Confused About How To Automate Your Business Without Sounding Like A Robot?
Today I’m going to give you some tips so six ways around how you can How To Automate Without Taking Away The Human Touch. Automating is a huge, huge benefit of businesses as business owners. We can get so caught up in the running of our business. Then it becomes overwhelming. And thinking about anything else that you need to do, just send your head into oblivion.
You just don’t even know where to start, you have all these ideas flying around, and you’re struggling to really get the time to put them into place. If that sounds like you, then you really need to be looking at automating. And when I say that, they have this fear of automating is going to make them sound like a robot. I get it, because effectively.
It is a robot.
But there are ways that you can automate and do it smartly. So making sure that you are not just automating, and then running off makes a huge difference.
Because what you should be looking at automating as in, is it’s going to save, huge chunks of time
Let’s use an example of 10 hours a week, which is completely possible with automating. And with those 10 hours. You may be reinvesting say one or two hours back into doing something that’s going to make your business stand out.
If you have missed the previous posts, it will be a quick example around your client onboarding. So if you are automating your entire process for your client onboarding. You could then invest back an hour for all your clients. And do something that’s going to make you stand out like a 15 minute phone call. That’s going to give that human touch and going to bring across your personality.
If you have missed any of the other posts do make sure you go back and have a look. Because they are very much aligned to what I’m going to be talking about here. This blog is primarily focused on how to do it because people have said that sounds amazing. And I completely get that automated piece and actually now that it’s been explained, like that. The automating piece actually sounds quite good to get in place. But how? So, these are my six tips in order to help you get started to really figure out the automation piece and what is going to work for you and your business.
1. Looking at your regular tasks that you can automate
So, what tasks are you doing more than once? Have you started to automate them? Because if you haven’t, then you should be. Making sure that you’ve automated that piece can make a huge difference. As an example, if you use subcontractors. It could be a case of you send an email every week to get a report from them. If you do that, make sure it’s automated. There’s no point you having to send that email. You could be doing other things that are going to help your business grow. Sending an email to your subcontractors isn’t going to do that.
2. Essentials in a process
What I mean by this and I’ve touched upon this previously. Is within the process you will have your essentials which is the things that have to be done to achieve the outcome. But you also have your nice twos. So making sure that you’re looking at the essentials piece, and you’re looking at how they work together. So how do they fit into each other?
Have you got steps that are maybe time-wasting and do not really need that step? Have you got steps that are actually duplicating each other? So for an example, it could be if you have your clients book a call with you. And then you’ll send them a questionnaire to get some pre questions answered. Whereas actually you could streamline that.
You could make sure that when they are booking a call, that they also have that questionnaire.
That’s going to gather and prequalify them before you get on the call. And that means that you know they’re going to do it, because they can’t book the call unless they’ve filled it in. But also it’s going to give you time to be able to see where that client is before the call so it means that the call is going to be more structured, and you’re going to be able to help them more.
So making sure that you’re really looking at that essential piece, and where it sits and is there anything that could be consolidated into one step, as opposed to multiple steps.
3. Look at the nice toos
Which I’ve touched upon. so the nice toos can be things that aren’t essential for that process but they’re things that you really want to do. These are things such as if you send the clients, a welcome gift. If you send the clients, a card if you send the clients emails that are kind of checking in and saying, how’s things going because although you want to that they’re not essential for that particular process.
So making sure that you’re having a look at all the nice to’s and looking at what ones you really want to take forward. So what ones are really going to make you stand out, what ones, your competitors are not doing.
4. The tools
So, the tools that you’re using for each step is going to vary, and there are going to be times that you’re using multiple tools. There are some all in one solutions, but the majority of the time, they don’t do everything that you need them to do, because essentially every business is different. And the tool that we’ll say is an all in one tool, there are still other things that you’re probably going to want to introduce.
So looking at the tools that you’re using.
Overall, again, so if we use an example of booking a call and then pre-qualifying the client. It could be that you’re using calendly to book the call and then you’re sending them to Google form to prequalify them. If you’re doing that you can actually consolidate that as you don’t need the Google Form. You can add the questions to your calendly account.
So it’s looking at what you’re doing and how you can really streamline it and pull it into one, as opposed to having multiple things during different parts of it. Because the more tools you’re using the more open to error, you become.
5. Map it out
How does it all look together? So we want to look at from start to finish, what happens on your customer journey.
So you want to look at where the customers begin. What stages, the customer goes through as an essential. So what needs to be done. And then we’re going to add in little notes that are going to have the nice twos. We’re going to look at the tools we use it to cross out the ones that we think we don’t really need to be using now. And then are going to pull that all together.
6. Time to Automate
So, once we have the process there, we can make sure that we have automated as much of the process as possible. And then once we’ve got the nice tos noted, we can then make sure that we are diarising in the nice tos.
And again, you can diarise by sending yourself an automated reminder when these nice twos are due. So, don’t just think that the nice twos are going to create more work because you’re going to need to remember to do them.
Just make sure that you’ve added a little notification in there for yourself and you’re going to get an email or a pop up come through and say, Hey, you need to do X, Y and Z for x y and Z client. And then, there it is, you’ve not had to take the time to figure it out, you’ve not had to take the time to diarise it and you’ve not had to take the time to figure it out and remember it.
And it makes sure that you are doing the thing that you want to do, and you’re not leaving any gaps.
So I hope that has really really helped. And those are the main stages that you’re going to follow in order to achieve real successful automating in your business. And, of course, automating can become as complex as we want it to be. For anyone that knows me knows that I like to keep things really really simple. So looking at the automate workflow and customer journey.
Just making sure that you automate as many of the steps as possible, means that you have simplified that entire process for yourself, and you will love it once it’s sorted. I know it will take a bit of time to invest initially, but the time that you will save going forward is going to pay back tenfold is going to be huge chunks of time that you can then use to drive your business forward. I hope you found it helpful on How To Automate Without Taking Away The Human Touch? As always if you have any questions do get in touch.
