How much time do you spend on manual, repetitive computer tasks in your business? The answer may surprise you. In today’s episode of “Make Space for More,” Melissa Swink discusses the third step of the Make Space for More framework, which is to simplify and automate your business. 

Melissa highlights the negative impact of manual work on business owner productivity and teaches how to use tools and resources to streamline and automate repetitive tasks. Work smarter - not harder! Listen to hear examples of how apps, software, checklists, templates, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) can be used to simplify and automate business processes, setting you up for successful delegation down the line. Don’t miss this episode if you want to learn how to buy back hours of your time by identifying repeatable processes and making them more efficient!

Key Highlights:

• Manual work reduces your ability to make an impact on your business. 
• Simplifying and automating business processes can save time and increase efficiency.
• Tools like apps, software, checklists, templates, and SOPs can be used to streamline and automate tasks.
• Making a list of repeatable processes and finding ways to simplify and automate them is a crucial step in growing and scaling a business.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about step three of the Make Space for More framework, which is to simplify and automate your business. Because the reality is, the more manual work that either you or your team is doing in your business, the more that that is...

reducing the overall impact and the results that you can achieve because it's taking additional time and energy that doesn't need to be taken up. And there are so many wonderful tools and resources available to not only make all of our time more efficient, but also introduce some automations as well to completely remove some of the work that we're doing in our businesses, which is really, really good news for all of us. So I wanted to share an interesting statistic that I came across with you.

particular study focused on office workers and in my own experience and experience through working with my clients and with my team members, I think that our, that, you know, approximate three hours a day is probably about accurate. When you think about, when I think about the days when I was a solo business owner and when I dive into the way that my clients are spending their time often, you know, before they start working with our team or when they're taking a look at.

Okay, I'm at capacity in my business. How do I continue to grow? What does working with a VA team look like? Or what does it look like to hire an intern or your first employee or what have you? Oftentimes we find that about 50 % of our time is spent on manual, busy work, if you will, in the business. And then the other 50 % is, if we're lucky, the other 50 % is spent on more revenue generating activities. Or maybe there's some business management things in there.

But I would say that the three hours per day is pretty accurate in my experience and my observation. So these three hours that we're spending on average day to day on manual repetitive tasks in our businesses, that time can definitely interfere with primary role responsibilities, whether that be you as the CEO of your business or also your team members as well. So depending on what your business structure looks like as you're listening to this,

Think about this through the lens of not only how you're spending your time, but also how any of your team members may be spending your time as well, because if they are spending manual time on repetitive things that could be streamlined or automated, that is time that you are paying them that could be saved and also then maybe applied to something more results focused in your business. The other thing is, is that manual work,

increases the likelihood of human error. We're humans. We have rough nights where kids are up or sick or something, or we have days where our mind is elsewhere because we've got just a lot going on. When I'm recording this, it's graduation season and summer's approaching, so we're thinking of vacations, we're thinking about graduations, we're thinking about all these different things. Our minds are elsewhere. So of course, likelihood is more ...

it's more likely that we can make errors from time to time. Sometimes we're spot on and some days just are not our days. But that is some of the reasons why we want to take a look at the manual work in our businesses and starting with the repetitive tasks that we're doing and looking at ways to work smarter and not necessarily harder. So just to recap before we dive into this step, in episode five with the Make Space for More framework,

We clarified our priorities as the CEOs of our companies, and we discussed strategies for structuring our calendars accordingly. In episode six, we got really honest with ourselves about who or what is no longer aligned for our businesses as we continue to grow and scale. So in step number three of the Make Space for More framework, we want to look at ways to simplify and automate the repeatable processes in our businesses.

