10 Things Every Small Business Should Automate to Avoid Overwhelm
We wouldn’t call ourselves the queens of automation, but, boy, are we pretty darn good at it. Over the years, we’ve automated more things in our business than we can count, and it’s saved us hours of valuable time that we can focus elsewhere.
We believe automation is a huge piece of the puzzle in allowing small business owners to either avoid or break free of overwhelm. When you have to manage the administrative, financial, marketing, support, and countless other duties in your business, the stress can quickly build up.
That’s why in this blog post, we want to share 10 things we think every small business should automate to avoid overwhelm!
1. Automatic Responses in Gmail
If you don’t have an auto-response created yet, we highly recommend this being one of the first things you aim to do. We know out-of-office responses are common, but we would suggest creating a general year-round one as well.
Personally, we have a year-round auto-response that lets them know we received their message, breaks down general information, and answers a couple FAQs. We include info like:
How to submit a support ticket if they’re a current student
Links to our blog, podcast, and Facebook group for those looking for business strategy, productivity tips, etc.
When to expect a response if they’re submitting a job application
General FYIs regarding podcast guest, affiliate program, and blog contributor inquiries
A link to apply for The Incubator
For those days or weeks that you are out-of-office, you can change up your auto-response to mention that fact and when you’ll be back (preferably at the beginning of the response to make sure they see it).
2. Your Client Onboarding Process
Oftentimes, it’s thought that the words “automate” and “clients” should never be used in the same sentence. There’s a common misconception that this would make you sound robotic or that it’d be obvious it isn’t really “you.”
Really, though, it’s entirely possible to automate your client onboarding process while still sounding like a real, live human being, and we’re able to accomplish this by using Workflows in Dubsado.
You can automate the emails, forms, tasks, scheduled calls, and other crucial steps that follow in your onboarding process. The most manual tasks you would need to complete is sprinkling in a little client-specific personalization to emails or forms before they send off.
We break down how exactly to automate your client onboarding process using Dubsado workflows in this blog post.
3. Your Client Experience
Surprise, we’re using Dubsado to automate our client experience, too! Workflows will allow you to automatically…
Send welcome or thank you emails
Create tasks to physically send welcome or thank you cards
Collect payments
Send recurring invoice reminders
Send check-in emails
Activate the client portal + add important forms and documents inside
Send design approvals or proofs
There are so many possibilities for automating tasks that play into the overall client experience when it comes to using workflows. We teach our students how to do these things to free up time and amplify the experience inside The Incubator.
4. Repinning Content on Pinterest
Whether you have tons of blog posts pumping out regularly like us, or even just a few, automating the way your content is repinned on Pinterest will save you hours in the long run. We like to use Tailwind for this process, and we love using the Smart Loop feature to repin different content automatically.
You’re able to repin content on an evergreen or seasonal schedule, and you get to choose which Pins you’d like to add to the Loop. Those Pins will keep getting rePinned until you remove them from the list, and you can always add new Pins to your Loop.
5. Posting on Instagram
We have no idea what we would do if we weren’t able to schedule our Instagram posts. (You’ll notice saving hours of time is a recurring theme in this blog post and in our business.) Our personal preference of scheduling tool is Later. We’re able to schedule our Instagram posts, plus crosspost to our Facebook page.
If you need to schedule videos, carousel posts, or Stories, the Later app on your mobile device will give you a ping with the images, video, and caption that you can take over to Instagram and post manually at the scheduled time.
6. Canned Email Templates
It’s likely that you send really similar emails often. Instead of retyping the same email over and over again, just create a canned email template that you can use instead. This way, all you’ll need to do is customize it if necessary, but the bulk of the email is already written for you.
We have many email templates set up in our Gmail account for everyday inquiries, plus we use Dubsado’s canned email feature when sending emails often to clients or leads. Read this blog post to learn all about using canned emails in Dubsado.
Some examples of canned emails we have are:
Welcome/onboarding new clients
General inquiry response to Incubator applications
Sending our contract to new clients
Reaching out to potential guests we’d like on our podcast
Accepting or denying guest requests to be on our podcast
Responding to student cancellation requests
“Is this program right for me?” responses
7. How You Collect Leads
Automating the way you collect new leads is an imperative step for service-based business owners. Using Dubsado, you’re able to create a beautifully branded lead capture form that you can either embed on your website or share a public link in your social bios.
From there, you can use workflows to send canned emails in response to your inquiries. You could have a general “Thanks for inquiring” response letting them know you received their inquiry and when to expect a response. This is a huge piece in stepping off on the right foot with potential clients because communication and keeping them in the loop is so important!
If you want to get more advanced with this process, you can map lead capture form answers to specific workflows based on their response. For example, if you use the workflow mapping drop-down menu block to get an idea of their budget, you can map responses that are too low to a “Not a good fit” workflow email. All other responses would get your general inquiry email or even a request to book a call with your Dubsado scheduler link.
Think about what factors are a dealbreaker for you. This could be their budget like in the example we used, how long they’ve been in business, what kind of business they have, etc. Just keep in mind that you can only use the workflow mapping block once in your form, so it should be the question that matters most to you!
8. Keyboard Shortcuts
We’re major fans of using keyboard shortcuts for things that you’re typing out often, like your email address, web page links, DM responses, even Instagram hashtags. If you have an iPhone, all you have to do is head to your Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.
From there, you can the phrase you want to automatically input and the shortcut that will trigger it. For example, “eml” fields our email address, and we have other shortcuts for links to The Co-op, The Incubator application page, our blog, and other pages we’re typing in often. If you get the same DMs often on Instagram, you can create shortcuts for those responses as well!
Just make sure the shortcut is something you aren’t typing often. If you used the shortcut “email” for your email address, then it would add your email address every single time you typed the word “email”, no matter how you’re using it.
9. Recurring Tasks
Using Asana, we’re able to set tasks on a recurring basis that need to be completed regularly. We also can create task templates for tasks that aren’t necessarily recurring, but the same type of task is completed often.
For instance, uploading our Incubator coaching replays to our program platform, Teachable, is a recurring task every Thursday. However, emails we send out that are different but use the same basis are created from task templates.
10. Collecting Testimonials from Clients
We’re talking about our favorite CRM, Dubsado, again! Using workflows, you’re able to automate sending client feedback forms, so that you don’t even have to think about it. If you have a project end date set for a project in Dubsado, you can base when to send your feedback form (like “3 days before project end date,” for example).
For some, asking someone to write kind words about them can be really anxiety-inducing, so putting this process on autopilot avoids those worrisome feelings from surfacing.
And that wraps up our list of 10 things every small business should automate to avoid overwhelm! If you liked these tips, we encourage you to share this post with your friends, or DM us on Instagram (@bossproject) if you have any questions or just want to chat.
