Automation can feel overwhelming, but starting is simpler than you think. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How can I automate my business?”, this guide is here to help. Imagine saving 10 hours a week or scaling faster with fewer resources—this guide will show you practical steps to make automation work for your business.

Although automation requires some initial setup, it can free your team from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value work. From improving customer experience to scaling your operations, automation is the key to unlocking growth and efficiency.

In this guide, you’ll learn practical steps to start automating your business, along with use cases, tools, and expert tips. Let’s dive in. 

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Simple Automation Use Cases for Small Businesses

If you’re asking yourself, “How can I automate my business?” here are the areas to consider: 

• accounting
• scheduling
• emailing
• project management (Asana, Trello, Monday.com, ClickUp, etc.)
• image creation (blog post
• publishing
• document creation (PDFs, reports, assessment results)
• invoicing
• sending emails
• generating quotes
• creating contracts and agreements
• onboarding clients
• pulling off data from the web routinely
• and even analyzing and evaluating it

Want to learn more about how automation drives real results? Check out this article on real use cases of automation for practical examples across industries.

Why Should I Automate My Business?

Automation isn’t just for large corporations. Even small businesses can reap significant benefits:

• Save Time: Automate repetitive tasks like scheduling and invoicing.

• Scale Faster: Handle growing workloads without increasing staff.

• Improve Accuracy: Reduce errors in data entry and workflows.

• Boost Employee Satisfaction: Free your team to focus on meaningful work.

For example, we helped a yoga studio automate their business bookkeeping, saving them 10 hours a month. Similarly, a client-facing team automated scheduling, saving 10 hours a week. These results show how simple steps can have a big impact. If you’re wondering “how to automate my business,” you’re not alone. Let’s dive into the steps you can take to start today.

For more inspiration, explore workflow automation ROI and see how automating workflows can directly impact productivity and costs.

How to Start Automating Your Business: Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Identify Repetitive Processes

To begin automating your business, follow these steps:

• Identify Repetitive Tasks:  Look at your top "To Do" items, and find ways to break them down into smaller tasks and activities that you can automate in their entirety. What tasks are repeated daily or weekly by your team?
• Prioritize High-Impact Tasks: Focus on time-consuming activities or tasks prone to errors. What is taking up your employees’ time?
• Get Feedback: Ask your team what processes slow them down or frustrate them.

If you’re unsure, a good rule of thumb is: “If it’s repetitive, boring, or time-consuming, you should automate it.”

For example, businesses often start by automating tasks like scheduling, invoicing, or email reminders. These simple changes make a big difference.

If you’re automating repetitive HR tasks, consider this guide on enhancing HR through automation for actionable insights tailored to employee management.

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Step 2: Fix Broken Processes First

The first rule in automating any business process is to make sure it is not broken. Look at the obvious, easy-to-fix processes. If your process is broken, it might be better to first make it more efficient. 

A broken business process can be anything from an inefficiently slow one, such as a paper form that has to be filled out in triplicate, to one that everyone knows is broken, like paying bills by check.

A task might be taking unnecessary steps, such as requiring approval from an executive when it could get it from someone else, or when it could now skip the approval altogether.

The first step is to ask people, "Do you think this is broken?" Or, "Does this seem slow and inefficient?"

Once you’ve fixed those, find the processes that are now well-optimized, and automate them.

For example, leveraging automation tools for CRM and marketing can streamline processes without introducing inefficiencies. Learn more in our blog on benefits of automated marketing and CRM to see how it simplifies client management.

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Step 3: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

A final thing to be mindful of is to make sure that your changes do not break processes that are already working well.

For example, if salespeople spend a lot of time making cold calls, but it is a process that works and one that they do not find mundane, you can automate auxiliary parts of that process. You can, for example, automate the follow-up calls that salespeople do, or automate finding leads in the first place, particularly if you can increase the quality of the prospects that your salespeople are calling.

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Step 4: Choose the Right Approach

Read a more in-depth article on how to choose your approach here.

You can choose to automate the tasks yourself using off-the-shelf tools such as Zapier. You might alternatively choose to hire a Zapier expert to do it for you. Or you can find a specific tool that does exactly what you need such as MailChimp.

Having mass appeal comes with compromises. You might find that you cannot automate your process well enough, find that you have to use wonky workarounds, or be inputting data twice.

