How to Automate Your Business: 20+ Simple Ideas

Are you ready to automate your business? Imagine being able to automate repetitive tasks, gain a competitive edge, and increase efficiency and profits. This guidebook is specifically designed for start-ups, small businesses, and solopreneur ventures, but don’t be fooled, these ideas can be applied to larger firms as well.

We’ll dive right into the action and explore how to create a highly automated business, no fluff, no filler, just practical and actionable advice that you can implement right away. So, buckle up, and let’s automate your way to success!

Chapter 1: Competitive Advantage

Your automated business needs to offer something unique and valuable.

How will you offer something unique and useful to your customer? How will you solve their problems? You need to answer these questions before moving on. These answers will help you understand what should be automated or outsourced versus what requires a person.

The things that help you create and maintain your competitive advantage should receive your personal attention. Everything else is a candidate for automation. Let’s quickly review a simple framework for creating a competitive advantage. 

Cost Leadership

Offer the same product or service as your competitors but at a lower price. This only works if you are maintaining your optimal profit margins. So, you must have highly efficient procurement, production, and operational capabilities.

You must have lower costs than your competitors to be successful with this path. Often this is done via proprietary technology and processes. For example, automation and AI are becoming more and more common as drivers of cost leadership.

Differentiation

This requires the creation of unique products and services. Often, you can see a type of arms race created by firms competing using a differentiation strategy. It is easy to get caught up in continually adding new features and options to products. Don’t forget that your efforts to differentiate should result in solving your customer’s problems better than the competitor. If it doesn’t solve the problem better, you are just adding costs to your product.

There has also been more discussion recently about how firms can differentiate through their cultures. There is a battle to attract and keep the best employees. So, firms that figure out how to create a winning and agile culture will find themselves with a superior workforce and a better chance of pulling ahead of the competition.

Lastly, I have seen more companies pursuing sustainability as a path to differentiation. This is something I completely support as we all work to create business models that aren’t solely built on the back of resource extraction.

Strategic Alliances

Can you deliver significant value to your customer by partnering with an outside person or firm? This is often used to introduce new technology or gain entry into new markets. Is there a technology from another industry that could be adapted to your business and give you a significant advantage?

Also, once these relationships are established, they are often very hard to replicate.

Chapter 2: Create a Plan

What is your plan to create an automated business? Should you automate, outsource or assign to the team?

Get Organized

Our goal is straightforward – use your team for only the most important tasks, workflows, and processes. All other work is a candidate for automation or outsourcing. Our work in Step 1 should provide us with clear direction on what is best managed by people.

Now, create a list of all other areas in your business and begin to jot down ideas. Here is a list of functions and capabilities to help you with your idea generation.

Set Goals for Automation

As you work towards a more automated business, use your Prioritization Planner to create a roadmap for your automation projects. Below are some questions and thoughts to help you set goals for your automation effort.

• What is the ideal outcome of automating the chosen process or task?
• Are we working to fully or partially automate?
• How much time is currently spent on the task or workflow?
• What is your savings target for the first iteration of your automation efforts?
• Start with the simplest and most obvious operations — the proverbial “low-hanging fruit.”
• Set a modest target when you are starting out. If you spend 10 hours a week on a workflow, try to save just 1-2 hours. Then improve over time.

Chapter 3: Automate your Business’ Revenue

Keep your sales teams focused on selling.

Let’s remember why a company exists. A company exists to help solve problems for our customers. It is critical that your sales and marketing teams understand and articulate your potential customer’s problems. Likewise, your efforts need to clearly communicate how your products or services help your potential customers solve their problems. This is the essence of product/market fit.

One of our key goals in this area of your business should be to maximize the time your sales and marketing teams spend solving customer problems. This is especially important if you are a start-up. The majority of a start-up’s organizational time should be allocated to optimizing your product/market fit. So, we should focus heavily on the administrative aspects of the sales and marketing function.

Sales Automation

It’s all about moving your prospective customers through your sales funnel. A manual sales funnel takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time to generate, quality, nurture, and convert leads. Because of this, software and automation are the keys to boosting the performance of your sales funnels.

Four primary benefits from sales funnel software automation

• Handle the largest volume of leads possible at the top of your funnel.
• Gather analytics from your campaigns to continuously improve your close ratio over time.
• Maximize customer experience and customer retention.
• Gracefully scale up your sales organization without adding a huge SG&A burden.

