Small Business Automation: Why It Matters and How to Do It

As a business owner, your currency is your energy and time. That’s why you outsource busy work, hire employees to help you shoulder the load, and reserve your attention for high-level tasks. But when repetitive time-suckers clog up your processes, it can be difficult to scale to the next level and make the most efficient use of you and your team’s time. 

It behooves every small business owner to begin asking at each step of their process:

“Is there a way to make this automatic? Could this get done without any requirement from me or my staff?” 

When set up properly, automation in your business can be a godsend, freeing you and your staff to shift focus to what really matters – building customer relationships, creative problem-solving, and selling products and services. 

Dig deeper into this post to discover why automation matters for small businesses and practical guidance on how to implement it effectively in yours.

WHY AUTOMATE YOUR SMALL BUSINESS PROCESSES?

For one thing, automating repetitive work relieves your staff from manually performing those specific tasks, boosting efficiency, buying back their time, and streamlining the process. This allows employees to focus on higher-value work that requires a human touch – like customer success, planning future projects, or managing their teams. Outsourcing predictable tasks empowers your business to do the same work with less effort. 

Secondly, automation reduces overhead costs. Administrative work that would take an employee minutes or hours to do, an automated system can perform in seconds, buying back that employee’s time and relieving the weight on your payroll. 

Finally, it comes down to productivity and what that means for you, your business, your team, and your customers. 

Statistics revealed across multiple studies show massive significant boosts in productivity across various departments with automation in lead nurturing alone showing a 200% improvement. 

Where could your business be this time next year if you saw a 200% increase in lead conversion starting today? Could automation be the key to hitting the next level of your business?

HOW TO INTEGRATE AUTOMATION IN YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

1. Identify Repetitive Tasks

Take a look at your business processes from start to finish. Get microscopic in your assessment down to the emails you send, the calls you make, the forms you fill out, etc. To aid in this process, have your team diligently track every minute of how they spend their workdays for a week to see where hours are going and to what kinds of tasks. 

Do this alongside them for your workdays as well! You might be surprised what’s sucking up your time.  

After the week of logging minutes, discuss the experience with your team. Together, look for repetitive tasks that don’t require a human touch. 

Did drafting emails take up a lot of the workweek? Were employees slow to start the day because they had to organize their tasks and calendars each morning? 

Identify holes in the process where you could set an automatic workflow to do the heavy lifting and discuss the possibilities with your team. 

2. Choose the Right Tools

After you’ve mapped the potential areas for automation that exist in your processes, explore how you might integrate tools to aid in automation. 

Here are a handful of tools to consider:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 

CRMs are great for streamlining communication with leads and customers making for a seamless customer experience from inquiry to signed contract. 

We like tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Dubsado that provide templates and workflows to make your sales and serving process a breeze. 

• Email Marketing 

No matter the kind of business you run, don’t sleep on email marketing! According to research, for every dollar spent on email marketing, businesses see a $36 return on investment. 

Automating this component of your marketing will feed your business with cash flow and nurture your audience to help you see a boost in new and returning customers. 

Try email marketing platforms like Flodesk, Mailchimp, and Zoho.  

• Project Management 

Never leave your team wondering what their next step is. Streamline assignments, templatize repetitive work, and set clear expectations for delivery all while tracking your team’s progress in real time. 

Check out task management platforms like Asana, Trello, and Monday.com to get started. 

• Accounting Software 

Streamline invoicing, collecting payments, and following up on outstanding work with the automation tools in your accounting software. 

Look into automation options available with accounting tools like QuickBooks, Xero, and Dubsado.  

3. Empower Your Team

As you begin automating your processes, don’t skip the step of bringing your team into the fold. Introduce new tools gradually, ensuring your employees understand how to operate the software and are aware of the benefits it brings to their roles. 

Training should be ongoing, with updates provided as tools evolve.

4. Monitor and Adjust Over Time

Once automation is in place, it's essential to monitor its performance and make adjustments as needed. Regularly review automated processes, keeping an ongoing conversation going with your team about what’s helping and what’s hurting workflow.

5. Start Small

If you're just getting started automated your business, start with simple, repetitive tasks like reminder emails for customer appointments or a task management platform. 

Setting up automation tools to serve your business well takes time to set up, organize, tweak, and solidify, but the one-time investment will pay off over time, buying you back your time and energy.

Once you and your team are comfortable with your first automation, streamline and implement it in a new area, taking it step by step. 

Automation is a necessity for small businesses looking to grow. By increasing efficiency, cutting time and monetary costs, and enhancing productivity, automation for your small business offers a multitude of benefits that compound over time. 

The key is to stay curious about how every process can be made a little easier and be done without the requirement of you or your team’s time or attention. Buy back your time and make repetitive tasks automatic. 

Are you a small business primed and ready for growth?

Check out the Top 10 Tech Tools we recommend for seamless business operations.