Automating your business is a WASTE of time. Here's the math... transcript

We learned this the hard way when building our business from our garage all the way to 180 mil exit. You can see us here just sign boarding away living the actual dream. So easy to fall into this trap thinking that automation is going to solve all of the business problems. Don't commit to that expensive new system to save you 30 minutes a week before running your ideas through the frameworks I'm going to share in this video.

I'm going to save you from some of the mistakes that you can make especially early on into the journey. I think the first question we want to ask ourselves is what is the cost to the business here? This is super important. Does it cost more to create the system versus the labor itself? This is a sick diagram. You've probably seen it once or twice on the internet, but it's like how long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you spend more time than you save across five years, right?

So, this is super key here. So if a task takes you five minutes and you do it daily, you can spend six days to actually make that improvement like to build the system around it. Let's say it's taking you an hour a day, you can spend 2 months fixing that over 5 years. I think that's super key. So 5 years you can spend to fix that task. So we've seen this happen so much. We used to have a business as part of our business called Real Studios.

It was a photography arm of us. They did photo and they did video for our business here. Now, we had a whole bunch of checklists to make sure they were taking the gears. Like, do you have your camera? Do you have your lens, all the basic stuff, we did this manually, right? This is the first step is like automation just with a manual checklist. We had to let the fires burn. The guys were forgetting gear. It was super annoying.

I can promise you that. It was You're trying to run a business. You're doing volume. People are forgetting things and rocking up to a shoot. And these are things that were time sensitive. It's like, "Hey, you need to be there at 10:00 a.m. Oh, whoops. Forgot my lens. Can someone please drive me the lens? Really, really annoying stuff. But this happens, right? We the first thing you to do before going building like we had like these grand ideas of having like a signboard or like the app with the little checklist that every time they went to a shoot, they would have to check it in.

Obviously, this would take work. We were a tech company, so it's easier to do, but it still costs time. Is that opportunity cost? So, you need to figure out what's the actual cost to the business over time. Is it worth systemizing? We just had a laminated checklist in the end of the day that got us pretty much all the way there. and yeah, you'd have one or two things uh missed. The same thing was with sign boards. So these guys up here, which we do a lot in Australia, see the sign here that goes outside the property?

Our team would forget their drill or their screws or something of along those lines. We ended up just taking it and sticking it to the dashboard of the car with all the checklist there. So that every time they got in, they saw that and they worked. And then that way we didn't have to go and do complex system. All right. The next piece of the puzzle is when we have to figure out should we automate things is we learn through the pain.

You've got to experience the pain and here at a certain scale you need to take a second look and see if it's worth solving. So this is now as you grow you add more customers. Is it affecting customers? I think this is super important to have a look at if they are generally we want to start looking at systems pretty quickly. So a little story for you of this where this happened to us is we had a nice big spreadsheet of thousands of template tasks.

So, a template is a piece of thing you build into the system for artwork. Think of a Canva design or something like that. And we got these and we were doing like I think it was like 500 a week at minimum. There was thousands of these things. This was one of our biggest things in our business. So, in the beginning, we didn't need any system. It was like really just run a spreadsheet. It was fine. But as we grew and the volume became bigger, we needed to eliminate mistakes because it was creating frustration, quality issues, communication.

So we could identify a few areas that were suffering because of not having the right automation. So what did we do here? We went out and built a full system that have all the tasks that customers could log their systems in here and then the team would work on them and would be real time and that is where we get our automation. So instead of manually reaching out to the customer every single time, our system would let them know, hey, this is done.

This is done. So that allowed for quality control, it allowed for communication. and it solved frustration and it helps with quality issues cuz we had a built-in like QC checklist that every time they did the task in the system they had to complete the QC checklist and it get checked off. So this is where you now get pain at scale and then you can start figuring out look you can just refer back to your little checklist here and you go how often are we doing this?

So we're doing this 5 minutes a day and we're doing it 50 times a day. We can spend 9 months fixing it. This is kind of where we were lying. This is where you need to start looking at, okay, I need to automate this thing real bad, real fast. All right, from there, this piece here, do we have the skills internally to actually fix this? I think this is important because for the example that I saw online, it was going to take um 5K a day and it was going to take 14 days or something like that.

And we knew that that was just not going to be realistic anyway. So, what is 5K * 14? Like, we're talking 70K here to fix this problem. But realistically you could there are a lot of ways you can solve automation in your business. If you're very good at Excel could say Google sheets calcn or Zapia I'm ass sure across your team you have lots of different ways to solve before you look at this solution here. Can we fix it internally using tools here?

Is there software? Is there a SAS platform that solves this thing for us out there? Could you spend 50 to 100 bucks a month getting a better piece of software that might solve the problem before we reach out to a full homebuilt automation system? I think that's like the last resort you want to be looking at. Now, obviously, if you're a software platform or software company, you can build tools yourselves. But you do have to understand that by doing that, you're going to take away focus from your main actual thing.

So, I want to show a quick example. So, I'm repurposing shorts and it's taking me, I would say, an hour plus a day. Now, that's 5 hours a week. And because I'm a software engineer for me to build the solution to what I'm doing. So my thing is I download the video, I then transcribe and then I have to chuck it through chat GPT. Actually it goes video then I have to get audio then I transcribe. So it's a bit of a process right and this is getting really frustrating for me in our business.

It's actually quicker for me to solve the problem in our platform than it is for me to go and do this manually every single time. Also you got to also calculate what's the cost to the business. what's the cost of the business for me as the founder to be doing this kind of stuff. Obviously, it can be outsourced to other team but they are really busy right now. Everyone's stretched. We don't want to really add or spend more money in this stage of the business.

So, you've got to pick what you can do and for us it means I can probably just build something and I can do it on the weekend when I'm not really supposed to be working and it's all happy days and then in the week I can use that tool and save myself some time. Now, there are other solutions as well. is like templates and making templates out of things make things repeatable and I think this leads us to our final point here.

So in order to create automation in order to automate we need systems if you haven't figured out the systems or the processes for what you want to do you cannot automate anything. So it's the first step is build the process. Build the process and figure out the systems. When I say systems a lot of people think technology but it's not systems. It's like what are the steps? What are the processes to get there? Once you have that and understand the true cost to your business, then you can go and figure out how to actually automate it.

So, it's either you understand the true cost and then you can find if there is another way you can do it. Once you have that, you're now set up for success in the automation. But there's a lot of things you need to do or consider before you just pull out your wallet and try and build a custom system for automation. There's a lot of people out there who automate your business. Figure out if you need that first. Figure out what the actual cost is versus the outlay and then see how long's the payback period, right?

Like if it takes nine years to pay something back, probably not the best thing. If you can do it in a year, great. But figure out what works for your business. I want to hear from you down below. Also, if you're still watching this video, shout outs. You're a legend. Tell me what systems, processes, and how you think about automation in your business. Do you just go and do it first? Do you think I'm wrong? Am I wrong in this?

Should we be doing things earlier? Or do you wait a little bit longer down the track? Or do you automate nothing? Is it all manual? Love to hear. Like the video, subscribe if you want to see more of this content. We learn a lot of things building from 0 to 180 mil. And we are just sharing them with everyone just so they don't have to make the same mistakes we did.