processAutomating your business processes can help you be more profitable, efficient and scalable.  It does so by using software or outsourced labor to take care of some of the work you have to do, so that you can focus on other pieces of work that no one else can do.

A “business process” is anything you do in your business more than once.  Examples for agents include:

  • promoting a listing
  • interviewing a buyer
  • writing a contract
  • making a listing presentation

And for brokers some examples are:

  • recruiting new agents
  • hiring employees
  • onboarding or offboarding agents

The returns on automation increase if the process has one or more of these characteristics:

  • tedious
  • core to your business
  • time consuming
  • frequent
  • unlikely to change in the near future
  • doesn’t require a lot of human judgement
  • produces revenue
  • expensive if done incorrectly

Keeping these criteria in mind can help you evaluate what to leave alone, what to document, and what to automate.  Automating is a five step process.

  1. Identifying possible processes to automate
  2. Do it manually as excellently as possible
  3. Make a checklist
  4. Live with the checklist, modify it as needed
  5. Automate

It makes sense for almost every business to do steps 1 and 2, and steps 3 and 4 will probably be useful for common tasks to ensure a consistent level of quality.  Don’t feel you have to go all the way to step 5.  The return may not be worth the investment.

You can identify possible processes by observing pain points around your office or in tasks you do regularly.  Make notes, interview employees, and try to do various tasks yourself to get a feel for how much it hurts to, for example, off board a realtor who has left your office, or prepare and make a listing presentation.  When you perform the process, think about ways to improve it–having standard forms for off boarding, or a powerpoint template for the listing presentation.

Now you can take your list and evaluate all the tasks.  It may seem overwhelming, but remember, you eat an elephant one bite at a time.  Think of the criteria above and apply them to help you select certain tasks instead of others.  Pick one that interests you, or seems to be very painful to do manually, or has high ROI.  Now, document exactly how this process should be done–put it into a checklist.  Make sure you include feedback from the people who actually do the work (they are probably the best writers of the first draft of the checklist).  Then, iterate on this checklist.  If you run this process off the checklist for a month or two, then you will discover better ways to do things, or different steps in certain situations.

OK, now you have a checklist that has been used and improved for a while.  You’ve determined that this is a process that is important, tedious and concrete.  Time to automate!

Automating doesn’t have to mean hiring an expensive programmer to capture your bespoke process.  Rather, it includes that option among others like:

  • Odesk–a off shore contractor who can follow a checklist while you sleep
  • Zapier or ifttt–simple web based integration layers
  • a virtual assistant–similar to Odesk, but a bit more commitment
  • excel macros–if you are doing a lot of calculations
  • canned email templates–if you are sending emails regularly
  • buying off the shelf software and changing your bespoke process to match it

To automate, replace each of the steps in a checklist with a piece of software.  If you can’t replace all of the steps, replace as many as you can.  In the example above of preparing and making a listing presentation, the checklist might be something like (and I am not a realtor, so this is a guess):

  1. Select and review comps
  2. Copy powerpoint template
  3. Fill in power point template with real data (comp and seller)
  4. Review presentation
  5. Practice
  6. Make presentation
  7. Send follow up email in 1 day
  8. Send follow up email in 3 days

If this was the entire process for a listing presentation, there are some steps that are a good fit for outsourcing to an assistant or odesk contractor (2, 3), some that are good for software (7, 8), and some that you need to do yourself (1, 4, 5, 6).  This is OK.  The point of automating a process is not necessarily to remove all of your effort, it is to focus your effort on the tasks you can do that no one else can do.  If you are a realtor, you should be the one picking the comps to justify a list price–that is an area of expertise that will probably not be replaced soon.  But by outsourcing some of the work that you need to do but that can be done by others, you free up time to work on the areas where you can really add value.

Business process automation is a large topic.  I hope this post has given you a taste.

[Graphic via http://miltonmattox.com/]