What should you automate?
Ten minutes of questions about the routine work in your business, and you get a ranked list back: what is worth automating, how many hours a year it hands back, and what you should leave alone. Your results appear on the screen. We do not ask for your email to show them to you.
- The task
- Time & frequency
- A priority list
How to get an honest answer
Two things make the difference between a useful answer and a made-up one.
Answer for a normal week, not your worst one. Every estimate here gets rounded and ranged, so a rough answer is fine. A dramatic one is not, because it quietly inflates everything that follows.
Ask the person who actually does the work. Owners consistently underestimate how long routine jobs take, because they have not done them in years. And if you are asking your team, tell them first what this is for. Automation returns work; it is not a stopwatch. People who think they are being timed will give you answers you cannot use.
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Step 1 of 4
First, your business
Two quick ones. They set the scale, and they decide which of the later suggestions are actually buildable on what you already run.
Which of these happen at your place?
Tick everything that sounds familiar, then narrow it to your five worst. Almost every business ticks six or seven of these, so a long list is normal and not a sign that anything is wrong.
Nothing selected yet
Now the numbers
One job at a time. These are bands, not exact figures, so if you are between two, pick the lower one.
What we would tell you not to automate
Saying no to these early is what keeps the first project from being the last one.
- Anything with a negotiation in the middle. The paperwork around a decision automates well. The decision does not.
- The once-a-year monster. Painful, memorable, and not worth it. It needs a written checklist, not software.
- The job where every case is different. When the answer to every question is "it depends", the process needs fixing before it needs speeding up.
- Work trapped in a program with no way in and an interface that keeps changing. It gets rebuilt every time the vendor ships an update, and you pay for that twice.
- The process nobody describes the same way twice. Ask two people, get two accounts, and you have a documentation job wearing an automation costume.
- Anything running on a system you are replacing within the year. Spend nothing on it.
We will tell you if it is not worth it
The assessment above is an estimate built from bands and averages. Checking it against your real numbers takes a conversation, and that conversation is free. If the honest answer is that a job is cheaper done by hand, that is the answer you get.