Automating my productized service to $180k ARR while working 1 hour per day

At the start of 2021, I decided to completely automate my productized graphic design/code service, Draftss. The experiment was a success & we increased our revenue by 80% in the year 2021 as we grew from $100K to $180K ARR 🤑. All this by working just 1 hour a day.

The Recipe:

Automating a business doesn’t always mean evaluating insignificant people out of your team & replacing them with technologies or other people. It is more about producing meaningful work using all the technologies & resources available to make the process work smoothly. In order to achieve this meaningful work with automation, you need a perfect blend of the Team, Software & SOPs along with Delegating crucial people for tasks based on the Urgency/Priority.

The Team:

The stepping stone of automation for any productized service is to have a team that understands everything that goes through them. The team should be smart enough to follow everything that is assigned to them at the required pace. You need a team that does not drag you down but instead lifts your business up. The process of hiring should be fast, but the process of firing should be faster. Every employee that produces unsatisfactory work will cost you a fortune in the longer run. You should keep an eye on the efficiency of each & every person in the team from any of the branches. If a single area of your business is weak than the complete automation cannot be achieved. All team members must work in sync to make sure nothing stops business from growing. Develop a good environment within your teams to increase their efficiency.

One of the difficult tasks for businesses giving Productized services is that you cannot afford to hire highly experienced people all the time for every designation in your business. So in order to save money, you should hire young people with 1-3 years of experience as freshers so that you can train them over the course of time. Establish a learning culture between the team & make them self-learn everything that you expect of them. Enable the seniors to assist them at the start to make it easier for them to absorb the new atmosphere & the culture. The best part about hiring young people is that in the future they may become masters in their field & can be promoted to manager positions. Create a hierarchy within your business to facilitate a constant learning culture. A business cannot be automated in the absence of hierarchy.

When it comes to productized business it’s likely that your business may consist of many services (like design, code, content, seo, etc.) & a lot of those services are dissimilar to each other. Ensuring that the workflow remains constant is of paramount importance. To achieve the workflow you will have to assign clear roles & responsibilities for each category of services to the managers. You should assign 1 manager to a team of 4-7 members so that the teams remain constant in their work & the manager is not overloaded. Assigning managers will also ensure that all the employees stay productive & accountable. The manager can also enforce the learning culture in the employees. If an employee is not up to the standards then the manager can easily figure out & fix it.

The manager is the leading man for all the people working under him & he can bring the best out of the employees. He is someone who will guide the team in your absence. Do not overload your manager & always divide teams based on the number of people a manager can handle. A manager can also help produce maximum work done with the number of people provided by pushing them to their max efficiency. If the team member fulfills his duties well then in future the employee can form his own team thereby helping you in the expansion of your business.

Customer Service:

The whole idea of automation revolves around saving time for yourself without your business getting affected. A common mistake done usually by founders who are starting out is that they spend a lot of time in servicing customers while they don’t actually need to take part in that activity. Onboarding customers is the most important part of any business, but there are various operational activities that do not require the immediate attention of a founder. To save this time there should always be a Customer Service team whose primary task is to onboard a customer & set the correct expectations at the beginning of their journey. At instances, the customers are confused about their requirements & solving their queries takes up a lot of time. In order to save the stress from yourself & your managers, you should hire a dedicated Customer Service team who will be solely responsible to deal with the customers to resolve their questions/issues. It is important for the people in the client service team to understand everything about the business first. They should be smart enough to assist the customers in solving their doubts & queries. All the relevant information can be further shared by the Customer Service team to the Client Service team.

Once a customer is on board the entire case should be transferred to the Client Service team, every small detail required by the customer is to be understood by them & shared with the respective team responsible for finishing the required task. The communication between the entire team & the client service team should be simple & clear. The major benefit of this structure is that all the unimportant inputs from the clients get filtered out by your Client Servicing team & only valuable data is shared with the Managers, saving tons of time for the managers which will result in increasing the productivity of the entire team.

Just like every other human being the Client & the Customer Support team also has a limited capacity to handle clients, so do not overload a person instead add more people to these teams. If the client service executive is overburdened, he may produce errors in the communication between him & the service managers making it crucial for them to work only up to the capacity they can handle. In the case of adding more people to this team, it is important to divide the work carefully between them to balance it among them for reaching maximum efficiency. Scale these teams based on how your business is doing & your forecast for the next 6-months.

Hire an HR:

Founders think that they should always be involved in the hiring process especially for a new/small business. I do understand that hiring is an important task but the attention of the founder is not required all the time. You should hire a Human Resource (HR) to take care of all the hiring needs. The HR can look out for most of the tasks of hiring which includes searching for new employees, sharing the basic info about the job with candidates, conveying information of eligible candidates to the managers, fetching candidate's documents, sharing NDA along with other important documents & many other tasks during the hiring process. All the formalities in the hiring process should be done by HR which will save plenty of time for you to directly interview them & accept or reject the candidate.

