How to Hack Your Working Week

Small-business owners are faced with a mammoth amount of tasks to tackle and often not enough staff or time to complete them. This can mean that employees have to cover tasks that are outside their job specification, don’t fit within their level of expertise, and distract them from excelling in their own position. 

Automation offers SBOs a way to take back time that can be spent more productively. According to a 2021 report by automation platform Zapier, which surveyed 2,000 U.S. knowledge workers from small and medium businesses, 88% of SBOs said automation allows their company to compete with larger businesses, while 65% said they’re less stressed at work thanks to automating manual tasks.  

By focusing on e-commerce and a new personalized email communication strategy facilitated by automation, we have also been able to grow our online sales by 300%.

—Kristy Alexander, founder, Apple Rose Beauty

The pandemic amplified this shift to automation, with many SBOs having to pivot quickly to meet the needs of their employees, partners, and customers, and stay afloat. This fast adoption looks to stand the test of time as SBOs reap the rewards that automation can bring. These include: 

• Lower error rates, thanks to standardization
• More time for employees to be innovative
• Reduced operating costs due to time saved on manual tasks
• Better customer service – using a chatbot, for example, that can respond to queries immediately
• Improved employee job satisfaction, as repetitive and mundane tasks are removed from their workload 

I spoke to three SBOs who have deployed automation at their business and saved precious time as a consequence. 

Apple Rose Beauty 

I am… Kristy Alexander, founder of vegan skincare company Apple Rose Beauty. 

I save time by… automating my marketing to improve the overall customer experience. Emailing individually with each customer to learn their preferences isn’t feasible, but using email automation through ActiveCampaign allows us to deliver that personalized experience at scale.  

By automating my marketing campaigns, my small team is able to focus on our skincare products and answering customer questions. 

How it works: We use ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation, email marketing, and CRM to create one-to-one experiences for our customers at scale, which saves a ton of time for our team because of how easy the platform is to use. 

It starts with our welcome series. We ask our customers to tell us their biggest skincare challenges. Then, we follow up by sending quizzes based on that response, tagging the contact into different segments with each new bit of information. This allows our team to create personalized experiences based on the data we gather in a way that feels organic, but the automation makes it feasible for our small team to accomplish. 

I also leverage ActiveCampaign’s Facebook integrations to upload my customer list automatically for Facebook paid advertising. I’m able to customize campaigns on Facebook with messaging that’s tied to customer behavior. 

Try it by… interacting directly with your customers and creating an open dialogue, analyzing how they respond. 

Total time saved: We save more than 20 hours per month. Our marketing automation strategy has enabled our small team of three to achieve six-figure sales annually – and we continue to grow. By focusing on e-commerce and a new personalized email communication strategy facilitated by automation, we have also been able to grow our online sales by 300%. 

TaleSplash 

I am… Amy Jackson, founder and CEO of PR agency TaleSplash. 

I save time by… automating the process of helping the experts we work with respond quickly to journalists’ questions. This is especially important when stories need to be filed on a tight deadline. 

How it works: We use Zoom transcription to record our clients’ responses to questions from journalists in whatever format is most convenient for them. Some clients like to respond live on a call together and some prefer to take turns. Either way, we use Zoom to transcribe their thoughts and then quickly clean up the formatting before sending the file off to the journalist in time to meet their deadline. 

Try it by… signing up to a video-conferencing platform to record meetings and keep an accurate record of conversations. 

Total time saved: Transcribing responses saves our clients several hours of time each month and allows us to secure coverage for them for thousands of dollars less than it could cost to do it all without automation. The value of that coverage equates to millions of impressions, traffic to their website, and revenue for their business. 

Ditto Transcripts 

I am… Ben Walker, CEO at transcription services company Ditto Transcripts. 

I save time by… automating our job-log functionality. 

How it works: Our job log was built without any automated functionality, so we had to enter each row and column manually –  this equated to up to 12 pieces of data for each file submitted by our clients. Much of these tasks are repetitive, and a simple program to take care of the repetition frees up my team to work on other tasks and have more time to be personable with the transcriptionists and clients.  

We achieved this purely with formulas and scripting features built into Google Sheets. Now, we can convert timestamps to decimal minutes; auto-calculate pricing and due dates; and summarize daily, weekly, and monthly production totals.  

Try it by… replicating part of a database on Google Sheets and giving access to your whole team to review. 

Total time saved: As we have slowly added more and more automations to our Google Sheets, it has saved us from having to do hand calculations and data entry, allowing us to focus on more pressing tasks. With the current automations set up, it has saved us at least one or two hours of work per day – that’s two and a half to five full days a month in time savings.  

Photo: Getty Images