3

RULE 3:

QUIT SETTING GOALS—THEY’RE KEEPING YOU BROKE

“I’ve always thought that each person invented himself . . . that we are each a figment of our own imagination. The problem is, most people have no imagination.”

—David Geffen

Most people love setting goals. They live for the rush of pushing themselves out of their comfort zone to achieve something new. And the reward feels so worth it: the promotion you deserved, that vacation to Mexico you’ve saved up for, finally buying your dream car . . .

Sound familiar? If this describes you, the “goal set” trap got you.

The biggest mistake you can make when trying to build wealth is to set goals you think you can meet. Nothing is more limiting. If your goals feel even remotely achievable in your lifetime, they’re holding you back.

I’m not saying you need to work harder. You’re actually already working too hard—and that’s your problem.

NO GOALS? THE RICH DO THIS INSTEAD.

Remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs? Well, there’s more to learn from this goose. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who obsess over the golden eggs, and people who obsess over optimizing the golden goose’s health so the golden eggs become bigger, better, and more plentiful over time. The goose is the system. The golden egg is a goal.

Systems can pump out goals at a higher and higher speed the more you refine them, with minimal input from you. It’s why smart people build systems to join the New Rich, and it’s why broke people stay broke as they obsess over goals—even with their brand-new luxury car (probably with a lease payment that will ensure they stay broke longer). See this page to see how I got my $350K white Rolls Royce Ghost for free.

Advertising’s number one purpose is to get you to want something, a golden egg. Luxury goods companies spend trillions convincing you that their hot new golden egg should be on your goals list. Roger Federer wearing the Rolex watch at Wimbledon is meant to make you want a Rolex. Designer brand Versace hiring Kim Kardashian for its next product launch photo shoot is meant to make you want that Versace gown. It distracts you from thinking about building the goose that could pump out a new Rolex or designer gown for you every month.

Imagine how your life would change if you didn’t buy these items unless you could actually afford to buy one every day. This is a good rule to use, and it’s also why most goals are so dangerous. When a goal is small enough to seem doable, even if it’s hard, you focus on the win and never put effort into mastering the process that will get you that result plus more (over and over again).

So set big, audacious goals, then forget the goals and focus on creating a system to produce the outcome you want not just once, but over and over again. That’s how we improve our performance, productivity, and results. Once the system is in place it will free you up to achieve even more audacious and imaginative things that seemed impossible.

TO GO BIG, FIRST GET MICROSCOPIC

So how do you master systems? Get laser focused on the minutiae for a brief time. They are what create the systems that make the audacious goals possible.

This may sound dull—the exact opposite of imaginative, even—but obsessing over the details is the only way you can forget about them. Knowing the minutiae that go into a process lets you create systems that automate the details. It gives you flow and routines. It frees up your brain space so you can keep scaling up with minimal input. That’s when the wealth kicks in. This is what the New Rich are doing that others are not. And it’s the reason why billionaires like Warren Buffett tend to have blank calendars.

Today I do fifteen to twenty podcast interviews over the course of three to four days each month. That’s the only time I put into the podcast. But in August 2015 I started building the system that would keep it running with no revenue, no team, and no media experience. Today, the podcast does six million downloads and $50K in monthly revenue with one freelancer helping drive the podcast system. This frees up my time—the definition of scaling with minimum input.

Systems thinking requires you to give up making money today in exchange for taking the time, energy, and sweat equity to set up systems that will do the work for you in the future. It’s a lot of up-front work, and that’s the problem for most people. They prefer the short-term win. They need the instant gratification. They want to have sex right now. They can’t put off current consumption. They can’t give up rewards over the next week even if it means getting a better return as soon as the week after. It’s why most people are too shortsighted to invest time in creating systems, and I’m glad. Let them be wooed by the flashy golden egg. They’ll stay broke while you join me in creating amounts of money you never thought possible.

Once your system is set up it should work like a machine: put less into the machine and get more out than when you were doing something yourself. Inputs and outputs. More on those in a minute.

