2 Ways to Automate Your Business

Hey everybody, it's Tara Bryan. And you are listening to the course building secrets podcast. Whether you're a coach or a CEO, the success of your team and clients is based on your ability to deliver a consistent experience and guide them on the fastest path to results. This podcast will give you practical real life tips that you can use today to build your online experiences that get results and create raving fans. Why? So you can monetize your expertise and serve more people without adding more time or team to your business. If you're looking to uncover your million dollar framework, package it and use it to scale you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Hey, everybody, Happy March, I am excited to be jumping on with you today. In today's episode, I want to talk about automation. And I want to talk about automation probably a little bit differently than we've talked about it in the past. Or maybe you have heard about it in the past. So often, when entrepreneurs and business owners are looking at their business, the number one thing that they are looking to do is to be more efficient with what they're doing and leverage their time leverage their expertise, and also provide an awesome customer experience, right? So so often, what that looks like is somebody showing up and, you know, creating an offer, and then fulfilling on that offer and doing all of the work themselves or maybe their team. And so every single time there's a new customer or a new client, it is a manual process of you know, attracting them, getting them in the door, having them purchase, and then fulfilling on what it is that you've sold to them. So it's so it's either a manual process, or somebody says, Well, I want to automate the entire thing. And and then they you know, maybe create an auto pilot course, right? So it sells automatically, the fulfillment is automatic, somebody just jumps in, they take the course and then they're done. And what starts to happen, you know, in that process is that the entrepreneur, or business owner doesn't feel as fulfilled, as they did when they were fulfilling for a customer, right. So when when you sold something, then you were doing all the work you were showing up, you're helping you're seeing, you know, the the direct impact of the results that you're helping somebody create. And there was a lot of satisfaction in that there was a lot of, sort of, well, I'm working really hard, but I know I'm making a difference because you're able to, you know, show up and touch and feel it and whatever else. And so the biggest challenge that people have when they start automating their business, is they lose that connection, they lose the very fire that helped them go off and do their own thing in the first place. And most often, when I'm working with people, that's one of the first things that we talk about is, you know, what, what sort of level of involvement Do you want to have with your customers? Do you want to just bring them in, sell them something like a course or a book or something else? Or do you want to have them get the foundational material and then help them solve problems, help them become more successful? What does that look like? In most of the time? People say, Well, yeah, I mean, I want to, you know, have my time, and I want to be able to leverage what I'm doing and scale it. But I also want to be connected. So I need to keep a one on one component, or I need to keep a group component or maybe they're also saying, Hmm, I can't actually,

you know, get success for my people without being there. Right. So that may be another hurdle that that somebody needs to overcome is, well, they can't become successful without me. And so we really unpack that in terms of First of all, like, how do you want to show up? And then second of all, really looking at this from two different points of view. The first one is, what are the sort of process and systems and you know, what parts of that customer journey can you automate? That actually adds efficiency and are things that like maybe you're doing on a regular basis that aren't necessary, right like scheduling meetings or, you know, tracking down zoom call links, and you know, like, administrative type things that if you automated would just save you a lot of time, right? Like, they're not the sort of the highest level of you showing up to help somebody get results. They're just sort of the things, right. So process systems, just, you know, a lot of the repetitive tasks. Those are the very first things that we look at to automate. Because here's the thing, like, those aren't necessarily something that, that you need to be doing, right? Like, there's no purpose in in doing that you can automate sending them a scheduling link. And, and there's no, that's not like the highest value of you spending time working with someone is to do that. So that's the first thing is like, how do you automate your repeatable tasks to repeatable process in your systems in your business, I'm really getting that dialed in, there are a number of those that I would say are common to most businesses, and especially businesses who are trying to scale and and so identifying those, getting those automated having that, that using technology and the tools that are out there to be able to leverage your time in that way, that's a no brainer, that's foundationally, what you need in order to be able to grow your business in the way that you want to grow your business. So you can show up and give the highest value to your customers, once they purchase whatever it is that you're selling. Right. So that's one aspect of it, I would recommend for everyone, that you at least start down that road of identifying your customers journey and looking at, you know, what's the low hanging fruit? Like, what can you automate? What can you create a process or a system around, that gets you completely out of the energy of thinking about that, then the second thing is your fulfillment process in and of itself, right? So when you are helping somebody, get it get a result, right. So you're helping them grow their business, or, you know, do the thing that is your expertise, there are also a lot of ways that you can automate that process. And it doesn't have to be an all or nothing. I think so often, experts out there say, Well, you know, you have to package your thing, and then and then like, you can't ever show up, you can't ever, you know, spend time with your people. Because that's not leveraging your time. And when you find value in what you do, and you love helping people and you love seeing, like, for me, I love seeing the light bulb go off, like when somebody's like, oh my gosh, I didn't know I could do that, or this is something that like, it was a hurdle for me, I love helping people can overcome their own obstacles. If I were to automate that, that then doesn't doesn't add to my fulfillment, right? Because my fulfillment is in helping people become successful. And while I can automate that, and create a virtual version of it, I still have kind of my own need to plug in and help people in various ways. And so I can automate, I don't know, say, 60%, maybe of my customer journey, once the customer becomes part of my world, and, and, you know, we have, you know, a way to automate that whole customer experience. So everything is dialed in, from, you know, here's where you get a thank you note, here's where you get rewards and recognition. Here's where you get, you know, this place where most people have this obstacle in, you know, step three, or whatever, right? Like, all of that's defined, and all of that is automatable.

