Automate to enable, not to replace
When most people think about automation, they think about what it’ll do TO their staff.
Instead, think about what it’ll do FOR your staff.
Sure, automating a task that a human is doing manually renders that human time surplus to requirements. That’s a good thing. Humans having spare time is a good thing (unless they use it to start wars or burn crops or watch AFL or something). You can steer that spare time into lead gen, sales calls, releasing production bottlenecks, executive assistance, anything that will help grow the business.
There are a lot of business owners, especially in Kiwi businesses, that turn down automation opportunities because they want to keep their staff. If that’s you: all power to you, but it’s holding back business growth. Cause ≠ effect. Automate to enable staff and grow your business, not to kick Shirley the accounts administrator on to the street.
On the flip side, if you do want to get rid of staff, automation is still a great way of doing that lol.
-Fred
Stop typing stuff
Think about what you type in a day. It’s probably mainly communicative stuff like messages and emails. You can automate messages and emails, but AI emails suck so you probably shouldn’t. Unless they are simple, uniform messages like task reminders or something. Anyway, we’re getting off track.
What else do you type in a day? Do you enter your KPI metrics and write structured reports? Do you enter production jobsheet details, logbook details, asset counts, stock counts etc? Do you log web form enquires in your CRM? All of the above tasks can be automated; you simply hook up the information source with the data entry interface.
Stop typing stuff. Let us know what you’re typing and we’ll automate it.
Except, please keep writing your own emails, AI messages are obvious and make the sender look stupid.
-Fred
Time and headspace
There’s a common theme when I talk to people about software automation. They’d love to do it but they don’t have the time or headspace to think about it (there’s heaps of other stuff happening in their business). Luckily, this is massively a misconception.
Once you’ve identified a task or workflow that can be automated, and work through scoping, we come onsite and set up access to the necessary bits of software. The time and headspace drain literally stops there. You don’t NEED to hold our hands or monitor anything from there. The automation kicks off and bam, there’s a whole bunch of spare time.
Stop thinking that automation can’t be done because you’re busy. It’s a tiny time and headspace investment. Being busy is awesome and automation will make it more awesome.
-Fred
Where’s time being spent?
Pick a team, a role or even a person in your business. Where is the bulk of their time being spent? If it’s not something physical like order picking or governance-based like QC, it probably can be automated.
(I know you can get order picker robots. But they’re kinda cringe).
Some people baulk at automation because it’s a consulting firm, a big scary monster that will shut their business down for a month and vacuum all their money up, before going away streamlined but bland. I think of it as the opposite: start as small as possible. Pick a task or role and automate that. When that’s done, pick another. It does a couple of things:
Avoids any business closure and outlay of stupid cash.
Lets your business retain its personality and structure while becoming more productive.
There’s lots of stuff that can’t be automated. Managing people, eating lunch, secretly watching football at your desk and auditors’ assessments to name a few. But I reckon you’d be surprised what can. Write down a few roles or people in your company, pick one and let us know what they’re spending too much time on.
-Fred
Stop keying sales orders
What happens when a sales order hits your email inbox? If they are jumping automatically into your ERP via a b2b portal, EDI or other automation, great. Click off this blog post and go back to procrastinating your entire day’s workload.
If they are sitting in your inbox until a human clicks on the email and keys the order into your ERP manually: you’re living in 1995 (watching the first wahs game??). 31 years later, you might have the most successful business in your sector but you’re wasting countless hours keying sales orders. You’re probably also experiencing regular and unavoidable errors with the keying process - wrong customers, product codes, quantities, freight etc. This happens because we’re all human and we all make unintentional mistakes and that’s never going to change. Solve the problem forever by automating sales order entry the moment it hits your email inbox.
It doesn’t matter what email client or ERP software you use; anything with an API endpoint can be automated, and anything without an API endpoint can be connected to an agentic AI. Wouldn’t it be cool to have your entire sales order entry workflow happening automatically this time next month?
-Fred
One way to be better than your competitors
Nearly everyone in business has competition. Unless you sell stuff that no one wants. Stuff like lemonade sandwiches or tickets to a Chiefs game. Consequently, you’re probably always trying to think of new ways to be better than your competition, so that customers choose you as their vendor.
There are a bunch of ways to do this: better service, lower prices, higher quality, faster output; you name it and someone in your industry is probably trying to be the best at it. However, one thing that doesn’t come up often is internal processes. If your internal processes are more streamlined than your competitors’ internal processes, that means you CAN deliver quicker. It means you CAN charge less. It enables you to provide what customers want from their vendor. When you get automation happening in your internal workflows, you become better than your competitors.
What’s a workflow at your company that would make your competitors jealous if it was automated?
-Fred
Native integrations are cool but underused
When I’m talking to a new lead, one of the first conversation topics is their existing software stack. Once we know what software someone’s using, we’ll know how easy it’ll be to integrate and thereby automate the manual tasks they are doing - even when the software is integrated already.