THE FIRST $700 I MADE

When I was building my first company, Heyo, it was an agency. I sold custom Facebook fan pages at $700 apiece under the name “Fan Page Factory.”

Audra was one of my first clients back in 2010:

----Original Message----

From: Nathan Latka <█████████>

To: ██████ <████████████>

Sent: Tue, Oct 5, 2010 11:23 pm

Subject: The Social Tee Customer Receipt/Purchase Confirmation

Thank you for your order!

Order Information

Merchant:             █████████

Description:          Fan Page Factory OrderId 167182995

Invoice Number:  167182995

Billing Information          Shipping Information

█████

███████

█████████

███

██████████

██████

Total: US $700.00

Discover

Date/Time:           05-Oct-2010 09:23:16 PM MT

Transaction ID:    3221553474

After she paid me, I then did the work to build each page: the design, the coding, writing the Facebook Markup Language (FBML—that’s what it was called in 2010). Eventually I realized it would be way more powerful and fun for me not to focus on actually coding new customers’ pages every month. If, instead, I spent some time and money developing software that’s a system, I can sell that system to other people, and they can drag and drop elements to build their own fan pages without my doing custom work. That would scale, save me time, and print me money. I’ll tell you how much in a minute.

I had to give up selling for a few weeks to focus on finding my technical cofounders on TopTal and start coding a system that would automate the work. I had to make a system for my system. It took a long time to build up that recurring revenue, but eventually I had thousands of people paying me $30 to $300 a month to use the system I’d built. It was an epic jump from having about one hundred clients pay me $700 one time for a professional service.

SEE THE BIG MISTAKE IN MY BOARD DECK?

The graphic on the next page is from our October 9, 2012, board meeting, which was about five months after we raised our initial $500K in capital (the line spikes up in April).

If you look at the January, February, and March columns, you’ll see how getting users to pay you $30 to $300 per month creates a revenue stream that “stacks.” As long as they don’t cancel, you keep stacking on revenue and it becomes a very efficient system.

I was twenty-one years old at the time, and we went from nothing in late 2011 to $99K in monthly recurring revenue in April 2012:

Summary Financials Results

One of my biggest mistakes at this point in building the system was hiring too fast. You can see we scaled up to about eighteen full-time folks, in the process of hiring four more at the time of our October 9, 2012, board meeting:

Organizational Build Out

All that being said, we’d have an acquisition offer of $6.5M+ go to a final board meeting and a valuation of $10.5M just one year later when I was twenty-two. More on that later (including a scan of the actual deal so you can read it yourself on this page).

SYSTEMATIZE THESE THINGS ONLY

Build systems around the things that take up most of your time. Sadly, most people don’t even know what those things are. How many of us are constantly busy but can’t look back on our day and say what we did? It’s all a blur. If that’s you (and even if it’s not), spend a week documenting what you’re doing. This kind of awareness forces you to be reflective and intentional, not reactive to whatever thing is in front of you.

When I’m first coming up with a system, I use Apple Notes and my BestSelf notebook:

Drill down to the little things you have to do daily or weekly to produce what you want, whether it’s saving for a house, launching an e-commerce store, getting fit—whatever. Go as small as you possibly can: how you respond to a customer when an order comes through, how you print your mailing labels, what you eat for breakfast.

OUTSOURCING: MY “STARBUCKS PROCESS FOR SYSTEM TESTING”

If you find yourself doing the same related tasks every day or every week, create a Google doc and document what that task looks like. Don’t get lazy when trying to document what you’re doing. You want to be so detailed that someone else should be able to read your document and execute the task completely, without your help. Don’t take details for granted, such as:

  1. The login info needed for a tool you use. When you pass this task to someone else, they’ll need login info.

  2. The personal details of your relationship with another person who is part of the process. This sort of thing is very difficult to pass off.

  3. Any subconscious steps.

After you think you have a process documented accurately, print it off and take a trip to your local coffee shop. Then go test your system:

  1. Buy five $5 gift cards.

  2. Walk up to strangers who have a computer and say: “Your coffee looks low; I’ll buy you another one if you take my three-minute challenge. It just requires your brain and computer. You up for it?”