Hiring an in-house developer or contracting one can help solve some really challenging automation problems and minimize the recurring costs of running the automation. But it takes time to hire/vet and manage.

Contracting an expert firm or consultant will usually be the fastest and most fool-proof way to get the job done, but not all business needs call for one.

For e-commerce businesses, explore Amazon automation and see how automation transforms order processing, inventory management, and customer support.

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Measure ROI: Is It Worth Automating?

A long-time client wanted us to automate a task they only carried out once or twice a month. Instead of seeing a return in the typical 3-month range, it would take 1.5 years before the savings justified the expense.

Knowing what the highest impact tasks to automate is key for an effective roll-out. There is little point in spending 10 hours automating something that will only save you 20 minutes, once a month.

Granted, this was a particularly tedious task and they appreciated the increased employee satisfaction so much that they pushed ahead. In that vein, keep in mind other aspects of automation that can be positive.

One client had such niche scheduling requirements and therefore, quite a complicated system to manage them, that appointments were being booked at wrong times, people received confirmations late or never, and data needed to be input twice. It was a headache, and it was hurting their brand reputation.

Custom integration and automation did away with all of this, apart from having a 450% monetary ROI in the first year alone. Saving their employees 10 hours a week, at $20/h, meant they saved a total of $10,400 and only spent $2,300. Dive deeper into automation’s ROI potential in our article on workflow automation ROI.

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More Than You Think Can Be Automated

At the same time, don’t let your imagination stop you. You would be surprised at how many things can be automated, despite seemingly requiring thought. “Thought”, so-to-speak, can be automated through relatively simple code and rules, and on the particularly complex end, through natural language processing, or pattern recognition.

Taking a look at popular automation can give you an idea. Just as well, asking your employees can give you a great insight into what bogs their day down. Warning: approaching this tactfully is key to a successful implementation, as employee buy-in is paramount. It can be easy to fear for one’s job when the business owner starts talking about automation.

Read: Losing Jobs to Automation

An analysis of a report can be automated. The numbers can be crunched, and if there’s a general rule of thumb that’s followed to highlight key numbers e.g. competitor is undercutting you, you might run out of stock sooner if sales keep going the way they are, or one of your investments has increased returns but more than tripled volatility – complex rules can be written and dynamic analyses and reports can be created.

Another example of automation that might not be as obvious would be if customers typically request some sort of data, whether from themselves or from another source. You might have a person digging through files, understanding them, and formatting them. If you have their data on file, even on PDFs, you can build a button that triggers the software to pull that data or even find it within a PDF and send it in various ways.

A real-life example includes people requesting that one of our clients send them a report about a third-party product the client owns. They pay the $15 fee, enter the product’s identifying number, and the software automatically pulls all the data from the third-party server for a $1 fee, formats it, brands it, and sends it to the customer.

Finally, if you regularly publish blog posts, you might constantly be reposting them on various social channels. You might even be editing and formatting a photo in various ways e.g. include the article title, author, blog image, etc.

It’s repetitive, follows certain rules of thumb, and can be automated.

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Getting Started: One Bite at a Time

Automating your business is a process. It involves changing how you do things, and that takes time. But automatic processes increase productivity and increased productivity leads to more profit, which makes your life easier and your company more profitable.

So, how do you get started? 

First, start small. Take one department or process -- accounting, for example. Identify one task that could be done more quickly, more efficiently, and without human error. Automate that task.

Next, automate a second task. 

The third, and the fourth. Write down a list of tasks, then automate the ten tasks you can automate. Repeat the cycle. 

At first, automation will be expensive. But every time you automate, you'll be saving money, and the savings will accumulate. And you'll end up with a system that is much cheaper to maintain because you'll only have to do maintenance on a very small number of tasks.

To simplify the process and discover 36 actionable automation strategies, download our free guide. Your competitors are already using automation to save time, cut costs, and scale faster. Don’t get left behind!
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👉 Download the Free Automatin Guide

Conclusion

We have seen business transformation first-hand and played an integral role in their automation efforts. Fair warning: Automation can be addictive. Every single one of our clients has come back with new ideas and ways we can automate their business to the point where there was little else to automate.

Automation can transform your business. By saving time, reducing costs, and boosting productivity, you’ll achieve faster growth and improved employee satisfaction.

Ready to automate your business?

👉 Claim Your Free Tech Strategy Session with our experts today.

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