Pillars of the Automate My Small Business Philosophy

Start Before You Are Ready – You can plan forever and never go anywhere. Many of us spend to much time planning too far out into the future. The further in the future you plan goes, the more likely you are wrong. Our solution? Plan for the short-term, and adapt. Sure it’s good to have a vision of where you want to go, but focus on the short term (measured in weeks, not months or years).

Fail Small, Fail Fast, Fail Forward – If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to fail at something you try. We believe that if you’re not failing, you’re not challenging yourself enough. Failure is not a bad thing if you limit the cost of the failure, and if you learn from it. By working in short sprints, you limit the liability of your failures, and build-in the ability to adapt to what you learn.

Finance Your Business with Your Customers’ Cash – The sooner you figure out what your customers are willing to pay for, the sooner you’ll have a successful product. Many people think that you need investors to start a business, but people who would invest in a business without a proven business model are not the type of investors you want. And without revenues, you are going to have to give up too much equity to get any real cash. Instead, build the minimum product that your customers are willing to pay for. Sell this and learn from your customers’ feedback. The revenues you get from your initial customers help pay for the refinements as you improve the product. This will also reveal the core features of your product which often aren’t what you envision them to be at the start.

Eliminate, Automate, Outsource, Replicate – The single best way to streamline a business is to eliminate unnecessary business processes. If you eliminate something, you don’t need a machine to do it, and you don’t need a person to do it. Once you’ve eliminated or refined the business processes, look for software or machines that reduce the work further. You’ll be left with work that a human has to do. Look to outsource (or crowdsource) this work (especially if it’s not core to the business). If you’re not an accounting firm, don’t do accounting. If you’re not a design firm, don’t do web design. Outsource this work to experts, and offshore it to save money. Finally, once you have a streamlined process, it’s time to replicate. Scale up your optimized process to maximize profits.

Plan for Automation – We preach automation, crowdsourcing, outsourcing, etc, but we also know that’s not always practical when you are just getting started. If you have to do something yourself, just try think about how you can outsource or automate it in the future. Design the business process to make it easy to outsource if you can. Often it doesn’t take much more effort than just doing it.

Make your operations repeatable and replaceable – Using outsourced freelance labor often means that you won’t have the same person to do a task forever. Document tasks on a wiki or record them in a screencast/video so that the task description is it’s instruction manual. Screencasting and videos are usually the easiest because you just have to record yourself doing the task once. Then you can assign the task to anyone by sending a link to the video.