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As a business owner, you probably hear a ton about leverage. Investing time or money into a system that will ultimately outproduce that investment and make you money is wise. For years, in the real estate industry, adding leverage meant hiring a personal assistant or bringing on a buyer’s agent and creating a team.
For many, these additional support services seemed out of the realm of possibility — too much money, too much time and no guaranteed payoff. Fortunately for all of us, the rise of automated support tech solutions has brought on various ways to add leverage to your business.
From automation to artificial intelligence, the landscape is changing drastically regarding what’s possible when adding leverage to your business. What am I talking about? No-code automation.
No-code automation is not only cool. It’s the future. What is “no-code automation”? It’s the ability to take advantage of technology in a way that used to require a programmer. No-code automation typically utilizes a drag-and-drop interface to program technology and tools to talk to each other, but with the benefit of not needing to write any code.
Frankly, if you’ve ever created a Gmail filter, you’ve taken advantage of no-code automation.
- Are you tired of manually inputting leads into your CRM?
- Want to add tasks to your to-do list automatically?
- Have a ton of repetitive technology-based tasks?
With a bit of creativity, there’s a good chance that you can automate that with some no-code automation.
Getting started
So how do you get started? First, look at the tools you already use. As I mentioned, being smart about the Gmail filters you set up is a significant first step to automating your way to a more organized life. Beyond that, you’d be shocked how many CRMs, project planners, form builders and other tools have started to incorporate no-code automation.
Slack has automated custom messages. MailChimp lets you organize your contacts automatically based on specific behaviors. Trello has Butler to help with repetitive tasks, while Airtable and Monday.com have something similar, but they just creatively call it “Automations.”
Look to see what the tools you use can do. Automating a 2-minute daily task (even if it takes 30 minutes to set up) still saves you 10-plus hours over a year.
What if you want to build automation utilizing more than one tool? Maybe you want to connect your to-do list app and your Team’s messaging platform.
Well, my friends, that is where the fun begins. Tools like Zapier, IFTTT, and Make (there are others, too) allow you to build automation where more than one tool talks to each other.
They are all no-code automation builders of sorts. These three tools integrate with thousands of different software tools, allowing for endless automation combinations.
Exploring your options
If you’re curious, Zapier has an explore page where you can select the tools you currently use and spit out “template” suggestions that might make your life easier.
As a test, I selected Gmail and Google Sheets. Zapier suggested two templates that might be helpful, “Save new Gmail emails matching certain traits to a Google Spreadsheet” and “Send emails via Gmail when Google Sheets rows are updated.”
Once you dig in and learn, you can connect thousands of tools while utilizing the ability to filter, format and parse out content, and you’ll realize how effective these tools are.
The best business owners add leverage to their business to avoid repetitive tasks and focus their attention on the highest and best use. Are you ready to introduce yourself and your business to automation? With technology these days, automation is an easy win for business owners, and its capabilities are only growing.
Jeff Buettner is the co-founder of Cor Consultants and the host of After the License. Connect on Linkedin or Facebook.
