How to Use Automation Tools in Your Business

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume your business is now earning revenues in excess of $5,000 per month. If it’s not you may want to increase that before you begin automating in any way.

If you are making $5,000 or more per month, then everything you read now will be very useful to you. It will help you save time, make more money and create a business that can run without you.

Let’s get into how to use automation tools in your business.

Automate Employee Training and Hiring

What do I mean when I say “automate employee training”? Let’s say your business helps clients with their email marketing and you have an employee who handles everything within the mailchimp, aweber or any email marketing software the client has.

You probably trained this person one on one when they first joined and it took up a lot of your time. What happens when this person leaves? You have to train another person and spend all the time again. Unless you automate it!

How do you automate the training? You create videos or a handbook or something that explains how to do every part of the job. Or in other words, you do the work once(and trust me this isn’t fun) and then never have to do it again! I can’t stress this enough, do not waste time retraining people for simple roles that can be explained in a 20 minutes video. Do the work once and then never do it again no matter how many employees you go through!

Another part of your business you should automate is employee hiring. A simple automation for hiring employees could be something like this.

First, you post on various freelancing sites and wait for freelancers to apply. Based on criteria which you’ve found the best candidates to have, you screen out many applicants and send the best a survey. Then you get those who pass the survey on an interview, ask questions, screen the bad out. Next you give the qualified freelancers a test task and if you like they’re work, congratulations, you now have a new employee.

Automate Your Lead Generation

Once you get big and want to get bigger, it’s time that you hire people, whether it’s a virtual assistant or a salesperson to handle the prospecting and closing of prospects.

Perhaps you have an Upwork funnel. Hire a virtual assistant to send out 10-20 customizable template proposals per day which will ensure you have many booked sales calls to do. If you read above, create videos to train this person, it’s not complicated and it’s worth the effort.

Want to go a step a step further? Hire and then train a salesperson to talk to the prospects and close them. As you get bigger, even doing sales calls isn’t worth your time! Automate by hiring go-getter sales people and paying generous commissions to keep them around. It’s a little harder to completely automate the training of salespeople since sales is a hard. But it’s worth it for you once again to put in the time and get people doing the sales and lead generation work for you. 

Automate Your Delivery

When you get to a certain level of revenue, it becomes wise to outsource the delivery of the service itself. With a hiring process/system you’ll have an endless stream of potential employees. The first employee you hire will be the guinea pig for your training methods. Once you’ve perfected your training, then you create a “mini-course” that teaches them how to deliver your service. Of course, you’ll probably still be mentoring them here and they’re because business isn’t so cut and dry and there are so many specific things that you can’t cover them all in video training. But once everything is setup, you’ll have a few trusted employees to deliver a great service, and systems in place to replace them if they leave which will free up your time for more important work.

Automate Your Project Management

Speaking to clients constantly is not a wise use of your time. Especially since clients will gladly take up all the hours in your day. Another time-waster you want to avoid is managing your employees who are delivering your service. The simple solution is to hire a project manager to not only keep your clients in the loop and their anxiety levels down. But also make sure your service is being delivered well and on time for your clients. With a good hiring process and a good training program, you won’t spend much time getting project managers up to speed!

Automate Any and All Processes Within Your Business

I’ve gone over the main things you must absolutely automate, but a simple rule that lets you know what you can and should automate is…

Whatever you do in your business repeatedly should be automated!

Anything that is done multiple times should be taught to an employee and taken off your hands. Doing repetitive work makes no sense for you as the business owner. You need to make your business work for you  and not the other way around.

If I had to create a step-by-step guide for using automation tools in your business, it would go like this.

1. Find all repetitive tasks that can be handled by others
2. Hire people to do and train them
3. While training them, create a handbook/training videos that explains how to do their job
4. Enjoy the extra time and leverage this employee gives you as he does the job for you
5. If he leaves, find someone else and give him the handbook/training videos
6. Rinse and repeat for all repetitive tasks

Listen, if you are doing all the work yourself, you’re not a business owner, you merely own a job. Leveraging the time of others is the way to automate your business and grow revenue into the six and seven figures.

And the best part is, when you automate, you earn more money and you have more time to enjoy it.