Automation can give you back your life as a business owner
When running a small business, there are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of.
Do you run your business or does your business run you? If you’re ready to be the CEO of your business and stop doing the boring and mundane tasks manually… the stuff that doesn’t light you up, you should embrace automation.
Automation has a bit of a bad reputation, as many people think that it’s not personal enough, it replaces jobs. However, automating certain parts of a process can take huge amounts of pressure from you and give your clients consistent great customer service.
How do you know if you should automate tasks?
Ask yourself the following:
Are you successful in your field but behind the scenes it’s a little chaotic?
Are you always chasing your tail and there just aren't enough hours in the day?
Are you always running out of time catching up and family life suffers?
Are you fed up with everything just looking a bit pants instead of it being slick and professional?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then automation in your business could really help you.
Think of automation as anything working in the background, freeing up your time to focus on other tasks.
Automation can help any business—no matter how small or large—to operate more efficiently, increase speed, provide a better client experience, attract and retain clients, create sales opportunities, reduce errors, and give you back some precious time - I bet you need that right now if you are reading this.
Not sure where to begin? Let’s break down the main areas you can start using digital tools to streamline your business today.
Social media scheduling and management
As anyone who manages social media accounts knows, scheduling posts and responding to comments is incredibly time-consuming. Not to mention that once you open up Instagram you’re in danger of being distracted by cute puppies and funny memes.
Social media management tools allow you to schedule posts weeks and months in advance and manage all your social platforms from one place. These tools can gather data to determine the best time to post, as well as provide info on what type of content is working over others.
My favourites for this are Planoly for Instagram, Buffer for LinkedIn and Tailwind for Pinterest.
Accounting
Accounting is one of the easiest things to automate, with many tools available today to manage budgets, report expenses, invoice customers, and accept payments.
Accounting software can handle everything from tracking income to paying vendors to automatically sending invoices and issuing reminders to clients who are overdue for payment. Automated expense reporting and mileage tracking eliminate the need to manually enter receipt data.
My recommendations for your accounting software are Xero and Quickbooks.
Project management
Project management software is essential for clients and teams to communicate, collaborate, and stay on top of project progress deadlines. These tools can assign certain tasks to clients, track progress and projects for you, and serve as a hub for all drafts and documents.
They can be customised to send out alerts about upcoming due dates. And they serve as an up-to-date work platform that has visibility on the latest project updates and what work is outstanding.
My personal favourite is Trello as I find this to be the simplest of them all but I also like Asana and Click up.
CRM automation for your clients
CRM stands for customer relationship management, but I prefer to call it a client management system as I feel it describes it better.
A CRM collects, organises, and manages all of your customer-related information and helps your business stay in motion. Build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish.
The right CRM tool will not only provide opportunities for up-selling but improves the client journey.
It probably won’t surprise you that as a Dubsado expert, my favourite is Dubsado*. Here are just some of the things that make Dubsado my all-time favourite:
Captures leads and moves them (automatically) into your sales process
Schedules appointments (with automated confirmation and reminder emails)
Syncs those appointments with your external calendar so you never have to worry about double booking
Sends your proposals, contracts, and invoices all together in a single email
Creates ‘canned’ emails that you send regularly without having to re-write them
Stores all documents and communications with your client in one convenient client portal that your clients can access at any time with their own password
Reminds you and any team members about internal tasks that need to be done
Sends your clients automated status updates throughout the project or when you reach milestones
Requests and collects feedback and testimonials from clients
If you have the vision to grow your business you need the right foundations in place. It’s no good trying to spin all the plates and expect to scale. Let’s face it, it’s just not going to happen.
When you review your processes, simplify and streamline with automation, all of a sudden scaling becomes so much easier than you thought it would be.
So in summary…. getting the right systems early in your business will not only help you scale your business, but it’s also cheaper and less complicated than hiring someone to help you….well until you’ve got this bit nailed first.
* Using this link will give you a discount but does contain an affiliate code so there is a kickback for me.
