending on what your business looks like.
Making your business automated is much easier said than done, and Carl has devoted much of his career (though he’s still quite young) to making that happen. But this is how he achieves freedom, he says. Freedom, according to Carl, is the ability to choose how to live your day.
There’s a real difference between having to go into the office for a 16-hour day and choosing to go into the office because you love your work.
Check out the full interview with Carl on Bond Appetit and listen to more great insights here.
Author: Ronsley Vaz
Ronsley is the founder & chief day dreamer at AMPLIFY. He is an author, speaker & serial entrepreneur.
He has a Masters’ degree in Software Engineering and an MBA in Psychology and Leadership. He is known as the creator of We Are Podcast – the first Podcasting Conference in the Southern Hemisphere, and the host of The Bond Appetit Podcast and Should I Start a Podcast. He has an audience of over 3 million in 133 countries.