Hey There Steemit and DTube Crew!
I started reading the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris a while back. I was also an avid listener to The Tim Ferris Show (a podcast) as well until he started pumping it full of advertising and affiliate links.
I love the concept of a 4 hour work-week and can see how the system can be achieved for a number of business models however, in businesses where you need to keep customers happy over an extended period of time, there is a real problem with the model.
Automating your business is a fantastic concept. Imagine owning a business and being able to just rock up when you want to, check that things are being done right and that the business is performing well financially, and then heading off for a round of golf or a local craft beer.
Or if you didn't want to spend your time on a golf course, wearing shockingly bad fashion, you could spend your hours working on another business and getting that one fully automated. In time, you could have three or four businesses. All of them running themselves and making you a giant stack of money.
In most cases, automating your business means employing staff to take on the work that you don't want to do yourself. For example, I don't want to train people myself. So I employee a small team of personal trainers to do that for me. This means that I can simply focus on marketing my business, selling memberships and managing the accounts.
I'm not about to tell you that automating all aspects of your business is impossible. It can definitely happen, and I've even seen it work. But what I will tell you, is that this concept is only going to work when your team is as passionate about your business as you, or at least completely on board with wanting to help you grow your business.
And this is the key flaw with the 4 Hour Work Week. Tim Ferris leads us to believe that outsourcing or automating some of the most important parts of our business is simple and can be easily done. He does mention that you might not see the same standard of performance, but brushes this off as if it isn't a huge deal.
What he doesn't really tell you though, is that you need to make sure that your staff are extremely passionate about your business and want to see it grow as well.
The only times I've seen my staff feel passionate about my business is when they see me working hard on making it grow as well. If I step away from my business, then my staff tend to lose motivation and drive and my business slows.
Most people will tell you that you need to give your staff an incentive to grow your business for you. These incentives can be:
But what if your staff aren't motivated by these things? Many of mine aren't. They simply appreciate a regular wage and a fun place to work. But that doesn't drive them to actively grow my business.
And this is where I am at now. How do I properly incentivise my and encourage my staff to help me grow my business so that I can step away a little to focus on other things (like Steemit :P)?
I don't have this solution yet, but I'll certainly come back and let you know how I go with rectifying this issue.