  3. Hand them the steps you’d printed.

  4. Ask them to follow the steps by reading them out loud so you can hear where they get confused.

In the steps above, I’m assuming this task is something virtual, or done on a computer, like sending an email template to fifty potential podcast guests. If your task is not done on a computer, apply these same steps but in a different setting.

Your goal is to find someone who knows nothing about what you do and watch to see if they can follow the steps for executing your process. You are testing your ability to fully document a system.

After several rounds of this you should have a much fuller picture of what steps need to happen each day to get something done without taking any steps for granted.

Try giving your process to a high school freshman in your neighborhood. If they can do it, good news for you: they are probably looking for a $10/hour job that will beat what they are making at their fast food restaurant gig.

This is the essence of systems leverage. If you have a clear system, it can be done faster and cheaper by somebody (or even something) other than you.

UNCOVERING THE BLIND SPOTS THAT MAKE YOUR MONEY MACHINE WORK

The up-front effort of uncovering every detail of your process will be worth it. Once your system is humming, you can step back and forget all about it—except when it comes to counting your money. You’ll probably want to do that yourself. There is nothing I enjoy more than counting money—it’s a beautiful big stack and way too much fun to pass off to someone else.

The coffee shop test may be enough to get you all the info you need. But if your project has many layers it will help to also think ahead to anticipate the blind spots you’re likely to miss.

You’d be surprised at how much you can easily miss. We take most parts of our day for granted because aspects are hidden or unknown. You’re reading this book right now to get smarter and improve your business. I bet you didn’t think about:

  1. Were the trees sourced to make this book from Central America or the eastern United States?

  2. Are the words you’re reading right now printed using pigment-based ink or solvent-based ink?

  3. Were the microthreads that hold the binding together made from linen thread or from its substitute, mercerized cotton thread?

Who cares, right? Well, if you were setting up a printing and binding business you’d care a ton. These questions showcase one type of system blindness: Material Blindness, and it’s important to anyone who is developing a physical product.

Time Blindness is another common oversight. We always project that things can be done faster than they actually can be done. Time savings typically kick in after a system has been operational for a period of weeks or months and you can begin to make system tweaks to juice time savings. Henry Ford created the assembly line where cars moved and people stayed stationary after observing the time inefficiencies of having the cars stationary and the people moving to build each car. He realized it was more efficient to have the cars move and people stay still.

Start/End Blindness also trips people up. A multilayered project can have several systems, but it can be hard to articulate where a system starts or stops—or where another begins. Newer businesses tend to have a CEO who does everything. On the streets, this sounds like: “I’m wearing so many hats!” Compare this to a well-defined system printing $50M+ a year, where the problem sounds more like: “I’m sick of doing the same thing every day!” This is because the business has been broken down into clearly defined systems and people have been plugged in to operate parts of the system that are harder or more costly to automate.

You can break the start/end haze by identifying one activity that triggers a system or a procedure, such as an interview invitation going out to a CEO (the start of my podcast booking system). This is your start. Next, think of the last action performed, such as submitting a completed, edited podcast episode to iTunes. Your system is everything that happens in between.

Clearly defining where systems start and end lets you piece them together in a perfect puzzle that will reveal your overall business makeup.

ANATOMY OF A NEW RICH SYSTEM

Once you’ve uncovered your blind spots, it’s time to line up your parts and build your system. New Rich Systems are made up of the following elements:

Inputs: What do you have to feed the system to make it work? Your golden goose needs water and food every day to survive—among many other things.

Outputs: What does your system produce for you once it’s set up? Keep your golden goose alive, keep getting golden eggs.

Feedback loops: Can an output of your system get you better, cheaper, or faster inputs to create a snowball effect? What if you could use your golden goose’s golden eggs to buy Goose Protein Enhancers to add as a system input that helps your goose produce two golden eggs per week instead of one?

