Hire vs Automate - Which is right for your financial advice business?
Ambitious business owners know the feeling of having too little time. The feeling that you can't get everything done.
There always seems to be more work than you have hours in a day. In those times, it’s difficult to focus on the things you want to focus on.
You're working so hard, trying to get everything done. Yet you feel like you’re not actually making progress on the parts of the business that you need to.
Usually, there are two ways that we try to address this kind of problem.
The first is to work longer hours, which will bring results for a while. Over time, you’ll have too much to do again.
The second option is to hire someone. Expand the team to take on some responsibilities. Buying back some time.
This is an expensive option. Both in time and money.
So what else is there to do?
Well, that’s where we’d like to share our experience.
We’ve used automation to increase the impact of our team. Automation has allowed us to deliver a high quality product to market. Automation helps us to deliver a great experience to our customers.
With automations at our back, we can focus on what matters in the business. Always pushing towards growth.
When we’ve decided to automate instead of hire
Our rule is to automate first.
Sure, there are some tasks that are difficult to automate or the cost is too high. When we automate what we can, we’re buying time to work on the things we can’t or don't want to automate.
To our team, automation is a given, it’s more about asking, what should we automate and when.
How we identify automation opportunities
Finding repetition in your business
As we work on our day to day, we are on the lookout for tasks that get repeated. Things we have to do on a regular basis are an immediate flag for automation potential.
Two simple measures we use are:
Have we performed this task more than three times?
Are we likely to perform it three times more?
If the answer is yes to either question, then we consider automating the task.
Evaluating time spend
Time spend is the easiest and most noticeable prioritization metric. If you are spending a lot of time on something, it's reasonable to think that you need to automate it.
Time compounded with repetition is a recipe for scalability issues if not managed.
We had deadlock in our data management process. Where our team had to perform the same 10 minute task about 200 times a month.
That's a 33+ hour per month problem. Roughly a work week (if you exclude meetings).
By applying automation to this process, we were able to buy one week of time back.
What would you do with an extra week each month?
Energy for the right things
Most people think about productivity as it relates to time. But your energy levels play a massive role in what you are able to do with your available time.
It's important to consider the energy required by you or your team for each task.
As an example, replying to an email is less taxing than building a financial projection model in excel.
Where would you want to save your team energy?
Or maybe you want to buy them time so they can focus on the higher energy tasks themselves.
Considering task complexity
As a tech business, we believe that everything can be automated. But that doesn’t mean everything should be automated.
A helpful measure is to consider the complexity of the task you want to automate.
The more complex the task, the more complex the automation. The simpler the task, the simpler the automation (most of the time).
It might be expensive to automate a complex task. But you can easily make that investment back. A short-term price for long-term gain.
Should you even automate?
The simple answer. Yes.
The complex answer. Also, Yes.
If you don’t automate processes or tasks in your business this is what will happen.
- You will reach a capacity limit.
- Growth and revenue can stagnate.
- You will have a harder time achieving your goals.
Automation frees up your team to focus less on tasks that are time and energy sinks.
It gives them the space to do their best work and add value in other areas of the business. Driving higher growth rates, revenue, and progress.
When you should hire
We get that every business is different and every situation nuanced.
Our view is that you should only hire when you are at capacity after having automated as much as reasonable.
The impact of automations on each new hire will be like a compound effect. Increasing impact and efficiency from the start.
The Plug
If you’re a financial advisor who wants to start focusing on what’s important, then you need time back in your day.
We’ve helped over 200+ financial advisors get their time back so they can generate more revenue.
If you’re interested. Book a demo here