What should still happen correctly when you are not in the office?

Most owners, asked what they would automate, say everything, which is another way of saying nothing, because a list of everything never gets started.

The useful version of the question is narrower. Name two or three things that should happen exactly the same whether or not you were in the office that day.

What tends to come out

Every enquiry gets an immediate acknowledgement, so nobody is left wondering whether it arrived.

Whoever is responsible sees what is due today without anybody telling them.

A customer who has crossed his credit limit cannot be given more material without a decision being taken on purpose.

The bill goes out the day the delivery happens, not when somebody gets to it.

Notice what these have in common. None of them is clever. All of them are things that currently work because a person is paying attention, and that stop when that person is busy, on leave, or has left.

Why this is the right list to start from

Because each item has a clear test. Either it happened or it did not, and you can check without asking anybody.

Compare that with a goal like improve our process, which cannot be checked, cannot be finished and therefore never is.

Start with one. Make it genuinely independent of any particular person, then take the next. In six months you have a business where a handful of important things are simply true, regardless of who is in the building.

That is what people mean when they say a business runs itself. It is never everything. It is a few things, properly.

Name the two things that should carry on exactly the same next time you are away for a week.

Making two or three things true regardless of who is in the building is exactly the work we do, and it is smaller than it sounds. Tell us your two and we will tell you what each one takes.