Stocks: Stocks are whatever assets pile up inside the system that then get used to generate an output. The input is food your golden goose eats for energy. The output is golden eggs. The “stock” is the energy in your golden goose. If it goes down, no more golden eggs. If stock stays low long enough, goose dies. No one likes a dead goose. A stock is a measure of change. It’s controlled by how fast or slow different inputs or outputs are interacting with a system.

Getting your system set up is more important than deciding you want to make $1M per year. That’s because once you have the bones of your system set up, the way you crank up production is by changing your inputs and outputs, better managing your stocks, and creating feedback loops that give you a true unfair advantage against your competitors.

The New Rich go to extensive lengths to clearly define inputs, procedures, and outputs, then always study their stocks and look for feedback loops that can save them time and make them more money.

HOW I PAY $29 TO GET BACK NINE HOURS OF MY TIME

Here’s how these ideas play out in my Top Entrepreneurs podcast system:

INPUTS

OUTPUTS

STOCKS

FEEDBACK LOOP OPPORTUNITIES

Here’s how everything works together to create a system for producing and publishing a podcast episode:

PROCESS:

  1. Nathan uses NathanLatka.com/acuity to schedule podcast guests in a batch format. (Red are interviews—I interview about fifty software CEOs every week.) I pay Aaron on my booking team $12 per booked guest.

  1. When it’s time to do the interview Nathan records it via Skype using Ecamm.

  2. Nathan puts Ecamm files into Audacity, then exports audio files to Google Drive, where Sam takes over.

  3. Sam finalizes each audio file by adding the pre- and post-roll open loop, intro, and sponsor mentions, then uploads the final version onto Google Drive, YouTube, Libsyn. I pay Sam $7 per episode for this step.

Bill To:

█████████

Description

Quantity

Price

Amount

Audio & Video Podcast Production Edit raw audio and video files from Google Drive, upload to █████████ submit audio to ██████ for transcription. Episode 1120-1149 of The Top.

20

$7.00

$140.00

Subtotal

$140.00

Total

$140.00

Amount paid

-$140.00

Amount due

$0.00 USD

  1. The release schedule is managed in a massive Google spreadsheet. When the episode goes live on Libsyn, I pay a virtual assistant to publish the guest’s bio, headshot, and SoundCloud embed on my blog. This costs about $5 per episode.

  1. The same virtual assistant then posts the episode on LinkedIn and emails the guest that the interview went live. This costs another $5 per episode. Steps 5 and 6 come out to $10 per episode. You can see the invoice below for thirteen episodes is about $130:

INVOICE

BILL TO

Nathan Latka

Latka Agency LLC

Austin, TX 78701

301 Brazos Street, Ste 70

Austin, TX 78701

INVOICE # 4339

DATE 12/03/2017

DUE DATE 12/05/2017

TERMS Due on receipt

DATE

ACTIVITY

QTY

RATE

AMOUNT

12/01/2017

Services

Melissa assistant work 11/18/17-12/01/17

Converted audio files to SoundCloud and posted to site, multiple episodes #847-#860, emailed respective interviewee, posts to LinkedIn, reading show notes

5.60

22.50

126.00

Thank you for your continued business! We really appreciate you!    
BALANCE DUE

$126.00

USING MY TIME:

Per episode time it takes me without help: ten hours

Per episode money cost without help: $0

USING OTHERS’ TIME:

Per episode time it takes me with help: twenty minutes (just me recording the fifteen-minute interview)

Per episode money cost with help: $29

Aaron: $12 per guest booked

Sam: $7 for editing each episode, uploading, scheduling

WMM Virtual Assistants: $10 for posting to my blog, emailing guest that they’re live

Using this system, I went from spending 300 hours of my own time each month (not possible if you do the math) to spending just 10 hours (30 episodes × 20 minutes) of my time and paying out $870 ($29/episode × 30 episodes).

I saved 290 hours of my time by paying $870. Absolutely worth it. Look for time arbitrage systems like this to set up in your business.

