How to Automate Your Business
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Every business owner is concerned about the financial health and viability of their company. And we all know that there are two levers we can move to create that financial health: increase revenue or decrease expenses. Preferably both.
While technology can help you create a great product, and even sell it to your customers, one of the greatest ways that technology can help is by increasing the efficiency (aka reducing your expenses) with which you sell and deliver your product.
How can a small- to medium-sized business leverage technology to create efficiencies? There's lots of ways to skin the cat, but we can group them all into three categories:
Three Ways to Automate Your Business
Analytics
Data is the lifeblood of any organization:
- How many patients per doctor are we seeing on a daily basis?
- What is our average profitability per project?
- What is our average sales cycle and win ratio?
Having visibility into the key drivers of your business is critical to having command and control; without it you're going by instinct at best and flying blind at worst.
How are you doing this now? Are you spending staff time manually collecting data, or running reports out of your system? Chances are that what you're getting out of your systems is barely enough to suffice, and not nearly enough to gain a holistic view of the health of your business.
Imagine a dashboard with the most important information you need to run your business readily available at a glance. No waiting for reports to be generated - or spending valuable staff time manually collating data and worrying about accuracy. Automation will pull all of the information for you and give it to you in a format that's perfectly designed for your needs.
Integration
Communication is always the answer. Your applications aren't the exception. What if you could connect:
- Your GL to your practice management system
- Your GL to your billing system
- Your time-tracking system to your billing system
- Your project management system to your file system
The integration of your applications and your data allows you to create automated workflows between your systems that can dramatically improve your efficiency as well as open up the opportunity to leverage AI inside all of your systems.
AI
Whereas Integration is about connecting systems and automating them, AI is about applying intelligence to that process. How about:
- Asking AI to alert you when a project is projected to go over budget before it happens
- Asking AI to review the most recent YTD Budget vs Actual report and identify trends
- Asking AI to optimize route planning for your truck drivers
And that's not even taking into account what's available without Integration. AI promises to automate content generation (think RFP responses, marketing strategy, blog posts), analysis (feed it data in any form and it'll give you insights), sentiment (are customers happy or sad?), and so much more. And with the advent of Agentic AI, even more is possible...
Efficiency through Technology
Technology and automation are now table stakes for even the small business owner. Financial health and continued viability increasingly depend on the savvy use of technology to create efficiencies and improve business outcomes.
There are a lot of low-hanging fruit. Analytics, Integration, and AI are all opportunities to leverage the state of the art for significant benefits, and it is in reach for the average business.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to us for a quick discussion about how we can help you leverage technology and automation for your business!
