5 Reasons NOT to Automate Your Workflow

If we were to believe marketers, we would think that automating our business is the secret to everything. You know, we put in an automation and all of a sudden we're making money in our sleep. We don't have to do anything anymore. We can fire all our staff. Automations are the answer. But like most things when it comes to marketing, this is a lie, at least in my reality. Maybe yours is a bit different, but in my experience, working with hundreds, or I guess now thousands at this point, businesses as they go through the systemization journey, automations in and of themselves is often not the answer people think it is. I see a lot of people coming after automations or getting excited about automating things for the wrong reasons. And in many cases, those automations not only don't make their business better, it can often make things worse because automations are being applied willy nilly without thinking about where automations can best serve us. So in this video, I want to be a bit of a Debbie Downer and talk about the five situations or the five signs where you should not automate a specific workflow or component of your operation. And before I go into the reason number one, you should not automate. Yet, I do want to say me as a business owner, we have tons of automations in our business. I do think automations and automating workflows can be really valuable, but it requires care and precision that I don't think is often advertised when the shiny sparkles are surrounding the topic of automation. Okay, so with that out of the way, let's go into the first reason you should not automate your workflow yet. Reason number one is personal touch is your edge. This is referring to any situation where the human interaction that is part of your process is the main thing or a driving force for generating value. If your organization stands out from your competitors because of your high touch and high quality customer service, automating that service may be shooting yourself in the foot because all of a sudden the thing that made you different, the thing that made you special, you're just like everybody else. Or for example, let's say you're a writer and writing using your personal life experience is what makes you special. Well, if you start automating your writing by having either someone else writing or having an AI writer create your written content, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. I know this feels like a ridiculous thing to put here because of course, why would I automate something that is really well done by a human? The reason I'm putting This in here is because I see this all the time, particularly in agencies and other service heavy models where, you know, they've got so much labor going in every project, they're desperate to try to find opportunities to save a little cost. So I wanted to remind you here, as our very first factor, is to evaluate whether something and the human touch going into something is important for you. And if it is important to help you stand out, to make your customers happy, to make your experience what it is, maybe don't automate it. Okay? The second reason to not automate your workflow yet also comes down to people. But in this case, I'm talking about internal people. Think about the people on your team right now and think about how they're currently working in the process. You're considering automating. So let's just say the process for social media writing, creating that content that you want to put on Instagram, how comfortable are those people today in that process? If your answer is not, oh, they're super comfortable, then do not automate if your people are still in a learning state, either with the process or with the technology you're using in the process. We do not want to automate yet because automations are confusing. Imagine if you were someone who is just getting used to a tool like ClickUp, right? And ClickUp might be where you're organizing all your social media content. Can you imagine? You're in there, you're trying to figure out ClickUp, you're trying to find tasks and find due dates and write things and you know, it's scary and confusing and then all of a sudden things start happening automatically without you clicking anything. All of a sudden your level of overwhelm went from overwhelmed to super overwhelmed because automations are throwing more complexity at you. This is the situation we want to avoid. Whether you have a new piece of technology or a new process, if people in your work environment are still learning that process, I would really encourage you to hold off on automating for a few weeks, for a few months, for a few days, whatever it takes, until someone feels comfortable enough that introducing this new automation, this new thing they need to understand isn't going to feel like adding more to the pile. Can't tell you how many times I've seen folks throw automations at something really new because they're just so excited about how new it is. Don't do that. You're going to make your life harder than if you just took a phased approach of one foot in front of the other. All right, that's Number two, the third reason that you should not automate your workflow is that you don't actually need what automation provides. Now this is a little bit of a weird one because why would you automate something if the automation isn't going to help you? I don't know, but I see it all the time. In my view, automations generally help in three broad categories. They help reduce labor, increase speed, and increase accuracy and consistency. Because, you know, a robot, a technology is doing things in these three areas, an automation can really help you. But if you don't need these three things, maybe don't add an automation. I've seen a lot of instances lately where people have tried to automate a process because they wanted to make sure the process reflected the customer's needs. For example, so let's just say the customer says, hey, I want my T shirts designed and your process is over here. It has all the steps. And they want to use technology to make sure that what the customer wants is reflected in the tasks internally for the team. In this situation, let's imagine the reason we want this automation is because we frequently are working on tasks that don't seem to relate to what the client wants and then the client feels not heard and they're upset about their order being wrong. Well, would an automation really help with this? In my experience, a lot of times the answer is no. The reason that we're not understanding our customer is because we're not having a great conversation with our customer. That is something that can be best addressed by asking questions and communicating more effectively. That's not necessarily the strength of an automation. Sure, you could do it if you're feeling real fancy, but it may not be. The most direct path is to build some kind of fancy form and automation versus just having a five minute phone call or a better intake form. This is the kind of situation where I usually see automations employed with when