I’ll talk more about income strategies later, but on this cost of $870 per month, I sell multiple sponsors at $10K+/month in sponsor fees.

Here’s one of many annual deals I signed for 2017 sponsor placements:

SPONSORSHIP AGREEMENT

DATE: █████████

1. Project objectives

This is a sponsorship agreement between █████ & The Latka Agency LCC (dba The Top Podcast). This will be a 12 month long promotion from Jan 1 2018 to Dec 31 2018.

2. The Top Podcast Pricing and Industry Metrics

3. Sponsorship Options

The deliverable(s) for this project are as follows:

  1. Mid-Roll

    This runs between minute 10 and minute 15 of the podcast.

    • 30 Second Mid-Roll
      ██████████████████

  2. Post-Roll

    This runs at the end of each show.

    • 30 Second Post-Roll
      ██████████████████

4. Estimated fees and expenses

The sponsorship package is a 12 month contract for a mid, and post-roll in 15 episodes per month with different CTA layouts. Ex: Mid is “Here’s how I use █████. Post is “Go get started on █████ now”. For this particular project, ██████ will be given the rates presented in Fig 1.1 below bringing total cost for ████████████

█████████

Title

Cost per month

# Months

Bi-Annually

Mid

$15000

12

$180,000

Total

$180,000

5. Payment schedule

All invoices are due and payable within 30 days of receipt by The Latka Agency LLC. █████████ will receive an invoice for this sponsorship contract with terms that stipulate 100% of the sponsorship agreement price payable within 30 days of sponsorship agreement signing.

6. Authorization

Work cannot begin until authorization has been received from █████████

© 2015 The Latka Agency LLC. All rights reserved. This document and the information contained herein is proprietary and confidential. It may not be duplicated, redistributed, reused or displayed to any other party without the expressed written consent of The Latka Agency LLC.

GETTING YOUR SYSTEM HYPEREFFICIENT (AND GETTING YOURSELF SUPERRICH FROM THAT SYSTEM)

The sweet spot is a balance: start by drilling down to every possible detail of what needs to be done, then look for ways to minimize steps. You don’t want to be doing all the work yourself, but keep your team small by reducing the number of steps humans have to take.

Look for opportunities to automate tasks as soon as you can afford to. Kitchen is an Asian-inspired, fast-casual restaurant that serves wok-fried rice and noodle bowls fresh, fast, and for under $10. They were paying $9K+/month for bookkeeping services. To drive down costs, they switched to an automated bookkeeping provider botkeeper, saving them $4K/month. They now get faster data processing, more reporting, and greater accuracy than they had ever experienced when they had someone on staff doing their books. They had to spend to save, but it was absolutely worth it.

After you write out a process, you can generate job descriptions by identifying the steps that one person can cover. In my podcast, I have one person, Aaron (Piper Creative if you want to hire him), doing everything involving guest bookings and Sam on all tasks audio-related.

Your system has zero chance of getting more efficient if it relies on only one resource. This is even harder if that single resource is your time. Leverage and efficiencies always come from combining one resource with another and making 1 + 1 = 3.

To get there, make sure some of your output is “saved money” that you can use to add inputs and increase feedback loop potential. So the iterations of your system over time would look something like this:

Stage 1: Input = You + Fiverr freelancer

Stage 2: Input = You + Fiverr freelancer + Automation software

Stage 3: Input = Two Fiverr freelancers + Automation software (Your time is now free, so you use it to start building another system.)

Stage 4: Your system is creating cash flow as an output, which lets you go invest in new systems or invest in making your inputs and current systems more efficient.

Stacking systems like this is like making a layer cake. The more sweetness you stack, the richer it tastes!

Until you reach Stage 4 you’ll always be looking for ways to decrease inputs and maximize cash flow. A smart way to do this is by negotiating down expenses that you can’t avoid (versus a sole focus on driving revenue).

Amazon and Walmart do so much volume, they have leverage to demand that the providers of their inputs (goods Amazon and Walmart sell) charge them less. They then pass on most of these savings to the consumer, which gives them more market share. Classic feedback loop.

