Today I want to show you how you can run your entire business from a tropical island and never leave your cabana.
A long time ago, back in the early 80s I think, I saw a program on TV that stuck with me. It was about this guy who lived on a tropical beach on some island in the West Indies and he made his living farming cultured black pearls.
They said he made about $80k a year doing it.
There were pictures of him walking along this little dock that went out into the ocean pulling up strings of oysters to check on them. He lived in a beach house with a big veranda about 50 yards from the water and apparently sat there during most days drinking tall fruity drinks garnished with umbrellas and pineapples. He had to spend a couple hours a day tending to his “crop” and the rest of the day was his to enjoy the beach. It looked like the ideal job – the ideal life.
So – I filed those images away in my mind thinking that someday I’d return to them and live that life. In the meantime, I had a lot of things I wanted to do – I was full of ambition. Today I look at his life and think – you know – I think I’ve arrived, my life isn’t that different. I don’t live on the beach, true, but I could if I wanted to. I could live anywhere in the world I wanted as long as I could get phone service or an uplink to a satellite. Everything I do is done over the phone or the Internet or by fax – I don’t ever HAVE to go anywhere.
I get up in the morning, have breakfast with my family, see the kids off to school, drink a cup of coffee with Nancy and talk about what’s going on in our life and then, every other day or so, my trainer Jeff comes and kicks my butt in our little gym downstairs and tells me I should eat less ice cream. Then, I go to my big home office that looks out over the woods in my backyard and I set down at my computer and answer my emails.
Okay, it’s not the beach. There are no waves gently lapping at my door – but you know – I kinda like it this way. I know a lot more about real estate than I do black pearls, we get fewer hurricanes here in Indiana, houses are a lot more profitable than pearls AND I get to teach what I know to appreciative folks who are set on changing their lives for the better. What could be better than that?
Here is how you can do the same with your life. It’s short, simple and easy to do. It doesn’t happen overnight and it won’t happen at all if you don’t do a little work, but once you get it set up and running, everything changes and life really does become idyllic.
There are three keys to building this type of business. You must learn to:
1. Eliminate
2. Automate
3. Outsource
Eliminate all the unnecessary activity
You do in your business. 20% of what you do makes you 80% of the income. You should be able to eliminate 80% of your work and your income should not drop by more than 20%. And by the way, if you spent a little more of that 80% of your time on the 20% activities, you WILL make a lot more money in a lot less time.
Automate everything
You can. It’s amazing how much of our life can be automated. Does that mean that some of the things you automate may not go 100% perfectly – that you might lose some money because some thing important falls through the cracks? Yes, it does. But when you look at how much time you gain by automating, the money you lose by the slight drop in accuracy is well worth it.
Outsource everything
You can’t automate. There are millions of people who would love to work for you and do your grunt work for a fraction of what that work makes you. They will thank you for the opportunity. You just need to know how to protect yourself and pay for work performed rather than hiring employees. Employees will suck your business dry – do everything in your power NOT to have employees. Instead, hire contract workers. There are so many places you can find great people these days, this is not hard.
The way you can implement these three ideas are by using systems in your business. Once you systematize a money making routine in your business, you can apply one of these three core principles to that system and put the whole business on autopilot.
This is the difference between having a business and a job. A business continues to run without you. A job collapses as soon as you walk away from it.
You can either create your own systems for your own business or you can use someone else’s systems.
If you go out and spend a million bucks and buy a McDonald’s franchise or a few hundred thousand dollars and buy a Subway franchise, you will be buying a system.
If you come and learn from me, you will be learning the systems I use to give me the life and business I have. Learning from me is a good deal cheaper than buying a franchise.
So now you know what it takes to live where and how you please without ever having to answer to a boss or a time clock again. Use this knowledge wisely, Grasshopper.
