Starting a business is hard enough but scaling it can be even more challenging. Now, it is more important than ever to take advantage of automation tools early on so you can streamline essential business processes to free up time as a business owner. In this article, a successful entrepreneur Keith Orie shares 4 steps to automate your business so that it runs with little oversight.

Select Which Tasks to Automate

The first step in automating your business is to determine which tasks should be automated. It may seem basic enough, however it is crucial that automation tools should be harnessed in the proper way to provide the most benefits to the company.

Just because there are automation tools out there, it doesn’t mean your business needs to automate every process possible. Identify which processes are critical to your business that are tedious, reoccurring, and capable of being run by an algorithm without error. Common tasks that benefit from automation include publishing posts to social media outlets at specific times, generation of reports, invoicing, email generation for leads, and certain customer contact. Once you determine which tasks can be automated, you can begin the process of determining which tools will accomplish your business goals.

Create Goals for Automation Processes

Once you have determined which processes will be automated, your business needs to create goals and targets to ensure the automation process is accomplishing what your business needs. What good does an automation tool attain if it costs more money to invest in a tool than the process produces for the business?

Goals can either accomplish freeing up time for employees to complete other tasks or to bring in a specific amount of revenue. What does the value add to your business by automating a task? Examples of targets may include a specific number of leads generated, leads converted, contracts delivered, and more.

Review Results and Adjust as Needed

If your business does not set specific goals for automation processes to meet, it may be difficult to identify if the processes are actually helping the business. Once you set targets, it is just as important to review the processes to determine if they are working or not. Routinely reviewing processes will allow your business to refine and adjust targets and processes to ensure goals are still being met.

If a process is successfully meeting a target, that may be a sign to increase goals to allow tools to continue to grow with the business.

Engrain Automation into the Culture of Your Business

As your business grows and adapts, you may realize that automation becomes more than just a technology that improves your workflow. A mindset develops along with the technology that asks the question “Can we automate that?” Each new project and process can be approached with the mindset of efficiency and determining how it can be automated. Over time, yourself and others in the business may be able to take a step back and continually reevaluate what tasks take up the most time and what can be automated to allow focus on more important opportunities.

About Keith Orie

Keith Orie is a customer-oriented entrepreneur and owner of Advanced Medical Sales, LLC. He started the company to give patients a chance to live a life not dependent on pain relief medication or invasive procedures. By providing medical professionals access to an extensive range of top-of-the-line durable medical equipment, he helps provide patients with effective pain relief treatment.