Guide · Before you automate
Fix these three things before you automate anything
Automation multiplies whatever process you hand it: faster, more often, and in front of more customers. Settle these three first and it multiplies something that works.
1. Intake: one way in
Write down every route a customer can reach you by: the form, the phone, the Instagram message, the personal email, the friend who texts you. Those are five separate places to check, and today the thing holding them together is you.
Pick the destination they all end in. It can be a spreadsheet this week, as long as there is only ever one of them.
2. Follow-up: decide it before you build it
On paper, in ordinary words: what happens the minute an enquiry lands, what happens on day one, day three and day seven, and when you stop. If you can write that down, you have something to automate. Automation is only the typing-up of a decision somebody already made.
3. The single source of truth
The customer list is probably spread across a phone, an inbox, a notebook in the van and a spreadsheet somebody else maintains. Name the one that wins and let everything else become a copy of it, because until that exists every automation you build will act, very confidently, on the wrong version of a customer.
Why that order
Intake first, because follow-up only works on an enquiry you caught. Follow-up second, because that is where the money is. The single source of truth third, because it is the one that hurts to change, and it hurts less once the first two are settled.
Where our interest sits
We build these systems for a living, so it is worth saying plainly: we would sooner send you away to spend an afternoon on paperwork we do not get paid for, because that afternoon is what makes the build hold. A system laid on top of a process you have written down is the one that still works a year later.
Want to know which of the three to start with?
Up to eleven questions, about three minutes. It asks where enquiries reach you, what happens after a quote goes quiet, and where the records live, which is these three in question form.
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