Ep 33 - Business Efficiency: A 3 Step Process for What to Automate First

Imagine a business where you spend 80% of your time on tasks that truly propel you forward. Today's episode is a game changer for every solopreneur out there We're talking about the power of automation and exploring the key question what to automate first for operational efficiency? I'll be sharing a 3 step process and providing real life examples of how automation can transform your daily grind. If you're ready to reclaim your time and supercharge your dreams, stick around. Are you drowning in the day to day task wishing you had more time to strategize and cast the vision for your business growth? Hi. I'm Donna Dube, your guide on this entrepreneurial journey. I've walked in your worn out shoes, burning the midnight oil, convinced that sheer hard work was the secret to success. Just one more email, one more task, until I found myself on a one way track to burnout. But here's the twist in the tale, I discovered that success isn't just about working harder, it's about working smarter. It's about being intentional with our time.

It's about steering our ship with focus because no team, system, or automation can outperform a lack of direction. In this podcast, I'm sharing with you all the strategies for business growth that it took me years to learn. If you're ready to step out of the daily overwhelm, so you can amplify your profits, then I'm ready to teach you. I believe the only limit to your business growth is the one you set for yourself. Go grab a notebook, warm up that cup of tea, and let's do this. Welcome back everyone. So glad you're here. Today, I wanna talk about a topic that actually came from a listener who asked if we could spend some time talking about automation and specifically as solopreneurs, what do we look at to automate first for operational efficiency? Now certainly all of us can benefit from automation within our business, but I think specifically as solopreneurs, we often find ourselves buried in the tasks. But the key here to differentiate is being busy and being productive.

Because you see, it's not about doing everything. It's about doing the right things. And so that's where these 3 pillars come in. You've heard me talk about them before: automate, delegate, and stop. And asking ourselves what tasks are we currently doing that can fit in these three categories? What tasks are we currently doing in our business that we could automate? What tasks are we doing that we could delegate to someone else? And what tasks are we doing that we could eliminate? How do we know that we can eliminate it? It's not bringing any evidence of return on investment. You've been at it for a while. You've had a chance for the momentum to be there and it's just not bringing you that return on investment. So we either gonna tweak it, change it, or we're going to eliminate it.

All right, let's get into this topic about automation. So I want you to think about automation as just another way of delegating, really. It's delegating to a machine rather than to a human being. And as solopreneurs, I wanna help us spend less time with the busy work because again, just because you're busy doesn't mean you're productive. It's time to break free from the misconception that busyness equals productivity. I'm sure you've heard this before the 80 20 rule, but really it fits here as well. Spend 80% of your time on activities that move you closer to your goals. So when you look at all the things you have to do in your business as a solopreneur, a lot will fall into what I call admin work.

It needs to get done and as a solopreneur, you're the only one on your team who can do it, But I wanna challenge you to think about it and say, how can we make it take less time? How do we identify what to automate? And today I'm gonna give you a 3 step process to go through so you know, what do I automate first in my business that makes sense from a strategic perspective and also makes sense in terms of operational efficiencies. This my friends is a process of continuous improvement. It's not a one and done deal, but it will transform how you work in your business and the time you have and what you're doing with that time inside your business. Scale right, let's let's get into the process. So step number 1 is divide and conquer. You wanna really get a good understanding of how you're spending your time. Try to understand your busy work, and the best way to do this is to conduct a time audit for a week. Now I know some of you just heard that and you wanna press pause, take out your AirPods and move on because the last thing you want to do is conduct a time audit, but I'm telling you leaders, this makes a huge difference.

Tracking your activities hourly for 2 or 3 days or even a week if you plan. There's so much gold in what you find when you track your time, Recognizing the task that shouldn't be on your plate. Recognizing how you were spending your week. So if you want an easy way to do this you can go grab my time tracking spreadsheet. The links are in the show notes. One reason I really like this spreadsheet is that there's a drop down menu so you can pick the area in which you, the task fits, and then you can also map that to your strategic objectives. So we've got 7 strategic objectives and I always like to see where our leaders spending their time against those strategic objectives. So if one of your objective is to increase visibility and at the end of the week you spent, you know, 2% of your week on tasks that relate to increasing visibility we've got a misalignment there.

