It’s a new year, and you might be thinking about streamlining your business processes via automation. But what if reorganising your business’ systems feels overwhelming? What if you don’t even know where to start?
This article is for those of you who want to automate your business in 2025, but don’t know where to begin. We worked with systems expert David Jenyns to break down automation into small, manageable steps, starting from the very, very beginning.
But first and foremost: What does automation mean?
At the most basic level, automation is optimising your business’ processes so that things get done as efficiently as possible. It often means freeing up small, repetitive tasks using technology. Crucially, automation is about giving you more time to work on your business, rather than in it.
“I kind of see automation as ‘How do we leverage a machine to do parts of the work that previously a human did?’ ” David explains.
He clarifies that automation doesn’t have to include a machine – it could involve delegating tasks to other people, or offshoring – but it often does. For example, automation experts like David are turning to artificial intelligence to help their clients streamline processes.
So, let’s say you want to automate. How do you get started?
STEP ONE: Take stock of your business processes
Before you can automate any of your processes, you need to identify what you’re currently doing and how.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start, you might divide your business up into imaginary departments, like HR, marketing, sales or product development, David explains. For each department, think about its purpose.
“Marketing’s purpose is to generate leads,” David says. “OK, well, what are the most important systems that contribute to generating leads in that department?”
By focusing on only the processes that generate results, you’re also identifying the processes that aren’t serving your business.
For an example of automation in practice, ISB also spoke to small-business owner Shannon Smit. Shannon, who owns a small accounting firm, explains how she undertook the exact process described above when starting her own automation journey.
“I started by systemising each of the different processes and taking them apart one piece at a time,” the business owner recounts. One of her departments was IT – which she promptly outsourced to someone else.
STEP TWO: Identify who does these processes the best and record them
Once you’ve identified the main processes that make up your business, it’s time to record them.
If you want to automate a process, you first need to establish what the process should look like when it’s done well and record this for later reference. Recording your processes is important for a number of reasons:
- You can use your process recordings to teach other team members to do them well, standardising the process and saving time.
- New team members can be onboarded much more quickly.
- Key-person dependency is eliminated.
- And, crucially: You can eventually use your most efficient version of the process when developing software to do the task for you.
When it comes to recording business processes, David recommends getting a video of someone doing the process on whatever recording device you have handy and prefer. If you’ve got employees, the person doing the task should be the team member who can do it the best. You can record them doing the task via phone, screen record, or even getting them to wear a Gopro; whatever is easiest.
Next, transcribe the video of the process. You can do this manually or use a transcription software, like Otter. Feed the transcription into an LLM, like ChatGPT or Gemini, and ask the LLM to draft a description of the process using the transcription.
Once it’s done, take the description back to the original team member who does the process best and have them check the LLM’s description for accuracy.
After that, you can enhance your documentation by adding links to templates, PDFs, additional resources, photos or the original video. Then establish a place to save all your recordings, like a series of Google Drive folders, or a note-taking app like Notion.
Shannon uses a software called systemHUB to store all her process documentation.
“Originally, it was all in Word docs,” she says. “But systemHUB enables us to have the text and the content. We do Loom videos for everything as well.”
Having all her business’ processes stored makes it much easier for everyone on Shannon’s team – particularly new hires – to reference them.
“The beauty of it is that now, especially from an undergraduate perspective, they can go, ‘oh, so how do I do that fixed asset section?’ They can go back to the systemHUB. They can watch the video, if that’s their preferred way of seeing things, or they can just read the text, which also goes through step by step.”
Shannon explains that she makes all her stored processes short, no more than five minutes to read or watch. This makes each process much more digestible. If you’re worried about missing a step, you can always save your original documentation video and refer to that for a more detailed explanation.
| Whose job is this? If possible, David recommends having a systems and AI champion in the business whose job it is to record processes and lead the automation journey. This adds a layer of accountability and means other team members can focus on their jobs. If you don’t have a team to help you, you could consider hiring a contract worker or enlisting the help of a family member or friend. This way, you can still keep up with your day-to-day tasks. |
STEP THREE: Optimise your tasks
So, you know the processes that make up your business operations, and you’ve taken note of how to do them well. Is it time to bring in the robots to do them all for you yet?
