Automate Your Agency

When is your process ready to be automated?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 28

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We’re living in an incredible time. 

Automation and AI can work wonders to make your business more efficient, save you time, and even cut costs. 

Sounds amazing, right? 

But here’s the hard truth: you can’t expect AI to run everything. And you definitely can’t expect to dive into automation without first rolling up your sleeves and mastering your workflows.

Automation is here to support you—not replace you. 

Skipping the hands-on work and trying to automate too soon? That’s a fast track to frustration, wasted money, and a mess of processes you’ll just have to untangle later.

In this week’s episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson get real about the right way to approach automation. Tune in as they cover:

🔹 The pitfalls of automating without preparation

🔹 Why manual workflows lay the foundation for AI success

🔹 How to let automation enhance your business instead of running it into the ground

🔹 And practical steps to help you get started without the headaches

Listen, we all want to make our businesses run like a dream, and automation can help. But only when it’s done right. This episode will help you avoid rookie mistakes and build systems that actually work.

What did you think of this episode? Drop us a 5-star review to let us know—it helps us reach more listeners who need this advice! And don’t forget to subscribe for fresh, no-fluff strategies to grow and scale your business every week.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate your Agency.

0:00:01 - (Alane): Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): So, Elaine, there's this certain type of inquiry that I want to talk about today that we're getting more and more of, especially as we get out there and market ourselves. And it's people who have business ideas and then say things like, hey, I've got this idea. Can you help me automate the entire thing? Or can you help me have AI run the entire business for me? And I know we laugh a little bit about this, but I think generally speaking, there's a lot of people looking at this going, hey, I've got this idea.

0:00:56 - (Micah): What if we automate everything? What if we use AI for everything? And it probably doesn't sound too crazy to actually say that or to actually ask that right now.

0:01:06 - (Alane): Yeah, definitely. You know, I hear that too. And there's two things that I always think about when they say this. The first thing is, do you even have the tech stack? Cause you automate software, not people. So you need to have the fundamentals there. And then two, do you actually know what the process is? And that's a key piece into automation because you need to know what the process is and you've had to do it manually somewhat before you can get into automating or it's a nightmare of changes.

0:01:38 - (Micah): Yeah. Actually, now that you say that, most of the people that ask about that, they haven't actually established a process. Sometimes not even a business, sometimes it's just a business idea. And, you know, we have to politely decline and say, sorry, we can't help you out. But I think you bring up a really good point, Elaine, because once you identify what that process is, once you try to do it, I think it's going to become very apparent that, no, you can't automate the entire thing, and no, you can't have AI run your entire business. I mean, we might get there, but right now it's just not where it's at. We need to be thinking about iterative improvements. Right. So get your process down, get the manual steps down, get that working, and then from that, figure out, how do you iterate and improve?

0:02:33 - (Alane): Yeah, you have to be willing to pay for software or you're going to keep paying for people to do these things or you're not going to be able to get your idea off the ground. You know, you're going to have to fumble through it. And we've done this so many times for ourselves and where we've had to do something manual before we put in any automation. And it really can start with a checklist, you know, a task with a checklist basically to start things out, to get the process down and then evolve that into a true automated sequence.

0:03:05 - (Alane): But having the tech stack there and whether you're working with APIs or native integrations, that's a perfect start to building on that. But before that, you're going to have to pay people.

0:03:16 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that I'd like to point out about this too is that I think a lot of people asking those questions are ultimately saying, how do I save a bunch of money, how do I save a bunch of time, how do I not have to deal with all of these things? But the reality is, if you try to do all your automations first, if you try to just throw AI at the problem, then you're going to be either paying somebody else to do it, a very costly sum while you figure out how your business makes money.

0:03:50 - (Micah): Right. So if we think, if we just kind of take a step back, it's kind of like saying, hey, I don't know how my business is going to operate, but I want to automate it. And then I'm going to pay somebody to automate how I think it'll work and then I'm going to try that. And then, oops, that didn't really work that well. So now I need to pay somebody to change the automation and then I got to go back and fix it. But I still have a couple new clients.

0:04:15 - (Micah): All right. The second iteration is now amalgamation of two, but that didn't really work either. So now let's add a third and then a fourth and then a fifth layer and pretty soon you just have this like monster automation that doesn't really work well and all this stuff is all over the place and you can't manage it yourself. So in the attempt to get rid of people, you just added a whole bunch of tech people that are helping you automate and leverage AI, which are a lot more costly than say a va, which is all you probably needed in the first place.

