The weekly run down: 16th July.

How to automate your business.

📰 TL;DR: If your business can’t run independently of you, then you have a job. Create processes, automation and systems to build an asset which can run by itself.

💡 Insight: Once you have some clients, you’ll need systems in order to scale and remove yourself from the business. Highlight bottlenecks to prioritise what you should systemise first. Then start documenting the process, and finding tools and talent to run them.

Here are some examples:

Finances: few people enjoy managing numbers and spreadsheets. It’s super important to understand your business health, but it’s a task which can easily be outsourced and managed with software such as Xero.

Action: Choose software and then hire a bookkeeper to reconcile all payments and produce key reports.

Your company hub: You need somewhere to store everything from process docs to your task list. Notion is the perfect tool to create a company dashboard to manage everything.

Action: Set up a Notion page for all your essential areas of the business, such as a daily task board, team member hub, sales CRM and process pages. Keep it simple and clean.

Team communication: if you get this wrong, important tasks and ideas will slip through the cracks and cause headaches for everyone. Set up a clear channel and rules for communication to keep everyone on the same page.

Action: Use Slack for team messaging and create specific channels for things like sales updates, marketing ideas or all team meetings. You can take things further and use Zapier to automate things like sales lead updates in the sales channel.

For making and receiving calls anywhere in the world, Call Hippo is ideal.

Operations: Your role is to steer the ship, not power it. Once you’ve created a process, you need to find someone to fulfil it. This is where virtual assistants come in. They’re a cost-effective way of hiring remote operators to fulfil your services and carry out admin.

Action: Clearly define the role you’re looking to fill with a full training process and KPIs. Now you can search for VAs either through places like Indeed or Upwork, or you can hire a company like Sheperd to do everything for you.

Time management: Managing your time is half the battle of building a business. Hard work doesn’t count for much if you’re working on the wrong things. Prioritizing your tasks and keeping a clear schedule will save you a tonne of time.

Action: Put everything in your week in your Google calendar, especially your top 10 tasks. Create time blocks for getting important work done. Leave space for other life commitments.

How to never run out of ideas to write about:

📰 TL;DR: If you’re not writing something original then it’s impossible to stand out. Lean into other content for inspiration but don’t blindly copy. Own your story.

💡 Insight: When you’re just starting to write online, it’s easy to think that you have nothing unique to write about. Everyone has something unique to write about, you just need to tap into it. The thing that holds most people back is assuming that what they have to say is obvious. When you assume it’s not obvious, then you’ll never have to worry about running out of ideas again.

The prescription: start writing to your previous self. Ask yourself what would have been useful to know 2 years ago. There are people a few steps behind you who will find value in that content. Make it unique by finding intersections of your interests and experiences such as skills, struggles you overcame and your hobbies. Now you have a unique way of doing things which is specific to you.

Become a planning pro

📰 TL;DR: Aimlessly swinging the bat each day and hoping for results is not what high performers do. When you learn to be more strategic with your time, you’ll get more done in a day than most do in a week. The key is planning.

💡 Insight: Planning can feel like a chore to those who are good at execution. The reality is, one hour of planning can save you 10 hours of work. Small adjustments to your trajectory will have a huge impact on your outcome.

Here’s how to effectively review and plan your week.

1. Celebrate your wins: there’s always something. Remembering the positives which you did well is what will keep you moving forward. Don’t worry if they seem insignificant, write them down anyway.

2. Lessons: what did you learn this week? Lessons are the biggest value add when it comes to growth. Don’t shy away, embrace them.

3. Roadblcoks: what was preventing you from doing your best work? Highlight them and make a plan to get them off your plate.

4. Top 10: there’s only so much you can do in a week. These are your top 10 tasks which will move the needle. Make sure they’re clearly defined, with an action and completion metric.

5. Book it in: If it’s not in your diary, it’s not going to get done. Once you have your golden list of tasks, allocate them to a time and day and ideally a place they’ll get done.

Tweet of the week

This is one of the best threads I’ve seen on using GTP for improving your writing.

Lessons from building businesses

📰 TL;DR: selling to businesses vs individuals.

A big realisation I had early on, was that pitching to businesses is much easier. Why? Because they can pay you more. They also understand the business a lot better, so if you can demonstrate how you’ll add value and increase their revenue, they’ll hire you.

Lesson: Focus on businesses instead of inviduals and make sure your service can save them time or make them more money. Ideally both. You don’t need a cutting-edge idea, you just need to be able to do it better and faster than the competition.

That’s it for this week, any questions or feedback just shoot me a reply here or drop me a DM on Twitter.

Tom Scourfield

Curious Entrepreneur

P.S: how do you like the new format of my newsletter?

Each week I’ll bring you:

1. One business insight (growth tactics, start-up ideas and stories).

2. One tip to improve your copywriting (the foundational skill for online businesses).

3. A practical performance tool to improve your performance and well-being.

4. My favourite Tweet of the week.

5. A build-in public update from my latest projects.

Let me know your thoughts below: