Episode 23: How to get automate things in your business and get time back
We spend hours each working day doing repetitive tasks which takes away the time we could have used to focus on other important work. In this short tip episode, Fiona discusses the importance of automation and why every business owner needs to use automation tools to save time and energy from doing repetitive tasks such as answering emails, sending instructions to new members of your team and sending emails to new subscribers. Listen now to learn which automated tool has helped Fiona run her business without wasting time.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction [0:54]
Quick Exercise [2:56]
Automation [5:22]
What To Automate [9:11]
On Service-Based Businesses [9:52]
On Product-Based Business [10:34]
Other Examples [11:07]
Conclusion [14:29]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Welcome to Episode 23 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I am excited to have you join me. And I really mean that. You know, you could be doing all sorts of things with your time these days, but I'm really honoured that you might choose to spend a little of it with me. And I have to say as well, thank you so much for anyone who has reached out to me. Usually it's through Instagram. I'm just over at @mydailybusinesscoach and I'm getting a lot of DMs - direct messages - being sent to me on there from all sorts of people all over the world who are listening to this podcast. So if you are one of them, thank you, thank you, thank you!
And if you are not, but you listen to this, please don't be shy. Come on over, come on over. And yeah, we can chat in the DMs. So, like I said before, it's just over at Instagram. I'm at @mydailybusinesscoach or you can reach out to my team anytime at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. Thank you so much.
And you can probably hear I'm pretty excited today because I also just got off the phone to my publisher. I have a book coming out shortly with Hardie Grant Books in Australia, but it's been published all over the world and we just went through the sales numbers of pre-orders. So I have to also say a massive thank you to any one of you who is listening to this and has pre-ordered the book, or if you're listening to this after 2nd of September and you've actually got the book in your hand and you've bought it from an actual physical bookshop, then, thank you, thank you, thank you. My mind is blown. It's pretty awesome. So anyway, let's get on today's episode.
Today is a tip tool or tactic episode. And today we're going to talk about is a tactic. So it's an action that you can take to help grow and scale your business sustainably. And it's something that I use a lot in my business. And I honestly couldn't have gotten to where I am without it. I wish I had used this more at the start of my business. I'm into my fifth year. And yeah, it's definitely completely shifted things. So what is this amazing tactic? Let's find out.
So let's take a minute and do a quick exercise, so I don't know if you're listening to this in the car or the gym or a walk or I mean, I don't know if you're in the gym, actually. So many places have closed down. But whatever you're doing, if you can't close your eyes, then just try and let your mind wander for a second, safely, safely. If you are in a place that you can close your eyes, please close your eyes and literally just take a few minutes and think about the last two weeks of your work or even the last week, maybe depending because we're in coronavirus time, you might only be working a couple of days or you might be working full on seven days a week. Hopefully not. But really take a minute and think about the last two weeks or last week of the work that you've been doing for your small business, and then think about all of the activities that you completed or the task that you did or perhaps didn't get a chance to do. I mean, hello COVID, I totally get it. You thought about your work, you thought about the tasks and the activities, now really have a think, how many of these tasks or activities were the same? You know, that is you sent a similar email or reply to a customer or a client or you gave the same instructions to a colleague or a remote worker or you sent the same information through to a potential collaborator or you answered the same question in your Instagram DMs. So we all do this. And according to two recent studies, one by HubSpot and another by IDC, which is a research company in the US, the average worker spends between 20 to 30 percent of their day repeating tasks or providing information on a task that already exists, such as, you know, sending an instruction guide to a colleague when the manual already exists or reworking some sort of document. And then you find out like three months later, oh, we already had that document complete somewhere, we just kind of forgotten where it was. So does this sound like you?
And if it does, exhale, it's okay. You are not alone. It's estimated that something like 49 percent of businesses utilise what I'm about to talk about. But that means that half are wasting time on tasks and processes that aren't efficient. So what am I actually talking about? I'm talking about automation. That is the tactic that we're gonna discuss in today's episode.
