Automation for Small Businesses: Where to Start (and Where Not To)
Automation for Small Businesses: Where to Start (and Where Not To)
Fair warning: this episode turned into a game of Podcast Bingo. Will Steph say one of her famous sayings? (Spoiler: yes. Several.)
Underneath the bingo, though, we talked about something we love: automation. Put simply, automation is your laptop doing the work so you can do the fun stuff.
Why automate?
The obvious answer is time. That two-minute task doesn't feel like much, but do it ten times a day and it adds up fast. As Steph likes to say: you can make more money, but you can't make more time.
The less obvious answer is the mental load. When your system tells you what needs doing today, you stop carrying it all around in your head. That's a lot more room for the stuff that actually grows your business, like winning clients, training your team, or just thinking.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should
That one's Debs's saying, and it's a good rule for life, never mind automation.
We come from customer service backgrounds, so we care about the human touch. Some things shouldn't fire off on their own:
Contracts. Automate the creation, but give it a once-over before it goes.
Renewals. A reminder to renew is often better than an automatic renewal email. You might have already had a chat offline.
Follow-ups after a call. Nothing says "robot" like a thank-you email that lands seconds after you hang up, with nothing personal in it except your name. (Bonus points if it's "Stephanie (Steph)".)
And please, check your automated emails. "Hi FIRSTNAME" fools nobody. 🙈
The middle ground? Email templates. All your standard wording and links saved and ready, so you just add the personal bit. It sounds simple, but it's amazing how many people don't use them.
Our favourite: onboarding in one click
Here's one we use ourselves, and have since built for clients too.
When someone signs up with us, we tick one box in our CRM. Then the system:
Adds them to our client mailing list
Creates their project, with the right tasks for their package
Creates their contract, filled in with all their details and saved in their own folder
All we do is check it and press send. It used to be a proper faff of copying, pasting and deleting bits. Now it takes minutes.
A good place to start looking for your own automations? Ask yourself what you hate doing in your business.
You're probably already automating
Lots of small businesses think automation is just for the big players. It isn't.
If you use a booking link like Calendly, TidyCal or Zcal, you're already doing it. Someone picks a slot, it lands in your calendar, and the Zoom, Teams or Google Meet link is created for you. One click, zero admin.
Rubbish in, rubbish out
Automation is only as good as the data in your system. If your CRM isn't up to date, it'll happily use whatever's in there, wrong or not.
So keep it tidy, and test, test, test. We test our emails in both Gmail and Outlook, because they don't always behave the same. Some Outlook settings block images from email marketing tools, for example, and that's down to Outlook, not the tool.
The tools that join it all up
To connect different systems, you'll usually use an automation tool. Zapier, Make and Pabbly are a few examples.
Many CRMs and project tools have automations built in too, especially on paid plans. These are great, but can be a little more limited than a dedicated tool.
You don't need a big budget to start. Zapier has a free plan with 100 tasks a month and simple two-step automations. Some apps, often accounting software, need a paid plan to connect.
It can get clever, too. We built one for a client who has around ten calls a day. Her video call tool emails her an AI summary after each call. That used to mean her VA finding the email, finding the contact and pasting the notes in. Now the summary goes straight onto the right CRM record, and a follow-up task is created for her VA a couple of days later. Hours saved every week.
Where to start
If you're using a CRM and an email marketing tool, connect them. When someone on a call says they'd love your newsletter, tick a box in your CRM and they're added. No awkward "can you just fill in this form?"
Then look at the tasks you dread, write down how you do them now, and see what could run on its own. If you can dream it, we can (probably) do it. ✨
Not sure where to start?
That's literally what we do. We're system agnostic, so we'll help you find what's right for your business, not sell you the dream of "just plug it in and go". (That doesn't exist. Sorry.)
👉 Take the Stebbington Six​ to see where your systems could be working harder, or grab a cuppa with us for a chat.