Think about all of your expenses right now. Now go negotiate all of them down using hard and soft power (hard: “I’m canceling my account unless you give me a $100/month discount”; soft: “I’m trying to save money and it would mean a lot if you could decrease monthly payments for two months until the business regains its footing”). Here are some expenses I bet you have that you can significantly decrease:

Software: If you spend a lot on software, point out that you have choices for whom to buy that software from and ask for a lower rate from your current vendors.

Material Expenses: If you spend loads in China on gray form 390x plastic for the widget you produce, ask for a volume discount. Put in the work to research what you could get from alternative plastic providers so you know what your true bottom line is should you have to switch from whomever you currently purchase from.

People Expenses: Head count is usually a company’s largest expense. It’s hard to negotiate this cost down. However, sites like Fiverr, Toptal (for developers), Upwork, and others are making it very easy to replace high-dollar talent with lower-dollar talent. Freelance talent is also variable (you can turn it off and on) compared with full-time employees, which are fixed expenses (way more difficult to turn off and on). Investing in tech when you can is another smart way to drive down people expenses. Panera realized spending $1K one time to install a virtual terminal to order your food is cheaper than paying a cashier a $15 minimum wage.

Also, look at your outputs as potential sources of cash flow. Are there ways your bad outputs can be someone else’s good inputs? If a software company is losing customers every month—a big negative output—they can turn this into a positive cash-generating output by selling their churned leads’ contact info to a lower-priced competitor (this helps everyone!).

THE SEVEN-FIGURE PODCAST SYSTEM

Once your system is producing golden eggs, you can shift your attention to bigger things and print more money. For me that golden egg is an episode a day, because an episode is worth several thousand dollars based on sponsorship revenue (in February 2018, I made $4K per daily episode on expenses of $29—good margin!).

If I hadn’t set up podcast production to run itself, I never would have had the brain space, energy, or time to reel in that kind of money. And how do I get new sponsors? Another system.

Each podcast episode is a new interview with a CEO. I use a tool called Acuity that lets the CEOs pick a time from my calendar. No need for a middle person to deal with scheduling. Immediately after the interview happens Acuity sends the CEO an email to thank them and let them know when the interview will go live. The email also mentions that we have one or two sponsorship spots open and asks if they’re interested in sponsorship.

This is the email that goes out from our system in Acuity Scheduling. William was our guest CEO for the day:

Re: your go live date

William >█████████████

to me, Sarah

Hi Aaron,

I had fun . . . thanks for inviting me. I’ve cc’d Sarah ███ on this email . . . she’ll be managing the social media posts for this.

We’ve never tried podcast advertising yet. I’m open to hear your pitch. Please send through audience details and costs.

Cheers,

William

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 12:49 PM, Nathan Latka ████>█████████ wrote:

The reply rate on this follow-up email is over 90 percent:

Now, because I do an interview a day, I’m inviting wealthy CEOs to become sponsors thirty times a month. If 10 percent reply and say they’re interested, that’s three leads. If one closes, that’s a great deal, especially since one deal will start at $30K minimum and can grow to as much as $180K.

Make sure the systems you’re spending most of your time and money on scaling have a direct correlation to additional cash flow, whether that’s downloads that translate to sponsor dollars, website impressions that convert to an increase in your average cart checkout size, if you’re an e-commerce brand, or a system for marketing the newspaper that drives more people to your brick-and-mortar location.

In my podcast system I used to post graphics on Instagram and Facebook for every episode. It cost me an extra $3 per episode, but I noticed it didn’t drive additional downloads. I know that if I have ten thousand more downloads per episode I can charge another $500 per episode to sponsors, so there’s a direct correlation to cash flow. Because that step in the system didn’t work in terms of driving more downloads, I deleted it.

People often get stuck working on systems that suck up their time but don’t bring in cash. It’s so tempting to lie to yourself because a system feels good when it isn’t actually accomplishing anything. So be hyperintentional about where you’re spending your time and ruthlessly kill any systems that don’t have a direct correlation to growing your bank account.

