Tag: Barbara Genest

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Your Marketing

One of the best things to start automating as soon as you can is your marketing. Automating is a lot easier and less expensive than it was just five years ago. Today, even a one-person business can implement marketing automation that assists in exploding their business and taking it to new heights never considered in the past.

 

These tools and tips will help you get marketing automation right:

 

  • Understand Your Sales Process – You should easily be able to describe the journey your customer takes from awareness through to delight. Because when you know what your customer’s intent is, you can put the right tools and information in front of them.

 

  • Know Who the Customer Is – Of course, part of understanding your customer’s journey is also simply knowing who exactly your ideal customer is. You must be able to describe who they are in detail if you want to know how to market to them. This fact never changes whether you are doing things yourself, using automation, or letting a contractor do it.

 

  • Create, Plan, and Publish Content in Advance – All marketing starts with content. Before you even start using automation, you need to have content for each level of the buyer’s journey to get their attention.

 

  • Pick the Right Software – For example, software like Hootsuite is helpful to manage the social media platforms all in one place. In contrast, software like SocialOomph.com can automate your content distribution by prepopulating content. Know what the point of the software is before you buy it and use it.

 

  • Focus on List Building – Whether you are marketing using automation or doing it yourself, the main focus you should have is on list building. Building your list with hungry customers is your first priority for any marketing you do.

 

  • Know What You Want – If you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to find the software. One issue with automation is you may not realize how much you can automate, so you don’t even know that you want it because you don’t know it exists. For this reason, educate yourself on various ways others use automation because the truth is if you can think it up and it’s repeatable, you can probably automate it.

 

  • Focus on The Basics First – When you first begin implementing automation, focus on the easy things you do now. For example, automating your sales pages to deliver a freebie, sign your lead up to your list, and then deliver automated nurturing messages is the first place you should consider automating.

 

Take a look at what you already are doing in your business, and then look up whether or not you can automate that. Posting to social media, sending new content to your email list, and offering self-help customer service are some simple but powerful ways that you can start automating your marketing.

 

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9 Tips for Choosing Awesome Contractors for Your Business Needs

When you decide to outsource to others using contractors, you must understand how to find good ones and keep them before you get started. Nothing is worse than finally deciding to pay someone else to do something and making a bad choice.

communication

  1. Know What You Want – If you don’t know exactly what you need, it’ll be hard to hire the right person or team to help you. If you cannot write a detailed job or project description highlighting the expected deliverables and timetable, and budget, you are not ready to find a contractor.

 

  1. One Thing Per Contractor – When it comes to your small home business, you don’t want to hire one person to be in charge of an entire project because it can cause problems. For example, if you hire one writer to write, edit, format, and do every part of a project for you and they get sick, you may end up without a project. But if you hire someone just to do the writing, someone else to do the editing, and yet someone else to make it pretty, you’re more likely to get a better product in the end. Plus, it’s a lot easier to replace someone only responsible for editing since each skillset is specific.

 

  1. Know Your Budget – You need to know the range you’re willing to pay for the projects you’re trying to outsource. To generate the number, you need to find out what the going rate is for that particular expertise. Don’t try to get a rocket scientist on a minimum wage budget.

 

  1. Check References – Even if your friend recommends a person or company for your project, always check up on them to be sure they are who they say they are. You’d do this if you were hiring someone to come to your storefront, do it when you are going to work with someone in your company every single time.

 

  1. Start Small – When you first work with someone, don’t hire them for a long-term project. Instead, hire them for a short-term project with a faster turn around time so that you can find out if they are right for you for future or more critical projects.

 

  1. Respect the Laws – When you hire a contractor, they are not your employee. How they produce your deliverables is not any of your concern. The important part is to answer the question: Did they deliver the results you paid for? You don’t control their time because they are not your employee. For this reason, pay by project or task and not hourly.

 

  1. Use a Project Management System – Some independent contractors have their own system and want you to sign up for their project management system. This is important because it helps establish that they are not employees. But if they don’t use their own, set up a system for them to use with you as it’ll keep everything more organized and on task.

 

  1. Communicate Regularly and Quickly – When your contractors have a question, get back to them as quickly as possible with the answers. They have their own timeline, and if you’re not fast with responses, you can end up being really hard to work with.

 

  1. Pay on Time – Don’t mess with someone’s pay. If you promise to pay them a certain amount of money for the work, then pay them when you said you would. Don’t hire people if you don’t have the funds to pay at that moment.

 

Remember that the old saying that if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Always check up on anyone you plan to work with, whether you are going to pay them, share private information with them, or have them associated with your business name in any way. There are lots of great people who want to work virtually as a contractor, so if you know what you want and do your due diligence, you will find them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Where to Find Contractors for Outsourcing

No automation plan is complete without an outsourcing plan. Outsourcing means that you find other experts to do tasks for you. If you outsource to a contractor, they are not employees because you can only make requirements on the deliverables but not on how they use their time creating and making the deliverables. Combined with automation, outsourcing is very powerful.

 

  • Your Network – When you want to work with someone, the first thing you should do is survey your network to find out if you already know someone who is an expert, uses experts or knows who you can use. The person recommended by trusted sources will almost always perform better than if you hire a total stranger.

 

  • Your Customers – When you have fleshed out the tasks you want someone else to do for you, send out a message to your current customers and audience who have signed up for your list already. You never know who is already in love with your offerings that can make them even better for you.
  • Fiverr.com – Don’t be fooled by the name. Most of the time, if you want someone who is an expert, you’re not really going to get it done for five bucks. However, there are some amazing people who use Fiverr.com as their storefront that you can hire to do various jobs, from editing video to coding. The sky is the limit.

 

  • Upwork.com – This is a job board where, for a fee, you can place an advertisement for your position. Ensure that you figure out everything you want the contractor to do so that you are clear about your deliverables.

 

  • Ziprecruiter.com – This is another worksite much like Upwork.com, but it’s also an excellent place to find contractors for your needs. You can hire all kinds of people for any virtual position or project that you have open.

 

  • Advertising on Your Website – Once you know what you need, you can put your job right on your website. Using the same promotional methods, you use for blog posts and other content, you can get the word out about your openings.

 

  • Thumbtack.com – This is a great site that enables you to list your needs or go through and find someone offering what you need already.

 

  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk.com) – This has been around a long time and is still working great. People list the work they do and make offers on the system. You just need to search for what you want.

 

  • PeoplePerHour.com – If you want to hire people to do a task in person or virtually, PPH is an excellent resource for you. Workers list their offers, and people who need projects done also list their needs.

 

 

Outsourcing, like automation, saves money and time because it takes things off your plate that you aren’t an expert at doing, so you can focus elsewhere. Using a combination of experts and automation in your business will boost your productivity exponentially.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Ultimate Boost in Productivity: Automation and Outsourcing

Being productive is an essential element in any business owner’s life. Business owners are busy and need to use every moment given to them as fruitfully as possible. Most business owners continually research ideas that will boost their productivity. They research organizing so that they can be more productive, but the truth is the ultimate boost in productivity will come from a combination of automation and outsourcing.

 

  • Inexpensive – Automation is very inexpensive, and outsourcing is less expensive than hiring someone in house to do the same thing. Using automation where you can, and outsourcing everywhere else is inexpensive and offers an amazing ROI.

 

  • Easy to Get Started – It’s not as hard as you might think to get started with either automation or outsourcing. Learn how it works by reading the software website and the manuals. For example, if you join Zapier.com, you can learn about applets, or zaps, that other people have already created and simply copy theirs. When you outsource today, you can go to a platform like upwork.com or even Fiverr.com to find qualified people.

 

  • Increases Capabilities – Even if you don’t have a skill, you can find it in software or find it in an individual or company. This means that a one-person business can perform like a larger business due to increased capabilities.

 

  • Better Quality – Believe it or not, the work you produce will be much better when you work with technology and contractors to see your vision come to reality.

 

  • Contributes to Lean Practices – Most businesses these days need to run as lean as possible, whether it’s the busy season or not. Automation and outsourcing give you flexibility when it comes to your budget.

 

  • Get More Done – You’re simply going to get more done when you have more help. If you can automate most things, outsource the few remaining tasks, that means you have that much more time to do more of what matters to you.

