How To Run A Business On Autopilot During Turbulent Times
By: Sophia Sunwoo
Tags: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Startup

How To Run A Business On Autopilot During Turbulent Times

You probably haven’t been in the mood to grind on your business lately. Here’s how you can pause without hurting your business.

James Adams

It has been a difficult couple of months for us business owners and human beings in general.

You probably have had days where you didn’t have the heart to ask for sales.

You probably haven’t always been in the mood to grind on your business.

And you probably carry all of this with guilt, that you’re not able to rise above these tough times and do business as usual.

Turbulent times call for pause, reflection, and stepping away from work when you have to. As a business owner, you must make time for this.

You are allowed to take mental health days and time for yourself.

The beauty here is that as a business owner, you have the power to do this. You just need to learn how.

Your business should be built with the capacity to function “as usual” even when you’re not always game for it.

Your business should not be an action-and-reaction entity where in order to make money, you have to do something for it. A real business creates machines that constantly produces results based on formulas running on autopilot.

If your business is at a standstill right now, or you’re begrudgingly working on it even when you’re not in the mood, here are 3 ways you can set up your business to run on autopilot during turbulent times.

Reduce Custom Strategy

The key to building a business with autopilot features is to reduce your reliance on custom strategy/work. In other words, you shouldn’t be running your business off of fresh to-do lists every month.

Every time you apply new, custom strategy to any part of your business, there are a lot of unknowns you are entertaining. You introduce risk.

Instead, much of your business should be running off the skeleton of a proven strategy. And if it isn’t, you should be currently in pursuit of discovering what that skeleton is.

You should have a sales formula, for example, that generates consistent revenue for you on a monthly basis. You should have a formula for other major arms of your business such as your operations, marketing, and customer service that are proven and always produces results.

It is only by establishing this skeleton or formula that you’re able to create a go-to autopilot system that you can leverage when needed, and frankly, should be using all the time.

Create Banks

I always have a back-up content bank that I can tap into when I’m not feeling in the mood to create new content. You can do this for pretty much everything like blog posts, designs, captions, and more.

Whenever you have some free time, add to your bank to help you manage your business from a more stress-free place.

We often create stress for ourselves when we’re not able to complete a task for our business in time or we’re about to miss a deadline. It’s also really difficult to be creative on-demand, especially when there’s so much going on in the world around you.

Creating a bank for your business also preserves your business’ commitment to quality. We often don’t do our best work when we’re distressed or emotionally absent — have a bank to draw from so that you can be consistent in the quality of your customer-facing deliverables.

Systems For Passive Income

The greatest gift you can give your business is a passive income channel. Passive income channels are products (digital or physical) that can be sold through automated marketing, sales, and operational systems without requiring too much hands-on interjection. This is the system 4-hour work week business owners use.

Passive income channels are a huge help when you want to build a business that can run on autopilot.

Some businesses go full-on with the passive income model, others have a diversified revenue model and use a passive income stream as one of their many channels.

As a business owner, you can build up your passive income model to the point that it can cover all of your business expenses, or provide a nice minimum income that your business can rely on.

This is a really nice option to have when you may not be feeling up to hustling on your business one month, or if you want to take a long pause from your business. The beauty of passive income channels is that after you make the initial investment to set it up, it will run by itself at all hours of the day.

This low-stress channel is perfect for supporting entrepreneurs when they want a more laid-back business they can step away from.