5 Automation tricks to boost your business efficiency.

The core of automation focuses on implementing a system to complete a task (mainly repetitive) without the need for human intervention. Therefore, you first need to focus on those things you do that are repetitive.

There are hundreds of opportunities to automate and most of them are easy and cheap to achieve. I am not talking about fully automate your warehouse or production line like Amazon or Tesla as that would require enormous amounts of money and time. Instead, look at the little things that take you 2-3 minutes to do, if you can automate those, you can save hours of your day every day. So here are 5 that are easy to do and apply for most businesses.

1. Automate payments

In my opinion, this is by far the most important, most small businesses struggle with cashflow, and getting paid on average 50 times faster will boost your cashflow. Think PayPal, Stripe, Wepay, etc, there are plenty of options. Adding an easy automated way of paying will save hundreds of hours chasing payments.

2. Sales and Marketing

From things like the automated text or email follow up, or a reminder for an abandoned shopping cart, checking in with that lead that's gone cold and generating new leads. Apps like MailChimp, Zoho, or Keap can help you automate your emailing campaigns, replying to emails, and much more.

3. Tasks and Collaboration

Make it easy and automate your workflow, from the very first step to the last. Apps like Asana, DropTask in combination with Zapier will help you connect multiple tools and automate workflows. No more time spent sending emails with long trails assigning work to a team member.

4. Document Management

This is a big one and there are a lot of big players out there. Document management means a lot more than just saving your files on the cloud and being able to access them whenever, wherever. But it's also about its ability and efficiency in sharing, internally and externally, managing access permissions, managing rights (copyright), its security and compliance, and other capabilities like e-signing. The most popular players here are OneDrive, DropBox, GoogleDrive, and Box.

5. Email

There are several apps like Slack or Trello that, together with Outlook, Gmail, or the current provider you use, can help you centralise and automate communication, while also avoiding thousands of internal emails.

Most importantly, start with a map of your workflow and identify where you can automate. Investigate apps that work together and are easy to implement. start with a trial, most of this apps have an intro subscription and/or a free trial.