SHOULD YOU HIRE PEOPLE WHO ARE ONLY 60 PERCENT AS GOOD AS YOU?

If you’re resisting replacing yourself it’s probably because you keep telling yourself one of two things:

  1. No one can do this as well as I can.

  2. If I replace myself, my team won’t need me anymore!

The likelihood that you are actually the best in the world at something is very small. It’s more likely your ego telling you this so you feel important. Even if it were true that no one could do something as well as you, two people who are only 60 percent as good as you will lead to 120 percent of your output, and it requires none of your time.

I always try to find, influence, and persuade the person who is the best in the world at something I need done to do my work for me. That’s a skill set that can be applied to getting anything done—a generalist approach—versus specializing in one thing and being pigeonholed.

“But, Nathan, if I replace myself, my team won’t need me anymore!”

It’s only a matter of time before this sort of thinking kills your team entirely. Look at the US political system. There’s a reason presidential terms are four years each. In other countries, without term limits, leaders who get power tend to add complexity below them on the ladder they climbed up to make it harder for other political challengers to climb up and challenge them. (By the way, that’s a great business strategy after you find a system that makes you loads of cash. Just look at the US taxi system and the complexity taxi lobbies added. Uber is now challenging that complexity head-on and is on its way to a $100B+ IPO.)

If you complicate the business version of your ladder, you’re isolating yourself as an input to a system that will never grow output. The only ways to grow output are to:

  1. Make the machine more efficient with the same inputs.

  2. Put less costly inputs into the system so ratio of output to input increases.

  3. Do #1 and #2 at the same time.

To position your overall success for the long term, you want to become a master at producing more. That means updating inputs and machines, your own time and energy (as an input) included.

When looking for human talent to replace yourself in a system, try many mini-projects as tests. Projects judged on performance are much more effective than scanning résumés all day. Nobody loves creative students who got Fs in school like Nathan Latka! Email me, I’ll hire you: nathan@nathanlatka.com

To find potential talent, use sites like:

  1. Fiverr: A freelance marketplace where all projects start at $5. Once you have a process defined, upload it as a task to Fiverr, find a talent, and watch how they execute. If they perform well, reach out and see if you can persuade them to join your system as an input however you see fit (hourly, contract, etc.).

  2. Toptal: If the input you need requires coding or development, use Toptal. Toptal is a site that has already vetted and curated the top 3 percent of developers across the world. Work starts at $50/hour. I put a $1K project through Toptal for the first version of GetLatka.com. The developer performed well and I’ve since put more money through Toptal to continue using him.

  3. Upwork: A nice mix of Fiverr and Toptal both price- and talent-wise. Contractors on Upwork will work for as little as $2/hour depending on the task. For my first iteration of TheTopInbox.com, I put a $2K project through Upwork, liked the developer very much, and ended up paying him $20K over six months.

Sometimes a human is not the best way to replace yourself in a system. You might feel the work you’re doing is very repetitive. If that’s the case, you might find it cheaper and more efficient to pay a site like Zapier to write code that links your application processes together.

TOP SEVEN BOOKS ON SYSTEMS

  1. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows simplifies what makes any system work and how to build your own.

  2. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish is the easiest blueprint to follow to clearly define what outputs you want in your business—the first step to figuring out the process and inputs.

  3. Business Adventures by John Brooks highlights CEOs and companies that created the most shareholder value over their tenure. You’ll start to notice business models and their underlying systems that will set you up for success.

  4. The Outsiders by William N. Thorndike Jr. is a collection of eight stories from eight CEOs who set up systems that provided the highest capital returns in history.

  5. Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe visually diagrams how things work using only one thousand of the most commonly used words in the English language (forces simplification and makes pattern recognition easier).

  6. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love helps dissect one of the most replicated, valuable systems ever built: the burger stand. No matter what industry you’re in, you’re guaranteed to learn systems tidbits.

  7. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss will help you find ways to systematize your business and your life to save time, energy, and money.