I have come across individuals who think of themselves as “business owners,” but when you examine what they have, it’s not a business. It is a lousy freelance operation!

Think about the talented designer or programmer who has a heavy workload that he has to employ others to help him. Does this guy have a business? Why not. He has registered a company name, he has people on payroll, and everything is looking like a business, except it really is NOT a business in the real sense.

So, if a business is not only registering a company on some piece of paper, what exactly is a Business (with a capital “B”)?

An easy way to examine your company and find out whether you have a Business or not is to imagine what it would be like to sell that Business to some one else.

If you are a programmer or a designer, what exactly are you going to sell if you’ve allocated all of your time to doing your clients work one by one? You, obviously, can’t sell your clients’ projects to a third party. Maybe you can sell some stuff like the furniture that you bought for the office, but other than that, you don’t have much else to sell as a Business…

So how does a service-based company make the transition to having an operation that you can truly call a Business?

There are a few different ways to go about doing that. One of them is:

Create Custom and Reusable Tools, Templates, and Material

A software development company that is specializing in a single niche can, as a result of this focus, develop some tools that aid with the completion of repetitive tasks that are commonly required by clients in their niche. For example, if you are in the restaurants niche, create a content management system (CMS) that has all the basic requirements for that niche’s Web needs, so that you don’t have to write similar code over and over.

These proprietary tools will not only give your company a strategic advantage to serve that niche, but they will also make your operation more of a Business.

Fulfill Your Orders with As Little Human Involvement as Possible

Even as a service company, you can actually help your clients achieve the same results that you deliver but without your actual involvement in each and every order. An extreme example of this would be if you were to write a book on how to create your own restaurant website. Using your book, your clients can create their own restaurant websites without your involvement in their individual projects.

Of course, you’re not gonna write a book and shut down your company, but in the same sense as the book example, you could provide your clients with tools to let them finish as much of the project as they could before you jump in, polish it, and finish it off.

If you have the technical resources, you can deconstruct any task and turn it into a computer-aided procedure. Even logo design, which is one of the most creative tasks, has been turned into a product that anyone can use.

The more streamlined your operation and the less human involvement there is, the more Business you will have.

“What About Consultation and Other Big Projects That Require My Own Time?”

Screw these types of projects. You really are wasting valuable time in which you could be creating a Business instead. So, don’t get involved in such projects because even if the pay is so handsome, it will turn into a slippery slope and in the long run you will lose a lot of time and money. But even for custom client projects that require intensive human involvement, there is a way to give them more structure and turn them into a Business. Use delegation, but before you delegate, you need to:

Chart Your Brain Out

Your company is a reflection of your personal beliefs and philosophies. But your company is not just you. You have to communicate your philosophy and beliefs with the people who work in your company. Also communicate your vision for the company, and communicate how you are going to achieve this vision. So that when a challenge arises, you don’t always have to be there to guide those who work for you. Knowing what you believe in and what you would do will help them act in your absence.

In other words, extract as much of your knowledge and ways of thinking out of your brain and put them in media that are accessible to others. Media that others can refer back to in order to make decisions, even in your absence. Create manuals, procedures, and guidelines for every single aspect of your company.

This perhaps is the most challenging part of creating a Business, but without this, you can’t have a service-based business. What you will have instead is an inconsistent and lousy freelance operation.

So, in short, what is a Business? It is the tools, systems, structures, procedures, and philosophies that create value that a free society is willing to pay for.