Getting Started Automating Your Business

There are only so many hours in a day and cloning yourself isn’t an option (yet). So, the next best thing is to clone your processes.

As a corollary: there are countless gurus out there singing the praises of automating tools for your business so that it runs on its own, how magical it is and it is the way to truly free yourself from working for your business rather than on your business (and they’re selling a course on Gumroad on how to follow in their footsteps). And while there may be some truth (for some people) in that, over the years we’ve seen more people haltingly use technological automation tools as half-measures that don’t really increase productivity.

It makes sense that they don’t work seamlessly – if they did, countless hordes of people would be setting up automated businesses that generate a good cash flow and the competition would (subsequently) bring it all to a grinding halt.

The reality is technological automation tools are built for general use and not your specific process, so while they can remove a bottleneck, the reality is – more often than not – they are just moving the bottleneck to another spot in your process instead of eliminating it.

 So here’s the solution:

Automating Processes in a Way That Works For Your Business Instead of Overtaking It

Instead of starting the process by looking for what you can get a zap to do, spend the next three months writing a step-by-step outline for every process that you do. If you have staff that have a completely different set of tasks, ask them to do the same. It’ll slow things down for a bit (ie your 8 hour day will turn into 7 + an hour to write down what you did that day), but you will have committed a wealth of knowledge to paper.

Next, share your processes with your team. Ask them to add their two cents (note: save the original file in case they accidentally destroy it) and if they have any trick that makes a process work more smoothly – it can be as simple as adding action items emails following up every meeting or much more complex.

Now, once you do this for a quarter of a year, you should have documentation for a majority of your day-to-day operations. Ask your team to share what they feel is the bottleneck in their day, start compiling them. Then, and only then, start looking for tools that relieve that bottleneck.

Once you’ve found the right one, implemented it, and it’s working the way you intended, find the next bottleneck and remove it the same way. Rinse, repeat.

As a bonus – you now have your main tasks documented, so that training for your next hire is going to go a lot easier. You’re automating processes and removing the most laborious tasks, meaning you’re getting more output from everyone on your team, and everything is that much more scalable.