887: ACTION SATURDAY (build your first – or next – automation!)

WEBVTT

00:00:00.059 --> 00:00:00.621
Hey, what is up?

00:00:00.621 --> 00:00:25.789
Wontrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all over the world, it's Brian LoFermento here, host of the Wontrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast, and in this Action Saturday episode, I'm sharing something with you that, just for me personally, really helps my life and my businesses function in a somewhat manageable way, and so this episode is actually inspired by a guest that we had on the show back in June, camilo Henao.

00:00:25.789 --> 00:00:27.285
Camilo is incredible.

00:00:27.285 --> 00:00:52.262
He was our guest in episode 865, where we talked about the power of automation for your business, and he is the founder of Catalytics Automation, and he shared so many insights with us that, for this Action Saturday episode, I'm inspired to encourage you to sit down and create your first automation in your business, or, for those of you who have already embraced automation, create your next automation.

00:00:52.262 --> 00:00:58.229
Now you might be thinking to yourself well, brian, for this Action Saturday, what sort of automation are you encouraging me to create?

00:00:58.570 --> 00:01:01.301
And the cool thing is, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

00:01:01.301 --> 00:01:14.954
You know how your current workflow is, and if you think about the things that are tedious to you, the things that are repetitive, the things that are just I always call them mindless tasks chances are a lot of them can be automated.

00:01:14.954 --> 00:01:20.795
Or the other opportunity area that I always look for is where do I lose track of things?

00:01:20.795 --> 00:01:43.620
And for me personally, as someone who does rely on so many systems and tools and processes and automations, quite frankly, if it's not down on paper somewhere and when I say paper, I mainly mean the computer or an app or software tool, I'm a big fan of tools that make my life and my businesses run easier and smoother If it's not down on paper somewhere, then I will forget about it.

00:01:43.620 --> 00:01:47.067
I will forget about my travel dates, I will forget about everything.

00:01:47.067 --> 00:01:50.153
If it's not in my Google calendar, it doesn't exist in my life.

00:01:50.153 --> 00:01:56.132
And so, with all of that said, let's use a really simple automation example, for example.

00:01:56.540 --> 00:01:58.424
Let's say you have an email inbox.

00:01:58.424 --> 00:01:59.468
We all have an email inbox.

00:01:59.468 --> 00:02:03.929
It's probably the area of my life that I struggle with the most, aside from phone messages.

00:02:03.929 --> 00:02:06.362
I'm the world's worst cell phone user.

00:02:06.362 --> 00:02:09.109
But let's use my email inbox as an example.

00:02:09.109 --> 00:02:25.268
How often do we send an email and we kind of note to self I'm going to need to follow up with this person, or note to self this is a potential sale, or this is a potential customer or client and I should probably remember to keep in touch with them, but you also have 50 other emails in your inbox that day and you're also replying to them.

00:02:25.268 --> 00:02:27.733
How the heck are you going to keep track of them?

00:02:27.733 --> 00:02:29.420
Well, hopefully you have a CRM.

00:02:29.722 --> 00:02:41.302
We've done Action Saturday episodes about CRMs in the past, but what's even better is to start automating things, and I'll use Gmail as a great example, because Gmail has a lot of really great automation triggers.

00:02:41.302 --> 00:02:45.612
You can create labels, you can create filters that actually do actions.

00:02:45.612 --> 00:03:11.707
There's so much that you can do and, for example, you can say okay, anytime I apply a label of needs follow-up to this email that I just sent, automatically add them to a Google Sheet, and so then, when you go into that Google Sheet, you can see all of these people who you've told yourself hey, I need to stay on top of these people, I need to check in with them in the next two weeks or month or six months, or I just need to keep them on my radar in some capacity.

00:03:11.707 --> 00:03:22.024
You can automate that with something as simple as applying a label, but you do need an automation tool that can do all of that for you, and so there are so many out there.

00:03:22.024 --> 00:03:23.004
There are a dime, a dozen.

00:03:23.004 --> 00:03:27.532
I'm not going to promote any single one here in today's episode because I've used so many of them.

00:03:27.532 --> 00:03:34.941
Zapier is one of the big ones, but I'm going to pull a page out of Camilo's book from episode 865, where he shared with us one of his favorite tools.

00:03:34.941 --> 00:03:36.947
I'm going to lean on him because he's the expert here.

