COVID-19: The Perfect Time to Automate & Outsource Your Business
There’s no other way to say this, but we’re in some bad times. Millions of people in the U.S. are unemployed. Work-from-home policies are now expected, not asked for. Workers are having their hours and wages cut to reduce the pressure on budgets. It’s a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be 100% a nightmare.
Instead of thinking of this time as an end-all of business, many are using the time and space to think about how to improve their services and processes. They want to take advantage of the business lull and find ways to do things better once business returns to some version of “normal” (definitely in need of quotation marks).
This global pandemic provides businesses with a unique opportunity to tackle the issues that have been sitting on the back burner for a while. You know… That form that causes you trouble and confuses clients each time they try to submit it. Or that new-hire on-boarding process that costs your HR department a lot of time and resources. Or that tedious report you always produce for your board each month. There are many things to address, of course, but we know that now is the time to focus on the improvements that can have the most benefit for our businesses.
Reflect with Your Team on Your Business
Sometimes it takes a crisis to see what is really important, and for us, it’s your team. Having the right team means everything. They are the people that drive your company forward, provide new ideas, and keep your accounts happy.
Reflect with your team. Ask them what processes take the most time away from their important tasks. If they had the magic wand, what tool would they create to improve their job? Have they thought of any ways to do things better?
You’ll be surprised what people might say. Take notes. Lots of notes. Convene a Zoom meeting to brainstorm. Get everyone’s opinions and ideas. Think of big/small things that could have high returns for your business, especially those that can be automated or done via outsourcing.
Map Out Solutions
Get a big ol’ Zoom board going and draft out solutions to those back-burner problems. Here’s a neat guide from Mind The Product on how to find quick and long-term wins to improve your business.
Think of Automation + Outsourcing Solutions
Focus on the top left and right-hand quadrants of your Effort vs. Value graph, and you’ll probably find that many of the fixes (more so for the top right-hand) can be done with automation and outsourcing.
Group all of the processes that your team needs to do but take a lot of time, then place them in a Venn diagram (Automation / Outsourcing). Find where and if you can place each process in the Automation, Outsourcing, or both areas. Could your process be done with just a quick automation in Zapier? Maybe you need a new virtual talent to tackle a group of similar processes. Perhaps you can automate a piece of it to reduce the amount of time spent for a virtual talent to complete the rest?
Take this and work with everyone on your team to customize your solutions to maximize the results from your efforts. Whatever you decide, your solutions need to be customized for your business. Solutions need to flow well with where your business is and where you want your business to be after the pandemic. Automations need to be scalable and easy to adjust so that you can continue to improve them, and your outsourcing solutions need to understand your business and fit well into your current workforce.
Turn this challenge into your greatest business opportunity. Don’t waste it, and always think of how you can improve your business with oursourcing and automation.
