What would your life be like if you only had to work one hour a day to make enough money to live the life of your dreams? Would that sound like an impossibility to you, or something that piques your interest.
I have to say that when I was working as an employee and trading time for money it would never have occurred to me that this was even remotely possible. But now that I have my own companies and have figured out how to develop systems that can run my business without me, it all makes sense.
What It Takes To Make It happen
These days there is definitely a rising trend in valuing performance over presence. The days of being ‘on-the-clock’ from the moment you start until your ‘shift’ has finished is slowly starting to give way to being about getting a set amount of work or projects done within a deadline.
This means that if you have four projects to complete for the month and you complete them in 1 week, then you can take the rest of the time off. And if you get your weeks worth of work done in 1 hour, then you can have the rest of the week off.
It’s irrelevant what hours you work or don’t’ work as long as your assigned work load gets completed to satisfactory levels. So this obviously only matters if you work for someone else. If you work for yourself, then it’s a bit easier. It’s the same process really, except you need to becoming good at outsourcing.
Building Your Outsource Force
If you want to live a 5 hour work week then you MUST get good at outsourcing those things about your business or life that you shouldn’t be wasting time on anymore. I now have a full time Virtual Assistant (VA) and about 50 part-time VA’s all helping to run several companies.
My only wish is that I’d though of it sooner in my business. It has freed up my time so completely that if I wanted to take a year off and come back to my business in better shape than when I left – I could do it easily. At first it started out as a process of delegation.
I delegated those tasks that I didn’t really need to do myself, and in fact hadn’t needed to for some time. This initially freed up my time to work ‘on’ my business to develop better systems and procedures for handling everything that Ii was doing, or that would be required to be done at some point.
Building a Remote Controlled Business
Initially, it takes time to train people in how your business works. Even showing a VA how to do your work initially takes time. But, here’s how to do it smart. When you train them, instead of doing it ‘live’ you make a training video, then catalog and upload it to wherever you store your video’s. You can even use You-Tube for this purpose – and it’s FREE!
Then, you have an ever expanding training resource that you can re-use anytime you like… And, as you train up people and your business grows, you train trainers to take that workload off you as well. It’s really the most awesome way to free up your time and remove the need for you to do all the work.
This doesn’t mean that you HAVE to let go of doing all the work if you don’t want to. You may be happy working a four day work week, or a three day work week, or a ten hour work week. It really doesn’t matter as that’s your call. What matters is that the process to make that happen is the same.
It requires you to get REAL good at outsourcing all those tasks that you either don’t want or need to be doing. You’d be surprised at what can be outsourced. The latest list I saw showed 784 tasks that can be done by VA’s for pennies on the dollar.
From answering your emails and phone, to doing outbound sales call, to customer support and website maintenance, there’s no limits to what you get done for you by an outsource team. It really is rapidly becoming the best way to run a business because of the relatively low cost of hiring people full time.
By the way, you can also hire the same people to help you out if you are a full time employee. Especially if you can get your company to rate you work based on performance rather than attendance. Then, it’s a no-brainer to hire some remote staff to help you out.
If your boss won’t come to the party, then it may be time to sack your boss and look elsewhere,or even better start-up your own business.
The bottom line is that it has never been more real to create a lifestyle based work or business setup. All it takes is enough self worth to believe that you deserve to live a better life followed by unstoppable action to make it happen.
Then, whether you dream is to travel the world while getting paid to do it, or you just want to free up your life to do what you want, when you want and with whomever you want, then you can have it.
