Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself

For you to become your business’s designer, you can no longer ask “how,” but “who.” That one question, “Who will get the work done?” will open your eyes to a business that will cruise right to the design phase.

My enemy was my ego.

The next time you dare to say “my business can’t be streamlined” or “I need to do all the work,” take a pause. You are lying to yourself. Your business can run on its own.

business. Designing elevates your business. And even if you are in an industry as specialized and independent as painting, you can be the designer of the business.

Doing, Deciding, and even Delegating maintain your

Once you get in the habit of setting aside the time, you’ll become more comfortable taking the time—and making good use of that time.

as you begin this process, I’m asking you to set aside just 1 percent of your work time for Designing. If you work forty hours a week, that’s twenty-four minutes a week, rounded up to a half hour. If working sixty hours a week is closer to your reality, that can be rounded to just one hour of Design time. You don’t even have to block off an entire

So this business is 65/10/0/25. Compare that with the optimal 4D Mix of 80/2/8/10, and we can see we need to ramp up the Doing (getting things done) and reduce the Deciding for others (perhaps we outsourced to virtual help, and they need way too much direction). There is no Delegation going on, and we want about 8 percent of the time spent on empow

I’ve also seen solopreneurs trap themselves in a Design-heavy 4D Mix. Putting 40 percent of your time in Designing (which is way more than the optimal 10 percent) may indicate you are a dreamer, but it surely means you aren’t spending enough time Doing the work to turn those dreams into reality.