by Dimitri

You only feel the real need for automation once there’s a growth spike or when things go south. In most cases, it is difficult for a business owner to finally make this step. It will require financial investments, new workflows and quite some time. For those in the deep waters of doubt, it is now time to recall the benefits your business will receive as a result of this process.

Not an easy step to take

Automation is really hard work. But it is necessary when you have finally found your niche, have built a system for attracting new customers and want to consolidate the resulting success.

Automation can be interesting if you approach it with a drive for success, see its fruits and reap them step by step. It is a process of small consecutive wins and I want to share them with you.

One of the problems of automation is the need to break down the present and venture forth into an unknown future, where things seem to be good.

First of all, you will develop new processes. Everything that has already been done (the team, the interaction between employees and more) must be reset and reinvented. You’ll need to learn to do things differently. What business is automation harder for a small one, with only two staff members, or a large one, with ten people just in the sales department alone? It is equally hard for both. Small businesses don’t always know what to do, large businesses, on the other hand, know how hard it’s going to be, thus they’re often hesitant to make that necessary step.

Automation effects

1. Arranging repetitive processes

Automation helps rethink and structure your business. Automation brings order to your business.

Lucky enough to find just your business and just your niche? Then do not waste any time. Build up processes, think about what needs to be done to regularly and permanently profit.

You should understand that in any industry the product development cycle is growth, a plateau (stagnation) and then — a fall (which you want to avoid). Learn and adapt to your business would have the foundation to thrive upon. Automation, the team and the experience you will receive will be a major step forward for you and your company.

Most large companies that have existed for over 50 years, do not do what they started with.

Most successful businesses adapt to the market. They learn to sell what is in demand right now because they have the entrepreneurial talent and the ability to build systematic business processes.

Most automation systems have a script laid down by the developer. Most accounting tasks — like sales, CRM, purchases, warehouse management, financing — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. It’s all like using your e-mail: you need to understand how to use this digital solution and keep using it. Invoice automation services, accounting software, CRM are not that hard to tame and implement, especially considering how beneficial they can be for business.

2. Raising business appeal

Good business is a well-built system. Therefore, the business owner has to build processes for everything to work as smooth as possible.

One you introduce automation your business will look more attractive to customers. I'm not talking about external, visual beauty. I’m talking about the fact that you can fulfill obligations that you showcase on your website, or put in a contract, or broadcast to your customers via ads/social media.

The first sale is initiated by ads, the website itself site, or a salesman. The second sale is initiated by the whole company in its complexity: customers get a unique experience working with you. And this experience is key to whether they recommend you to others or not. At the end of the day, it’s all about convenience for your customers. Make it easier for them. Be like Amazon. As Gary Vee said in one of his videos, Amazon is so pro-consumer it’s scary.

3. Making all the right decisions

"You can control only what can be measured". We can organize the work of the company and see how this system grows and builds up, provided that we understand how it works and can properly measure its growth.

I will give you an example. Everybody knows a TV show called Jeopardy. Contestants need to select the category and answer the question. If the answer is correct, bonus points are instantly awarded. If the answer is incorrect, points are taken and you can immediately see the result on the contestant’s desk screen.

I am sure that business looks about the same. Any chief executive has an account reflecting the business scoring system. It’s not just about financial gain, it can also be a set of assets: goods in stock, company debt, etc. Managers make different decisions in different areas (categories like in the TV show).

• Should we buy CRM?

• Should we develop in-house CRM? Or hire someone to build a custom CRM for that matter

• Which employees should we hire?

• Which should we fire?

• Should we outsource a sales department or not?

If you make the right decision, you score. Otherwise, you dip step by step and proliferate problems that eat up a lot of resources.

One of the effects of automation is that you understand what is happening in your business, you can evaluate each decision and make more correct ones.

4. Reducing the number of bottlenecks in your business

There is a theory that business and the increase in its potential is an infinite straight line. We can progress forward as much as we want. In reality, this is not quite the case, because there are always some limitations.

