Why Your Current Way of Doing Business Isn’t Working, And What You Need To Fix It

Have you ever felt envious of those coaches who take vacations and don’t worry about their business? Everything continues to run smoothly with no input from them at all. Or the consultants who spend all their time doing the parts of their business they enjoy, and almost no time on the rest?

You may have thought to yourself that they must have a ton of money or a huge team for them to be able to do that in their business. Or maybe you just think they’re faking the funk and really working 24/7.

In reality, none of those scenarios are 100% true. The truth is that successful coaches and consultants do work hard, especially in the early stages of building their business. And most do not have the unlimited budget for a huge team.

Their secret sauce is a combination of outsourcing and automation.

They follow these three rules:

1.  Automate as many things as possible
2.  If it can’t be automated, outsource it
3.  If it can’t be outsourced, decide if it’s really worth doing at all

So, let’s look at the first rule – automation. Which parts of your business can run on autopilot or made easier with technology? Think about the following areas:

• Your Sales Funnel
• Email Marketing
• Social Media
• Content Creation
• Your Website
• Payments & Invoicing
• Scheduling
• Even filing your digital assets, like images, files and documents.

So let’s talk about why you need to automate your business.

Think of all the tasks you have to do each day. Many are repetitive and tedious, wasting your time and energy. When you automate, those tasks take care of themselves and you can focus on what you do best; which is coaching and consulting.

The Benefits of Being Automated

There are several benefits to being automated. I will list 3 of the biggest ones below.

Increased Productivity – By getting rid of tasks that drain your time and energy, you can focus on money making activities in your business. There are two types of tasks – routine and “thinking”. Both tasks require more concentration and critical analysis on your part. But when you can put some of the routine tasks on autopilot, you can spend more time on the tasks that only you can do. This not only increases your productivity, but streamlines your business.

Eliminates Human Error. You've probably burned the midnight oil before because you had to get that blog post out or that email sequence up. Only to be embarrassed when you see the mistakes made in the light of day AFTER you have hit publish. When tasks are automated these mistakes all but disappear.

Business Scale – If you sell info products along with your coaching/consulting and you are manually running the orders, a sudden increase in business from a social media post or something going viral can overwhelm you. An automated sales system allows you to keep up. And when you keep up you keep customers happy. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have seen big name coaches who have a hit product take off only to not be able to handle the onslaught of new people and orders and end up getting chargebacks and bad reviews because of it. The way social media is setup you don’t want your business on the receiving end of that nightmare scenario.

Tasks You Can Automate

So you may be asking yourself “what tasks can be automated?” There are tech tools out there to help you automate nearly every aspect of your business. Common tasks that can be automated include:

• Content Creation. You can’t create all your content automatically, but there are tools and resources available out there to make getting content out to the masses easier.
• Your Sales Funnel. Your sales funnel can be setup and monitored through automation so that you can focus on serving your clients.
• Email Marketing. If you want your sales to sky rocket, then you have to automate the process of managing your email lists and send out broadcast messages.
• Social Media. If you want to establish yourself as an expert, then you are going to have to have a presence on social media. There are tools available to help you easily manage multiple social media accounts and platforms.
• Your Website. There are ways that you can even automate keeping your website updated.
• Payments. Wouldn’t you like to get paid even if you are on vacation or asleep? Automation is the key. It allows you to take payments and manage your financial tasks so you don't have to waste time doing it manually.
• Digital Assets. Your computer files, images, videos and documents can all be automated. There are tools out there that even help with this part of your business.

What Can't Be Automated

Automation is great, but there are two areas that you can’t automate. The first is the initial setup of your systems.

I know, I know. But there is work that is required to get your systems in place. You just can’t wake up and everything appear ready to go. That’s not real life.

You must realize that the time you spend setting up your systems correctly is time well spent. In most cases you will just have to set it up once for it to produce for you for years to come.

The next area is relationship building. With social media and other online marketing channels, it's as important as ever to be real with your customers. Automated responses and replies in moderation is ok but not every single communication from you. Remember you are trying to build a relationship. You are basically courting your prospects. How would you feel if a robot came to take you out, or if all the response you ever got from your spouse or best friend was a text message only with no real interaction? You would be put off for sure. Not someone you would want to do business with.

So, don’t do it in your business. There are some responses and such that can and should be automated, but the core of your communication with clients and potential customers should be live and heart felt.

Of course, automated systems aren't perfect. But remember you will need to take the time to learn how to use each automation tool. However, the time you save using automation will pay back in spades the time you are spending now to get your systems in place and learning how to use the tech tools to make automation a reality.