The typical sales funnel has four stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and action. Let’s take a look at some automation ideas in each of these four sales funnel stages.

Sales Funnel – Awareness Stage

• The main goal is to communicate that you understand your lead’s problem and have a solution. You are a leader in this problem space.
• Your automation need to send personalized communications. Leads need to form an emotional connection with your message.
• We want automation to enable us to handle the largest volume of leads possible.
• This stage is heavily emotionally driven, with very little rational decision-making.

Sales Funnel – Consideration Stage

• The main goal is to differentiate your solution from others in the market.
• Your automations need to communicate how your solution meets the lead’s buying criteria (budget, form, function, etc.).
• We want automation to enable us to stay top of mind with our leads.

Sales Funnel – Decision Stage

• The main goal is to answer any final questions before the lead makes their final decision. Logical decision-making at this stage.
• We need to provide fact-based communications to support why your solution is superior.
• We want automation to provide information like discounts, down-sell offers, up-sell offers, and social proof messages to improve conversion.

Sales Funnel – Action Stage

Lead converts into a customer. The after-sale workflow starts.

Sales Funnel Management Tools

How does a Sales Funnel System work?

Each of these solutions allows you to create a workflow to move leads through the various funnel stages. The systems allow you to create branching logic to answer questions that are specific to your lead. These systems have become very good at allowing you to design funnels that match users to content that answers their questions. Automated funnels support either behavior, event or time based communications.

Marketing Automation

Emails, text, sponsored searches, direct marketing, and social media ads are just a few ways that you may use marketing automation.

Social Media Management

• Spend less time posting and responding to social media.
• Lessen the burden of consistently posting.
• Increase engagement with your customers.

Content Marketing and Keyword Research

• Spend less time doing keyword research.
• Decrease the time required to create content that drives traffic.

Email Marketing Automation

• Spend less time on lead nurturing.
• Decrease the time a sales rep needs for lead follow-up.
• Increase your communications with your customers.
• Increase sales funnel conversions.

SEO & SEM Tools

• Spend less time driving traffic to your sites and sales funnels.
• Decrease time required to monitor SERP rankings.
• Increase domain authority through backlink discovery.

We are all customers at some point. Let’s not forget that we all want to be heard and understood. A little bit of empathy goes a long way with your customers. Lastly, I want to leave you with one more thought. I can’t stress enough how important it is to optimize your product/market fit.

Chapter 4: Customer Experience Automation

Would you be delighted if you were the customer?

According to McKinsey, automation within your customer service and support teams can result in a 40% savings on service costs. Moreover, the quality of your service levels also rises with automation. These efforts will have a huge impact on your overall customer experience. Many of your automation will focus on problems and questions that commonly arise after a sale.

Most customers understand that problems occur. The customers’ experience with your product/service/brand is closely related to the speed at which you solved their problem. In fact, another McKinsey study showed that 75% of customers demand service within five minutes of online contact. So, we see why automated chatbots are a popular way to address customers’ demands. Let’s review some potential areas for automation.

Chatbots and Conversational AI

• The main goal is to provide the customer with an immediate answer. This enables you to deflect calls and emails to your service agents.
• We want these automated bots to provide information 24/7 and more quickly than a human agent.
• The conversational AI market is expected to grow to $13.9 billion by 2025.

Chapter 5: Operational Execution

What automation is used when making, delivering, and servicing your product or service?

Manufacturing Automation

The current state of manufacturing automation technology is incredible. That is to say, regardless of what you are making, I’m confident there are opportunities to automate some or all of your processes.

Chapter 6: Finance and Accounting Automation

Remove unnecessary friction from your finance operations.

Finance automation technology leverages AI, machine learning, and decision support systems for use in areas such as financial analysis, payroll, invoice creation, collection, and the preparation of financial statements.

Financial Close Automation

• Spend less time on the administrative element of month-end close.
• Improve backup documentation of manual journal entries.

Accounts Receivable / Accounts Payable Automation

• Leverage any automation features offered by your ERP.
• Increase your cash conversion cycle.
• Automate invoice reminders for customers.

Payroll Automation

Chapter 7: Personal Productivity

Automate and optimize personal workflows.

A well-run firm relies on the easy exchange of documents and data. Likewise, you need to enable a low-friction environment to facilitate collaboration across your teams and projects. Below we outline some tools that will enable you and your teams to efficiently share and collaborate across any document or project.

