Can you automate parts of your business?
Work efficiently and you will budget efficiently. If you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your money. Automate.
Streamlining where possible is key for small companies and entrepreneurs trying to compete with the big dogs. If you have bottlenecks in your process that can be mitigated through the use of machines, don’t hesitate to automate. Expense management is a great example of a task better left to robots.
Do you still have paper receipts floating around? Products like Veryfi use machines to alleviate the burden of manual human data entry.
Finding solutions that wipe out mindless tasks empowers the people who were previously doing that work. They now have more time to spend on more meaningful tasks that push the needle forward.
Think about it this way:
If you have five employees each spending one hour a day on data entry that’s 25 WASTED hours in just one workweek. Over a month that’s 100 hours! Imagine what you could do for your business with 100 extra employee work hours.
And what about the cost? What are you paying each of those employees per hour? What does 100 hours over the course of a month cost you? There’s no way it’s less than the $15 it costs for a machine to do it. What improvements could you make to your company if you and your employees put 100 more hours worth of money back into your business?
By eliminating this inefficiency you’re not only saving time and money, you’ve also made your operations more efficient.
It’s easy to get lost in the day to day of the startup grind. When there is so much to do, sometimes people develop tunnel vision and lose sight of their goals and company vision. That’s why it’s extremely important to automate when you can. This allows you to transition from working “in” the business to working “on” the business.
Working “in” your business v working “on” your business
You have a plan. You are following that plan. This is vital. But here’s the punchline: Nothing ever goes completely according to plan. So with everything going on, are you nimble enough to make actionable changes that can realistically be implemented? Have you had enough time to take a step back to ask yourself, are we headed in the right direction? Do I or my employees need to re-prioritize? Automating where appropriate is like buying time, which you can use to start thinking strategically and not just tactically.
For early stage startups, this is paramount. Speed and efficiency are key. Would having more time and money in your business help you accomplish your goals faster? The answer is most certainly “yes.”