Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about when you shouldn't automate in your business. I'm often talking about automation and how you should do it as much as possible but there are definitely times when automation is going to do your business a disservice.
I wanted to talk about those times specifically so that people can kind of understand I'm not saying that you should have bots and Zapier and everything running your business 100% of the time. There are times when it is not appropriate to automate but that differs from business to business and situation to situation. What I want to do is give a few general guidelines for when you shouldn’t automate if you're in a position where you're trying to figure out what you should do, and then I want to dive into some really specific examples of when you should never automate or maybe an example of where an automation went wrong.
I also want to clarify what I mean when I'm talking about automation. A lot of people hear the word “automation” and get scared because they are thinking about really complex things happening with supercomputers but when I'm talking about automation in terms of business automation it’s anything that you can set up that runs without the intervention of another human i.e. you.
Let's start with some more general situations where you probably don't want to automate.
1. When you don't know what you're doing.
If you have some sort of business process and you don't actually understand it or know how to complete it or have a clear idea of what you want to happen at the end of that process then you shouldn't be automating it. The best advice I always give people when they're trying to decide should I automate this or not is “Do you have all the steps worked out manually? Because if you don't then how are you supposed to tell the computer what to do?”
2. When it's something that isn't a repeatable process.
Automation is good for straightforward repetitive tasks, but if you have something that you do every month but depending on what's going on in your business the process changes every single time you do those are the kinds of things that are not a good candidate for automation.
3. It happens infrequently or the set up is more work than what you’d save.
Something that you just do quarterly or annually can sometimes be more trouble than they're worth to set up an automation for. To be fair you could hire someone to figure out how to automate tasks if you think eventually it is going to save you time and sometimes it's about frustration as well so even if there is something that only takes you half hour but you just absolutely hate doing it then having someone you hired to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to automate that task is probably going to be worth it to you
What about some specific examples of when you shouldn't be automated in your business or examples of when automation went wrong? These are typically the things that I see the most and a lot of the time I think I think people do them because they're so focussed on saving time that they don't realize the impact that they're having on the people interacting with their business or it's just they haven't properly worked through the steps of what needed to happen and then the automation has kind of gone awry.