Right? So it really helps if you map those out for the week and then we map them against your strategic objectives and that happens automatically in this tracker on the 3rd, 4th tab there is a chart which you can easily see your percentage of how much time you are spending in each strategic objective. So again, go grab that time tracking spreadsheet. It's in the show notes, the link. All right, so we've tracked our time, we're at the end of the week. Now what? Now we want to look at what I should be spending my time on as business leader and what I shouldn't be spending my time on, and the truth of the matter is asking yourself what I shouldn't be spending my my time on is actually the most important question because as solopreneurs, we are doing everything ourselves. The admin, the accounting, the bookkeeping, it's all done by us. And so we wanna try and automate the things that we shouldn't be doing. Now I know some of you may hear, oh, oh you know what, but some of these tasks, you know, I really shouldn't be doing them, but I've always done them.

It doesn't take me very long, just a couple of minutes. And again, I want you to think outside the box because when you're telling yourself things like I've always done this, it only takes me a few minutes. You've got blinders on. Just like those horses in the races. You've got your blinders on and you're plowing ahead in the lane you're in. I want you to take those blinders off and think outside the box. Ask what I should not be doing. Ask why am I doing this? And actually take some time to think about it.

Because I think you'll find that there are are a lot of tasks that you're currently doing that you have been doing, but they do you don't have to do. Big difference. And remember that a lot of tasks fit within a workflow. They're not single items, right? It's a chain of events that happens in your business. So in this case, I want you to be able to start thinking about a workflow diagram, creating a flowchart and defining what the process is, mapping out the pieces of this chain of events that makes something happen. And we're going to some examples in a few minutes, but being able to map that out, whether you like to do it in mind mapping software, you like to do it on paper, whatever that is, but being able to write out what the process is and mapping out those pieces is gonna become very helpful and something necessary to do before we actually start to automate. All right. I just wanna put in a little caveat here about procrastination, because a lot of us have this issue.

We can end up procrastinating on this endless quest to find the perfect solution Are you wasting time looking for the perfect software tool, the perfect app, the perfect journal, the perfect planner and all that time you're spending doing, looking, you're not actually doing what you should be doing. It's a trap my friends, a real big trap that we as entrepreneurs fall in. So just ask yourself, am I on this endless quest to find this perfect is to design and implement. So now that we know what this workflow looks like, we've mapped out the process. We wanna start automating some of that work. So let me give you an example of a podcast workflow. So we might have at the beginning, we have to spend some time thinking about what the episode's gonna be about. Maybe jotting down a few points or making a simple outline.

We have to figure out what the call to action is going to be, or if we're going to have certain resources available in the show notes. Then we have to record the episode and then where does that episode go? Well, it might go to us to edit because we don't have a team to edit. And so we have to edit the episode. We have to add any maybe music at the beginning or the end. And then we might wanna create some social posts and an email letting our audience know that a new episode is ready. So these are the different pieces that we would have in our mapping, in our flowchart of what happens to a podcast episode. And then once we've finished all of that then we wanna go into our software and upload the episode and schedule it for the day that it needs to be released. If we have guests on our podcast, then we would have another work for how we manage guests, right? We might invite guests.

Guests might pitch to us. How do we deal with that email? How do we send them a calendar link with a recording date and time and where they need to go for the recording? And then again, that recording would flow into our regular podcast workflow. So now we have a recording, we need to edit it and etcetera. So I hope you're getting the picture here of what I mean by this workflow or profit, and you can do this with many different processes in your business. You can do it with calendar management, you can do it with invoicing, you can do it with your accounting profit management, your forms, like It's an endless list but I want you to just focus on one area. What's one area that you identified when you did your time tracker of things you shouldn't be doing and let's take one area and automate that first. And so we are very fortunate that we have a lot of software tools available to us and a lot of those tools are what I call no code, so you don't have to understand how to code the computer to use the software. There's a lot of flexibility built within them and yep it's going to take a little bit of time to play with it and to get used to it, But just like anything else, the more you use the tool the more comfortable you are with it.

