You’ve got customers, and your business model brings money in, but at the end of a month of hard work, firefighting, and long hours, there is vanishingly little to keep after your expenses have been paid. You know the business has the potential to scale, but all your time is taken fighting fires and fixing mistakes that your employees should have known to avoid. If you accepted less orders to focus on scaling, your overheads would quickly catch up and pull you underwater. If this sounds like you, you’re not the only one. The first few businesses I worked for had this exact problem. It was miserable. But entrepreneurship shouldn’t be like this. The day to day operations should be taken care of without constant attention, so that you can focus on what matters - taking the business in new directions, or having the freedom and spare time that you dreamed of when you started out. **So why has this happened?** The key issue is that your business has outgrown its internal processes. Without a standardised set of products or services, each job brings a new set of problems that need solving. And without documented processes for how to complete tasks, your employees do things differently each time, making your results poor or inconsistent. Finally, tedious admin tasks take time and attention away from activities that actually move the needle and bring money in. **So what should be done?** The processes used to deliver results should be documented in a set of standard operating procedures, so employees don’t need to ask you how to do each task, they can read the manual on how to do it themselves. Tools such as software or hardware should be built to make required tasks fast and foolproof. For example, templates or stencils detailing where to cut out material for a particular product so workers don’t need to measure this out for themselves each time. Admin tasks that are repetitive - such as sorting out payroll, or ordering components - can and should be automated (or semi-automated) with programming scripts and software. This prevents most mistakes and means that tasks that would otherwise take an afternoon can be completed at the push of a button. Overall, a business with well documented and automated operations is easy to manage. This is what makes a business sellable and drives real enterprise value. If this is something you need to figure out, but just can’t find the time. I would like to work with you to do just this, using the skills I developed designing and building high quality aviation tooling sold to Rolls-Royce. Message me this interests you.