And why is that? Because it is more cost effective to look for opportunities to become more efficient or even leverage software and tools to automate these repetitive tasks in our businesses than it is to pay someone else to do them for you. And that's why we take a look at, again, looking at the big picture of the framework, what are the most important things we need to be doing? And then we're looking at what about all of these other things?

that don't necessarily fall into my priorities in my role as CEO, but there's all these other things. We look at what are the things that could just be eliminated outright. We look at how can we simplify and automate some of these things. And then the last piece of the Make Space for More framework ultimately is building a team and really working together as a well -oiled functioning machine to grow and scale your business.

beyond your own capacity or where the capacity is in your business right now. So that's why we want to, before we look at building the team or increasing the team's capacity and all of that, we want to take a look at first, how can we actually work smarter so that nobody is doing unnecessary manual work in the business? So the other thing that I want to share with you at this point, sometimes people's eyes tend to glaze over or their brains start to just shut down because they're like,

I don't love systems that's really boring to me. Or when I think about automating things in my business, I think of technology that takes a lot of time and energy to set up, or maybe I don't understand. But I just want to have you pause for a moment, because when I say to simplify and to automate, I'm not necessarily going to suggest solutions for you that are high tech. Sometimes we think about those big CRM systems that have

all these automations and these click funnels with, you know, if this happens, then that happens. And it's just like, then those things are great. Don't get me wrong. And especially if you have an experienced person with that particular system to help you set it up, fantastic. But I just want us to take a step back here because this does not have to be complicated. And often simple is better. So when we look at simplifying and automating our businesses, there are three things.

that I want you to consider. So the first solution, again, maybe apps and software. So just wanted to share with you a story from one of our clients that we're working with. His name is John, and he has been a business owner for several years now. He's doing this line of work and ultimately his corporate role, and he saw some opportunities to go independent and start doing this on his own.

and he's got a lot of business interests, he's got a lot of hobbies and things, but he was keeping track of his business income and expenses and ultimately profit or loss on a simple spreadsheet. Now, a simple spreadsheet is great for starting out. If you're a new business owner, I certainly used a spreadsheet for many years to keep track of this, but over time as the business grows, what happens?

It takes a lot of time and energy to maintain the spreadsheet because everything that you're doing is manual. So you're keeping track of all of the money coming in and you're tallying that up. You're keeping track of all the expenses are going out and tallying that up. And if you're not diligent about doing it, say on a weekly or a monthly, even maybe a quarterly basis, then at tax time,

then you're spending hours and hours and hours trying to pull all these numbers together for either yourself if you file on your own or your accountant, and it can become quite a chore. And so as John's business had grown and he started working with our team, he's like, you know, this is how I'm keeping track of this now, but I ultimately would like to move this towards an automated system so that it can.

please keep track of these totals for me. And so he upgraded to QuickBooks Online. It was one of the basic options that they have. I want to say it's probably around $25 a month, but he was able to then connect his bank accounts. He was able to send invoices through this system. So then what happened? All of those manual calculations that he was doing have gone away because this system for $25 a month,

solve that problem. So he's able to automatically, and he might spend a little time, I should say, invoicing his clients, beginning and end of projects, but these are all things are being sent out, they're being tracked. He can see when invoices are late or past due, depending on how he has it set up. Maybe he can receive payments electronically as well. So he's not having to...

maybe manually process credit card payments or receive checks through the mail, he can automate those payments as well and have them be electronic. But then also, it's bringing in all of his transactions from his bank, his business checking account, maybe any business credit cards that he has, and he is able to go in or even have a bookkeeper go in as a second step here and categorize what those are. So then,

at the end of a month or a quarter or a year at tax time, he just has to look at a report, make sure everything looks good, and it's done. He is no longer spending that manual time of hours and hours adding these things up on his own. And again, we're talking about a $25 a month investment, which is saving huge amounts of time. And there are lots of versions of this. I can also share with you plenty of tools and ...

free software that our team uses to manage our business as well. One of them being Clockify. It's a free system that we use to manually, or I shouldn't say manually, but keep track of the time that we're spending on internal tasks or client tasks. Whereas, in the beginning of my business, I remember I used to keep track of my time on a spreadsheet. 15 minutes here for this client, two hours there for that client.

and then sort everything and bill it out at the end of the month. Now, Clockify is something that just sits on our desktops and we can just type in a brief description, what we're working on, who the client is, and hit that timer. Or we can manually add in, maybe we spent 30 minutes making outreach connections for a client and we can just add that in. So you get the idea. There's a lot of great tools and apps that don't have to cost a lot of money.