 

  • Reduce Mistakes – If you don’t know how to do something, you’re going to make mistakes as you learn. But if you hire an expert, they’re going to make fewer mistakes. If you use technology and set it up right, there will be no mistakes.

 

  • Develop Improvable Business Processes – When you want to outsource or automate something, you will need to write down the process so that you can visualize every single step, including the impact of the steps. This is going to create a situation where you improve every single process you have.

 

  • Make Better Decisions – When you have better facts, you can make better choices and decisions for your business needs. Setting up automatic reports that appear in your Dropbox the moment you need to review them will blow your mind, but it will help you make better decisions since you won’t be fishing for the info at the last minute.

 

  • Creates New Opportunities – When you have more time to judge how your business is performing, and you’ve developed each process to be the most efficient possible, you’re going to have more doors open for you just when you need them.

 

To set up more outsourcing and automation, you’ll need to know what your business goals are, understand your core business, audit your internal processes, and learn how you can integrate what you already own with new technology that can help you with automation and outsourcing.

 

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26 Things You Can Automate in Your Business

There are numerous things you can automate in your business. Some things you may have already thought about or started, such as email marketing. But others you may not have thought of yet, such as auto file generation, event registration, and more.

 

  1. Social Media Marketing – Use software like Hootsuite.com to set up social media marketing sharing and engagement.

 

  1. Blogging – Set up your email marketing software and social media platforms using software like Zapier.com to generate applets that will automatically share any blog you publish with your email subscribers and social media platforms using the right size image and everything.

 

  1. Research – Use a combination of artificial intelligence, surveys, behavioral emails, tagging, and other tools to automatically deliver reports to you based on the criteria you set.

 

  1. Tracking and Measuring – Set up Google Analytics or platform analytics to track and measure and create automated reports. You can use Zapier.com to automatically create a document that is filed away for you to check when it’s time.

 

  1. Remarketing – Set up a pixel that autocrinally tells your customers when they left their shopping carts or that sends an advertisement just to them based on their behavior in your cart.

 

  1. Event Registration – Let your customers sign themselves up for your events using the tools included with platforms like GoToWebinar.com or connect software using IFTTT.com and another tech.

 

  1. Customer Care – Set up chatbots, customer questionnaires, and a self-service kiosk right on your site. Chatbots can be programmed to speak in your brand voice in a conversational manner and offer an amazing ROI.

 

  1. Email Responses – Set up triggers within your email autoresponder software that delivers the right information that you’ve preloaded into the system to your customers just when they need it most.

 

  1. Transactional Emails – Preload all transactional emails to your autoresponder so that they’re delivered based on what your customer does.

 

  1. General Email – Set up automation in your email so that when someone signs up for your list or buys something, they get periodic emails based on their interests.

 

  1. Invoicing and Reminders – Set up your invoicing tools to generate automatic invoices based on the criteria you set up, as well as sends auto-reminders. Most bookkeeping software will do this these days if you set it up.

 

  1. Payroll – If you have employees, invest in payroll software or work with a payroll firm. They’ll provide the tools that allow your employees to enter their time and control various aspects of their pay independently.

 

  1. Storing Records and Receipts – Purchase software that enables you to take a picture of your records and receipts so that it’s always there when you need it.

 

  1. Bookkeeping – A lot of bookkeeping software today, even Go Daddy’s version, will automatically book your purchases and income for you. This can save hours, depending on the number of transactions you have daily.

 

  1. Customer / Client Appointment Scheduling – If you’re a coach or someone who has to interact with customers and clients via appointments, let them make their own. Software like acuityscheduling.com lets your customers self-serve in more ways than one.

 

  1. Bill Paying – If you have bills to pay, you can set up automatic payments for all sorts of bills so that you don’t have to think of them every month. You can do this via your bank.

 

  1. File Backups – Everyone should be backing up all the time. Having an external drive isn’t really good enough now. Buy file storage online. It’s much safer, and set everything up so that it backs up automatically.

 

  1. Calendar Sharing – You can automate your calendar sharing by using the right type of software for your needs. For example, if you work with a team that is spread out over the country, using Google Calendar that you can all view and see will help. You can also use project management software like Basecamp.com for this.

 

  1. Email Inbox Management – Use software like boomerang.com to help you keep spam out of your inbox. You can also set up Zapier.com to organize your files for easier consumption.

