The fresh energy and insight of a Business Mentor can make an enormous difference to business owners who feel overwhelmed and overworked. A Mentor can help you identify where to put your attention and which tasks you can delegate or automate. Automation is not only a solution for huge companies, factories, or tech businesses; it can help you as a small business owner too! If you’re new to automation, you can start simply and enjoy the benefits almost immediately. Let us explain.
At its simplest, automation is the practice of setting your repeating manual processes to happen automatically. It means you and your team will be freed from remembering or managing such tasks yourselves. Along with helping things move faster, automation can reduce human error and boredom! When your team’s more engaged and can focus on interesting work, you’ll all get a lot more from each day.
Unleash the power of your everyday software
Most small businesses already have software that can automate processes. Common office software systems have much capability that’s often untapped. If you’re sending emails, doing online invoicing or taking any kind of booking, then you already have some powerful tools.
For example, our email program is full of functionality to save you time with automation. Beyond an ‘out-of-office’ message, you can have tasks or calendar items forwarded to your diary or someone else’s. You can ensure your whole team is notified when a key customer gets in touch, so you don’t need to worry that you’ll miss an important message. Want to send a special thanks or update when you meet a milestone or complete a certain action? Your email program can probably do that too!
Most business owners just need a healthy dose of curiosity to get started with simple automation. The time you spend exploring your current software will come back to you ten-fold as you learn to make the most of the functionality. Check out the tools, rules and preferences in your program, or jump online to search for ideas about your task with the name of your software.
If that, then this
At the heart of any digital automation is basic computational thinking, which is not as complicated as it may sound. It uses the same logic we learned with 1+1=2. Automation sees that if you have one, then add one, you’ll automatically have two. In other words, “if that, then this”.
The benefit of automation goes well beyond taking care of individual documents or emails. Automation can help reduce the impact should you or a team member be unable to work because they’re sick or isolating. Omicron has meant this is a constant concern for business owners, but you can ease some of this burden.
There’s peace of mind knowing invoices will be sent, customers will receive follow-ups, and suppliers will get your orders. If you have a Mentor, you can talk through other business-critical processes and your options for their management as well.
Get started for automatic benefit
It’s clear that automation can bring unexpected value to your small business, and you don’t need to be a full-time programmer to get it underway. Instead, start by identifying repetitive processes and getting the most from your existing software. Your Mentor can help you think through your options and decide where extra resources or investments are worthwhile.
Finally, if you don’t yet have a Mentor, there’s no reason to delay. As soon as you complete your application, our own automation will alert us and begin matching and prioritising a mentor with the best fit for you!