Integrating two bits of software means to connect two relevant API endpoints to get data from one and push it to the other. Lots of software comes with native integrations these days, and new ones are being developed constantly; think Hubspot data sync > Xero, Gmail interface > monday.com, etc. Native integrations are popular because they are super easy to set up and maintain. You don’t need to be a developer to hook them up, and they are supported by the software companies.
However, almost every native-integration-user I talk to isn’t using these integrations to their full potential. They might have a contact sync between their Hubspot and Mailchimp, but they’re still manually transferring activities from Mailchimp to Hubspot. They might be getting Unleashed invoices automatically generating in Xero for sales, but not for purchases. These are super basic examples, but if you are using two bits of software with a native integration, and still having to do stuff manually between the two, there’s a lot of automation still to be unlocked. Book an appointment to find out how.
-Fred
“We’re too busy for automation right now”
“This is awesome but we’re much too busy for it, try us in six months.”
I get told this ~50 times a week. I’m talking to a prospect about an automation idea, they’ve identified how much time it’ll save, and we can get it implemented within a week after they press go. Some of them have even gotten the project scoped and have a quote in their inbox ready to sign off.
Then, they have a super busy week of admin and putting out fires. They don’t have the headspace to think about automation because their business is coming at them too fast to think about anything else. They’re reacting to everything. They don’t even do any sales work, it’s too busy for that. That’s totally understandable - we all have busy beaver weeks of working in the business instead of on the business.
Unfortunately, the week after is the same: five long days of treading water that even overflows into the weekend. They’re making decent money and staff are stretched but happy. It’s good to be busy. Generally, being busy means being successful.
Two weeks turns into three months. There have been a couple of gaps in the onslaught but not enough time to put brainpower into automation. A super promising project is now almost dead in the water. The illogical of this never ceases to amaze me; it’s like running as fast as you can to get to a stack of cheeseburgers (or something), but you’re on a treadmill fixed to the ground. You’re expending many kilojoules (or something) of energy, and staying alive, but three months later you’re in the same place.
Another trend I’ve noticed: people hugely overestimate the personal time investment for automation. They expect to close up shop for a week while a project gets put in. In reality, business continues to be aggressively normal, and the only time investment that we require from you is a matter of minutes to get access set up - we can row the waka from there.
If you’ve had an automation idea in the back of your head for ages, and you’re the villain in this blog article, reach out today. Right off the bat, we’ll give you a timeline and explain any impact on your business operations.
-Fred
Violently chundering a few thoughts about AI
AI fatigue is real. Everyone and their dog and their dog’s dog seems to be spewing about it everywhere these days. Not only that - every second piece of content online is AI-generated, rendering your grandma unable to perceive the difference between reality and what is essentially GTA gameplay clips. Everywhere you look, some form of AI is on its knees begging for your attention. I’m not a purist by any means; I use AI hundreds of times in a week. But all the slop becomes tiresome.
We also use AI extensively in some of the automations we put in. It’s excellent at doing human hack work that you can’t write a program for: transcribing, scraping websites, consolidating emails, being a technical product ‘brain’ etc. Where it sucks is where it’s not needed. 9 out of 10 Linkedin posts have a shitty AI rendering (guilty) of ‘productivity’ or ‘low hanging fruit’, with a shitty AI monologue (not guilty) explaining how earning more and spending less will make you more money. It’s made me value originality and personality a lot more. It’s 10x’d my respect for people that write/generate their own content.
That’s the content side. It’s still super chill at doing automations. Let us know if you have an AI automation idea but you don’t know how to get it off the ground.
-Fred
Be lazier
Do less hack work. It means you can do more work that contributes directly to growing your business. Or you can be lazy and go play golf more. You might be unable to break 100 through 18 holes, but you can keep trying while your hack work still gets done.
Justin Gaethje just won the UFC lightweight title, literally 20 minutes ago. He can only achieve that by putting in countless hours of work: fitness, sparring, mindset etc. He can’t automate any of that; some achievements are only enabled by putting in a crapload of hard work. However, any online tasks that you or the team are doing regularly don’t fall into this category. Purchasing schedules, sales reporting, entering orders and checking off invoices don’t require hard work. They simply require somebody identifying a way of automating them, then you can sit back and watch (or work on your shitty golf swing) while those tasks happen automatically.
Good automation saves heaps of time. You can use that freed-up time to grow your business, or you can be lazier. The fun part is, once good automation is in place, the choice is yours.