They can save a lot of time. Okay, another thing to consider when we look at simplifying and automating our businesses, checklists and templates. These are often very underutilized and I would even say maybe taken for granted in our businesses because they're huge. They are low tech, they're pretty simple, but they can be huge. So,

The best example that I can give you of a checklist, I can give you an example of a checklist and a system that our team uses, but we use a project management tool called Asana. Many of you will probably be familiar with this. monday .com is another one. There are lots of project management tools out there, but we use Asana. And in our Asana, we have a template that is pre -built that is called New Client Onboarding.

And in this template, we have all the steps that go into when a client starts working with us. It can start with getting the contract signed, into setting up their account in terms of like invoicing and payments. It goes into their kickoff calls with the team. It goes into making sure that they get added to the proper...

email campaigns, to welcome them as a new client, to check in 30, 60, 90 days into working together. All of the steps of our client journey are included in this one template. And this template is built out, so then all we need to do when a new client starts working with us is duplicate that, update who these tasks are assigned to and when they're due, and it's done. And by doing that,

we remove all of that manual guesswork that's in our minds of, okay, we have a new client. What did we need to do again? I forgot that step. I think this is really important, especially for those of us who have gone through the process of working as a solo business owner and then starting to work with a team. So much lives up here in our minds that creating some of these checklists,

Not only gets it out of our minds, but into a physical form that somebody else can follow and ultimately replicate in our businesses, but it also creates that consistency in terms of the experience that we're providing for our customers. So we have that ultimately that client checklist built into our Asana system. You don't even have to get that fancy with it. You could even have a document that is on a shared drive.

where it walks through, like when a new client inquiry comes in, we send this message and we send them this scheduling link or we ask them to fill out this intake form. You get the idea, but checklists can be huge. And it's just so much easier to, rather than trying to manually remember all the steps that need to go into something, have them all outlined. The other thing is templates.

email templates. My assistant has done a fantastic job of creating templates right in my Google email. So we use Google Workspace for our company and right in there I have email templates. So when I'm sending a welcome email to a new client and introducing them to the team, the basics of what needs to go in that email is automatically automatically populated. I just maybe need to update names.

a few personal pieces of information in there, and then that is done. I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. So just wanted to share with you checklists and templates, very, very low cost, if not at all, but huge for taking out some of that guesswork and especially for getting all of these things that are rattling around in your own brain out into a physical form where others can follow them as well. Okay.

The third thing to consider when we're looking at simplifying and automating our businesses are documented and recorded standard operating procedures, SOPs. So this is taking this one step further from that checklist and template idea into being able to cross -train and ultimately have others duplicate some of the things that we're doing in our businesses. Now there's a couple of things here that I want to mention when we talk about SOPs and I don't want your eyes to glaze over.

I don't want your brain to travel going like, yeah, that's really overwhelming to me. I want to remind you of a couple of things. In an earlier episode of the podcast, I shared what I call a tale of two coaches. And just to give you a recap, I worked with a business coach for a couple of months, the summer that I was preparing to go on maternity leave before my daughter was born. And he had me spend the summer.

creating a manual of all of my clients tasks that I was going to have others help with while I was on maternity leave. And I mean, these are old school documents like step one, go to this software and log in. Step two, click on this button over here. Step three, you get the idea. It was extremely tedious. It took all summer. I hated doing it. Now, ultimately it got done and it was very helpful for getting.

and be able to support more clients in their businesses and be able to bring in team members to be able to not only support me, but help our clients grow as well that I really needed to get serious about this. And she asked me, what do you think is your first step or what do you think the next step is? And I said, well, I need to start creating this manual. And she's like, no, you don't need to do that. She's like, hire somebody who has this experience.

and the expertise or the skillset that you need for this handful of tasks. And I ultimately ended up hiring two people, by the way. I hired one who was very analytical and organized and I hired one that was more creative and loved to create content and things like that. But anyway, that was just a side note there. So I hired two people who had the experience in the areas that he needed to. And she said, have them...

watch you perform the task, have them take notes on the process, have them send those notes to you so you can provide any feedback or make any revisions or tweaks, and then hand the task off to them. So that was so much more convenient and so much more efficient because I don't know that I ever would have been able to hire the team and build the team in the way that I have if I was manually recording all of these SOPs.