So take a couple tools for a test drive and see what you think. Try to automate one step at a time of one of your workflows and see how that works for you. Alright. The end result here is we want to spend more of our time doing what counts, and what counts is bringing us closer to our goal and having a return on investment. Alright, so you may come up with, you know, I gave an example of podcast workflows. It could be calendar management, could be invoicing, could be client onboarding, and we'll go through some of that as we get through the rest of the steps here. All right, the third step in this three step process of trying to figure out what to automate first is the refining and operations, and so once we've created the system, we've created this workflow, this profit, It's not a one done deal, right? We're gonna run it several times and we're gonna learn from it. We're gonna find areas where we wanna tweak and where we wanna change because maybe something is really good, but it would be even better if we added an extra email somewhere in the process or we added way for the customer or client to contact us a certain way.

Right? So I just wanna share some thoughts about systems in our life and our business because I think this really captures it well. And this is a little poem written by an economics, an economics professor and general systems theory founder Kenneth Boulding. And he says this, a system is a big black box of which we can't unlock the locks and all we can find out about is what goes in and what comes out. Perceiving input output pairs related by parameters permits us sometimes to relate an input output and a state If this operations good and stable, then to predict we may be able. But if this fails us, heaven forbid, we'll be compelled to force the lid. And so just a reminder to have fun with this process, to work through it. It's not going to be perfect the first time but as you get more used to the software, as you refine your workflow process, it's going to become easier and easier and the truth of the matter is that systems in your business are really like a leverage point. Right? We can use them for finding new clients, we can use them for onboarding, we can use them for delivery of our product program or service, and we can use them for off boarding so many areas.

We can automate our hiring process when we get to that scale, we can sending an offer, signing documents, ordering equipment, so many processes and systems that we can develop in within our business. But again, I don't want you to get overwhelmed. I need to do that time tracking. Pick one area that's really a bottleneck. Pick one area that you're spending time on that you shouldn't be spending time on as a leader and start to automate that one step at a time. Alright. I'm going to give you an example of your client onboarding procedure. So really your client onboarding is your first opportunity to leave your clients impressed and excited to work with you, right? And so, we want to automate this.

So it's a win win scenario. We don't have to worry doing manual labour, and not doing things on time, and making errors, and our clients are gonna trust that they made the right decision by choosing to work with us because we're gonna have a smooth crystal clear process that leaves them feeling supported. So let's look at the different pictures of what could be part of your onboarding process. So first, you might have welcome emails, you might have invoices and contracts, you might have payments that they need to make up profit, maybe some intake forms or registration forms, and then scheduling a kickoff call, or an orientation call, or and how we get started. And, we can automate each of those steps within our business. Right now, I don't want you to dive deep into which tool and which one's the best for me. And do I put it here or do I put it there? That's not where I'm going. Today I want you to think more higher level and believe that even as a solopreneur you can automate and have a process of how you do that and where you start.

If you think about our life, our life is actually very systematized, right? A lot of people have a morning routine. It might not be very well defined for some it might be unintentional, might be inconsistent, but most people have some sort of routine they go through in the morning and I encourage you to create a system of automation to support you as a business leader, even as a solopreneur. Harness the power of automation because it will help you take away much of the busy work. And I know many people have a fear that they don't know if it's working and what if something goes wrong and all the, you know, objections that come. But the truth of the matter is, in order to be able to grow and use that 80% of your time on the things that matter most, you're going to have to set up some systems and automations because I want you to save that brain and all the good ideas you have for the big stuff. I don't want you to get overwhelmed and be afraid and just be stuck. So find a tool that does what you want it to do and move on. Don't get stuck and overwhelmed by searching for the perfect tool because that's a form of you find something that works for you, set it up, tweak it, and improve it as you go.

But pick an area and let's focus on setting up some sort of automation in your business. Alright, as you know, I always like to hear how you took this podcast and put it into action. So I'd like you to hop over to the Facebook group CEO amplify and share with me what happened when you did the time tracking. What was one of the biggest 's and insights you saw when you tracked your time for at least 2 or 3 days? And from there, what area are you going to focus on to automate within your business as a solopreneur? Until next time, keep amplifying your business and your life. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoyed today's episode, kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me.

Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.