If you're like most business owners, you are always looking for ways to save time. And, automation can definitely help with that! By automating certain tasks, you can free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.
What Does it Mean to Automate Your Business?
Business automation is the process of automating business tasks and processes to improve efficiency and accuracy. This can include automating things like marketing, sales funnels, lead nurturing, and customer service. Automating your business can save you time and money, while also improving your bottom line.
So why do you need to automate your business? Some of this might be the most basic information, but I guarantee at least one of these 7 reasons will help you automate or update your automation.
1. Automation Can Save You a Ton of Time .
If you're like most business owners, you are always looking for ways to save time. And, automation can definitely help with that! By automating certain tasks, you can free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.
2. Eliminate Repetitive Tasks.
By eliminating a single daily 15-minute task, you get at 2 weeks of your time back over the course of a year. How many of those repetitive tasks can you eliminate? There will be more than one, for sure. We'll be talking about these
When you start systemizing your business and looking at the processes you have, you learn that you are doing a lot of things that don't need to be done. It's busy work. It all comes down to the 80/20 Rule – 80% of your results come from 20% of your work. Even when you're experienced and have running your business for a long time you can find yourself fiddling around with stuff that you shouldn't be doing.
You need the most simple and concise systems possible.
3. Scale Faster.
This is so key when you're hiring people. If you don't have systems or processes in place, how are you supposed to explain your process?
You want to be able to scale and scale faster because it is hard for an individual to get to 6-figures without a team. You have to be able to replicate what it is that you do.
4. Save Money and Reduce Labor Costs.
One of the examples of labor cost savings within my business is refunds. If you were doing a refund, for example, everything happens at once. When you click the refund button, it notifies the customer, it notifies my virtual assistant to remove them from the Facebook group, and it all happens in one fell swoop. If you don't have a system in place for that, it would probably take you 20 minutes to do that versus one second. But when you think of the amount of time it takes you to actually do the task, you realize that they sometimes get free weeks of access to your content because they haven't been removed from the group.
5. Improve Customer Service
Your customer service is everything. If someone signed up for your amazing freebie and they don't get the email with the download for 3 weeks, by the time they get the email, they've probably forgotten about you.
The more time between deliverability, the more likely they are to have forgotten about you. You might as well be a complete stranger.
It's so much more expensive to attain a new client than to retain one that you already have. If you improve your backend service with existing clients, you can retain them for way longer. Continue to give them value and check in on them with automation.
If someone makes a purchase and there is no instant follow-up, they could end up with buyer's remorse.
6. Sell Your Business
At some point, you may want to sell your business for a profit, even if it is your passion business. If you don't have processes in place, no one is going to buy your business.
When companies make an acquisition, they are either buying technology and/or a system; very rarely is it brand strength or the name of a brand.
How do you infuse value for other people? You make it so someone else can run it. The only way to do that is through systems and automation.
7. Have Peace of Mind
This is the most important part of automation. We started a business, not to be beholden to your business. If you can't take a vacation from your business, at some point that's going to be a problem. You need to be able to take time away from your business and have it still work.
What happens if your assistant quits or goes on leave and you have to find someone else? If you have a process document, anyone should be able to do it. You should be able to hire someone quickly.
These are all mind-numbingly amazing reasons to automate your business. In the next episode, we will be discussing the 6 things every entrepreneur needs to automate right away.