The other important task of HR is to fire people. Just like the hiring process, the firing process must also come under HR so that you save yourself more time.
We will be covering the firing process in the article ahead under the Updates section.

SOP:

The most essential ingredient before fully automating your business is to build a process with clear concepts so that it can be followed by all the people of the company. Creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is like making a manual for an electric device. It should contain all the information that you want to be conveyed to the current or new employees. It is also like writing a script for the employee even before they are hired. The idea behind setting up SOPs is that the person gets the idea about what they are going to do once they start their day-to-day tasks. It might be a little tricky for a new employee so it would require training & educating them so that they can completely understand the SOP before getting comfortable with this new system. As a founder, you need to invest your time to create SOPs. A unique SOP should be made for every delegation under your business.

If you want your business to follow a constant cycle without any failures then you need to set standards in your business. Write everything down that should happen or everything that is to be avoided. Make a list of all the expectations that you have from a particular role & draft your SOP accordingly. It should make the entire process easier as it will help to kill all the time that goes to waste in the process of thinking & asking.

One recurring problem for businesses is that the employees do not follow the SOP provided. It is the duty of the manager to make sure that the guidelines are being followed by everyone. The manager will help & guide them adopt the SOP and incorporate it into day-to-day activities. Another problem that persists is that you cannot expect many things from a single employee & if you feed him with more than what they can chew, they will probably end up with poor performance. A basic rule that should be followed when it comes to creating an SOP is that"

"All the responsibilities of an employee should fit under the length of a Sticky Note."

If your SOP exceeds more than that it would be very difficult for the person to achieve all of them without making any mistakes. Successful implementation of SOP will guarantee smooth workflow & help you save tons of time that can be converted to increase the productivity of the overall business.

Knowledgebase:

Every person who works under a manager always has many questions hitting their mind as the situations arise. It is likely that several employees might have the same question but at different times. So it is ideal to make a Knowledgebase for all the people working for you answering all these questions. This knowledge base should be completely internal & only people from the organization can have access to it. At times the questions might be related to employee's role/responsibility or it may be something related to the business in general. Make a list of all these questions & answer them so that no individual has to waste time if the same question arises again. You can think of all the incidents that occurred or situations that have a high probability to happen in the future. The benefit of creating a knowledge base is that with time it will grow & in future massive amount of data will be readily available for anyone from the team. The time a person takes to ask & get the answer can be totally eliminated with the use of a knowledgebase.

Avoid using applications like Google Docs or Grammarly for making a knowledge base instead buy a SaaS (preferably LTD) that will provide you with many features & will be easier to use. It will be more simple to manage a paid service & you can give all the members of your team access to this data.

Utilize SaaS:

No productized service can achieve automation without using SaaS to complete its tasks. Invest in SaaS that will help you save time & increase your productivity at the same time. Use softwares that will solve your internal problems even if it comes at the expense of spending a little money on it.

It might occur to you that instead of using a SaaS you can just develop it using the in-house resources but doing this will prove inefficient in the longer run. The total amount of time & resources your team will use to create that SaaS will always be more than what you can get by paying a small amount. The additional benefit of this will be that you won’t have to worry about the bugs or failures & you will always get more utility as they keep upgrading their SaaS.

One minor drawback of enforcing the use of SaaS is that there might be some people who would not understand how it works & there will be a learning curve. It will be the Manager's duty to make arrangements for them so that they can be well educated at first to avoid the problems that might occur in the future.

Efficient use of these softwares is very important to your business if it helps to solve your recurring problems. Buying SaaS that increases productivity is money well spent. Depending upon the productized service you provide, the use of softwares will vary. For e.g. if there are many people working under the same branch you can use Asana, GitHub, Gitlab, Teamwork, Basecamp, ClickUp, Hive & other softwares for task management.

Some Project Management Softwares that can help you increase your team's productivity:

A. Slack
One of the best software to use if you want all your team to work in sync. The primary use of Slack is for team communication while making it clear & simple for everyone to use. A must-have technology for any business if they want to automate entirely.

B. Trello
Getting everything assigned in front of the team helps in making sure that no tiny detail gets missed. You can set rules for the team behind every task & every activity done by any member inducing more credibility & seriousness in their work.

One thing that should be noted before buying/using any software is that the data is readily available on the software. The workflow should remain constant even if anyone is not available. It should be cloud-based so that it can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. The workflow should never get interrupted by anything that happens within the team. No matter how small the data seems it should always be readily available. Nothing stops the Business.

It is said that communication is the key in any walk of life. In case of running a business, communication is more important than anything else because a business can collapse if the connection between the employees is uneasy. Use communication modes & softwares that can help your business grow. For instance, you can use an app like Voxer which gives real-time walkie-talkie kind of usage. There are plenty of other apps that suit your team & the kind of information that is to be transmitted between them. Use apps like WhatsApp & Telegram for basic communication between teams.

"Spend on SaaS if it eliminates your difficulties & increases your productivity."

