Wearing every hat
I spent the best part of a decade and a half working at The Auction Barn, and one of the biggest things I took away from that experience was just how many hats you end up wearing when you’re running or managing a business.
Sales, advertising, staff management, customers, suppliers, systems, paperwork, correspondence, day-to-day problems: it all needs to be dealt with. And when you’re busy, the day-to-day stuff has a habit of taking over.
That experience is a big part of what eventually led me to start Media Canberra. I’ve been able to take what I learnt there and apply it to helping other businesses through website development, automation, marketing, software and improving the systems they already have.
More recently, I’ve started looking much more closely at something that is often overlooked: where is a business simply wasting time and money because a process hasn’t been improved?
A simple example: quotations
One of the areas I’ve been working on is automating the quotation process for a business.
On the surface, creating a quotation doesn’t seem like a particularly big job. But when you’re doing it repeatedly, dealing with customer information, products or services, pricing, correspondence and follow-ups, those small tasks add up very quickly.
After a couple of iterations and improvements, I’ve developed a simple solution that can automate a large part of that process.
The point isn’t really the technology itself. The point is what it gives the business back.
If someone is spending hours every week preparing quotations and doing associated paperwork, that’s time they’re not spending on sales, customers, networking, improving the business or simply getting through the work that actually requires them.
Stuck working in the business
I know this because I’ve experienced it myself. While working at The Auction Barn, there were plenty of things I wanted to be doing: attending events, networking, looking for opportunities, improving the business and working on bigger projects.
But when you’re inundated with correspondence and day-to-day tasks, it’s very easy to get stuck working in the business rather than on it.
This is where AI gets interesting
AI isn’t just about generating text or having a chatbot on a website. Used properly, it can take an existing business process and remove a significant amount of the manual work involved.
That might mean quotations, customer enquiries, administration, data entry, follow-ups, internal systems or other repetitive workflows.
And sometimes the best solution isn’t complicated at all. It’s simply finding the repetitive task that is costing the business time, figuring out why it is being done manually, and building a better way of doing it.
That’s a service I offer
This is becoming a bigger part of what I do through Media Canberra. I’ll look at how a business actually operates, rather than just looking at its website:
- Where is time being wasted?
- What is being done manually that doesn’t need to be?
- Where are staff spending hours on administration?
- What software is being paid for but barely used?
- What processes could be simplified, automated or replaced?
Save time, save money
Sometimes the answer is a new piece of software. Sometimes it’s an automation. Sometimes it’s a website or system improvement. And sometimes it’s simply getting rid of something the business doesn’t need to be paying for.
The goal is pretty straightforward: save the business time, save the business money, and give people more time to actually work on the business.
That’s something I learnt firsthand at The Auction Barn, and it’s now something I can apply across the businesses I work with.