0:04:48 - (Alane): Yeah, I mean, if you're a seasoned entrepreneur, like this happens to all of us when we're coming up with a new business, like from the idea that you started your business from, is your service or product the exact same from when you started your business? Most likely not unless you were already in the industry for such a long Time knew the exact pain points and went to market with that, which is very, very, very uncommon.

0:05:14 - (Alane): You might be dabbling in something here, you know, see some gaps and then you start building, which is typically where people are at. They see some gaps, they want to fill it. But your product, I mean, we've done software multiple times now, Micah. And how often has our, the idea that we had for software evolved from what we originally started it out to be?

0:05:36 - (Micah): A hundred percent of the time, Yeah. I would say every aspect of the business has evolved from our original idea because you have to get it out there, you have to try something, you have to get the feedback. You're constantly wanting to improve. Right. We've talked about this in other episodes, but there's cases where you'll start offering a service and then you realize, wait, this service is actually kind of hard to fulfill.

0:06:04 - (Micah): So then do you change the service? Do you change the product? Do you change your internal operations? Do you change all of it? Do you change your audience? All of those variables. As a founder and as an owner and as a leader, you have to make those decisions every single day. If you're tied to an automation process, then you're immediately eliminating your agility.

0:06:29 - (Alane): Yeah, you know what, I'm going to throw something out there as a concept, Micah, is for these automated sequences. I mean, we have a ton of these operating for ourselves and our clients. You do get to a point that you know the process and you want to put it in there, but this is the concept I want to convey that these are little mini SaaS products for your business, because you need a technical person, you don't need a full stack developer. You know, you're, you're not looking at that technically savvy, but you do need somebody that can understand APIs, hook things up, or work with a company like us.

0:07:04 - (Alane): And you have these end result products. So. I don't know, Mike, I don't know how you feel, but I like to. I'm starting to think of them as little mini SaaS products.

0:07:13 - (Micah): Yeah, I think that's actually really legit because you're saying, here's what I want, here's the input and here's what I want it to do, and here's the output. Whether that's a dynamically generated proposal, whether that's client onboarding, those are some of the easy things that we've put in place recently. We did all of that manually to the point where we knew this works. We had our templates for our proposals set up, we had the sections of the proposal set up, we knew exactly how we wanted to convey the pricing.

0:07:48 - (Micah): And until we figured out all of that, we didn't even attempt to automate anything in it because it was. We wanted the agility.

0:07:56 - (Alane): Yeah. You know, one thing that I do see a lot of times is where it's a new idea that the company wants to use automation and AI for because they think that's going to solve their problems. Where instead I always change the conversation because they think, well, my company's already running, everything's running smoothly, and if you start to dig in. Okay, well, is every client onboarded consistently?

0:08:21 - (Alane): Well, I get. No, I guess not. I'm like, do you know all the steps? And does somebody new coming on board automatically know all those steps? Well, no. And I, you know, there's actually a different process for if they were onboarding a vendor versus onboarding a reseller versus onboard. And I'm like, okay, so is it always consistent for all of those scenarios? Well, no. Okay, so why don't. Instead of solving future problems with automation and AI, what if we just start with the current ones that you're having and digging in where efficiency could actually transform your team, give you the more the budget to work on some of these ideas? Because we're not saying don't go after ideas.

0:09:01 - (Alane): Definitely that's how we evolve as a company. We want to stay relevant, we want to come up with new ideas, we want to be efficient in those ideas. But how about we start with where things are broken internally right now?

0:09:12 - (Micah): So, Elaine, let's talk a little bit about how do you identify when it's ready for automation?

0:09:20 - (Alane): Yeah, I actually think that this is an evolution of getting to that point. And I'm putting in a lot of new processes with my marketing team. And so we've got to first, okay, we've got an idea we want to test. Okay. Let's kind of piecemeal it together. Here are our ideas. This is a basic structure and we just use ClickUp to basically come up with a main task. This is our main goal right now of what we're trying to achieve. And here's our ideas for the subtasks associated with it. And that's what our start is, is just doing that. We run through that a couple of times and we'll make notes.

0:09:56 - (Alane): Okay, what are some things that we really liked? What are some things we need to change? How can we improve? And we will actually go through that process sometimes four months before we go to our team to build an automated sequence. And that seems like that feels like a long time, but really once we get to the point of automation, man, that is a well oiled machine that I don't have to then go and reiterate with our tech team to build out more stuff.

0:10:24 - (Alane): Because right now, my small team and I for marketing, we can be agile, we can really move fast on making changes. And so if I extend it to the technical team, that is a more lengthy change.