Delegate your tasks:

Delegation is the nail in the coffin for Automating your productized business. Every founder is surrounded by tasks that are recurring but they still have to work it out as they cannot trust others to do it. It always feels like a big risk to let someone else work on some tasks which you think nobody can work better than you. Delegation is an art that only true leaders possess as it comes with a lot of risks & takes a lot of courage to implement. Doing it might look like compromising the quality of work but you can always train your reliable employees to get better results if not the perfect results. If you think that Automation can be achieved without delegation of tasks then I can assure you that you would never come out of the loop & will always be trapped despite the use of Softwares & SOPs.

The easiest form of delegation is to assign tasks that are repeating in nature. You can easily train your employees on how to solve that particular problem & eliminate some things from your plate. Anything that takes 30 mins of your day means that it will take 210 mins in a week & 182 hours in a year. You can save this precious time for yourself if you simply find someone else to do it.

You can also make a list of tasks that do not appear daily but still eat up your time. Create a list of all such small tasks & delegate the list to someone else. It may require some searching for such a person, but in the long run it will be more productive for the business.

Delegating the tasks to other people will help you save plenty of time which can be efficiently utilized in growing the business. Let people from your team get more responsibilities on themselves & delegate tasks to the people who are the most trustworthy. The founders are usually stuck with things that end up consuming the growth of their business. If you want to successfully implement automation in your business then you need to entrust your tasks to other people.

"Delegate the operational activities before it kills your time."

Reporting & Stats:

Since Covid, most businesses have started hiring from any part of the world. It is difficult to understand & check the productivity of each employee if they are working from a remote location. Establishing automation in your business without knowing the productivity will end up in your business getting crashed. In order to check about your team, conduct reporting meetings for your teams so that you can stay in the loop & understand the productive of a team. For efficient use of these meetings, you can make a standard list of all the activities every individual does in a week or month. These meetings can be conducted by the managers who can give you a report of these teams. However, you can also be a part of these meetings because such meetings usually last for a few hours & can be done on a monthly basis.

One easy way to understand the team's productivity is to make the employees upload all the work they do in the entire day. This information can be collected by their managers & they can compile this data to understand how well an employee is performing. Doing this within your team will induce a sense of responsibility in your employees. They will understand that if they provide unsatisfactory work on any day then the manager can figure it out. The managers can later compile this data to present it to you & it will help you to learn how every team is performing. You can also use the same method on your managers too so that it helps you to evaluate their performance too. If an employee is giving unsatisfactory work, you can easily figure it out using this method & train/fire that employee. Any liabilities within your teams should be given a warning if you want to test them out or you should get rid of all such people if you want to effectively implement automation.

Regular Updates should be made mandatory within your team. Every manager should take updates from all the people working under him every day. Giving updates personally will help the employees to increase their productivity as they themselves can monitor the amount of work they produce. All this data should be readily available for the founder so that he knows which employee is performing better & deserves an appraisal.

The Robin To Your Batman!

Operations Head is the main go-to man who is looking out for everyone & everything on your behalf. He is someone who has the leash of your business as he can either make your business grow or collapse. The most difficult task for you would be getting a reliable operations head, only someone who is highly educated or has massive experience of your work should have this responsibility. He is equivalent to having a CEO.

The main benefit of getting an OP Head is that he will take all the load from your shoulders without compromising on the quality of work. You can assign all your responsibilities to the OP Head & he should be able to manage everything on his own. The primary objective for this designation is to check if everything is working in the required order & increase the productivity of the entire business. This person should work to take your company ahead even in your absence. He will be the only person having the most privileges & power in the team after you. We can also say he is the Robin to your Batman.

The Epilogue! The Finale!

You are really serious about automation if you made it here. Developing automation within your business can be the best decision as you can get 10x more returns. The initial stage is the most difficult part of automation as there is a lot of planning & research involved to establish complete automation. If you want to bear the fruits of automation you need to plan it thoroughly. There would be setbacks in the plan, but you need to pro-actively customize it based on the type of business. Eliminate the issue, figure out if it is a recurring issue, & then create a standard process for the resolution.

Streamline all the processes by efficient use of SOPs in your entire system. The best part about streamlining is that your quality of work improves & it sets standards within your team to achieve great work. Despite detailed planning, some situations might occur that can lead to the failure of your plan. However, these mistakes will define your business so do not stop there, instead learn from them so that you can avoid them in the future.

The key part for this system to work is to have a great team, this team can help you scale your business towards your goals. To achieve this implementation of SOPs is a must along with optimum use of all the softwares that can increase productivity or solve a repeating problem. Make sure that everything is executed with the help of managers.

"Change is a process, not an event. There is no limit to the scope for improvement. Don’t settle with what you have achieved, the next change might turn out to be better than what you have started. Keep improvising."

I hope you found this article informative. If this article inspires you to start automating you processes & need some help, I’m always available to help you with it. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know.