What limitations do you ask?

• “Our accountant is now busy, so I can’t send you a commercial invoice”

• “We have 50 applications and only one person to handle all of them”

• “I won’t risk taking this order to avoid the cash gap”

Some bottlenecks require many resources to eliminate. For example, when you have 2/3/5 people in one position doing basically the same thing. These tasks are often very well solved through automation.

5. “Seek and hire” game made easy

As long as you do not have your business in order, you have to look for “jacks of all trades”. Find such employees is extremely difficult: they need to keep everything in check — the shipments, Excel reports, emails, accounting software and what not. These are often very specific people, with some unusual characteristics. Since there are few of them, you will have to pay them dearly. My experience clearly shows that a small business with unstructured processes always overpays for the work of its employees.

The more you systemize and automate processes the cheaper the workflow becomes. If your sales manager tortures excel sheets for hours every day and you can alleviate their suffering by automating data tracking and recording, it will at least boost workflow efficiency in the long run and allow for more profit with the same level of expenses. Or you can at least keep the profit the same, while cutting the manager’s work hours and, eventually, salary.

When to start?

So, the automation system allows you to:

• build workflows and understand them;

• build a team;

• attract qualified and inexpensive staff;

• be more appealing to clients and provide them with high-quality customer experience.

When is it time to start? Everyone tends to delay that decision. Usually, people start feeling the real need for automation when:

• Everything starts growing rapidly and uncontrollably;

• Everything goes bad and profits plummet.

Only 10-15% of businesses make regular improvements (just think of how, in reality, non-competitive the business environment is provided you put all the effort possible into your company!). It is better to not delay the automation.

Outsourcing & Delegation as another form of automation

Even though automation turns out to be not as scary as some people see it, some small companies simply haven’t reached the point where they can afford it. It is a common occurrence at an early stage. So how should they deal with the issue? Well, the answer is as simple as pie — partial automation.

The benefits of streamlining processes show both in operational efficiency and in the bottom line. Many business owners don’t know how to quantify the gains, but simply freeing up people from small tasks to work on more valuable endeavors can make a huge difference in profitability. An example would be using a solution from somewhere like Affinda to extract relevant data from incoming invoices, freeing up accounting to spend more time collecting on receivables, thus improving cash flow. Simple and inexpensive automation has now made a massive impact on the business that will be reflected in the bank account.

Many people in general and entrepreneurs, in particular, think that automation is something strictly robotic, digitized and AI related. No, it’s not. Automation is optimization first and foremost. It is minimizing the workload and expenses your company takes. Just imagine, instead of wasting your $500/hour-CEO-time on searching and hiring people you can hire a couple of people to review job applications for you. You will: free up your time and use it more efficiently; double the volume of applications reviewed; likely lower the costs of the task by at least two times. So what do we learn from that?

1. Look for repeating, patterned tasks

2. Delegate!

Where to?

Freelance Marketplaces

Delegating and outsourcing all or parts of your recurring tasks to a freelancer at Fiverr or Upwork can be a game changer, especially if you’ve never considered that as an option. Speaking of optimization. Freelance marketplaces provide you with opportunities to hire specialists at lower costs than in the US, sometimes even 3 times cheaper. Sounds like profit, right? However, there are pitfalls to avoid. It’s sort of a risk/reward game where you can run into a freelancer who will provide low-quality results. Choose carefully, but be sure it’s worth the hassle. Rating systems on these platforms are a decent indicator.

Micro-scripting

There are various reasons why some of us cannot afford to get rid of hefty Excel sheets and put software to work to just spit out the necessary data to our sales department. There is a solution. Instead of making a step, you can make a half-step.

Systemize processes within the Excel (or Google) sheets and either use ready-made add-ons (a lot of which are free) or write a script (custom functions) to suit your tasks.

For example:

At GRIN launcher among other tools, we use Ahrefs for list building and upload data into Google Sheets via .csv files. We then need to filter the data, according to relatively strict criteria each time.