00:03:36.947 --> 00:03:46.864
He talked about makecom, and so I've personally looked into makecom.

00:03:46.864 --> 00:03:47.205
It's really cool.

00:03:47.224 --> 00:03:57.322
If you go to their website and you look at solutions, they have all the automations you can make across your business with regards to marketing, sales, operations, customer experience, productivity, people in your business teams, hr, information technology, finances.

00:03:57.322 --> 00:04:02.800
There's opportunities to automate so many things in our businesses and in our lives.

00:04:02.800 --> 00:04:06.929
By the way, I'm not going to lie when I talk about automations in today's Action Saturday episode.

00:04:06.929 --> 00:04:08.932
I use automations in my life as well.

00:04:08.932 --> 00:04:17.408
When I leave home, for example, all of my smart lights turn themselves off, and so I've got those automations set up based on my geographic location.

00:04:17.408 --> 00:04:29.505
There's a lot of really cool things that happen, so I don't have to keep all of these things in my head, which means that there's a heck of a lot more space in my mind to actually worry about the stuff that's going to move me forward.

00:04:29.505 --> 00:04:37.437
So automations can be a second, a 10th part of your brain that handle things without you needing to worry about them.

00:04:37.437 --> 00:04:43.033
So what's really cool about makecom is whether you ever feel like using makecom or not.

00:04:43.360 --> 00:04:47.791
You can go there and go to solutions and they have a whole section called inspiration.

00:04:47.791 --> 00:05:00.161
And if you go into the templates under inspiration, there are, at the time of me recording this, over 6,000 templates of example automations that you can use and it shows you.

00:05:00.161 --> 00:05:07.214
You can click within, let's say, communication, and you can say let's go SMS and phone, and it says create a new.

00:05:07.214 --> 00:05:09.841
Let's see, you can automatically have it.

00:05:09.841 --> 00:05:13.569
Text somebody who you put their business card into your system.

00:05:13.569 --> 00:05:16.843
You can have there's literally thousands of these.

00:05:16.843 --> 00:05:23.404
It's hard for me to manage all or even give examples of all of these, because for your business, for your life, there's different things.

00:05:23.404 --> 00:05:25.408
You can have Facebook ads.

00:05:25.408 --> 00:05:33.387
You can create Facebook ads copy with Google Sheet, organizing it from prompts that you make in ChatGPT.

00:05:33.387 --> 00:05:37.341
That's the degree of which you can create in automation.

00:05:37.702 --> 00:05:42.072
And if you're thinking to yourself, well, brian, how technical do I have to be?

00:05:42.072 --> 00:05:43.425
How much is this going to cost?

00:05:43.425 --> 00:05:50.586
The beauty of it is that tools like makecom I will use them as the example because I'm on their website right now it's free, they have a free plan.

00:05:50.586 --> 00:05:55.809
Almost every automation tool has a free plan and they're all no code.

00:05:55.809 --> 00:06:07.413
These days they have all of these apps already integrated so you can essentially just create recipes and I say that word recipes because one of my favorite tools is if this, then that it's very language based.

00:06:07.413 --> 00:06:18.564
So I say, if I drive away from this location, then turn these lights off in my home automation system and they already have all of those tools set up for me so I can just click.

00:06:18.564 --> 00:06:23.831
If location leave this area, then do this.

00:06:23.831 --> 00:06:28.504
So it's really not intimidating and the sky is the limit.

00:06:28.624 --> 00:06:33.017
And if you feel like you can't dream up in automation, go to makecom.

00:06:33.017 --> 00:06:35.283
Look under solutions, under inspiration.

00:06:35.283 --> 00:06:46.045
You'll find their templates and start figuring out something that can make your life and your business run way smoother, way simpler, so you can get more done and impact more people.

00:06:46.045 --> 00:06:49.812
It is a fun action for this Action Saturday episode.

00:06:49.812 --> 00:06:51.845
So get out there, take action.

00:06:51.845 --> 00:06:56.362
If you feel inspired to share your automations with me, I'd love to hear from you.

00:06:56.362 --> 00:06:57.105
Drop me an email.

00:06:57.105 --> 00:06:59.711
My email address is hello at imetbriancom.

00:06:59.711 --> 00:07:01.903
Otherwise, go out there, take action.

00:07:01.903 --> 00:07:03.447
I'll see you right back here tomorrow.