So what’s a budding entrepreneur to do when it’s not viable to employ full time staff yet but getting all this done requires a 28 hour working day?

Automation!

Automation is transforming the way a lot of organisations do business these days – mine included. Any repetitive computer based task never needs to be performed more than once manually. I just document the steps taken, refine the process and record it into an automated computer script that I can then run whenever I need – or schedule to run without me having to even click a start button.

Here are some examples of what is automated in my business at the moment:

Example #1 New customer creation:

Manual actions – fill in form with customer details (name, contact details, industry, website details) – 2-3 minutes

Automated actions:

1. Search customer database for customer numbers and create a new customer number
2. Enter customer details into the database
3. Create database tables for customer
4. Create customer folders on the server hard drive in the customer area correctly named with customer name/number

Time taken – less than 1 second

Total time taken – 2-3 minutes + 1 second. Manually this would take about 15 minutes.

Example #2 – Updating the records of customer backlinks (websites that link to our customer websites)

Manual actions – none, it’s scheduled to run once a week at midnight every Sunday

Automated actions:

1. Retrieve a list of all active customers in the database
2. For each customer found perform the following actions:

• Take the customer’s web address and search Yahoo Site Explorer for sites that link to it
• Compare the results to sites already in the database for this customer (imagine doing this manually.. for all your customers!)
• Enter only newly found sites into the database with a date and time (for comparisons and reports over time)
• Create a log file and put it into the customer’s corresponding folder

To do this manually for one customer could take up to 1 hour depending on how many new sites need to be filtered out of the results so as not to create any duplicate records. The whole process takes Visiboost 0 minutes and 0 seconds thanks to automation.

Example #3 – Automated Forex trading

As part of my business growth and stability plan I like reinvest some of the profits into the financial markets, currency markets in particular. My charts tell me that I miss a lot of good trades overnight and when I’m otherwise engaged. Also I don’t want to spend all my time glued to the computer waiting for trading signals. So what’s the answer?

Automated trading!

My charting software comes with its own programming language that will trade my system when the right combination of signals are all in place.

Is it flawless? No

But no trading system is – in fact software is probably better at trading than I am because it will follow the system to the letter without letting emotions get in the way. Anyway the ins and outs and merits of an automated system that trades the markets for you as you would (should if you stick to your system like a robot like the software does) is a topic for a different post.

The end result is another automated system that works away in the background while I’m working on something else.

Who’s good at multitasking now?!