One of the most valuable lessons I learned in my business journey was not directly related to making money. I realised if my business stopped the moment I stopped working, then I didn’t own a business; rather, I was the business.
At the time I had this realisation, my business had a LOT of manual processes and as a result came to a grinding halt when I stopped. I never planned to become a business myself, I wanted to build a business that had value. One I could eventually sell.
Wanting to own a business and not be a business, I researched how I could automate my manual business processes in a cost effective way and began to implement my learnings. Using Google Workspace, I have almost automated all of my business’ operational processes, leaving me to focus on marketing and growing the business. I haven’t quite automated everything (yet) but I have got my business to the point where it won’t stop if I stop. I can go on holiday and my business will still run.
I have achieved this by building automations into the back of Google Workspace. These automations carry out the manual tasks that I was doing in my Google Drive on my behalf and cost me NOTHING. They’re free.
In this blog I will explain some of the different business processes you can automate using Google Workspace. For each process I will outline the manual process I used to do and then explain the automated version.
Let’s go!
Although sending cold emails didn’t actually stop my business from running, this was a process that I found extremely time consuming and very low value. If you use cold emailing as a marketing strategy you will likely be familiar with the process I’m about to outline and you’ll definitely want to learn how I automated it!
Before building my cold emailing automation, I would build an emailing list on Google Sheets to send cold emails to and then send individual emails to each “target”; for each target I would create a new email, paste in my email template, personalise any personalised fields such as name, subject the email, paste in their email address, proof read the email (about 3 times) and then click send. Then repeat for the next person on my list. Using this process, it would take me almost all day to build a list of ~30 targets and send them all individual emails. This process was killing me.
By connecting my Google Sheet (which I had my list of targets) to my Gmail account, I was able to automate the time consuming process of creating individual emails for each target and sending them. Once I had established this connection, between the two Google applications this is how I would send cold emails:
Write a draft email in Gmail specifying any personalised fields.
Create my emailing list.
Select the entries in my emailing list that I wanted to send my cold email to.
Click send.
Once I click send, the automation built into my Google Workspace account would iterate through the list of targets I selected and use the draft I had made to create an email, personalise it and send it. Using this automation I could create, personalise and send 30 personalised emails in less than a minute.
Could your business benefit from an automation like this?
You don’t just have to use it to send cold emails. You can send very personalised weekly newsletters in the same way that don’t look like they’ve been sent from an email marketing platform like Mailchimp. You could even use it to streamline your customer onboarding process or any other processes where you regularly send the same email using a template, such as an order dispatch notification.
This was the first process I automated in my business and probably the one that saves me the most time! I’ll explain…
One of my business processes is creating an “investor pack”. This is a PDF document that contains lots of information on a certain investment opportunity. It is a type of brochure. For every enquiry my business receives I take the information given and create an investor pack for each. The process would go something like this:
Create a copy of my investor pack template.
Go through the template and update all the relevant fields to match the details provided in the enquiry.
Save the new document as a PDF.
There may only be three steps to this process but step 2 was VERY time consuming. It could take up to an hour to just produce one investor pack! For a business that had plans to scale to the point of processing 100+ enquiries a day, this process wasn’t scalable or sustainable.
Fortunately, it was a process I could easily automate. This is what I did:
I took my investor pack template and named all the fields that I customised for each enquiry.
I linked my enquiry database to this template and created a programme that made a copy of the template, updated the named fields with the relevant information in my enquiry database and then saved the new document as a PDF.
- Once I had built this automation, all I had to do was select the enquiries I wanted to create an investor pack for and run my programme.
This is an example of how you can customise a template with specific database data. The template doesn’t necessarily have to be a document. It could be a powerpoint or email as in the example above. Other examples include creating personalised contracts for new clients that you create from a template. How could you use automation like this in your business?
One of the biggest inefficiencies in businesses is transferring data from one source to another. An example of this is taking form submissions and transferring the data to a spreadsheet.
The form provider you use may already automatically add new form responses to a spreadsheet (such as Google Forms) but if they don’t manually transfering information can become tedious.
For example, my lead generation business uses a lot of forms and without using paid third party software, it wasn’t possible to link these form submissions to a spreadsheet. Before I built my automation, every time I received a new form submission I would get an email notifying me of a new submission (this email contains all the form fields and responses) and I would manually transfer the data in the email to a Google Sheet and then start processing the enquiry.
Transferring the form response was a time consuming and low value job. To get round this, I created an automation on the back of my Google Workspace that looked for new emails with a certain subject. When a new email was received that matched the subject it would add a row to my spreadsheet database and then copy across all the relevant information. I no longer have to waste my time transferring data from one source to another and the best bit, it is free. I don’t have to pay for Zapier or similar software to do it for me!
This is one example of how you can build an automation which takes new emails and their content and does something with it. Instead of having a new row added to a spreadsheet you could get the automation to add an event to your calendar, add a task to your to-do list and much more! Would you find this useful?
One way to add additional value to your service is to provide reminders. For example, a car garage could notify its pre-booked customers of upcoming appointments and also notify previous customers when their MOT needs renewing. Both of these reminders help the garage to make more money; customers are more likely to not miss appointments and also more likely to book new appointments with the garage.
Going through a database of customers and appointment dates or expiry dates and manually sending an email to customers that have dates falling within a certain time period could be a way of doing this, but a very time consuming way. A better way would be to build an automation that automatically sends a booking reminder, expiry reminder or similar to any customers that needed the reminder. You can do this in a similar way to automatically sending cold emails:
Connect your spreadsheet of clients to your Gmail.
Write draft email reminders in Gmail.
Set a daily trigger to run your automation which will send your reminder email to any customers that have a “significant” date upcoming.
This automation will completely remove your input from your process of sending email reminders. Would this free up some of your time?
These email reminders don’t necessarily have to be driven from dates in a spreadsheet. You could create an automation that periodically sent an entire database an email. For example, if you send an invoice reminder at the start of every month you could automate the process of sending this email using a similar automation.
These are just some of the different processes that can be automated using Google Workspace. If you don’t already have a Google Workspace account, you can create one here.
As with lots of things in business, there are different ways you can go from A-B and there is no right or wrong way. You may already use different pieces of software that do some of these things for you BUT the above solutions are ALL free! If you’re looking to reduce your business’ running costs, these could be something for you to consider.
Understanding the importance of automating business processes will be a turning point in transforming your business into a scalable and sustainable business which has value.
If you have any questions about any of the automations mentioned in this blog, drop me an email at lawrence@thesmallbusinesstoolbox.co.uk. Over the coming weeks, I will be sharing individual blogs on how you can code your own automations on the back of Google Workspace. Make sure you’re subscribed to my newsletter so that you don’t miss them!
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