Automate Your Way to Productivity
Hello All,
A few years ago I read a book called the The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. (which I highly recommend). The gist of the book is that too much time spent working in the business and not enough time spent working on the business is a big reason why 50% of new ventures fail within the first 5 years. In other words, many of us (I am certainly guilty of this) spend too much of our time on the technical or management of the business rather than growing it. The book focuses on the franchise model, which allowed McDonald’s (and everyone since) to expand (and create empires) relatively seamlessly by systematizing, documenting and automating processes.
While many small business owner/solopreneurs have no interest in a creating a franchise or necessarily even hiring employees, the solution to becoming more productive remains the same - understand your processes, document them and add a level of automation where possible. By doing this, not only do you free up time, you develop a greater, high level, understanding of your business. Additionally, if you do decide to hire employees or subcontractors, the transition is much simpler. (One of the central messages of the e-myth is that no business should rely on a single individual.)
With the advent of AI, in it’s numerous forms, automation has become much easier. There are numerous tasks that can be automated:
Create templates for emails that you send out regularly,
Schedule social media posts
Manage your leads and automate emails to customers
Clean up your emails
Use online scheduling software
Set up rules for transactions in your accounting software
Much of the software that we already use has automation built in. For example, Word has an autocomplete function which can be quite useful when writing an email or a blog post. QuickBooks allows you to set up rules where by transactions are automatically allocated. Excel can import stock prices automatically based on parameters that you set. There are also an overwhelming number of apps out there (including ChatGPT and it’s many variants) which can help you with almost everything else.
All of this requires an initial investment of time and perhaps more challengingly, to step back from your business and look at the big picture. There are also only so many things that can be automated without the cost becoming prohibitive or compromising the essential identity of the business that you are trying to build. The goal, for me at least, is to automate as many of the tasks that are tedious or uninspiring and lend themselves to some level of automation, so that I can free up my time to do the work that I enjoy.