• we need URLs to specific pages be chopped down to www.[domain].com and redistributed to a column with a specific name

• we need 70% of data (columns) deleted

• we need to check if there are domains that are clearly out of interest for us

We allocated few coding hours to write a simple script to automate the filtering process, rework URLs, delete extra columns and exclude domains from the predetermined list will save an incredible amount of time and money, as efficiency is bound to grow. All instead of scrolling through thousands of excel lines your employee will get a thinner, lighter and relatively clean spreadsheet to work with. Save their time, save your money.

Google has an extensive guide on how to do it, so with some effort, it won’t be difficult and time-consuming even with no coding background.

Virtual Assistants

It’s may seem much like a freelance marketplace option but it’s not. Virtual assistants are there not to come and go. They’re out there to stay with and make your business thrive in the long term. VAs are about providing you technical, administrative and creative assistance anywhere you go. You delegate your tasks, provide a description and here it is — you’re free to work smart, while they work hard. The greatest example of VA outsourcing is probably Tim Ferris with his 4-hour week concept. By the way, here’s a great article about wonders outsourcing does from Tim’s blog: Outsourcing Life by A. J. Jacobs

There are basically no limitations to what VAs can help you with, but they are definitely a must for these tasks:

• Accounting

• Online research

• Database entries updates

• Presentations and data processing

• Email management

• Business trip bookings and arrangements

• Meetings scheduling

• Social media routine

• Editorial duties for your blog

The limits are only in your entrepreneurial imagination and gut feeling.

In-house doesn’t equal profit

It's always cool to brag about in-house solutions, but there is nothing wrong with using cloud services or any external solutions either. The key point is profit. You like profit, don't you?

Do you have resources for in-house development? Great go for it! You don't? Try outsourcing tasks at hand. And even if you’re getting enough money to justify your monetary and time expenses? Pre-planning never hurt anyone. Think of scalability first. I like it, I’m allergic to non-scalable solutions. Your goal is to make a profit every time. For example, if you are looking for a solution for lease lifecycle automation to ensure that you get consistent results across each lease that you initiate and execute, there is little value in doing this in-house unless you are a tech or software expert. Instead, it would be much more valuable to outsource lease portfolio automation software to ensure that you will gain state-of-the-art, expert-designed software that will simplify the leasing process, make audits easier, and eliminate low-value activities across your team. This will then increase employee productivity in more valuable parts of your business, and, of course, increase your future profit. As such, if you are not an expert, outsourcing should always be your choice for automation solutions.

But since my agency offers so many outsource solutions (dedicated team to build your MVP, media outreach, content marketing and like 50 more items) I might be biased :)

A finishing reminder

• It is important to remember that the most important aspect of any automation is the human factor. You can design the most remarkable technical solution, but people just will not use it. I myself had such issues: part of the functionality of the system, which I once developed, was never implemented. To avoid it, you need to make sure that any function is actually in demand by your clients and will carry real value. Management also needs to ensure a change in the habits of your employees so that they properly and effectively use the solutions.

• You need to treat automation projects like investments. The cost of the project is not as important as the effect of its implementation. Therefore, there is little point in directly comparing different systems and platforms in terms of functionality and license costs. Each company is individual, and it is important to formulate your own expectations of the project in numbers and think about the acceptable budget to determine the limits of return on investment. This will make the conversation with the integrator (developer) as substantive as possible.

• Prioritize correctly. First of all, it is necessary to automate processes that help increase the profitability of a company, mainly aiming at interaction with customers and sales growth. Secondly, automate functions that increase efficiency and directly allow you to control and minimize costs.

• Automation should be treated with ease. Don’t be afraid :) With modern cloud technologies, there is nothing bulky, complex or unaffordable. A professional with business expertise will quickly understand your needs, help you structure the project, formalize the expected effect, and make an assessment of the development and implementation. At the same time, the cost will be fixed, your risks minimized, and the schedule will be realistic and feasible. So do not hesitate to communicate with automation integrators, you will often receive estimations within just several days.