So what is automation? Well, it's basically the setting up of systems so that they run almost almost kind of in brackets by themselves. So think about things like email correspondence, customer service and even Instagram DMs (that you all know that I'm a fan of the DM). But what does automation look like? So it could be, like we said, email correspondence or customer service. But what does it actually look like? This can vary depending on the business and depending on your audience's needs. But in my business, say, for instance, almost all of our emails to inbound requests. So people that come off the website come from Instagram, all the kind of inbound requests, what we write back to those is pretty much automated or it's tweaked from automation. So my amazing V.A. and I, we use Front, which is an email tool, and we have various kind of canned responses, I guess you could say, inside of that tool, and they can be found and added to an email in milliseconds. And some of the things that we have set up are actually automated. So no one even even has to go in and put the canned response. It's just an automated sequence. So this means we're not writing emails from scratch all the time for the same type of questions.
Now, that's something I definitely used to do in the first year of my business. If people contact me for business coaching or for consulting or anything else. I was starting every email from scratch and then I started getting in the process of, oh, I've sent an email similar to that, I could go and copy and paste it. And then as time has gone on, we've gotten more sophisticated. I guess you could say in some of our email correspondence just to automate it, really. And likewise, if you sign up to certain freebies, I have a bunch of freebies on my website just under mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop and then look for freebies or you sign up from a course. I sell those as well in My Daily Business Coach Shop. You'll receive an email sequence that helps you utilise the freebies or the course. So an example of this is when people have bought my Get It Done e-book, they can opt into a monthly accountability email sequence. So that is automated and it goes out to them every single month. And it kind of is like a check-in with their goals for that month and that sort of thing. So those things are set up as automations and they've really helped. Similarly, when people commence 1:1 business coaching with me or group coaching, they are on-boarded through a series of welcome email. So they on-boarded to this is what to expect and this is how long they go for and these are the tools we use and all of that kind of stuff. Likewise, one of the tools that I use a lot with coaching is Calendly, so any meetings or calls that I have are automated by hooking up my calendar with calendly, which is a scheduling tool, and Calendly links to Zoom so that when someone books are meeting in Lee, a meeting is already automatically created inside of Zoom, which is the video conferencing tool I use to conduct my group coaching or my business coaching calls. And then that link is sent both to myself and to the person being coached. So all sorts of meetings happen for small business owners, and Calendly has been an incredible tool to automate that. So instead of being like, "Hi Fiona, what time would suit you?" And I'm like, "Oh, I don't know, Doug, what time would suit you?" And you go back and forth and play that email tennis. This way, if someone asks to catch up with me, even if it's, you know, sometimes even if it's a friend, I'm like, can you just book it in here? You know, it just makes it easier on my calendar. But most of the time, it's to do with my actual business. But I can literally just send them a link or my VA, can send them a link, and then they can find the time within the times that I have available that suits them as well. So it just avoids this whole back and forth, back and forth and delays. You know, sometimes you ask people, oh, can you do any of these times? And it's like three days before you hear back from them. And by then, those times are kind of redundant. So that is another example of how we automate.
So you want to think about, "OK, well, this sounds like a great thing and I need to do more of it, but how do I know what to automate?" So the purpose of automation is really to save time and to stop you having to do the same task over and over and over again. And prior to automating an inbound email responses, like I said before, we were were just spending a lot of time, sometimes hours writing virtually the same thing to people. Knowing what to automate starts with the basic exercise that I asked you to do at the start of this podcast episode, to literally spend a bit of time looking at the task that you complete in an average week and then asking yourself or your team, is there a smarter way that we could do this?
So for service-based businesses, automation might look like, you know, setting up your email sequences, scheduling your appointments, making sure that you can automate those things. It could also be automating kind of your opt in so your lead generation strategy, so you might have a free piece of valuable content that people can download in exchange for their email address. And then as soon as they put in their email address, they are nurtured through email sequences or some people use Facebook Messenger bots. I don't, but lots people do to kind of lead these people to a point at which you then sell something to them or that they can at least understand more about your business and potentially see how they could work with you. So that's an example for a service based.
