Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello, you're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough.

Keila Hill-Trawick: In the past couple episodes, you've heard us talk about scaling and what that means for your business, and how outsourcing can really support you in doing that and what I tried to sprinkle through. There is also this idea of automation. What does it look like to really automate some of the processes within your company, so that you can [00:01:00] streamline processes and enhance efficiency? This is incredibly important when you're going to be a small team, because since you don't have the hands to do all of the work, those resources and tools that you're going to use in order to make your business better need to be top notch. But it also means that you need to understand them. So let's dig into how automations can positively impact small businesses, and how you might be able to use it to help your business thrive. So when we're talking about automation, I am thinking about technology [00:01:30] and software that execute repetitive tasks for you with as little human intervention as possible.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Sometimes this can commoditize things, but what we want to make sure is that we're using the people in the business for their brains, that they are not doing things that maybe software or platforms could do for us, and then we can be responsible for reviewing and interpreting that information for our clients. This can be everything from data entry to email marketing to the way that people sign up to work with you. These all can use automation [00:02:00] in a way that allows you, as always, to focus on the thing that you really want to be doing. While the computer takes some of this stuff off of your plate. Now, for a long time, automation seemed like it was only really relevant and available to really large businesses. We didn't necessarily have access to the same software, and usually it was cost prohibitive when you really wanted to get into it as a small business. But in relatively recent times, software has really started talking directly to us. They want small [00:02:30] businesses to use them in order to make their jobs easier. And so we have a lot more options in what we can use, not just as systems, but as components within systems to really help make our jobs easier. Now we can automate essential processes or at the very least, help automate.

Keila Hill-Trawick: One of the things that I think is really important at Little Fish is that we have this balance between a hand. So an actual human touch and what we're doing with software. And we want to make sure that when we're communicating with clients, when we're having conversations [00:03:00] with them, that they are getting a human being, and that these automations, this software, this tech is really supporting us in being able to be one on one with our clients. We'll talk about some examples in a second, but I just wanted to make that point to say, we don't just want to be talking about the software, we don't want our clients or our customers to be talking to robots. We want to make sure that we're doing a good balance between, you are talking to me, and I am being supported, and I am able to be more efficient for you because [00:03:30] of the resources at my fingertips to make my, uh, role more efficient. All right. So what do we mean by automations and how can they increase efficiency and productivity. Well I did promise a couple of examples. So I'm thinking about things like appointment scheduling. So sending a link instead of back and forth emails to try to figure out when you can next be available on someone's calendar data entry. Um, some of this can be automations between systems. So when somebody [00:04:00] signs up, for example, on a form on your website, maybe they automatically get added to your mailing list.

Keila Hill-Trawick: This stops somebody from having to manually go do that on your behalf. I'm also thinking about things like invoice generation. Maybe you have a service where once the contract is generated, it automatically generates the invoice right after it. You see how that could be an extra step for you to do. Finding tools that will do that for you automatically mean that you are not the stopgap or the bottleneck [00:04:30] for the next step in the process to happen. Waiting on you to press a button. So think about automation as a force multiplier, right? It helps businesses to accomplish more and less time, but you want to use the right ones. Automate too much and nobody feels like they're talking to a real person. Or and what is more common? Something breaks and you don't know where to fix it. So you want to make sure that you're not creating a new job for yourself, particularly if you're going to be the one [00:05:00] that is responsible for the automations that are happening in your business. I wouldn't be me if we didn't talk about finances. Automations can be a cost savings. We've talked about this in other episodes, but there are times when you think you need another person and you actually just need something to happen automatically for you. I think about admin task, where it may be more beneficial for you to have an operations person who is building the systems behind the scenes but isn't necessarily, uh, responsible for [00:05:30] implementing or doing all of the menial tasks.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Sometimes you do need an admin, sometimes you just need a better system. But that cost savings of not hiring faster than you need to is really going to be beneficial, especially for small businesses that are already working on margins where they're trying to make sure that they're using the right amount of money for the right things. When you choose to invest in automations at a lower cost, you're able to invest the extra money in other areas. So that could be [00:06:00] product development, marketing, or even customer support. Those things that are really going to make a difference in your business. If all of the underlying tasks are already taken care of. You also get to have a significant savings in terms of employee related costs. So remember, if you don't need a person, then you don't have payroll taxes or benefits or, um, insurance and training, all of those things that cost with bringing a person on. Now caveat here I believe in people. It is really important to me at Little Fish that we [00:06:30] are hiring individuals who are empowered to take care of our clients in ways that we know we can trust them to do. The point of automation is not to replace people. It's to make their jobs easier. It's to make them more available for the client work that we're actually doing.

