Semi-Automatic Business

Why business owners need to strive for automation.

business is a machine

There are many lenses through which a business can be viewed but one that is very fruitful for business owners is seeing their business as a machine, a machine for securing sales and delivering on sales promises. Even if our business offers a highly bespoke service or product, inherent in business is that there are repeating processes in the background.

This puts the business owner in the position of the mechanic, building and fine-tuning their machine to perform its function, and if we want a business that is efficient at producing profit we will need to make sure that each of these processes are well designed, robust and running smoothly with little management in other words, semi-automatic.

The good news is that almost everything in business repeats to a certain extent. The questions your prospects have, the stumbling blocks to people buying from you, the delivery problems, and the staff issues all tend to repeat. It is up to us to design the solution that will work for our business.

by design

Very often, under the pressure of time, a business owner comes up with a way to do something without much thought. That is understandable but if we are going to maximise our profits we need to think through the solution. Many times given the time to look at their processes, business owners can see the inefficiencies they have baked into the business.

Over time we need to examine each process and find the solution that works for our business. Often we can learn from how others do things but however much we copy we will have to build it into the way our business works.

robust and automatic

Then once, designed the process needs to be made robust and automatic. We need to document it so that we and others can repeat it over and again. We may need copy and checklists we can roll out. It is unlikely that software can automate every aspect of our process, but the more we can get software to do, the better. We need to train people and crucially keep reminding them of the process until it becomes second nature.

A mindset and a habit

Of course, this is not a one-off event. We can’t design and implement every process at once and even processes that we have put in place will need review and improvement.

We need a mindset that spots the repeating problems and identifies the little systems that will give us the greatest return on our time. It is surprising how very small changes in processes can produce big results. We need to keep our eye out for the things that are eating up time and other resources. Sometimes the solutions are incredibly simple.

We also need to make time for this work and that is what Michael Gerber made famous in his concept of Working on the Business vs Working in the Business. Without the investment of our time and focus, the business will be unprofitable and start to fall apart.