Hello and welcome to another episode of behind the madness. I'm your host, James Roberts, founder, and owner of Method. We are a growth agency who are hell bent on unlocking company's potential through creative and marketing techniques. On today's episode, we are talking all about automation and optimization, something that I love. Once again, I am joined by my two friends. Jamie and Paul. So let's jump in with today's topic. Firstly hello both. How are you?
Very good. Thanks James how are you
Yeah. Good, good. It's nice to somebody asks plus somebody cares Jamie. It's nice somebody cares.
You say that, but I'm going to stop you there because we're going to flip the script today and we're going to put you on the spot a little bit. We know that automation optimization is your baby. you love making sure a company works more efficiently. So today to ask you a couple of questions, get your responses and see how it goes. That's right. Isn't it. Paul.
Yeah, James is an automation and workflow nerd.
said like a true friend.
Yeah. Thanks mate. Right go on then let's get cracking.
So first and foremost, what's it all about? As in, we've just thrown automation optimization all out there. What you talking about?
So with automation, optimization, anything along those lines, it kind of is around streamlining. If we're just focused on businesses and obviously be done in everyday life, to be honest, it can be done with anything personally, as well as business. But for this, I think people will get more interest out of business optimization and automatization. So we're primarily talking about streamlining companies, we are trying to optimize their day, into working more efficiently.
done in a number of different ways. I could certainly talk for hours and hours on the topic. And you can break that down into certain sectors. So when we take the car industry. There's two ways of making cars that you can make beautiful handmade cars like our friends over at Pembleton, or you can go down the automation route and mass produced cars.
Now to do that, you've got to get systems in place where that automation is taking care of and in that instance, they are actual robotics that are automating the car manufacturing process. I think it's nice to start there because everybody has seen the pictures. Everybody is seeing video footage of these cars being produced and you can take it one step further.
If you look at the likes of BMW who actually have almost robots that are driving around the shop floor, doing all of these automation tasks now what that's doing is obviously speeding up the creation of a car in this instance and saving people's time. We only have so much a day and to train up staff, to be able to do that, to train up engineers, to train up people is obviously costly and can take a lot of time.
That is key, that is a massive key point is talking about this, given me a great outlook of what it is, but why, why should business owners marketing teams, like, why should they care? Like, what's the benefit.
So it's, obviously it generally does come down to cost. Everything has to come down with cost of business and we are trying to get the most for our buck. We built a system a few years back, and when we were introducing it to companies, they were really worried about it replacing them because it was doing a part of their job, but I never looked at it like that.
I look at it from the view that it's giving that person time back, that can be used to do more beneficial tasks for the organization, or for the company. If you're doing a repetitive task all the time, you are paying for somebody to do that repetitive task rather than build on or grow. And I think that's what it comes down to is, is the growth.
So if you are automating something, they then have time to grow themselves, they have time to learn new things, but also you have the Headspace maybe to apply that into a different field, but you are saving money on that person. You have bought them back time where you are going to get more productivity from them.
They're going to actually be able to do more things for that money when they are, you know, could be very highly skilled members of your team that are doing the same thing day in and day out and that is a waste of time and resources.
I imagine massively on, on that point, the employee team get much more enjoyment from that jobs as well, because they're not doing those boring tasks that you kind of said, and they are given more time and license to use their expertise to innovate, or to think up new ideas or grow themselves with the time you've given back to them. So I can see it being a massive, useful tool on that side of the morale as well. Paul have you got anything fire over to the boss man?
I want to add on what James just said really, it's it's about efficiency. It's about giving people time back to do their job. If started the job five years ago, you will have taken on more today then you signed up for you're constantly getting niggling little jobs thrown at you to do that takes up so much time.
With automation, workflows, and things like that like that it's giving you that time back to concentrate on your job and not, not wasting time on the jobs you're doing before it's just letting technology do it for you.
Yeah. Interesting. Going going back to James. I'm going to put a bit of a clock on this. I'm going to look for one to two minute answers for the next couple. You spoke earlier about the importance of having these systems and stuff in place. How do you plan automations? What do you do for that?
Quick answer, start simple, you are never going to have a complex system overnight. It's never going to just wake up one day and you're going to have your whole system, your whole organization automated.
You have to think with the basics first, you know, maybe take email something that every organization uses and we will all send an email with the similar content in it, three or four times a week, easily, where it could be related to sales and that same email or that chasing email of did you get my quote? We will send it and we will write it every time. So why not set a template that you can use and you change a few things because we all want to be personal.