 

  1. To-Do List Development – Using Zapier.com, you can turn your emails or other accounts like Slack and Trello into a to-do list with the right commands.

 

  1. Digital Product or Freebie Delivery – Set up your sales page so that when your customer signs up, they’ll receive the product automatically.

 

  1. Lead Gen and Nurturing – When your customer gets their freebie, you can automatically deliver emails that build the relationship using Aweber.com or other autoresponder services.

 

  1. Contact Management – Use a system that allows you to scan your contacts into your customer relationship management software along with tagging so that you can set up networking ops fast.

 

  1. File Creation – Set up IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to create files and add them to your Dropbox from tasks, emails, and other triggers.

 

  1. Help Desk – Use software like Freshdesk.com to set up an automated helpdesk for your customers.

 

  1. Surveying Customers – Use behavioral triggers on your website, in email, and on social media to deliver a survey to your customers.

 

Now that you’ve seen this list of ways to start automating, did it give you some good ideas? What do you want to automate? If you’re not sure about how to automate something in your business, I can probably help if you contact me.

 

 

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8 Things You Should Outsource in Your Business

As you learn more about business automation, it’s important to realize there is another way to automate your business, and that is by hiring someone else to do the work for you. Hiring experts to deliver work for you on your behalf is called outsourcing.

 

You can outsource to contractors, or you can hire employees. It’s up to you and depends on the type of business you want. Outsourcing to contractors allows you to hire experts for parts of projects without keeping them on payroll long term and is focused just on deliverables. In contrast, hiring employees puts you in charge of their time and gives you the ability to direct them more closely.

 

  1. Legal Work – Most small business owners will not hire a legal person to work on their team as an employee. Instead, they hire a law firm on retainer and use them only when necessary. If you do have a lot of contracts and other needs for a legal team, this is your best answer to those annoying legal issues. It’s also nice to have someone on call that you can ask simple questions of and check over contracts.

 

  1. Finance – Most small business owners can save a boatload of time, stress, and money if they find someone to help them with taxes, bookkeeping, payroll, and other issues with money and accounting. You can hire a bookkeeper, a CPA, an EA, or even an admin person to do the data entry to help remove some of these responsibilities, but this is where you really do need an expert, at least at first.

 

  1. Technology Needs – Most small business owners hire people and use automation technology when it comes to their websites. Building websites, using automation software, and all that technology really does need someone who understands it all in a professional sense.

 

  1. Marketing – Whether it’s social media marketing or some other type of marketing, hiring an expert will pay off. Experts know how to use the software available and know all the tricks of the trade to ensure the process works. When you outsource marketing, you free up time to do something you’re more knowledgeable and skilled at doing.

 

  1. Graphic Design – Giving a designer ideas for your graphics is so much easier than trying to design them yourself. Even if you think you can deliver good ideas using software like Canva.com, it’s not going to be as excellent as an expert can make it, and letting someone else do the design will save an enormous amount of time.

 

  1. Customer Care – No business owner should be handling their own customer care because it’s just too hard. You’re too close to your product or your service, and it’s too easy to get upset about issues. But an expert can help set up your customer care in a way that takes it off your plate for a lot less than you may realize.

 

  1. Administrative Tasks – Track the admin tasks you do every day, and you can likely save a few hours a day if you hire a virtual assistant to do the administrative stuff all business owners have to do. Whether it’s managing events, performing personal errands, or other tasks as directed by you, this is a substantial time saving and can really turn your business on like nothing else.

 

  1. Writing – Your business needs a lot of content for customer education, product information, and so forth. Whether it’s blog content, article content, sales page content, or internal content, a professional writer can help you with it.

 

Whether sales, marketing, finance, accounting, customer service, or helping manage a team, you need to outsource in your business. You may not have enough resources to outsource it all right away, but you should consider creating earning benchmarks that signal the time to outsource the task. When you outsource more, you free up your time to focus on what you do best.

 

 

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3 Reasons to Automate and Outsource

As a business owner, it’s important to understand what your expertise is. If you’re spending time in areas that you lack skills or information, you may be making mistakes that you don’t even realize you’re making while sacrificing what you are good at doing.

