You’ll find it tough to recruit in a full employment economy. So try to embrace intelligent automation and structure proven processes to grow profitably. Do not rely on more people to complete tasks inside your company. Instead use smart artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the many processes your small business does every day.
Intelligent Automation
This week on the Small Business Radio Show we’re joined by Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier. The company provides a workflow automation tool used by over two million people. Foster discusses the importance of connecting work apps. Small businesses use these daily to improve productivity and profitability.
In their new report, Zapier found that 83% of people use 3 or more applications for work. Companies tend to buy a new application to run each time they have a new problem in their company. But Wade points out most of these applications don’t talk to each other. Employees spend a lot of time entering the information multiple times into different applications. Or they manually transfer data from one to the other. This causes errors and a lack of productivity. Automation can connect these applications together. Then they use the data across multiple departments on an as needed basis. They can also create cross company reports used for management.
These types of connections need to happen. Because small businesses rarely find one application that will fit all its needs. Wade cautions against using custom or one-off customization. Instead use something that is standard. For example, an out of the box connector should only ask the company permission to go from PayPal to QuickBooks with no programming required. Another common connector is joining an application that collects leads to one that is used in email marketing.
Wade also discusses the challenges and successes of running Zapier as one of the largest 100% remote companies in the world. He’s scaled from a team of 3 in 2011 to over 200.
Listen to the entire interview!
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