Not necessarily. As David explains, the benefits of automation can be less technologically complicated than we think.
“Generally, the biggest wins in most small businesses are just adding consistency and removing key person dependency,” David says. “You know, making sure that if, say, ‘Sarah’ is not in, the task can still get done.”
Once you get that in place first, and the business has a good number of systems in each department, then you can consider how to outsource each process to a machine. David gives us some examples of how this could work.
“The first, easiest one is [Chat]GPT or whatever LLM you choose,” he says. “You want to look in your processes for writing- or proofing-related things, or anything where it just makes sense to go, ‘Hey, maybe we could craft a prompt here and stick that into the process for step number three.’ ”
To get better answers from your LLM, David recommends spending some time training it up. There are plenty of resources out there on how to do this; basically, it involves getting the system familiar with what sort of answers you want from it. It’s not dissimilar to training a new employee.
You can also use AI for inspiration on automating. For instance, you might feed your process back into ChatGPT and ask it for suggestions on how to optimise the process. You could ask it to suggest steps it could do for you, or to recommend software to lighten the load.
If you want to get more sophisticated, you can also use workflow tools, like Cassidy. These tools can string together processes for you. For instance, you can set up the tool to copy and paste text into ChatGPT for proofing, then copy and paste the result into a separate document, and then apply formatting in a specific way.
If you’re feeling even fancier, and have more of a budget, you can even create a custom coding solution that is specific to your business. To find someone who can do this for you, you can search the internet for custom coding solutions in your area, or “software solutions for small business”. If you’re good at vetting contractors, you can also find cheaper deals on sites like Upwork, David explains.
Shannon says she got custom software for her business. After hiring some IT contractors, she showed them her systemHUB. The contractors were able to look over each process and tell her whether they could set up an automatic system via some custom software.
For instance, her team identified a repetitive and unnecessary task that was wasting everyone’s time: redoing clients’ fixed assets statements in Xero. Pre-automation, the tedious task took up 30 to 40 minutes per client. To save time, Shannon’s contractors built a custom piece of software to do the task.
David describes an accountant client who set up a custom coding solution to double-check client information in their ATO portal.
“One of the tasks is to log into the ATO portal to see whether or not any new reports or things have been updated that they need to send over to their client,” David says. “They created a little robot that basically logs in, scans the portal, double-checks things…against their account, and then emails the client to let them know.”
It sounds like a tiny task, but setting up a coding solution to do the checks for them saved this client more than 1000 hours a year, David says.
| How do you find (and choose) the right software to do tasks for you? There is an overwhelming amount of software out there to help you with the automation process. How do you find the right ones for you? David recommends chatting with colleagues and/or seeking out other people in your industry to see what they are using. He also says that it’s worth doing an audit of your existing SaaS tools, to see if there are any features that you’ve missed, before springing for something new. |
STEP FOUR: Getting the team on board
Both David and Shannon mentioned one key challenge when it comes to automation: getting team members on board, if you have them.
“It just starts off with talking about it,” David asserts. “As a leader in an organisation, you need to lead by example. You need to talk about it. You need to bring it up in team meetings. You need to celebrate when someone does this right, when they create a process, or they leverage AI to do a thing.”
Shannon says she does training sessions with her team regularly. She also encourages them to use tools like AI in their own time to get more comfortable with them. To practise with AI, you can start using it to help you with anything, from making a shopping list to organising a holiday.
Ultimately, both Shannon and David think AI is the future – whether their team members like it or not.
“I’ve said to my team – as brutal as it sounds – this is where we need to go, and I’m just going to drag everyone kicking and screaming,” Shannon laughs.
“I mean, the reality is, a team member who uses AI will probably, in time, outperform tenfold a team member who doesn’t, so that the team member doesn’t really have a choice,” David says. “Either the business you’re in is going to do it, or the competitor is. The genie is out of the bottle. There’s no going back on this now.”
This article first appeared in issue 47 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
