A short instructional video by Donna Bordeaux (Donna Genie) explaining a 3-step approach to improving business tasks: optimize, automate, then outsource. She gives concrete examples—client onboarding workflows automated via Zapier or IFTTT—and offers calculatedmoves.com's services to analyze and automate clients' processes. The piece encourages re-evaluating tasks (stop or streamline first) and highlights practical automation triggers and use cases.
Hey, I'm Donna Bordeaux with calculatedmoves.com let's talk a little about automation today. There are a lot of schools of thought on how to make things run smoothly in your business and many times they're overlooked. We typically like to look for a person to handle a task that we don't want to handle, and that's okay. But there's some steps that you are maybe missing in your process before you do that. So I'm going to walk you through a couple of things that I use in my studies of making sure that we are doing everything in the most efficient way. First off, we'll give you a little acronym. I stole this from my friend Ari Meisel at Less Doing. He tells us to optimize, automate and then outsource in that order. So taking one particular task, let's look. First off, it's easiest to take a task you don't like to do. Take a look at that task. Is there a way to optimize that task? First off, is there an easier way to do it? Should it just not be done anymore? Heaven forbid. I run into so many cases where I'll ask the question, hey, why do you do that? I don't know because we've always done it that way. Well, take a look and make sure that's not the answer. That's not a good one. Or if it is, stop doing it. What would happen if you stopped doing that task? That's another question to ask yourself. Next up, let's say that you have it as streamlined as you possibly can. The next step is to look at ways you can automate a task. Let's talk about automating for a minute. Many people do not take a lot of looks at how to automate and get rid of things. So for an example, let's say you get a new client and every time you get a new client you need to tell your staff that they are coming on board and give them a small brief about that. Maybe you need to set up a project in your project management system. Maybe you'd like to send them a thank you card. Alright. Did you know that almost all of that process should be automatically done? If you haven't checked it out Already, check out Zapier.com that's Z-A P I E R.com Zapier has the ability to link a lot of applications and they don't even have to be applications. It could be as simple as putting something in a Google sheet, sending an email that can trigger all of those other actions to happen. And it is awesome how it can link different applications together. You can also check out IFTTT if this then that it's a shortcut. IFTTT also has a lot of triggers and automations that you can utilize. Some cool stuff like when I head to a particular location, if I head to church on Sunday, please silence my phone. It can do that automatically for you. It'll detect the location you're in and silence your phone. So there are a lot of things like that that are a lot of fun to deal with and also can make your life a lot easier, less trouble and automate some tasks that you've just thought you had to have somebody else do. So take a look. One of the services that we are implementing for our clients now is is to help them analyze their processes a little more and look at what they can do to automate some of their tasks and streamline. So if this is something that interests you, I'd be happy to talk to you. This is kind of one of my pet projects I've always believed in. We are very efficient at calculated moves and it's because I love to look at process automation. If you have any questions, let us know. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel right here in the link and also you can check out our blog@calculatedmoves.com blog I'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you're automating today.
