Aaron O’Sullivan is the guest today from SystemsCultureImpact.com to talk about how to start a business online.Without systems in place, there’s always a ceiling that you will hit in terms of being able to continue to launch successfully and delight your customers. So Systems, Culture, Impact helps Amazon businesses to scale up and helps them fully install systems into their businesses and create a great virtual team with a great team culture.Aaron’s BackgroundAaron started on Amazon in 2013. At first, it was a side gig while he was working in the mining industry in the far north of Australia. He dabbled in affiliate marketing before finding ASM1 and getting into the Amazon world. After attending the ASM event, Aaron went all in on Amazon. After 5 months he was able to quit his job and focus on his business full time. Meanwhile, his business partner was building a team of staff in the Philippines and asked Aaron to join. They ended up having a team of 45 staff running multiple different brands across all different types of industries and niches on Amazon.It was a challenge to come up with the systems to be able to scale those different brands. That’s how Aaron learn what worked and what didn’t work and how to start a business online. He learned it pretty quickly, created a process and system for how to remove yourself as much out of business as possible and attracting great virtual assistants in the Philippines.How To Start a Business Online: SystematizingAt the beginning of your Amazon business, overwhelm can strike quickly. Aaron suggests starting with the end in mind. Everybody’s situation will be different. It’s important to have an idea of how many products you want to launch, by when, and have a rough idea of when you want to get your first employee. He says it is much better to plan that from the beginning than to go about it without any foresight.Hiring without a plan often means you don’t have any processes and you may not know what areas of the business you will bring them on that are the highest value to enable you to grow faster. Start thinking about your business outcomes and creating structure from the start. It doesn’t matter if you don’t hit the targets you set for yourself. It’s something to work towards.Once you’ve got clarity on your big vision, you break it down into outcomes for the quarter. Then once a week—for Aaron it’s Sunday—spend some time looking at this quarter’s outcome and plan out the week ahead. From that week’s plan, you put the most important things you’re your calendar or project management tool like Asana. That weekly rhythm helps prevent overwhelm, keeps you moving forward and starts to really build traction.The Hype Versus RealityIf you have done a course to get started on Amazon, don’t just rely on the course to give you structure. Most courses are there to help you launch one product, which is great. But you need to think beyond that from the start. If you come from a big course, they might have sold it to you on this big vision, which is very optimistic.Give me a call to help you check it to make sure that you’re setting up a plan based on reality not based on hype.Take the things you’ve learned and distill them into a really simple system for you to use yourself, and block it into your calendar. Connecting with your vision and plan in your document each week helps keep you motivated and on track.Reflecting on Progress and Celebrating the WinsIt can be challenging if you do find there is a big mismatch between the original outcomes and the reality of what has happened. It’s less likely to be a shock to you, though, if you have a weekly check in routine as Aaron suggests. Just like a pilot is continually adjusting the airplane’s path throughout the flight, checking in weekly allows you to reflect on what’s working, what’s not and whether you’re on track towards your outcomes or if you need to make adjustments.