How Small Business Automation Can Make You More Money.

When it comes to the New Year, we all have personal goals as well as business goals, and somewhere between the two lies the goal to have more money and more time.

Unfortunately, the two often counteract each other, in that in the conventional working world if you want more money then you normally have to invest more time.

Whereas if you want to have more time, you normally need to work less hours which results in making less money.

At either end of the spectrum, life begins to feel rather unstable and unbalanced.  

You, therefore, want to find a way to make more money whilst at the same time having more time, and the key to this can be found in the principle of automation.

What is small business automation?

It is using the tools of technology to take care of recurring business tasks, that you require to grow your business. But often takes up a chunk of your time.

When you do small business automation, you free up time to focus on the more intricate aspects of your home business that cannot be automated.

Tim Ferris in his New York Times Bestselling Book, The Four Hour Workweek describes the importance of using small business automation and/or tools to take the strain off of us business owners.

Similar to how a wrench leverages effort, you want to find strategies to leverage your own effort in order to make more money whilst saving more time.

 

How small business automation makes you money

-You free up your time and achieve more with the same time slot hence making more.

-Helps you to concentrate on the core aspects of your business hence helping you to grow.

-You avoid burn out and become more creative as you grow your business.

-With growth comes more money and with more money. You can hire more staff and move from being a solopreneur to having others help you power your vision.

 

Small business automation could be, for instance, using an email service such as MailChimp to manage email marketing campaigns rather than sending out emails individually.

 

It could also be using virtual  services such as call answering to take some of the pressure off of your shoulders, while still ensuring your clients and customers receive top quality service.

 

Home business owners often make the mistake of thinking that they do not need business process automation. Because they are small and often try to do everything manually.

There in lies the mistake because without automating your business you will not grow as a small business.

You will spend a lot of time doing repetitive tasks that eat up your time as business and fail to do the more important tasks that will grow your business.

Small business automation will not only free up physical time, but headspace as well. As it will give you the peace of mind and certainty that things are running smoothly.

Rather than having to respond to situations like a firefighter, ready to jump into the action at the sound of the bell.

You want to be able to relax and focus on your business at a strategic level. Rather than feeling exhausted as a result of it taking over your life.

Before you jump into small business automation, there is something which must come first, that is planning for your business.

 

Planning For Automation

When you plan your business ahead of time, you know what to automate and what to concentrate on doing yourself.

Lack of proper planning will leave you without a proper strategy on how to approach your business.

I plan for my small business ahead of the year but even in the Newyear I keep tweaking my plans.

As I think on what to how to make it work out well.

Of course, I am like you a small business owner who tends to have lots of ideas scattered all over the place.

I got fraustrated with checking different pages of my notebooks for ideas I thought I wrote down somewhere.

So I designed a planner that will suit you as a small business person and help you to get the best out of your home business this year.

The home business planner comes with 36 pages of evergreen templates.

that will enable you to brainstorm your business ideas, from idea generation to execution.

This planner makes planning your home business for a whole year a piece of cake.

It helps you to itemize what you need to do to take your business to another level.

You have quarterly plans to help you manage your plans in bite sized format that will help you move fast.

To see a demo of the pages on this planner, go here.

Now that you are done planning, the next step in your small business automation plan here is

Outline the business processes you want to automate and then find tools which you will use to automate them.

Not all business process automation tools cost money, there are free automation tools too.

Here are examples of business processes you can automate.

 

Business Processes You Can Automate

 

1-SALES CYCLE

A sales cycle is the term used to describe, amongst other things, the steps taken between a customer finding out about your product or service to the point they become a customer and buy something from you.

One of the most laborious and costly processes in any business is lead generation and converting those leads into sales.

But today, this process can be entirely automated through the integration of your leads with email management software like MailChimp.

MailChimp allows you to create landing pages for your leads that you gain from advertising on Facebook.

By offering integration with Facebook, you cut down the time you would have spent transferring contacts from Facebook to your email list.

So your leads go from getting your advertised free offers to landing in your email list where they begin the process through your sales funnel.

Hence freeing up your time for more core business operations.

The best thing about this tool is that a good part of it is free to use.

 

2-Pageview Growth via Pinterest.

There was a time when the only way you could grow your pagevies via Pinterest was by manual pining.

But the only snag was there you had to invest a lot of time, to be able to achieve meaningful pageview growth through Pinterest.

Then enter Tailwind, a tool that changed the equation. With Tailwind you can pin as much as 30 pins in a day without touching a Pinterest button.

You just set it up as your small business automation tool and it keeps pining for you.

When you sign up with Tailwind, you get your first 100 pins free.

You can also join my tribe on tailwind for free.

Sign up for a free trial here.

 

3-FULFILLMENT

The process of posting and packaging items that have been sold can be very time-consuming.

Particularly if you are a single business owner, selling lots of items each week.

Fortunately, today, you can outsource your product fulfilment using dropshipping  method.

Where a third party takes care of postage, packaging, and sometimes even creating the product on your behalf on an ‘as and when’ basis.

Dropshipping is a method of fulfillment where a manufacturer or distributor ships a product to your customer on your behalf.

 Amazon, for instance, is one of the leading providers of this model.

Dropshipiing will free you up from holding inventory or running around tracking inventory.

You can now concentrate on making sales while someone else does the hard work of fulfilling your orders

Small business automation is a key process in helping your home business to grow and make more money.

As you automate the less key aspects of your business and focus on the aspects that power that growth.

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