Turning Your Brain Into A Business or “How To Scale Your Skills To A $100 Million Dollar Exit”

The single greatest challenge I face as an entrepreneur?

How in Google’s green earth do I turn the ideas and skills that I have into a scalable, profitable business that I could sell for 100m or more?

I feel this is a challenge many, many entrepreneurs face.

You’re great. But is your knowledge and skills repeatable?

You are a great freelancer, or great at running a two person show, but could you really take what you do and turn that into a company with 50, 100 or 10,000 employees? What systems would you have to setup? The task seems daunting to me.

The $100 million exit

Some personal background: I’m a small time entrepreneur wanting to get big. The last “real” job I had was working at Blockbuster (evil!) in 2003. Since 2005 I’ve been supporting myself solely from my own businesses. So, I’m successful in the sense that I have a roof over my head, savings, and a profitable company. Just no $100 million exit yet.

But back to the topic. How to turn your brain into a business. How to take those things you do so well (design, programming, sales, whatever you do so well) and turn them into a monster business.

I’ve had a number of part time employees before, and now have had a full time worker, Blake, for a quarter now here at my little media company (we buy/develop web properties).

I still have a long way to go learning how to turn my personal skills into a scalable corporate business, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

What I’ve learned so far about scaling your skills

• Document everything. And I mean everything. Anything that comes as second nature to you (how to do basic keyword research for example), need to be documented

• Think, “Could someone else do this 10 hour project if I spent 5 minutes outlining the process?” If the answer is “Yes” then outsource it. Or, outline the process into a single page word doc and give it to a task ninja (ie, junior employee)

• If you have to spend 10 minutes typing up an e-mail to your assistant on how to do a task that would take you 5 minutes, just do the damn work yourself you lazy bum.

• Break your entire business down into small “Action Chunks”. “Action Chunks” are tasks, often repetitive, that grow your business (ie, make 5 sales calls, or write 5 pieces of new content). In your organization chart, map out who specifically does these “actions chunks”

• You must be able to teach or explain your businesses basic concepts to your workers. Or at least point them in the right direction.

• Your employees should learn from your mistakes. If a concept or skill took you three years to master via trial and error, you should be able to train your workers to master that skill in 3 months or less. They shouldn’t have to make your mistakes as well.

• Always write your ideas down, and not on paper. Keep a e-mail thread going back and forth to yourself with thoughts, ideas, etc. You never know when an idea from last year might be the exact solution for your business today.

• If at all possible, keep at least a $5,000-$10,000 cushion in your business account. If you don’t have $5,000, then make that a priority goal. The last thing you ever want to do is bounce a payroll check because you didn’t budget correctly (trust me, it sucks)

• Read “the e-myth” and “getting things done” Those two books have helped me more than any others in figuring out how to scale my brain.

So that’s it. That’s the little tips I have about my monster problem of scaling my personal knowledge into a multi-million dollar business. I have a long way to go to really get Fiaff Media where I want it to be.

Thanks to Andy from BuddyTV for the inspiration to get my thinking about this issue, as well as DK @ Purpose Inc. Make sure to help out a kid in El Salvador!

What say you?

What tips do you have for scaling your knowledge? How do you take your ideas and implement them into a company larger than yourself?