 

When you understand the core business, you will know what you sell, who you’re selling it to, where your buyers are, and how to find them. You’ll also know how you’re going to distribute the product or serve the customer. Additionally, you know how you stand out from the competition, and you use that to your advantage by differentiating yourself in the marketplace.

 

Remove Bottlenecks

 

When you start to automate and outsource tasks in your business as you develop each process, you’ll start to notice that bottlenecks are a thing of the past. Because the truth is, in most small businesses, especially those run by people starting them from home with no business experience, the bottleneck is the business owner.

 

Sometimes lack of skill causes the roadblock. Sometimes they just lack desire or energy because everything becomes so overwhelming. But whatever the reason, if you are engaged in organizing and planning as business owners should do and focused on automating and outsourcing, ensuring that others are responsible for doing, you’re going to get more done.

 

Reduce Errors and Mistakes

 

When you work with software, fewer mistakes will happen once you set it up correctly. Even outsourcing to an expert will ensure that mistakes and errors are less likely to happen. The main reason is that you’re going to use software that is tried and tested, and you’re going to hire people who are experts.

 

The truth is, hiring experts or using automation software can reduce your errors and mistakes so much that the cost will produce an amazing return on investment. You’d probably spend a lot more time worrying over the issue than your customer service expert or the automation software will. But you’ll get superior results in the end.

Setting Boundaries: It’s Not Selfish to Go After What You Want

Spend Time on Higher Value Projects

 

This is the biggest reason of all to automate and outsource. Focus on your primary business, which is the core of your businesses’ existence. As a business owner, while you may need to do things in your business as a job, once you reach specific benchmarks, you should hand those tasks off to machines or to experts so that you can spend time on projects that produce a much higher value for yourself such as business planning and idea generation which is the key to business growth.

You live in an amazing time to be a business owner. You can find plenty of technology to implement in your automation plan and plenty of people to hire in your outsourcing plan. Figure out what you want to do, set your goals for doing it, and then follow through.

 

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How to Do More with Less

Many folks in western society have been taught by word and deed that being busy makes them a good person. The truth is, being busy does not mean that you are productive. You can be busy doing the wrong things. Getting more done with less implies that the impact you make is more significant than your effort.

 

Some ways to get more done with less:

 

  • Understand your key objectives – For any task, what is the point of doing it? Does this task actually impact any of your critical business objectives or the objective of the one task?
  • Automate – If you can document the steps you do for a task, you can likely automate a lot of it. From using macros within your documentation to implementing new automation tech, there is likely a way to do it.
  • Outsource – If you cannot automate it, you can likely get someone else to do it for you. As a business owner, you should actually make it your goal to outsource or automate almost every task in your business, with few exceptions.
  • Batch tasks – Once you’ve figured out what tasks you really do need to do, batch things together that make sense. The fewer steps you can take, the better. For example, if you need to do bookkeeping, save all your booking entries to do one day a week instead of doing it daily.
  • Avoid multitasking – When you are doing a task, do that task. Don’t do anything else that will take away your focus. No human really can multitask anyway.
  • Create realistic schedules – When you write your tasks into your calendar, it should make sense. If a task takes four hours, you need to ensure you really have four hours and not one. For example, include set up time, drive time, and all the time needed to finish the task as scheduled completely.
  • Do the hard things first – If there is one thing on your list you really don’t want to do, but you cannot eliminate it, automate it, or outsource it, get that out of the way first thing.
  • Track your time – When you first start doing things, it helps to track your time so that you stay mindful of how you’re spending it and so that you know how long any given thing really takes you.
  • Focus on money-making tasks – Note which tasks you do that generate invoicing or money in your pocket. These need to be done first thing.
  • Cut distractions – Set up your workspace to eliminate distractions and interruptions. Turn off notifications, your phone, the TV, or anything that can take your mind off what you are doing.
  • Use the right tools – Don’t skimp on investing in the tools of your trade. If a tool exists to use that helps streamline your business and eliminate busywork, you need it.
  • Know your top five – Everyone has off days, but if you create a list of the top five money-making must-dos for a basic day, then even when you have issues, you can focus on those top five tasks.

 

Remember that being organized in your business is part of what a business owner does. Business owners reduce risk in their business by organizing, planning, and generating new ideas that create new opportunities.

