Are you fighting gravity on a daily basis? Many businesses have components which require labour and thus labour must scale to grow the business. Other businesses scale without labour or very little labour.

Nothing new here. A simple analysis would say this is classic services, versus productised business but it goes deeper than that. Essentially services can be commoditised through automation. As humans we just haven’t figured out how to do that in many situations.

So this post is really about growing large and avoiding tracking sideways in your business. We know this stuff works. We have seen businesses go from 100k to 1million turnover in a year by employing techniques we have taught business owners. These are nearly always operational problems we solve rather than traditional accounting ones.

Another way to look at this labour gravity issue is to discern the difference between hourly labour versus commoditised labour. If your business does hourly-based tasks you are subject to labour gravity. You would be much better off breaking your tasks down into commoditised components and then from there cost them and review them for automation candidates. Even changing your billing model to have fixed pricing or tiered pricing that relates more to the task you perform and less to the hours worked.

In product-based businesses the gravity is technical and centred around supply-based issues which scale much better. These limitations can be engineered out.

So when I speak to business owners who are data entering transactions from their eBay or Trademe system into their accounting system I can see the labour gravity taking effect. More recently I heard about a business that was merging reports from their payroll, inventory and invoicing systems to produce a report they needed. It’s easy to see the same thing happening at the management level in business.

Fortunately these businesses end up finding us and we can fix that but you can see they are subject to massive amounts of labour gravity. Sometimes these people resist in fear of making their role less relevant. This is where people divide into two types. Those that embrace it and reinvent themselves and those that fight it in an attempt to maintain the status quo to serve a self interest gain they get out of doing the work that machines can do. This is so wrong because the reinvention of oneself to do higher end tasks generates more income for society, higher billing rates, more interesting work. It’s the difference between evolution and maintenance. Evolve or die.

Hidden treasures exist in this approach. If you think about what the world looks like fully automated all you will see is art, passion, self expression, family time, love etc. The list goes on, it’s all those things that are at the essence of happiness and not in the realm of the mundane. Automation is a pursuit dedicated to causing happiness that liberates people from automaton existences.

You may be wondering why I am being firm on this, it’s because I’m passionate about this and I want you to “get sum”. You’ll love automation, the more you engage it the more you will be liberated by it and and the sooner you will realise the truth… You are what you haven’t automated.