How To Scale And Automate Your Online Business

Do you want to learn how to scale and automate your online business faster and more effectively?

While I was at the SellerCon event in Orlando, Florida I had the opportunity to interview Aaron O'Sullivan, who is the Founder of Systems, Culture & Impact. Aaron is a successful entrepreneur who has been building brands on Amazon for the last 4 years. He has sold several million dollars in product sales.

Business automation is essential to every entrepreneur. Aaron coaches 6 and 7-figure Amazon and E-commerce entrepreneurs about how to automate and scale their businesses to the next level. His mission is helping people achieve more freedom, income, and fulfillment.

In the words of Mark Khoder, “Automate and delegate your systems so that you can work on your business, not just in your business.” Are you ready to learn how you can scale and automate your online business?

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Scalability is one of the cornerstones of entrepreneurial success. Every entrepreneur wants to know how to scale. However, when it comes to taking action, they get stuck.

The point at which an entrepreneur is able to scale is when their revenue increases, while their operating costs remain low. I have been able to scale my business to where it is today. However, it took a lot of time, effort, and patience.

One of the biggest challenges that a lot of entrepreneurs face is trying to do everything by themselves. If you want to grow your business, you need to seek out help. The end goal is to remove yourself completely from the majority of your business operations. Doing so will allow you to focus solely on your strengths.

In our interview, Aaron talks about how to scale and automate your online business.

Can you share with people a little bit about your background and how you got into the business that you are in now?

I came across the ASM course in 2013 and I went full-in. I consumed the content and implemented like crazy. Shortly after, my business took off. After 5 months, I quit my job where I was working in the mines as a construction laborer in the far north west of Australia. I was like a kid in a candy store. I was launching new brands and products in a lot of marketplaces.

About one year later, my business started to decline. I was freaking out.

It took me awhile to join the dots together that you need systems in place in order to grow your business and enjoy your life at the same time. I ended up meeting my now business partner at an event. He went to the Philippines to put together a large team. I joined him there.

I built the systems and processes for a team of 45 staff who would run 10 brands and hundreds of products in different marketplaces. We figured out what worked and what didn't work through failure. I've been helping people with their systems and operations ever since.

At what point should someone start to think about systematizing, hiring, and removing themselves from the operations side of their business?

It happens to everybody at some point. If you don't start to offload tasks and really focus on what is valuable to your business, your business growth will plateau at some point.

I recommend that people get started as early as possible. You will be doing these tasks anyway, so you might as well hit record and build up an alcove of training as you're doing it. It's not that hard to get started. During the beginning stages of your online business, you will be wearing all of the hats.

Your daily workflow quickly builds up and you are stuck fighting fires.

As your business gets more complex, you start adding new products, brands, and marketplaces. All of a sudden you find yourself in reactive mode all day. The actual productive business growth work that you do is really small. It was T. Harv Eker that said that most startups spend 60-70% of their time focusing on the operations side of their business.

That translates in the Amazon world as working on ranking your products to page 1, building a list with Facebook and Google Ads, opening up new sales channels, and building relationships with influencers. These are all things which most creative entrepreneurs want to be working on.

Most people are not inclined to just offload work onto others because they come from an employee-framed mindset. That's the challenge. I recommend that you create a big list of tasks that you do. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is that they hire the day before they've got stuff prepared. They bring on a team member, they give out a couple of tasks, but they end up spoon-feeding them. Soon after, the VA becomes a liability instead of an asset.

Before you even start looking for a VA, prepare a list of things to offload to him or her. Download, track and rank your tasks. In a presentation I do we talk about downloading – get clear on exactly what you have been doing over the last few weeks.

Look at your project management software, your to-do list, or your Google calendar.

Secondly, you want to track your time. Any time that you switch a task, write down the time that it took to complete it. At the end of the day, this is what dented my pride. However, this process also changed my life.

Third, now that you have data from the last few weeks, you can compile that into one big list. At the top of the list will be high-frequency tasks and things of low value. These are things that irritate you and that you shouldn't be doing. Draw a line under the top 10. That's your strike list of things that you need to get rid of. That's how you prepare the list.

Now that you've got your list, you start recording training videos. As soon as the VA presses play, give them context – the outcome, purpose, and the success criteria for a given task.

This way, they will always know what good quality looks like.

If that procedure changes, then they already know what the outcome will be. I recommend using Loom or Snagit for recording video content. Now you've got a list of archived tasks to hand off to somebody when you bring him or her on to work for you. In the end, doing these things will increase the value of your business. This is the goal of most entrepreneurs – to make an exit, cash out and get rewarded for their hard work.

Once someone has created this process that you just shared, how would they go about hiring a virtual assistant?

Before you start looking for someone, it's powerful to have your company positioned in the right way. I'm always a big believer in developing a company culture and establishing a clear brand purpose, vision, and values. That speaks volumes to people. If you want to attract a talented person to your company, then you need to stand out. An “A” player is somebody who is going to over-deliver, show up early and stay late. They are committed to the vision. They want to be a team player and are keen to build systems.

