Run A Business Without Overworking
Run A Business Without Overworking
How to automate and streamline your business to end the day by 3PM
I’m ending my work days at 3PM now after starting at 9AM. I run a pretty laid-back business. Not because I don’t have enough customers — I actually have a lot to happily hit all of my sales goals.
I have a laid-back business because I’ve automated and streamlined pretty much everything I do. Since I don’t spend any time creating from scratch and I have systems and people doing things for me, I end up with free time in my day.
If you’re a business owner who’s currently stressed or overworked and you’d like to adopt a more laid-back approach, you can achieve the same results by taking on my automation approach. Here’s how you can create an automation plan for yourself and free up more time during your workweek.
Step 1: Write Out The Culprits
Spend 2 weeks or more recording all the tasks throughout your work week that you’ve repeated more than twice and that you know will show up again in the future.
The easiest way to do this is to have a document open on your computer throughout the day that you can easily jump to.
Once you feel that you’ve captured a large chunk of your repeated tasks, start creating templates and systems to automate your responses.
Some examples of tasks you can automate are:
Emails
Delegation
Billing
Operational Tasks
..and so much more.
Emails are probably the easiest place to start your automation journey. If you have Gmail, the platform has a “canned response” feature that allows you to insert pre-saved email responses in your emails. Otherwise, you can save a document on your computer with pre-written responses to common questions that you receive and copy and paste from this document.
Template out as many email responses as possible and save custom responses for truly one-off questions and for customer interactions before closing a sale.
Customers won’t remember that custom answer you typed up for them when they asked about shipping speed and your return policy. However, they’ll remember your personal touch if you do it right before their purchase.
Delegation is another easy act to streamline.
Rather than sending an email every time I need to delegate a task to someone on my team, I can drop the task on my Asana board, where I name multiple columns after common delegation tasks I request like “Turn this blog into an Instagram caption”, “Copyedit this document” or “Respond to this email”.
When I need someone on my team to complete one of these tasks, I just create a new card with their name on it and drop it under a delegation column to let them know that that’s a task I’d like completed.
Step 2: Assign Time Buckets
Now that you’ve created a list of tasks to potentially automate, we’re now going to organize these tasks amongst daily tasks, monthly/quarterly tasks, and yearly tasks.
Categorize each task under whether it’s a daily, monthly/quarterly or yearly task that you’re looking to automate. For example, a daily task would be something like checking your emails, a monthly task may be running reports on the month’s performance on all your marketing channels, and a yearly task may be writing a new marketing and sales plan for the year.
Once you’ve classified each task under one of these time buckets, you should start seeing a distribution — where are most of your tasks falling under, or are they evenly distributed?
If your tasks are all skewing towards one time bucket like the yearly bucket, you should go back to step 1 and identify more daily and monthly/quarterly tasks you can add to this list.
This is an important step because if you only have a bunch of yearly tasks on your list, you won’t see much reduction in your work day. You’ll have to wait to collect on your time-savings until the end of the year.
If you have a healthy distribution of tasks amongst the daily, monthly/quarterly, and yearly buckets, this is where you’ll start seeing shorter work days, and less stressful sprint times.
Step 3: Automate Unexpected Tasks
There are a couple of tasks that most entrepreneurs don’t realize that they should automate and streamline, but they should:
Products and services
Marketing and sales plans
Project management
Customer service
Honestly, I can keep this list going because you can automate and streamline anything, and you should.
If you have a product or service business, automating what you sell saves you time, and preserves consistency of product quality.
Let’s say you’re a fitness coach. Rather than spending your clients’ time giving them knowledge about nutrition and physical fitness in-person, why not put all that information into a workbook or video? This will ensure that they receive 100% from you and that each customer is provided the same level of quality and service.
When you don’t standardize your product delivery like this, there’s potential for you to not deliver superior quality if you happen to have an off day and miss a few things when communicating nutrition education to your customer.
You can take the same approach for a product-based business. If you’re for example, selling rings and you think of an incredible design idea for the front-facing part of your ring, you can finish up your ring by quickly referring to a book that lists out all the bands, metal styles, etc. you’ve used in the past and make some selections.
You can streamline your decision making even further by adding data next to each ring component about which combination sold the best, rather than jogging your memory for it.
This systemization allows you to focus your creativity where it counts and to streamline your decision making for the smaller things.
This same process can be applied to every other component of your business — marketing and sales plans (or any plans for that matter), project management, customer service, and more.
Stay in your zone of genius by only introducing customization, creativity, and new ideas to refresh and add spark, but recycle and reuse what has worked in the past. Reinventing the wheel isn’t for entrepreneurs who value their time and use this currency with respect.
Enjoy all your free time!
Do you have a healthy business or does it need a tune-up? Grab my free checklist to find out.