What to automate first in a small business
Most small businesses do not have an automation problem. They have a handful of repeated tasks that eat hours every week. The skill is in choosing the right first one.
Three questions to rank tasks
List every repeated task you can think of, then score each one on three questions.
- How often does it happen? Something done 30 times a week saves far more than something done twice a month.
- What does a mistake cost? Wrong amounts on a quotation, a missed follow-up or a forgotten reminder all have a price. Tasks where errors hurt are good candidates, because software is consistent.
- Can you write the rule down? If you can explain to a new employee exactly what to do in five or six steps, a machine can follow it. If it relies on judgment that changes every time, keep a human in the loop.
Good first candidates
- Copying enquiries from a website form, calls or chat into one place and notifying the right person
- Sending appointment or payment reminders to people who agreed to receive them
- Producing the same weekly report from the same sources
- Generating documents from a template, such as a quotation or an agreement draft
Poor first candidates
- Anything that happens rarely
- Anything where the rules are still being worked out
- Anything that needs a sensitive judgment call, such as handling a complaint
Write the manual process first
Before building anything, write the current process as numbered steps: who starts it, what information arrives, where it is stored and what the output looks like. Doing this often exposes steps that can simply be removed, and removing a step is cheaper than automating it.
Start small and measure
Automate one task end to end. Keep the manual method available for a few weeks. Compare time spent and errors before and after, using your own numbers. Only then move to the next task.
Keep humans able to step in
Every automation should show what it did, and make it easy for a person to correct or stop it. A failure that nobody notices is worse than no automation at all.