Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s community that stops without her
Ruby is a content strategist who runs a paid community on the side, for students of her LinkedIn writing course.
This week, she ran the community’s weekly call, answered forty questions in the chat,
and wrote a personal welcome to every new member.
The week she was ill, none of it happened, and three people left.
She reads that as proof she needs to work harder.
🧩 Her struggle:
She never wrote down how she runs any of it, so nobody else can run it when she’s away.
That Friday, she watches a clip a student posted in the chat,
which tells the true story of a man
who also had to be there in person for his business to work,
and later sold most of his companies for $46.2 million.
It started with one gym owner who wouldn’t let him cancel.
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✈️ The trip he didn’t want to take
One month a gym was on Alex Hormozi’s schedule and he simply didn’t want to go.
By 2017 he ran a business that fixed struggling gyms.
To fix each one, he flew there and did the work himself.
So he could only help as many gyms as he could visit in a year.
There were only so many weeks in a year, and he had to be inside every one of them.
So he told one gym’s owner he was canceling the visit.
In his own words, the owner “practically threatened me to help him.”
The man refused to be dropped.
So Alex offered a compromise.
He’d show the man exactly what to do, and the man would do all of it himself.
Get this — within thirty days that gym collected almost $44,000 in new sales, four times its previous month.
Alex had not been there for any of it.
That result changed how he ran the business.
His process worked when he wasn’t in the room.
He stopped flying out and started teaching owners to run it themselves.
His company went on to sell the system to more than four thousand gyms.
In 2021 he sold most of that business, together with his supplement company, for $46.2 million.
He did not find a way to work more weeks.
He built a business that didn’t need him at all.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Self-Running Machine
Alex showed a gym owner exactly what to do, so the owner could run it without him,
and that gym collected almost $44,000 in thirty days without him there.
This tactic is called The Self-Running Machine.
He didn’t get faster at doing the work.
He showed the owner the work once, so it didn’t need him there, and then he stopped going.
So the work keeps going on the days you’re not there.
Write the step down once, and somebody else can run it.
The business keeps moving on the weeks you can’t be there.
Write the step down once, and somebody else can run it, or an AI tool can.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
So what about Ruby, and the paid community that stops any week she’s not there?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it how she runs the weekly call.
Her AI sidekick says:
Write down how you run the weekly call, one step at a time, so a member can host it without you.
That weekend, she writes every step on one page.
She asks her most active member to host next week’s call from it.
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🌅 Two months later
Ruby has missed two weekly calls since then, and both went ahead without her.
Her page of steps now covers the welcome messages and the chat as well.
Nobody has left because she was away.
The work only you can do is usually work nobody has written down yet.
Write down your steps so exactly that someone else can run them without you.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below turns the thing only you can do into a written procedure somebody else —
or an AI — could follow tomorrow.
🧰 What you’ll need
The thing you redo every week that only you can do, and how you decide
- In your own messy words. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. picking which member question gets answered on the weekly call, and I skim the chat and pick whichever one I have a strong reaction toWhat goes wrong when it’s done badly, and what you’ve written down about it so far
- e.g. the call turns into general advice and nobody speaks up afterwards, and I have written down nothingWho would do it if you couldn’t
- e.g. one of my longtime members, or an AI
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my community posts, my member list, or my notes, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who took my course on writing for LinkedIn and joined my paid community.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Every step must be checkable. If a step needs judgment, say so out loud and replace it with a rule, a number or a question.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The thing I redo every week that only I can do, and how I decide, in my own messy words:
{e.g. picking which member question gets answered on the weekly call, and I skim the chat and pick whichever one I have a strong reaction to}
What goes wrong when it is done badly, and what I have written down about it so far:
{e.g. the call turns into general advice and nobody speaks up afterwards, and I have written down nothing}
Who would do it if I could not:
{e.g. one of my longtime members, or an AI}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The judgment calls — every point in my description where I am deciding on instinct, listed plainly.
2. The replacements — for each one, a rule, a number or a yes/no question that gets the same answer without me.
3. The procedure — the whole thing as numbered steps a stranger could follow tomorrow.
4. The test — how they would know they got it right, without asking me.
5. What cannot be handed over — the one part that genuinely needs me, and why, in one sentence.
Then tell me the single step I have been leaving in my head because it felt too obvious to write down.