-Fred
Stop hating your software
Picture your ERP in your head. If it makes you happy (giggle and kick your feet), this post isn’t for you and you can go back to doomscrolling or doing your cave drawings or whatever. If you constantly whine about your ERP and dread opening it in the morning, you’re likely looking to change to something different at some point. However, you’ve already changed three times in the last 10 years, for the same reason. You assumed it was the implementation guy’s fault. He scuffed his due diligence on your specific business needs, and put in a popular ERP with zero flexibility for adapting to your business. This happened twice, and now you’re using the worst one of the lot. Sound familiar?
You can change ERP; but who’s to say it’s not going to be the same story? Not to mention the huge cost and stranglehold on business operations while the new one goes in. This doesn’t apply to ERPs only - I’m talking any pieces of software that your business uses. If you hate using them, maybe it’s a you problem.
Maybe your software stack isn’t integrated enough. Instead of creating a sales order manually in three places every time you get an email order, put in an automation to do this when the email arrives. You may think it not possible, but with all due respect, it doesn’t matter what you think is possible. If you want to automate, we’ll know what’s possible.
Stop bitching about your software and identify why you don’t like it. Then, contact us to see if we can fix it.
-Fred
Just because AI can, doesn’t mean it should
I met an operations manager from a construction company this week. Let’s call him Darren (because that’s his name). Darren had been a prospect for a few weeks and we’d sussed a time to meet at his office. Unlike a normal prospect, however, Darren had tried automation before, and tried it on a bunch of different tasks across different software. He had it parsing CAD pdfs, drafting quotes, scraping pricelists and drafting emails, among a bunch of other tasks. He hated it. He turned it off pretty soon after turning it on.
Here’s where Darren went wrong: he had jumped straight to using AI for the automations. He had MS Copilot doing all sorts of stuff purely from chat prompts and Claude acting as an integration between the different pieces of software. The software wasn’t actually integrated, it was just pretending to be (using AI). It was incredibly expensive, more than a new employee he reckoned. It also didn’t work that much - most of the time, AI would complete the tasks correctly a couple of times and then find something to cock up on the next run. Darren had identified some really good tasks to automate, put in the automations, and somehow ended up spending more time fixing the automations than working on business growth like he intended.
AI is incredibly powerful, and it can do anything online, but it’s not usually the best solution. If a task happens the same every time with different data, you should automate it using programming and/or middleware instead. This is a fraction of the cost of AI tokens and you can trust it to do the same thing every time it runs.
So, if we shouldn’t use AI for recurring work, where is it best used?
Firstly, what you’re probably doing already - use it as an advisor. Bounce ideas off your chatbot of choice, make it suggest things to automate, and make it come up with the best solution for the automation ideas. It’s also excellent for grunt work: writing code, debugging code, spreadsheet formulas, transcribing, data manipulation and more. Stuff that used to take days of messing around can now be done in an hour.
Furthermore, it can build apps. You might hate your CRM (most people do). Try asking Claude Code or Lovable or any other AI app builder to make you a new CRM, with all the good bits of your current CRM and all the bits your current CRM is missing. It’s surprising and exciting how much it can build, entirely referencing plain text prompts. The new app won’t have any existing integrations, but it will have an API endpoint to enable them.
AI also does a great job of web scraping, but keep your prompts as specific as possible and make sure to double-check the links it references. I find it too much of a yes-man; it’ll explain how to do something, I’ll explain that isn’t possible, then it’ll go round in circles on a handful of ideas without just telling me that the thing isn’t possible. Ask it where it’s getting its information from, and have a look at the source to cut down wasted time on misunderstanding a problem.
Darren was pretty switched off the idea of automation, because his idea of automation was completely reliant on AI prompts. AI is capable of anything, but that doesn’t mean you should use it for everything.
-Fred
If you don’t enjoy work, automate it
Do you enjoy every online task you do at work? Great, you can close this tab and go back to watching wahs highlights. If you don’t, you should get it automated.
There aren’t any limits or constraints on automation. You can automate anything if you can explain how to do it. If it’s difficult to explain, or heaps of different stuff can happen during the workflow, or it’s very intuitive, use AI to make the automation. Wherever you are now, think of your least favourite online task at work. Is it quality control? Internal follow-ups? Missing or incorrect product info? What constantly or regularly pisses you off?
And even if you can’t think of a way of automating it, let us know. I’m 99% sure we can automate it, and we’ll let you know ASAP if we can’t.
-Fred
Use basic software and build it out
80% of business owners and decision makers I talk to about automation hate at least one piece of software in their business. However, they never change or improve it because it’s doing the bare minimum and there are bigger, easier priorities. Often, this software has outsourced management (an IT company is looking after it for you), isn’t integrated with anything, has zero customisation/wiggle room and every task is super manual. Does that sound familiar to your IT stack?
Whenever we scope projects to integrate software of this nature, it almost always emerges that the best solution is to change to a different platform that offers more customisation. The simpler an app, the more you can customise it for your needs. That’s why I love Excel and GSheets; they’re incredibly powerful and they start off completely blank. You can integrate anything, build anything, and AI actually knows about them and can write formulas that work. Oh, and they barely touch your wallet.
