Yesterday Seth asked perhaps the most most important that any entrepreneur needs to ask himself — how much does your business depend on you?

It doesn’t matter if your business is Internet-based or an offline business but this question is perhaps the most important thing that you need to ask yourself. Why? You will have an extremely hard time struggling with your exit strategy. And, there is only so much that one person can do and earn.

The issue here is that what if you want to exit the business tomorrow and if your business depends directly on you, then how does anyone else buy it out?

Another issue is that if the returns you get from your business depend on how much effort you directly put into it then you are limiting your maximum income. After all, there is only so much effort that you can put in.

Basically, you want your business to run by itself.

For an offline business this means that you need to have a corporate structure that can run by itself without you having to micro-manage.

What does this mean for an Internet business? Well, it means that you basically want your business to run on auto-pilot or with minimum effort on your part.

What does Internet on auto-pilot really mean?

Technically every Internet business is a business on auto-pilot as all you need to do is to setup a site and it takes care of itself and your customers. However, realistically, there are a lot of levels of auto-pilotness.

I personally dive all sites into two categories : 1. Reference Sites 2. eZine sites.

Reference sites are those sites which you create once and after that it basically runs on its own with little or no interference from your side. Resource directories, reference text and even those free image and file hosting sites can be considered an example of it.

eZine sites can be thought of as those sites to which you need to consistently add content to be relevant (or at least keep users coming back). News sites, blog sites and training-membership sites are perfect examples of it.

Personally, I am a fan of the first kind of sites. Though there is nothing wrong with second type of sites — even I run a few ezine type sites — but then you will have to work each day on these sites.

Wonderful thing about reference sites is that you can be gone on a vacation for a week and not worry about a dip in your visitor count and hard-feelings of having to face stale content. While you can schedule most content management systems to publish your content at a later stage but creating that content is even harder work.

A question you need to ask to yourself is that how much is your Internet-business on auto-pilot? Can you go on for a week without touching your site and it be still running on full horsepower?