0:10:38 - (Micah): Yeah, there's a piece that you just mentioned that sparked an idea on my side too, Elaine, which is the process needs to at least achieve some of the desired outcomes that it set out to achieve before you automate. That's a really good way to look at this because if your process, if you try to automate or use AI in a process and you want this process to do X, but you have no idea if it's going to actually do X or achieve X or bring in X or whatever it is, then you're just on a wild goose chase.

0:11:14 - (Micah): And so being able to do and create a manual process, whether it's in ClickUp or anywhere. Right. Just without trying to do everything without humans first use humans, have it, achieve a desired outcome, then you know, okay, cool, like this is working.

0:11:36 - (Alane): Yeah. So Micah, this reminds me, I'm going to switch gears just a little bit, but I was on a call recently and we were talking about a digital transformation for their company. There's a lot of pieces that were moving and you know, I was throwing out different ideas. Like, you know, are you manually doing proposals? Are you doing reporting for your clients? How are you doing assessments and giving that report to them? And they were, they were like, well, we're all manually and it's very time consuming.

0:12:06 - (Alane): And he's, and he said something that really I thought was perfect. He goes, I think of everything in our organization as a report because everything has an end result. And so how can we use AI and automation to get reports done? And I'm like, you know, what if we do think about it like that, even in our organization of things that we've automated one proposal generation, the end result is a proposal, AKA a report. You know, like thinking of it as like there's a document at the end of this that's getting sent out and how many things? And so if you're looking at your company and going, okay, well I don't want to just start with automation and AI for an idea that I have, let's look at a current process that I have. Okay, let's think about it with that on our Head. You know, in that mindset, what is a report that I am doing or my team is doing as an end result, that could literally be monthly reports getting, getting sent to your clients.

0:13:00 - (Alane): That could be a proposal, that could be a lead magnet, that could be a PDF that you're generating for something from some assessment, and you're sending it out. All of these things can be automated with AI and pulling together your software platforms.

0:13:15 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. And it's all enhancing your existing systems.

0:13:20 - (Alane): All right, so the hard part, Micah, is when we say, you know, start with a process. You already have to start with doing automation and AI. Well, okay, how do I. That could be 40 processes. You know, that's still hard to distill down. Okay, where do I start? Where do I prioritize this? And one of the things that I've really just started developing from conversations I'm having, but also seeing a lot of what we're automating for people outside of, you know, maybe some of the stuff in a project management system is looking at.

0:13:54 - (Alane): If we look at things as a report, whether we look at it, okay, the end result is a proposal. Let's think of it as a report. Okay, that's a report. A proposal is a report. Then we have legitimate reports. Maybe at the end of the month, you do a Google Analytics and PPC and social media analytics, something like that. You have some type of report that you're going to send to your clients that's a legitimate report. And then maybe there's an assessment that you do whenever you're starting to work with a client, do an assessment. You're gathering information, and then you have a report that you send to them.

0:14:29 - (Alane): Those are perfect for creating an automated sequence and using AI as a part of it. And so if you just look at, okay, what reports do I do on a monthly basis? Let's start there. That could be hours and days of time saved.

0:14:46 - (Micah): Yes. I mean, we see it all the time. Clients will come in and they'll be like, it takes me a week to build this. It takes me a month to build this. And I'm not exaggerating. There's reports, if you want to call them that, but PowerPoints and decks and presentations and traditional reports that people spend hours and hours every week only. And all that data is sitting in systems and that process already exists and people are doing it. It has all the earmarks you need, all the ticking all the boxes, checking everything off of what you actually need to automate and leverage AI.

0:15:29 - (Micah): So, yeah, when it comes to saving time, That's a big one.

0:15:33 - (Alane): Yeah. I mean, we do a lot in global mobility and a neighborhood guide. It's a report, right? Like, it's a designed asset that gets sent off. Those take between two to four hours, and you might do 250 moves a year. That is a ton of hours per year saved by automating that report. So, you know, I just wanted to give one more example, and I think, Micah, we can. We can close this out on thinking about these assets that you're generating every single day, every single month, and how those could be automated, because that's a likely chance that. That's perfect. To go from a manual to an automated process.

0:16:11 - (Micah): Yeah. Love it. Great examples.

0:16:13 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode.

0:16:16 - (Alane): Of automate your agency.

0:16:18 - (Alane): We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.

0:16:26 - (Alane): Com.

0:16:26 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:16:30 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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