Build momentum through automation
As the end of the first month of 2020 sneaks into sight, it’s important to take a moment to pause and take stock of how the year’s commenced.
How has the enthusiasm you started back at work with fared? How’s your focus? Your productivity?
And most of all, how’s your momentum?
Momentum’s the secret sauce that works hand in hand with purpose to drive action, reveal insights and build opportunity on a daily basis. It’s the force behind growth, behind strengthened results, and the force many of us who are pursuing our own business dreams would consider some hefty trades for if we could guarantee it on a daily basis.
While there’s plenty of factors that go into the momentum mix, there’s a number that are controllable. These may be your time management skills, the areas where you allocate financial or staff resources, or the pressing admin issues that get in the way of the deep work that’s needed for growth. By identifying what’s not contributing to that daily focus, or what’s getting in the way of space for the work that only you can do, you can intentionally make changes that create space for momentum to pick up its speed.
Here’s three things to consider on the road to making momentum your daily asset.
#1. What are you concentrating on?
Is it pursuing new opportunities, relationships, clients, or is it staff and office management? Are you spending more time on ‘how’ your business works than on the work itself? If so, identify the culprits and look to an automated solution. If you’re bogged down in internal emails, find a new way to communicate with your team that’s focused and easily searchable. Spending too much time on customer queries? Employ a chatbot’s services to manage FAQs for you. Creating manual reports every month, for hours at a time? Tell your CRM to do it for you.
#2. Who would you add to your team if overhead wasn’t a concern?
Small business owners know the juggle that comes with managing workloads and increasing overheads. Particularly in the early stages of a new business, it’s easy to buy into the idea that you should take care of every area of operation in order to keep costs low. If you’re holding back on offloading tasks and responsibilities you’re carrying due to a need to keep overheads low, look to systemised options that can come at a fraction of the coast. Things like bookkeeping, client bookings, marketing and sales can all be automated — if you’re not sure how, come and join us in the Automation Hackers Facebook group as a first step to digging in deeper.
#3. What could you do with an extra day a week?
I’m not suggesting you work Saturdays. Instead, what could be gained from your focus, energy and expertise being set aside to work on, and not in, your business, if you’re able to take back your time from other areas of daily activity?
Your time is valuable enough that it’s worth the fight to protect it. This week, I encourage you to take stock of how you’re spending it, and where you could be replaced by a better workflow, a clearly defined system, or a revamped approach altogether. Be ruthless with where manual work’s eating into your capacity and let this question be your guiding light — ‘can it be automated?’
Odds are, the answer’s yes.