they're not actually going to be helping the issue. When it comes to any problem in our business, we want to find the best solution for that problem. To do that, we need to understand the actual problem and explore what tools we have available to solve that problem. Automation is just one tool and in situations like this where there's a communication disconnect, oftentimes people are better communicators than technology that people create. So in this instance, perhaps a conversation could be a better way forward than trying to throw an automation at it. It's important for us to match the problem with the solution, not just throw automation at any problem. We can possibly find. Speaking of problems, the fourth reason that you may not want to automate yet is that you do not have a go to mechanic. Now I know automations have this connotation with being set it and forget it. But the fact of the matter is automations are usually between or within a piece of technology. And if there's one thing we've learned about technology over the past few years is that things change and technology changes and things break and servers go down and outages happen. And every time this happens, your automation is going to require maintenance. So I don't want you to get into the world of automations because you expect it to save you tons of time and require no work from you. That's simply not the case. If you are looking to automate, you need to also be willing to sign yourself up for the maintenance process. If you're someone who hates maintaining your technology, you would hate to go into make or to zapier and integrately or your ClickUp automations. You would hate that. Then maybe either learn to like this if that's at all possible or hire somebody who does know and like this skill set because unfortunately the nature of automation is that maintenance is going to happen and you need to be prepared for it. I hate to see people who spend, you know, hours trying to figure out their first zapier integration. They set it all up, they're so excited and then it breaks in a few weeks and you know, just because something happened, life happens and because it broke they just decide, you know what, I'm unwilling to fix it, I'm just going to let it sit there. So then those hours they put into setting up that automation have all been wasted to save time on a 10 minute task because they're unwilling or unable to maintain the automation that they've built. Please don't go down this path. Realize that automation, like all work that we talk about on this channel, is an ongoing thing. And if you're not willing to maintain the automations or hire somebody to maintain those automations, then don't bother with the upfront investment of setting these all up. You'll probably save more time just by doing it manually versus spending three hours trying to figure out an automation that then breaks next week. All right, that brings me to our third, fifth and final reason that you might not want to automate your workflow yet. And this is perhaps the most important of any the one we've talked about here. You do not want to automate a workflow if you do not have a proven recipe this is a bit of a cliche by now, but you guys have probably heard the saying where automating a broken process gets you more broken stuff faster, right? That's kind of the mindset here. If you don't know what you need to do, doing that unknown thing faster is just going to waste you more time faster, waste you more resources faster. And we don't want that to be the case. If you're exploring a new service, a new offer, a new workflow, a new process, explore it manually. Take the time to do each step, to send each email one by one so you can experience what's working and not working about that sequence, and do all of that testing and manual work before or you automate it. It's that simple. Unfortunately though, this is usually not practiced by a lot of business owners. You might have this idea for this new offer you want to create, and you're so excited about this new offer, you start creating a template of every step of the offer and setting up automatic emails that go out. You never test them, you just turn them on. And then when clients start going through, they start receiving this automated flow. And the problem with this situation isn't necessarily that you've gotten really excited and automated, that's great. But the problem is with new processes and things that aren't proven, you're going to need to tweak things a lot. You're going to change a step, change an email, change this, change that. And when we add automations in or any kind of process equipment, we're adding resistance to change. You know, if I wanted to add a new step four to a process, but I already have that automated over and make or zapier all of a sudden, if I want to change that process, I need to go here, write a new step of the process, then go over here and change the automation, or hire a consultant to change the automation for me. And I'm adding double work just because I was so excited to automate that I could not wait and do things manually. Back to the examples we've given in the past. Oftentimes manual can actually be more time efficient than automated if our process is not down to a science. So if you're exploring something new, please, please, please consider doing it manually, experiencing it manually first and when you feel confident that that process is where you want it to be for the next how long, then explore automation. We don't want to automate something that is still just getting figured out. So in conclusion, those are five reasons why you may not want to automate that shiny new workflow quite yet. Take the time and make sure that you know what you are automating, why you are automating it, whether the automation will actually help, whether the automation will actually hurt, and whether that process that you are looking to automate is ready for that level of speed, accuracy and consistency. If all of those boxes are not checked, do not pass go. Take a pause here and do the process manually until you can confidently say yes, we're ready to automate it all. Once you can check all those boxes, congratulations, you are ready to automate. Only once you've defined your process and checked all five of these boxes are you ready to start automating your process. And hint, just because you're automating does not mean you're done. There are actually many forms of equipment you can give to any given process to make it more efficient, more systemized and more easy. Easier in your day to day life. And actually in the description below this video I have a training where I go through some ways we can think beyond just automation. So if you're looking to systemize your entire operation, define what your processes are and equip them with all sorts of equipment including SOPs, automations, delegation, all that good stuff, then check out the link in the description below. Otherwise though, I hope this is a helpful video about how to automate or not automate your process. Thanks for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.