Comments on: To Survive This Economy You Must Automate Your Small Business

By: Vahur

Vahur — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 18:43:18 +0000

It still takes a time to make things on a new way.

By: Heartburn Home Remedy

Heartburn Home Remedy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:11:25 +0000

I can tell that this is not the first time you mention this topic. Why have you decided to write about it again?

By: Denise O'Berry

Denise O'Berry — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:39:11 +0000

@Jason Looks like you captured the essence of what a small business needs. Thanks for sharing your site.

By: Jason Holden

Jason Holden — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:13:49 +0000

This is the very reason that winweb (www.winweb.com) started in business and the very reason we have partnered with winweb, by providing a full tri-ledger accounting system small business clients are able to automate the accounting function, couple this with being online (hosted) they can make use of a VA (virtual assistant) to enter the data, win win you would think, but it is not that easy convincing small business this is the way forward!

By: Luz Spielberg

Luz Spielberg — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:37:51 +0000

Hi Amanda…that is really what entrepreneurs should learn to do — avoiding as much as possible the error. Most of the time we tend to learn in a hard way when in fact we could have prevented it to happen.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

By: elev8

elev8 — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:57:43 +0000

Good post! It is quite hard to understand sometimes when you meet people that do not have automated processes in their business.

Orbis TaskCentre

Business Process Management (BPM) Software Suite

TaskCentre is a powerful suite of Business Process Management (BPM) technologies that ‘loosely couples’ business applications enabling organisations to automate virtually any employee-driven business process.

By: Denise O'Berry

Denise O'Berry — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:26:04 +0000

@Clate That’s a good observation. We do tend to focus on those things in our business that we love. You provided some good advice. Thanks.

By: Clate

Clate — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:28:07 +0000

Great post, Denise. The more small business owners automate, the more they can focus on marketing and sales, which is what propels the growth of the business.

In working with lots of small business owners, I’ve noticed that we tend to either entirely neglect the stuff we don’t like to do (invoicing, collecting cash, book keeping usually fall in that category) or we reluctantly work on the things we don’t like to do and spend WAY too much time doing it. My advice to entrepreneurs is:

1. Come to grips with the fact that when you start a business, you have to do a bunch of stuff you don’t love
2. Automate as much of that “stuff” as possible
3. Build your business to a point you can delegate or outsource the stuff you don’t love and you can’t automate (viewing the delegation as a reward for success works well); and
4. Always work toward doing ONLY the stuff you love.

The reality is when we start a business, we have to do a bunch of stuff we don’t love (unless you’ve got boatloads of cash, which usually isn’t the case). I firmly believe a lot of folks lose their business because they don’t come to grips with this brutal fact. But if we follow the steps above, the business grows and the entrepreneur becomes more and more satisfied in pursuit of doing ONLY what he/she loves.

By: Denise O'Berry

Denise O'Berry — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:23:34 +0000

@Erick Sounds like you’re in tune with this market and have created some helpful tools. Thanks for sharing.

By: Arthur Bland

Arthur Bland — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:54:09 +0000

Well I hope they will Denise…