Automation: Speeding Up Without Slowing Yourself Down

Hello and welcome to the YouCan Podcast. I'm your host Sarah Jolly Jarvis and today we are on episode 32.
Can you believe it already? And so today we're going to be talking around how automation can speed things up but only when the time is right. And that's the key thing here is when is the right time and when is possibly a little bit too early on in the game.

So that's what we're going to be talking around today. Many new business owners, they get bogged down in tech and automation before they've even made a single sale.
And I see this not just with new business owners, but also with people who are creating a new offer. If they're changing the direction of the business or the format in which they deliver their services, they will faff around with technology we will get ourselves all dug into all the the sort of black holes that and that are there for technology and landing pages and different resources and all these different things when actually sometimes we just need to get ourselves going we need to test that theory out we need to see what people want we need to see what format that they want it on before we start getting all those bells and whistles in place.
I often see people trying to launch that first offer with all the technology already in place, all the emails, all the automation and everything else. And so we're going to be talking around why that's not a good idea and actually how doing it at the right time in the right order, you can actually make your life easier when it comes to what to put in those emails what to say to those individuals and how to really resonate with your target audience but first of all i want you to imagine right just to kind of set the scene on this imagine opening a cafe investing in all that high-end espresso machine the custom built websitebuilt website, an automated ordering system, all that point-of-sale stuff, before even testing whether people wanted your coffee.
Yeah, just imagine, right, if you moved into an area and you actually had no idea if these people were really into their coffee, and if they were into their coffee, how into their coffee were they? Now, the smart approach is to start with something like a pop-up store. Okay, so you can test that area, you can test the demand in that area.
And rather than going the whole hog, signing a lease, committing to all that money, you could do a bit of a pop-up. Okay, and you can serve that great coffee, you can see where the demand is, you can see where there is a demand and where there are lulls in that demand.
And you can already begin to start thinking around, okay, actually, I only catch people during the week, this isn't very busy on the weekends, do I want something that is only really busy during the week? Or do I want to look at a different location? Once you've signed a lease, once you've got yourself committed to that, that geography that you are in, it is very difficult and very costly to change that. So look at understanding what is it, what format, what demand is there, what is appealing to people before you start investing in that shop, before you start investing in automation.
That is the same logic. It is exactly the same logic for coffee shops for leases as it is for automation and complex systems that sit behind that automation there is no point having a 14-day email sequence for example you know indoctrinating people into your business into your world into upsells if you haven't yet got anybody coming through the front end and you have no idea what's going to attract that person to you and therefore what it is that they'll be wanting to experience, see, understand, what's going to convince them to buy.
There's just so many different variables that until you really know and understand who it is that you're attracting on that front end, you have no idea how to create the right resource or something that's really going to resonate with them. So what am I saying here? What am I telling you to do? Well, really what I'm encouraging you to do is to sell your offer manually first.
Okay. Whether that's a course, it's coaching, it's a service, whatever it is.
Okay. Yes, it will absolutely not be efficient.
It won't be scalable. It will be a lot of effort.