I want to give you some other ideas here in terms of SOPs. So in recording those and getting them out of the brain and into a physical form. Loom, L -O -O is a software that we use. It's, I think, about $10 a month. I love it. It allows me to record my screen with a voiceover and I can hand off tasks very easily to my team.

I can also provide feedback, like maybe they send me some graphics for social media, just for an example, and I can say, let's make this font a little bit bigger, or can we use this photo instead? And I can just give that feedback in a really easy way. The other thing too, is speaking of Loom, one of the things that I do when I'm having a conversation with a potential client is we have a conversation.

where I learn more about their business, what does their current team look like, what are some of the opportunities in front of them, and also what's stopping them, what is filling up their time, what's on their plate, what do they keep putting on the back burner and all of those things. And then after that call, what I do is I put together a proposal with recommendations from my team and I use Loom to record a video overview of the proposal we put together.

We recap the things we talked about in the conversation. I go through recommendations that we have. I go through pricing and how that's structured and frequently asked questions that we get on our working agreement. And I can tell you that people love these videos that I send to them along with their proposals because it really helps answer a lot of questions. It's also convenient if there are multiple decision makers involved where it gets everybody on the same page in terms of,

Here's what they're recommending, here's why, here are the terms and conditions and all of that. I share that because there are probably ways that you can better leverage the conversations that you're having in order to save time as well by using some tools like this. The other thing that I just wanna mention when it comes to documenting and recording your SOPs and your businesses and your processes is that it is often helpful to review them with somebody else,

and get their fresh eye and get their opinion on are there ways to do this better? Are there ways to save some steps? You'd be surprised at how many times the team will be able to show me, hey, what if we do this instead, then we can just pull this from here, here, and here, and you don't have to manually send it. Or my business coach is great about, hey, let's simplify this. To give you an example, I thought that,

when I onboarded a new team member that I should maybe have like an e -course or something. And so we could cover all the details in terms of how we work with clients, how we use the systems that we use. And she was like, you don't have to do that. Just create a simple spreadsheet with a checklist of here are the videos you need to watch, here are the documents you need to read. Don't worry about building out a full, formal course. Again, these are things that are aspirational.

really complicated and fancy, highly unlikely for me to ever bring them across the finish line to completion. So getting other people involved in the things that you're doing on a day -to -day basis can shed a lot of light in terms of what you could be doing differently and ultimately making it better. So with all of that being said, your next step here in the Make Space for More framework,

is to start by making a list of the repeatable processes in your business. So think about what are some of the things that you do every day? What are some of the things that you do maybe once a week, once a month, quarterly? And start looking at what are the repeatable things that we're doing and what are some ways that we can make them more efficient so that we can save some time?

You know, are there apps or is there software that we could ultimately spend a little money to upgrade and then save a lot of time? You know, are there checklists that we can create so that we know that every time we do these things, we are hitting every single step and it's consistent across the board? Are there emails that you are writing over and over and over again? Like maybe for another example, in here, one of the templates that I have is when...

we receive a referral or we receive an introduction by email that I can respond quickly and just fill in some of the details. Thank you for making this introduction, so and so, it's nice to meet you, that sort of thing. I have a template in there that I can just bring up and customize and send it out, it saves me time. So look at ways that you can leverage checklists or templates. Also look at what are some standard operating procedures that need to be documented.

Can you record yourself performing the task and then ultimately hand it off to somebody else much more quickly than doing a formal training session or preparing things perfectly for somebody to take over? Look for some of these things. That is your next step here. So make that list of the repeatable processes that you're doing and then just make a note alongside those. What is the next step in order to simplify or automate some of those things?

Thank you so much for listening today. I greatly appreciate your support. I hope that this information has been helpful for you. And I encourage you to follow, subscribe so that you don't miss our next episodes where we're going to dive into building a team when it comes to everything from what kind of return on investment can you expect? What are some of the things that you should keep in mind before you hire? How do you hire? How do you work with virtual team members? That's an area that I particularly specialize in based on having a virtual assistant business, but we're going to talk about all of those things and more in our next episode. So thank you so much for your support. I appreciate you listening and we'll see you in the next episode. Have a wonderful day.