How to make your business smarter and more efficient
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.“
Bill Gates
As you read in our first in the series of Business Automation blog posts, business automation is taking tasks within your business that are repetitive, and having someone or something do them automatically. In continuation of the series, we’re going to dig a little deeper into what else you can do with business automation within your business.
Once you have identified what your always and your every’s in your business that are possible to automate within a technical aspect, the next step is to dig into those tasks further to break them down. Ideally, you will have more than just a couple of tasks that you can automate within your business.
Identifying Multiple Tasks Within Your Business
If you own a restaurant, and you wanted to start doing proactive marketing. You start to look back on customers that visited your restaurant for Valentine’s day and you want to send them a special coupon for them to come back and visit. Or you have a list of customers who have purchased gift cards, and a holiday is approaching and you want to reach out to those customers and promote a gift card special that you are having. It could also be you wanting to reach out to new customers to visit your restaurant, so you want to automate an email every Wednesday at 12pm you want to remind everyone of your happy hour special from 2-6pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Categorize Your Tasks
It could also be identifying areas that you’d like to improve, such as making sure you are properly staffed for busy times of the day, or automatically ordering your supplies and food when inventory starts to get low. Once you identify a large list of items in your business that you could potentially automate, start looking at grouping them in categories, ie. financial, marketing, managing vendors, etc.
Once you start grouping your tasks, take a look at them and start asking yourself what technology systems that you use to manage each task, ie. scheduling software, email, payroll systems, credit card processors, point of sale systems. When you have your list established, you will start looking to hire someone with a technology background or someone who is comfortable with the systems and digging into what they are capable of doing for your business. This will get you into the third step of business automation, so keep an eye out for your next blog post in the series.
Interested in Business Automation for your company?
By identifying where you can automate parts of you business, you can in turn have higher productivity, increase performance, and help to reduce your operating costs. Think that you have an area in your business that could be automated, but need some help with the technical side of it? Contact us to chat about it!