Keila Hill-Trawick: For those client conversations and interactions that we look forward to, and not leave them mired in these smaller tasks that could be done automatically for them with the help of a computer. The other thing that I think is important to note about automation is that it can [00:07:00] improve accuracy and reduce errors. And I will say not just because it is doing it for you and is better at it, but because the first time a human looks at it, it isn't to data entry. So think about things like a tax return. If I can do a tax return where it will automatically let me pull in W-2 information the first time that a person looks at it, they are reviewing that information to make sure that it matches what we got from the client. If their first task is data entry, it can lead [00:07:30] to more errors because now they're reviewing their own work. And I don't know about you, but for me that has always been really difficult to catch my own mistakes. And so when the first level can be automation that is being taken care of for you, when you look at it, you're looking with fresh eyes. You didn't put that information in there. And so your ability to reconcile it against other support documents is amplified by the fact that you didn't do it in the first place.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Now, why is this important? Well, first of all, your reputation depends on it, right? None of us are perfect. But [00:08:00] the more errors that you have, the more you show clients that you're not necessarily as, um, detail oriented as they would expect you to be. I would say the other thing about that is, especially when it comes to accounting and billing, there are additional penalties and interest and all kinds of things that can happen when there are financial errors. And we just want to make sure that we are limiting those as much as possible. Again, and I say this all the time, nobody's a machine. Mistakes are going to happen. But [00:08:30] this just provides a way for us to make less of them, which I for one, as a recovering but kind of not recovering perfectionist, am always glad for. Another thing that automation can do for you is it can make data collection and analysis much more powerful than what our brains can comprehend. Remember, automations can take data from a whole lot of places, put it together, manipulate it, and then report out to you information that you might want. This means that small businesses can leverage [00:09:00] this data like customer behavior, sales trends, and even the performance of marketing campaigns. Can you imagine doing that by hand? I mean, if you're me, you're also used to doing things by hand, like math that we now have calculators to do.

Keila Hill-Trawick: But I digress on me just being old. The point of this is that the time that you would be taking to do this manually can actually be taken care of for you, so that you can actually spend your time analyzing what those reports are telling you in order to make faster strategic [00:09:30] decisions about what the business might need to do next. These data driven decisions really allow you to fine tune what you're doing in the business. You can allocate resources more effectively, and you get to make decisions that not only drive growth, but also make sure that you, your team, and your clients are being taken care of in the best ways possible because now you're making decisions with support, information, and not just anecdotal based on what you think is happening in the company. Finally, we talk a lot here about [00:10:00] scalability and growth, especially when it comes to being intentional about doing so. And automation supports that because it allows processes to adapt to increase workloads and customer demands. So as you start growing, as your business starts changing, as various things within start happening for the business, you really want automations behind the scenes to start capturing those details for you so that your workload doesn't get heavier. Um, as you think about intentional growth and not growing too [00:10:30] fast, you want to make sure that where there are areas where you see that there's going to be an issue, you can catch those in advance.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So, for example, if you got an automation that was great for you when you had 100 clients but feels like it starts breaking at 150, you can kind of nip that in the bud and figure out what you need to do next. That doesn't lead to like the termination of an employee or an overall in your business. I'll say that from my perspective and from our clients perspectives, um, automation and operations [00:11:00] is really the game changer in the business. Nearly everything that you do is really based on this foundation of how strong your systems and processes are, and using automation as part of that is really going to strengthen your ability to figure out where you need to touch things and where things don't necessarily need as much of your attention. So at the end of the day, automation isn't just a buzzword. It really is a practical tool. It can enhance efficiency, cut costs, and [00:11:30] ultimately provide a superior customer experience, which is most important on our end. We want to make sure that clients are getting what we want to offer in the way that we hope to provide it for them, and having these little tech bots in the background do some of that work for us allows us to be able to provide an excellent customer service experience, because we have room and space to be able to do that.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Now, remember, as you're doing automations, that the journey can be just as rewarding as the destination. [00:12:00] There are a lot of new things that you can learn, a lot of new ways that you can play with technology and software in order to figure out how it best serves your business. It's not just about saving time, even though that's what we talked about a lot. You have the opportunity to really unleash creativity about how do you want to show up? How do you want your team to be able to work, and what are the ways that you can use tech to make your business the one that you want it to be at the size that makes sense for you, fulfilling the goals [00:12:30] that you set out for the business to begin with. So excited to talk about automations today, and we'd love to hear from you! What are your favorite ones? What are the automations that have kind of saved the day for your business? Shoot us a message at podcast at Accounting Comm. We'd love to hear from you.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link [00:13:00] is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.