Ben Roy

I've been thinking a lot about people in the Internet Marketing business and how they've set their businesses up. Having talked to people all over the spectrum, one perplexing observation is that it seems very few people focus on putting their businesses on auto-pilot. In fact, many of them have major time commitments involved in keeping their business running.

That's counter to what I would have expected. Part of the idea of escaping the rat race is to free up one's time to spend on other things than earning a living. Or is it? Is the only point of owning a business to be your own boss? If it doesn't come along with significantly enhanced freedom, it hardly seems worth the hassle and effort. And without outsourcing, automation, or some other way to scale it beyond your own time constraints, the income will be bounded.

The degree to which people are shackled to their business varies from case to case. On the lighter end it might be a daily scheduled call that has to happen at a specific time. On the far end it's something like a graphics artist that is selling large numbers of header images or whatever and has to slave day and night to meet client demand. The latter seems especially rampant, where people have a created a 'business' that is succeeding only because they are putting in significant amounts of time.

Of course, if someone is really enjoying the work they're doing, there's nothing wrong with that. But it'd be nice to think that there are ways to combine freedom with the work you love.

For me, that means building highly automated businesses, or at least revenue streams that don't require much of my time or attention. I know there are many out there that are successfully doing this, and those would be the people I would strive to emulate.