For product-based businesses, it could be automating some of your customer service messages. It could be utilising an FAQ or frequently asked questions section on your website and using the text replacement tool on your phone or iPad to automate this (i.e. a social media comment, so instead of replying from scratch to every Instagram, DM or Facebook comment about, for example, what are your sizing options, you create a 'sizing' text replacement inside of your iPhone, which has the same message as your sizing section on your website).
So if you've never used text replacement, it is going to change your life. If you have an iPhone, you can literally go into settings. I'm going to do this while I'm recording so I can check that it's definitely happening. So you go into settings, you go into general, you scroll down to keyboard and then you'll see text replacement. And what you can do then is basically just make any kind of code word. Or, for instance, in this example, you could just right sizing and then you can put in the full message. And it means that when you are in an Instagram DM or Facebook post or whatever and you're on your phone instead of having to reply the whole time or go and find the link or whatever it is, you can just right sizing, enter, and what will come up is the full text replacement and you can tweak that text replacement depending on what the question is that they've asked. But basically, all the information that you need is there within seconds. So that's one way of sort of automating things.
Likewise, it could be for a product based business that you set up emails. According to SKUs or whatever you call the different types of products that you have - most people call them SKUs. So you set up different types of emails, according to the SKUs, by linking your e-commerce and email platform. So when someone buys, for instance, your most popular summer dress, they receive an automated email sequence on how to style it or what else it matches with, or even a discount on summer sandals, for example.
So other things that you could automate in a small business, whether you're service based or product based or you sell a mix of both, could be things like onboarding of new staff or clients, capturing and nurturing of leads. It could also be linking your core content with different distribution channels. So, for example, your core content might be blogs, so like a video blog, like a YouTuber and you might share that your latest video on LinkedIn and Instagram at set times throughout the month post-publication. So a really good tool for this is Co-Schedule. And of course, all of the tools and links will be in the show notes. But that's a great tool to kind of populate with. Okay. This piece of core content is coming out to your blog or your blog or your email or your podcast. And then you can populate. I want it to go on LinkedIn a week out, two weeks out. Two days out. Two hours out. Whatever. So that's an example of automating kind of content distribution.
Another example could be sending ad hoc surveys to a customer base to consistently improve your offering. Another one is setting up meetings like I've talked about. Calendly is incredible for this, but there are a bunch of other tools like Acuity.
Updating your stocks and wholesale accounts about new collections. So you might have a back end kind of forum or a hub or portal that they can go into and access information. Chasing up late payments. So again, I use zero, which is just one way. There's my job. That's quick books. There's lots of different accounting tools, but I use Xero and it's set up so that If people don't pay their invoice that they get a reminder notice. Now, again, I don't really use invoices that much. A lot of stuff goes through my website, which is upfront payment, but that is a great tool if you are getting late payments. You can also put in things like a late payment fee. So all of that stuff is automated and you're not there chasing the invoice all the time.
Another one would be asking clients or customers for testimonials or reviews generating repeat business by sending emails to clients or customers, you know, X months after they buy something from you. And there's just so many other ways to automate it.
There are countless ways to use automation in your small biz. And before you get scared that it takes away the 'human' element, consider this: a study by WebFX found that triggered emails (that is automated emails as a result of a customer / client completing an action) receive 70.5% more opens than other types of emails.
People want to be seen and they want their requests to be responded to quickly.
Automation ensures that happens.
So how might you add more automation into your business?
How could this make things easier for you, especially right now when we are all juggling so many things such as homeschooling or workarounds for our team working from home.
I’ll leave you to ponder those questions as that is the end of this quick tip episode. If you enjoyed this or learned something (and i hope you did!) i would love it if you’re able to leave a review for me on iTunes. It just helps this podcast get found by other small business owners and lord knows, we all need as much help and tips as we can get right now.
Thanks for listening to my daily business coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
If you enjoyed this or learned something (and i hope you did!) i would love it if you’re able to leave a review for me on iTunes.
If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