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What Do You Do All Day?

 

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. But, in order to figure out how to automate your business, you first need to know in detail what you do all day long so that you know which tasks can be automated, should be automated, and even whether it’s something you should be doing at all.

Review
Stay focused

In every business, you will have daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, and even yearly tasks or quarterly tasks. The best thing to do is to get out a calendar and enter the items you know you have to do.

 

For example, you have to pay quarterly taxes, and you have to balance your books at the end of the month. You must buy a business license each October or January depending on your location and the rules and laws in your area. Whatever it is that you know for sure has to be done, enter it into your calendar, blocking off the approximate time it will take you to do it.

 

But there are also the daily things you do that generate your income. When it comes to generating income, it’s essential to specify which actions you are doing that generate income and which actions you’re doing that support generating income. Go through the steps you take in your day and write down what you’re doing, step by step.

What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

 

Coaches Example

 

Ø  Business: Coaches retired teachers starting a second career as independent course and project designers.

 

Ø  Morning: Checks the mail, email, and Trello to find out if there are any fires to put out this morning before paying any bills due for the day. Calls her group coaching clients for the weekly hour Zoom group coaching session. Writes 7 product educational and nurturing emails for a new one-on-one coaching product to market to her group coaching clients.

 

Ø  Afternoon: Records part of an online course in development. Transcribes the group call and sets up her part as a standalone presentation video.

 

Ø  Evening: Answers coaching client questions for those who signed up to receive daily emails and schedules them to be delivered in the morning.

 

As you can see, this is just one day out of an entire year and is not representative of all the money-making tasks this coach does, nor is it a complete picture of what happens in the business overall. But it does give you a great idea about where to start automating and even outsourcing. Once you see what you’re doing visually written out, it’s a lot easier to figure out places that you can improve your process. Take the time to write out every process you do each day that you do them. Once you’ve documented the different activities you do each day, you can identify what needs to be perfected and then automated or outsourced or both.

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What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

As a small business owner, you probably think that you have a lot of jobs to do. Some people like to describe the job of a business owner as one that wears many hats. As the saying goes, sometimes you have on your salesperson hat, sometimes you have on your finance hat.

 

It depends on what is happening what your job is at any moment. However, your main job description as a business owner is to plan and organize the daily operations of your business.

 

On any given day, you may be responsible for:

 

  • Developing your business plans
  • Arranging financing
  • Hiring staff or contractors
  • Reviewing sales
  • Developing marketing strategies
  • Overseeing daily activities
  • Identifying opportunities

 

All of these jobs represent your main function as a business owner, which is managing your risk.  In each of these jobs, you really don’t physically do anything other than analyzing what someone else did for you, whether it’s automation or human.

 

Therefore, when you realized that you don’t need to physically do the tasks that you design, your job as a business owner becomes a lot simpler and can be boiled down to risk management.

 

When you realize that your job as a business owner is really one of risk management, it becomes a lot clearer what your main function is as a business owner. Realistically, you may have to wear a lot of hats at first, doing the tasks defined for each, — but it’s your choice to do the projects yourself or not as a business owner.

 

In fact, one can argue that it’s best for a business owner not to physically do the tasks that don’t require them since you only have so many hours in the day. It’s always, or should always, be less expensive to outsource or automate where you can. But you do have to start someplace, and most small business owners start out doing all the tasks themselves.

 

In any case, it can help to understand that finding and setting up automation in your business is one of the roles you play as a business owner. By doing so, you’re going to reduce risks associated with your business because you’re going to ensure those tasks get done in a timely fashion by someone (or something) who knows what they’re doing.

 

The more you can automate, the fewer things you have to outsource, and the bigger and better you can build your business because you’re going to free up your time to do more of what an owner does instead of the tasks involved in each area. After all, one of the reasons you started your own business is so that you can have more work-life balance, right?

 

One can argue whether the idea of balance even exists, but it’s clear that if you’re doing the job of 10 people, it’s hard to find that time freedom, much less anything resembling balance. In fact, you’re very likely to get burned out if you’re a small business owner who thinks that you have to physically do everything in your business. Instead, realize that part of risk management is to find ways to free up your time so that you can devote yourself to discovering new opportunities for your business.