Email and Collaboration

Google Workspace

The Google suite of products is fully integrated and offers a very easy-to-use experience for the user. This solution is used by over 96% of start-ups according to Google.

I would pick Google Workspace if you are a smaller, more cost-sensitive organization. To clarify, you won’t outgrow Google Workspace unless you are a large enterprise.

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft has poured a lot of R&D into Office 365 in recent years. The solution is now very robust and has a huge number of options. I have been especially impressed with their Power BI and Power Automate solutions. Both have become industry-leading offerings in their respective areas. However, the learning curve for the Office 365 suite is steeper than for Google Workspace.

Microsoft offers a great solution for companies looking for a reliable solution with a huge depth of applications and features. However, there is a premium price that comes with this solution. Most of the features offered in Office 365 are sold ala carte and incur additional monthly fees.

Lastly, I would recommend picking either Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365. You don’t want your team to be working within both solutions – pick one and rally around it. Aligning around one solution will also save you money.

Tasks, Projects, and Workflow Management

Let’s face it, you must actively manage projects and tasks. Many operational teams operate from numerous locations, including individuals who work from home. Automation and smart workflow design can reduce the amount of time spent on tasks and project management. Here is a list of processes and events that should be candidates for automation.

• Project intake and creation.
• Notification of project task assignment.
• Project team updates for stakeholders.
• Notification of past due and upcoming assigned tasks.
• Project approval workflows.
• Notifications of missed deadlines.
• Warnings about upcoming due dates.
• Warning about overloaded resources.
• Task templates for recurring work.
• Overdue backlog review notifications.

Standardize around whatever project tool you and your team pick. In addition, you should train your teams to use the tools consistently and then regularly review progress.

Below is a list of tools to review. Likewise, I suggest starting with a solution that is simple and letting it evolve over time. Don’t over-engineering this part of your business.

Chapter 8: Monitoring the Business

How you will verify your automated processes are working correctly? There are many ways to monitor your business and the automations that are helping you run your business. However, two ideas are critical to understand – exception management and control systems.

Closed-Loop Control Systems

You will need to build feedback loops into your automations. It is very important to understand what state your automations are in versus the ideal state. Thoughtfully designing these tests will be important for your long-term success and smooth operation.

Basic Control System

• Measurement – you need to be able to measure the current state of your process.
• Controller – you need to be able to determine action based on the comparison between the current state and desired state.
• Actuator – you need to take corrective action to return your process to the desired state.
• Repeat cycle

Example 1: Car’s cruise control system.

• Measurement – Your car’s speedometer measures the current speed. E.g. 60 MPH
• Controller – Your car’s cruise control system takes the actual speed and compares it to the desired speed. E.g. 65 MPH
• Actuator – Slow down the car if the speed is above desired speed. Increase speed if the actual speed is below the desired speed. E.g. increase by 5 MPH
• Repeat cycle

Example 2: Sales lead import and qualification automation.

• Measurement – All imported leads should be assigned “Good” or “Bad”
• Controller – What is your desired state? No leads with the “unknown” assignment
• Actuator – Take corrective action. Notify management of an “unknown” lead assignment. Continue notification until the lead is corrected.
• Repeat cycle

Exception Management

Management by exception is a time-tested best practice. In essence, it is the process of only bringing issues to the attention of management. Your control systems will generate the exceptions that you and your team will manage.

• At a minimum, I suggest you set up monitoring for all automations to ensure “success” and “failure” states.
• You need to think about what events or data represent known good outcomes for your automations. See example 2 above as an illustration.
• You can also use these two principles to automate compliance with any business rule.

Wrapping up

In the 21st Century, businesses must shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive business models. This is because all business owners aim to make more with less, allowing for a smaller use of resources to reap larger benefits. The business industry will change drastically in the upcoming years. This is why automation is the most viable option to ensure the long-term sustainability of your business and enhance its productivity in the short term.

Lastly, I want to leave you with one more thought. Please create a work culture where automation is valued. Modernization initiatives are more often derailed by cultural issues than technical ones. Workers need to know that automation is not a threat to their jobs but rather a way of making the job more effective. Ideally, automation will also make their jobs more enjoyable too. People are more inclined to embrace change if they know their livelihoods are not in jeopardy.

Thanks for reading.