And, also, I know when I want to show up in that journey, and so we look at that independently, right? We were like, Okay, well, what do we want to automate? How can we automate that? How can we, you know, continue to leverage our time and our experience, so we're helping people at the highest level and not, you know, monkeying around with with things that maybe just are tasks that take up time. And, and really dialing that in, to have an awesome customer experience, create raving fans, and really create a virtual experience that's as good or maybe even better than one that is not automated and one on one. And so, you know, when we're looking at this, you know, one of the things I want you to take out of this podcast today is look at your customer experience. So the very first thing that you need to do is define your customer experience, right like what you know, either your prospect experience Customer experience or both, if you're ready to do that, and, and, and map all of it out, then look at the low hanging fruit that you can automate that really provides no extra value for you to do it, or to have somebody else do it or to have a computer do it right, like scheduling a meeting. I remember back early in my career, we used to spend so much time going back and forth and email trying to figure out a meeting time. Now we just use a scheduling tool and everybody can, you know, look and see when the best time is and then you schedule it automatically. And you get a link and or the phone number and you know when to show up and you get a reminder and all the things, that whole process used to be a manual process that you I bet I spent five hours a week on silly little things like that, right. So that's an example of something that's really easy to automate, it's, you actually could do it for free. And it is,

it will save you a ton of time. Now most likely, you could repeat that kind of activity for I don't know, maybe 10, maybe 15 different activities within the customer journey, that if automated would save you time to just show up and, and do your highest level of work. So map that out, identify those, those, you know, quick opportunities or low hanging fruit. And then really start looking strategically at how you're delivering your experience, be it one on one, be a group be it you know, done for you do it yourself, you know, whatever else, however you're looking at, monetizing your expertise, really look at that, and and think about what parts of it, you can start leveraging your time on what are the pieces and parts that could create an amazing experience that you don't have to continuously make up each and every time. And and then and then start documenting that or start, you know, turning that into a framework and use that to deliver until you are able to grow and scale it right. So you'll start to see where you show up how you want to show up where your energy is the highest. Everything else then, is something that either you can, you know, hand off to a team member or you can set a process around and automate it. So really challenge you to think about automation, think about how you can maximize your time, your energy and your team's time and energy by looking at both sort of the the task and Process automation and the client experience automation. So if you want some additional help with this, I have a free training that may be valuable for you, as you think about automation, you think about how to create an awesome experience that still authentically you, that still puts it in the position of being maybe a virtual version of you. But it's leveraging your time it every single time that you do something over and over and over and over and over and over again. That is something that can be automated and also allows you to show up and do that those higher level problem solving pieces for your clients, which they appreciate more than you spending time on repeatable tasks that could be automated, right? So okay, there you go. There is your course building secret for today, really dial out that process and see what you can come up with. I would love to hear from you what the one thing is that you are going to automate in your business to help you save time. So add that into the feedback or send me an email I would love to hear it. Until next time.