Podcast: $1 million automations any business can use
If you consider your time more valuable than $1/hr then chances are you have opportunities in your business to automate tasks and make your time more valuable.
In this short video I got through some of the automation I use that have helped me scale with very little complexity.
Video Transcript
Hey, how is it going Ryan Caswell here from B2B leads.com. Today I wanted to go over some of the main automations that I’m using my business. They’re really helping me scale without having to hire lots of people to help me manage the business. So first I wanted to get into what automation is. Touch a little bit on.
Why you need to automate so three key things I really want to go over to start with, and that’s why you would automate when you would automate. And of course, how to automate things within your business. I know a lot of people see automation as this big, mysterious thing. You need to be some sort of tech developer in order to automate systems and processes these days, the tools available, make it so easy to do.
Anyone could literally do it. You don’t need to be a. You just need to know how to think like a developer would. So first, why would you automatically. So you wouldn’t always automate things. It really just does depend. But the main reason you would automate is because you can use things like computers to do tasks for you to reduce your time, because you can pay a computer a lot less than you would.
So if you can pay someone a lot less than you would pay yourself to run a task, it makes your time far more valuable. It makes your business far more scalable. So that should be the first obvious reason you can get computers to do things for the most. A lot cheaper than you can do them yourselves.
That’s the frustration you want to automate things when to automate. So in terms of hierarchy, whenever you’d need to do something with the business, you should really ask yourself this question. Do I need to do this? If you don’t need to do it, get rid of the task. A lot of businesses have running tasks and activities and can’t safely say whether it’s even adding value to the business and model, whether it’s just a cost.
So be very analytical, understand the time you’re spending on each activity and whether it’s finding a good enough return. And if it’s not then get rid of it, you should always get rid of things before you even look to automate them.
If they’re not adding true value to your company next. Get rid of it, then you should try and automate it only if the automation costs is going to be less than the cost of doing it yourself or getting someone else to do it, which comes to my next point, which is of course delegation. If you can’t automate it, you want to delegate it to someone whose time is less valuable.
What you want yours to be. And then if you can’t do that, then last you have to do it yourself. But we want to be automating things fairly high up in terms of hierarchy. So if we can get rid of it, get rid of it, but if we can automate it, then we wouldn’t be automating. Everything we can within our businesses.
And there are a lot of things that we can within our businesses, want to share some of those with you today. And finally, how so a lot of people don’t realize how simple it actually is. And there’s some great tools. I’ll only talk about one today because this one’s kind of the easiest one to use. Great.
May for anyone to be able to use it. It’s called Zapier. Now Zappia lets you do really cool things, but at its core, it basically lets you set up if this, then that. So if you want to run an automation, business and automation is generally driven by one of two things. It’s an well, it’s driven by an action reaction.
So an automation will happen based on something else, driving that to happen. So it’s one of two actions of the cool ones you’re going to be looking at. It’s going to be. Some sort of action has been taken prior, which was. That automation or it’s driven by a time trigger, which is kind of an action, but it’s, it’s more, well, the, the action is time dependent, whether that’s a daily activity or a weekly task or a quarterly task.
It’s, it’s an automation that runs based on a time trigger. So in Zapier you can set up things. Tom triggers daily, daily automations that run based on daily time, Driggers, weekly contributing, set up a whole bunch of different ones, or you can do them based on actions. So for instance, if someone fills out a form online that you can say, if someone fills in this form, then I want you to run a bunch of activities with my business.
And I’ll talk about some that I use in my. In just a minute, that depend very heavily on forms. And I just want to reiterate here that you do not need to be a developer to do these things in a future video. If you want to leave a comment and you’re interested to see how to actually use Zapier and how simple it is to do, then just put a comment below and I’ll, if there’s enough people interested, I’ll definitely put something together, but it really is as simple as saying, all right, if something happens over here, I’m going to select that thing.
This thing has happened and then ends up, Hey, you can choose which application you want something else to happen in. And you can take the information that was entered in over here. So the main time trigger driven tasks that I use in my business are ones that are creating jobs for me on a daily, weekly, monthly.
Basis that, so that I don’t need to think about when I have to do things, the more you have the ability to clear up thought in the day and reduce the amount of thinking you have to do. So you can just focus on things that actually require, thought the more you’re going to be able to focus on high level activities that provide a lot more value to you in terms of income.
So I have. Daily weekly, monthly, quarterly driven tasks. And they all feed basically the jobs that I need to do regularly into Trello. So I use Trello as my project management system. And the way that works is it creates these things called car. In these columns for what I need to do today. So this one might be, you know, sales call planning and he creates all these cards.
And in, within each of these cards, it has the standard operating procedures, even though it’s me giving me jobs for myself, I put everything in, in terms of standard operating procedures. So first of all, I don’t need to think everything’s there for me. And at any point, if I need to delegate these tasks in everything’s written up and ready to go. I don’t have to go back and try and remember how, you know, everything is set up. So do the same thing for weekly and monthly tasks, but they feed into my, what I need to do today. So these are tasks that are driven by time, but then a huge component of what I automated my own is onboarding.
So when you onboard new clients, typically there’s a lot of setup that needs to be done when a client starts up. You need, obviously, I mean, generally you do take an onboarding survey to get a lot of information that you need to get the project started and you need to set up all the resources, folders, and things like that.
Set me. Set tasks that need to be completed by certain dates. So long as you can map all this out, quite neatly, you can pretty much have everything driven by your intake form. So if someone fills in a form, say that’s a Google form, MailChimp, Chimp survey. I can’t remember the other one. So people fill in a form and then once they submit that.
That then goes to Zapier. And then this is where it’s really cool. You can then say, all right, I need to email the client. I need to set up a folder in my Google drive or my Dropbox folder. I need to set up all these resources in that folder. I need to take the information that they’ve entered into this survey.
And then put it here, here, and here. I need to send this to a copywriter. I need to send this to my VA to set this up. I need to book this meeting. This is the job that needs to be done by this TA time. Based on when they’ve done this, all this admin stuff that adds off and takes, you know, hours of your day.
Can all be automated and makes your time just so much more valuable and makes you personally far more scalable in terms of your capacity to earn more in the year. So that’s kind of one of the main ones that lifts a lot of the time off my belt, that end content marketing. So for example, this video is something that I’d have to record, but there’s a lot of tasks that happen on the backend.
Like I’ve got a team. Handle all the YouTube keyword researching, and then also helped me with the actual posting and putting it on YouTube. And then I need another on my VAs to then post it on LinkedIn. And there’s a whole bunch of tasks and I really just want to focus on creating the video. So then what I do is I create a video.
I put it in a folder. I give it to my my YouTube guy and then the YouTube guy fills out a form without, with all the. But when it’s scheduled and things like that. And then that creates all the tasks for the VA’s and all the dates that things need to be posted in order to keep the social media gods happy in that bay.
So there’s just so much potential. And you can probably tell, I get very excited about this. Automation is just one of those things that it’s just the low hanging fruit within a lot of businesses to just really leverage and make things far more profitable. So. I know it was all very high level today.
And that didn’t really get into the actual nuts and bolts of it. But I just wanted to get you excited about automating in your business. Basically tell you how simple it is. Seriously, get a free account with Zapier and start having a play around. Have a think about one simple thing you could automate your business.
And then when you see how easy it is, I’m sure you’re going to get some momentum and start building out some more information automations and making more money today. Anyway, I hope that has been helpful. Any questions, let me know. And as always have a great day.
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