5 Processes Every Small Business Owner Should Automate Today

As a small business owner, you know that there are tools out there to help you maximize your efforts. Automation is a forceful way to win the attention game and ensure that you are spending your time growing your business rather than using your time to complete repetitive tasks. If you have not automated any of these tasks, it is now time to liberate yourself and do the work to automate these processes.

Domain Renewal

Since we are well into the 21st century, we don’t need to quibble about the need and necessity of having a fully realized website with all your company’s information available (but not in a PDF please). You have a FAQ and contact form and your website has a sign-up form for your newsletter, right? But have you put your domain renewal on automatic renewal?

As your web traffic grows, you become a bigger target for snipers who will snag the URL you’ve lovingly raised and nurtured as soon as it becomes available and then offer to sell it back to you at a grossly inflated price. Avoid this heartbreak by making sure your domain renewal is automatically paid for every time it comes up for renewal. Check your credit card’s expiration date and make sure to enter that information into your calendar (even if it’s years in the future) to ensure that no part of this sequence ever goes astray.

Social Media Platforms

We are so fortunate to have a variety of social media websites where we can send our messages straight to our customers and potential clients, but the reality is that it is easy to bogged down in maintaining the consistency of our message across platforms.

That is why if you use a social media platform to access your social media accounts, you can release some of the friction of bouncing around from website to website by using the platform to interact with all your social media profiles. Many of these platforms offer scheduled posts, the ability to manage several profiles, access to multiple social media websites from one dashboard, and much more. The most prominent platforms also offer a free version where you can get your feet wet, but the paid services offer advantages that make them great deals.

Newsletters

We are in the midst of a newsletter boom. Email newsletters are the stealth weapon for getting your clients’ attention. In the old days, newsletter subscription databases were usually updated by hand. Many newsletter purveyors still maintain this method out of stubbornness or fear, but the services that are available today are astounding, and they do it at a very fair price (hint: some are free).

These services assist in maintaining your subscriber list, give you metrics on click-through rates to help you see what gets your readers going, and will even offer ways to personalize your message. While your hand-crafted newsletters may be fun to create, unless it’s a central part of your business, it’s best to automate this process and leave yourself free for the vital work of your business.

Scheduling Staff

If you are in charge of scheduling staff every week or two, you know how tedious the process can be. Thank goodness for employee scheduling software. With it, you can see at a glance who’s available for a given shift, review days off requests, and even email or text your team the new schedule.

Calendars

Every year you buy a calendar on sale after New Year’s Day and place it somewhere prominent to keep track of your schedule, and there it sits when you need to know what’s happening in two weeks…except when you’re not in the office, so you have wait until you return to set your appointment. Hopefully, this scenario is a distant nightmare, but if you are using your phone to keep track of your schedule, but don’t have access to your calendar on the web, this scenario is closer than you think.

Sync your calendars and update them religiously. This is where outsourcing your memory to the cloud has great advantages. If you are chronically late, you can have your calendar ping you and remind you when it’s time to leave. If you need to make sure someone else is available and you’re using the same calendar service, you can invite each other to meetings. You and your team can coordinate your game plan for that new account on a shared calendar. The options are infinite and give you, the user, the opportunity to powerfully deploy your calendar across platforms and devices.

I say, if there’s a tool that you can use to automate a process, use it, and reap the benefit of the time you save.

Author: Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007 and again in 2010 and 2013.