It'll be a lot of legwork, but it will allow you to start earning revenue very quickly. It will help you to gather real feedback from buyers rather than you guessing and making assumptions.
You'll know because those people will be putting in their hand in their pocket to buy that thing from you. It doesn't have to look perfect to start off with.
There are very, very few industries where you need it to be all shiny and sorted before it goes out there into the domain. Even the most professional of services can start quite basic and you can grow and you can develop from there.
Now, that's not to say that we don't feel better selling something which is totally put together and has got all those bells and whistles and is all shiny and has got a system. It makes us feel more official.
It makes us feel like, you know, proper. It makes us feel justified in the price that we're offering.
It makes us feel more confident in our offer. But that offer can, a decent offer will sell itself.
I know people who are generating millions per month now with their programs, with their courses, with their trainings, who started those trainings, those products off with Google documents and access to those Google files and Google videos where those individuals could access that information. People didn't care because they knew it was rough and ready.
They knew it was at a price that was never going to be repeated. They knew they were getting good value for money, not because it was this polished opportunity with all the bells and whistles, but because it had the information that they were after.
And that is the key thing. So even if you're just starting out, you can still get away with providing things in a more rough and ready format.
The key thing is to understand what resonates with your audience before you automate, before you put those things in place. Okay, from a sort of practicalities tip, because everyone always wants numbers.
Okay, if you can get at least five sales for that offer that you are creating before you start to put things into place from an automation, five sales is a good sign that your offer is worth automating. Obviously, that depends on the size of your audience, et cetera, et cetera.
But that is a good starting point. That is a good rule of thumb.
If you're thinking, hey, what about me? What about my scenario? And you're left puzzled by this, drop me an email, sarah at youcan.online, and I will help as much as I can. Okay.
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To your audience, etc. Start small, okay? So begin with simple automations where you are wasting the most of your time, like, you know, automatic purchasing and signing up for the course, okay? So you can can start with a lot of my clients start with a basic checkout so then you're not faffing around with card details and they go to that quite quickly and particularly with stripe and things like that you've got those payment gateways you've got that opportunity with softwares like the software i mentioned last week go high level where you can um be putting uh those those resources in place very quickly very very easily yes you might get charged more to start off with than everything else but it's a way to take payment it's an easy way to take payment and then from there you can progress so they might be your first step then you might look to you know what actually I don't I don't want to be talking to people in the dms or whatever for a product that's worth less than $100.
Totally agree with you on that one. So then we can start looking at having landing pages, sales pages in place so that people are able to sign up through those pages and get convinced over your offer being a great offer without you having to have that with them.
Then it might be email sequences for the onboarding of new clients where you just go in, you know, if they make the purchase and then it automatically puts them into that offer, makes that offer available, sends out emails, starts that process of automation even better. The more complex automations like upsells and downsells and other offers that can order bumps that can come into a sales funnel, they can come later.
Okay. Equally, if tech isn't your thing, then outsource it because you'll be able to outsource it because you'll have made sales.
And if you are better, your time is better spent, if it doesn't float your boat or you're not naturally good at this kind of thing, or it's not something you see yourself doing in the future, then if you are making the sales, then you will be in a position where you should be able to reinvest that money in getting the help you need to get that tech up and running. Please do your due diligence.
There are lots of people out there saying they can do things which they can't. And so, you know, look for recommendations, etc.
Again, if you're ever confused about that, drop into the You Can community and ask who would I recommend for such and such or drop me an email. Okay.
So the key thing is here is to play to your strengths. If you have listened to my earlier podcast on not strangling your cash flow and still stunting the growth of your business through taking too much out of it to cover your own expenses, then you've already got the idea that you are wanting to reinvest into your business.
And therefore, you can do that with the sales that you will make from the revenue you've generated from actually putting this thing out there in the first place, rather than keeping it under wraps until all the automation is sorted. It will pay for its own automation.
Okay. Now, automating after validating that offer, making sure you've got demand for it, making sure that people are coming through, making sure the right people are coming through as well.
There's no point automating it with the bad message. So for example, you know, you are putting out a message of, um, I can, I can help you get 10 clients in the next six weeks.
And then from there, what you're getting and you're getting real newbies, but you don't want newbies. You want people who have been in business, but they're just not got the lead gen that they would like.
Then what you can do is you can tweak that initial messaging. If you had built an entire automation on that, then you'd have had the follow-up emails talking about getting those six clients, getting those leads within the next 10 clients, 10 leads within the next six weeks, whatever.

You would have been basing everything off that, but actually that brings you the wrong people.

So as it's going through, you can see the quality of the leads you're getting. You can see the type of people you're attracting.
You can either do more of it or less of it or pivot or whatever

you need to do to get it in front of the right people. That is when you are then in a position,

I would go again. And when you've got five sales from people who actually you want to work with you enjoy working with for example then I'd be like yeah okay this is this is good this messaging works and then I would start to slot it into my automation and and that that automation process so you know automating at the right time once've got the right people coming through, it saves you time and money by building only what is needed, okay, when it is needed.
It fits your audience, which is what I was explaining there with, you know, you better understand them, you know that you're getting the right people through. You make more sales because the process is streamlined, it is optimized, you're getting the right people, you're not having to go back and rechange anything.
You're not having to, you know, down tools because it's not working and you need to get another one up and running. You can fit it in as you go.
You sell first, you automate second. It's the fastest way to build a business that actually works and actually gets the right people through the door.
Okay. so don't let automation slow you down.
Okay, you're using it to speed it up. It's supposed to be a tool that enables efficiency, but used at the wrong time, it's going to slow your launches.
It's going to slow your progress. It's going to slow the development of your business.
It's going to slow your understanding because you're going to be detached from those individuals. And so you're not even going to know who you're talking to if you stick a sales page in the way.
When you've got a sales page going between you and a client, you want to make sure you've got that client right and you know who it is you are tailoring that sales page for. If you've enjoyed this episode, if you've got somebody in mind that you think, you know what, this would really work well for them, then please do share it you can feel free to dm me you can dm on instagram facebook or you can drop me an email sarah at you can dot online with your biggest automation challenge and please don't forget to subscribe and review this podcast every bit helps so that's it for me this week, guys.
I look

forward to speaking to you again next week, where we're going to be talking a little bit more about

referrals and why referrals are your best source of leads and how to get more of them. So I look

forward to speaking to you then. In the meantime, have a great rest of your week.
Bye for now.