There are a number of platforms where you can find talent. Upwork is great. It has been around for years. There is Freeeup, which is a great service for on-demand. Lastly, there is PriorityVA, which is more of a higher-level project management software.

Ideally, your first hire will be someone that can do a lot of different things.

Within that hiring process, it's important to disqualify fast. Get clear on who you are really looking for, in terms of what you need in your business. Always hire for attitude first. Obviously, someone needs to be competent, but if you have somebody that has an amazing attitude that is hungry to learn and wants to be a part of your team, then they can be trained in anything. When you are in the hiring process don't get someone to create a document from scratch. Give them a broken document with mistakes in it so that they can improve it.

What has been your experience working with people from the Philippines?

I love Phillipino people because they are playful, respectful, hardworking, and easy to work with. They are great for doing a lot of the day-to-day customer facing stuff. You can find some really smart Phillipinos that can handle all sorts of operational stuff. They are driven to help you get results and they are excited to be a part of a team culture.

I know that one of your missions is to help feed people in the Philippines. Can you share more about that?

When I first arrived in the Philippines I was hit quite hard by the poverty. It was really tough to see. I knew immediately what I wanted to do. Everything that I do in business is to try and end suffering around the world. It starts in the Philippines because that's where our team is.

When we launch a new brand on Amazon, every time we sell a product, we feed two children in an area of Manila known as, Murky Mountain.

This is a huge rubbish dump and one of the worst slums in all of Asia. It's been there for 50 years and 50,000 people live there. I've never seen squalor like it in all my life. My mentor, Jane Walker, set up a school there 20 years ago and has been helping the families and communities that live there.

We connected and I asked her how we could support the school that she founded. We've been working with her to provide food to children and do our part to break the poverty cycle so that these children have a chance to escape the rubbish dump. Phillipinos are really resilient and resourceful. These children are the most inspiring people that I've ever met in my life. The one thing that I noticed is that everyone is happy that lives there. There is a lesson in that.

Once you've found someone and hired them, what would be the typical onboarding process?

Earlier we talked about how important it is to build that list of things that you need someone to do before you hire him or her. A lot of people struggle with the onboarding process. They will hire somebody, give them two tasks, and then they get distracted with all of the other stuff that they have to do. They don't give their VAs enough work. The leader then feels guilty because they are paying somebody who isn't doing productive work. The VA wants to do a good job, but he or she doesn't have great work to do. The VA ends up becoming a liability.

This is why a clear onboarding process is so important.

When you bring someone on you want to ramp up responsibility over an 8-week period. Most people will give people 2-3 tasks and then leave them to it or they give them everything at once. Neither of these options is ideal. This is why we’ve created an onboard blueprint, which is how to bring your VAs from branding up to full speed. We call it getting them from novice to ninja in 8 weeks. At the high level, each week you want to be giving your VAs two tasks.

Each week needs a theme so that VAs can get up to speed and indoctrinate themselves into your world. Weeks 1 is all about connection, which means outlining the purpose and values of your company, getting them to meet the rest of your team, and then giving them access to tools that they need in order to get set up.

Week 2 is about clarity, which means outlining the outcomes for the quarter, in relation to the year. Outline where you are going and how your VAs fit into the company culture.

Week 3 is about routines, which means setting daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythms that they are responsible for. You want to get clear on the meetings and one-on-ones that you as a leader or your team members will be having with the new VA.

Week 4 is the ramp-up. At this point, you define what your VA is going to be able to handle, based on their current progress. This is where a lot of entrepreneurs are reluctant to hand over some of their work. This is what keeps people from building their legacy, and ultimately, scaling their business.

Weeks 5 and 6 are all about leverage and lift-off.

This is where you are going to create the actual training needed and that will give you the bridge for you to be able to lift your business off.

Finally, weeks 7 & 8 are about recalibration and reviewing. You are going to check-in with the new VA and see what capacity he or she currently has, and what more she or she can handle, if any.

From there, you celebrate.

Can you shed some light on the money component of scaling a business that a lot of people get held back by?

If you are working on customer service in your business, you will do your head in. On websites like Upwork, you can find amazing talent for $4/hour. That's a great deal. As a leader, you need to be working on $1000/hour tasks, whether that's creating or ranking new products on Amazon, building a list of customers, or learning marketing. The more you spend time on the high-value stuff, the more that your value will increase, because you get better and better at skills that will grow your business.

You will be at capacity if you do not relinquish control.

There's a mindset shift that needs to happen in order for your business to grow. Would you rather a task get done, or would you rather that it be yours? It's liberating when you give up control because it allows you to take your business to next level. It's all about achieving the outcomes that you desire.

As an entrepreneur, you need to stay in your zone of genius because that is the space where time dilates because you are loving what you are doing. It is where you are bringing the most value to your business.

This is how to scale and automate your online business.

I hope Aaron's insights have inspired you to take action and start automating your business operations. If you aren't yet using the power of automation, you are working too hard.

In the words of Bill Gates, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Choose wisely.