You have to be personal, but the bulk of it is done. That could be your first step in terms of automation.
Perfect and well, under a minute, so nicely done.
I've got a question for you, James. Some people might be put off by the high cost of implementation of automation. So is it worth it?
So, yeah, so as I said, you know, templates could be free. You could save them on, on Google docs. When you get up to, obviously we are HubSpot partners HubSpot have around marketing automation and sales automation even service looking after ongoing clients are brilliant at what they do and you can get some really complex automation workflow set up.
When you get to that level yes, there is a cost involved, but the flip side of that, Essentially a HubSpot license, I usually treat it like a member of staff that is working, you know, every day of the year, working every hour. They're not forgetting things. I don't have to pay them a pension. So really a member of staff that is helping the whole organization out. So I think don't view it as an outgoing cost that is you know, not, not going to really win you anything back. It certainly is.
It's going to win you back in terms of optimization time, also, yeah, treat it like a member staff who's doing all of those jobs for you.
So I think kind of answered them part a little bit of my next question, but if you were to give people a toolkit for automations, optimizations, what does, what does yours look like? What would you recommend? And like you kind of did there is there a scale, obviously starting, maybe on a free solution to paying for a tool like HubSpot.
Yeah, so again, you know, there is ways that you can utilize optimization, so it could, it could just be a simple System that you are looking at within your business, that looks at how much time you are using in certain tasks. So every time you are writing emails, for example, and it's a bit of a boring process to go through, but if you can segment that time and understand how your staff are working, we all think we know, but really we don't.
There's so much wasted time that happens within a day. That's understanding that first and foremost, which essentially is free, we can do that with stopwatches, you can have a good idea of really what your staff, your team, your workforce are doing, then you can decide, well, what should we automate? And with a lot of these platforms, you know, we use a number of different tools and they all start off with a starter or a free version to kind of get you going.
So within our tool kits, yes, we have some in fact, all of our tools, I think have a starter option, and then you can grow that as your business grows.
Okay. So last one from me before I let you off the hook. Business doing okay, how do I start? If you would just give me a easy process that I could follow here. And it's once two minutes, super simple. How do I start freeing up this time? This time that you said to me, that I could have, how do I do it?.
So again, analyze what you're doing, set out, what you do during the day. I think going back to time and tracking your time and understanding how you spend your day and how you split up your day is a really interesting exercise. Then once you've done that you can set time within your day. So without getting started with any of these tools, it's a good to have this understanding of how you can optimize yourself. Block in time to do set tasks.
we all have this monkey mind, especially when it's within business and we will have to jump between different tasks. Different people are pulling us in different ways of phone will go off and email will come in and we're being pulled in all of these different directions, which is why it's sometimes very nice to get home and put your feet up.
So block out time, you know, on a Thursday morning for an hour, I'm going to do prospecting, in the afternoon I'm going to look at clearing my emails out, set time within your day and stick to it. You might have to deviate, but then also set meetings around that. So I know that between 12 and one o'clock, I'm going to have my lunch and I'm going to go for a walk, let's say, that's blocked out.
That's in my calendar, people can't book a meeting then, then I'm going to do meetings at two til three and set things like that. All of a sudden you're optimizing yourself from then you start to then get a greater understanding of how to manage your time and what repetitive tasks you are doing and then you can start to move on from there to what to include.
Perfect. Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense, Paul, is there you've got to fire at him before I head back over to him?
I think he's covered pretty much everything that we needed to in this podcast.
That's perfect. So, James, thank you for jumping into the hot seat and giving your expertise on that. I'm sure HubSpot will be very happy with a couple of mentions. We will try and get them on here as well at some point, so if you're listening. James, back over you to wrap up and say bye to our lovely audience.
Yeah. So as I mentioned, I love automation. If you have any questions about how to get started off, drop me an email. It's probably the easiest way, james@hellomethod.co.uk. And I only answer emails on a Friday afternoon between five and six. No that's a lie. Just drop me an email and I will come back to you on the, on those.
It's a lie.
It's a lie. I'm always on my emails. So anyway, thanks for listening. This has been behind the madness with me, James Jamie and Paul today. We hope you enjoyed learning about automation. Make sure you subscribe. So you're going to get all of our latest episodes pop up on your phone. And as always, you can head over to hellomethod.co.uk, to sign up to our email list and get notified from there, with our blog and all of our lovely content that we're putting out on there as well.
We'll also include some links and some resources in the show notes as ever, but that's it for this episode. So see you next time.