You can build any generic business processes on spreadsheets. I know I sound like an IT neanderthal saying that, but ERPs are just a whole bunch of spreadsheets (tables) anyway. I’m not saying nothing else is required - if you run production and manufacturing, an industry production tool is likely going to be necessary. But the point is that the best software stack for your business is starting from blank interfaces and building them out. It applies to CRMs for example: anyone that hates their CRM finds it way too complex and rigid, because it’s not designed for their business. You’re going to save a lot of long-term time, hassle and money if you start with a blank canvas on something like monday.com or ClickUp, as opposed to a function-heavy, expensive CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce.
Build stuff for your business. Avoid getting stuff that’s built for other businesses. Future you will be happy.
Size doesn’t matter
The word ‘automation’ is often perceived as a revolutionary project that will turn a business on its head for a month, like putting in a new ERP or doing a cloud migration. Conversely, I encourage business owners to start as small as possible. The bigger the project, the more stuff can go wrong. That’s why lots of IT projects stall and everyone wishes they had never started.
I’m not saying avoid new software - if your existing software doesn’t work, get new software. I’m saying that automation is a fantastic way of avoiding constant fights with your software and getting your productivity back. Look at every task/workflow happening in your business; what one is going to have the biggest impact on your staff productivity if it were automated and thereby removed?
Let us know. We can tell you if it’s a good thing to automate, or if you’re fighting a losing battle with your software. Starting small with automation is cheapest, quickest, avoids narcissistic consultants, brings immediate tangible results, and more often than not, the best option.
(hopefully you noticed how I purposely made this blog post small as well).
-Fred
You should have done automation yesterday
“But that’s what an automation firm would say.” Correct. It’s going to help our business. However, it’s also going to help yours.
Think about it like two car options for your commute: if you don’t have automation yet, you’re driving a car that you can only use 10 hours a day, it needs a new tank of fuel every day and new tires every week. It’s not broken, but it needs heaps of maintenance, governance and puts a huge amount of pressure on your finances. With automation, you have to stump up the cash to buy a new car. But fortunately, it’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, uses a tank of fuel once a month, and new tires once a year.
Let’s play a quick maths game:
-Car 1 needs a new tank of fuel every working day. At $200 a tank, that’s $40k a year. It needs new tires every week, at $1000. That’s $50k a year. So it works 10 hours a day, 5 days a week and costs $90k per year. Sound familiar?
-Car 2 needs a new tank of fuel every month, and new tires every year. That’s $3400 annually. You would need to pay more than $80k for the car for it NOT to be valuable, and that’s only based on one year. Oh, and it works 24/7.
The fun part is that it really is that simple. Good automation replaces mundane work that admin staff are doing. It means you can replace them or push them into work that will help grow your business.
There’s no ‘best time of year’ or ‘investment quarter’ for automation. Yes, it can be a large outlay to get it done, but it pays itself off so quick that you’re doing your company a huge financial disservice by NOT getting it done ASAP.
-Fred
How to add value in a world of AI
I’ve been talking to a client recently who keeps identifying more and more opportunities for automation in his business. After all, automation is a drug. He’s also super hooked on Anthropic’s Claude, his AI bot of choice. As we find more stuff to automate in his business, he keeps defaulting to Claude as the solution and building automated workflows via Claude, all the time with zero clue what it’s doing. This introduces an awkward dynamic for us; he wants to keep costs down by avoiding our services and doing automation in-house, which is fair enough, but 90% of the time Claude doesn’t have the best solution. He’s constantly beating a dead horse to spit out inflated, unintelligible workflows that don’t holistically achieve his goals.
AI is incredibly powerful for writing code snippets, locating bugs and brainstorming ideas. It’s terrible at identifying the best solution for automation. It’ll soak up heaps of time and tokens to set up a workflow, then require babying through every time it runs. Back in reality, you can ask it to write an entire Python script to run instead, which is completely free, instant and doesn’t break all the time.
I can write code in heaps of languages, but why would I? An AI bot can do that for me. We add value by knowing the best solution for your automation opportunities, and default to engaging as little AI as possible to keep logic high and costs low. We add value by putting intelligible code in intelligible places. Our expertise is valuable to people who want the best end-to-end solution, not a tacky trellis that kills scalability.
People with good oversight of AI are 100x more valuable than people who use AI for everything, and 1000x more valuable than people who don’t use it at all.
It’s actually pretty hard to quantify our value in that area without being speculative. I realised that while writing this blog. Perhaps try AI for yourself first, and let us know when it shits the bed.
-Fred
Automation is a drug
The first thing I ever automated was SMS follow-up messages to contacts in a lead bank. Instead of the admin team going through their call list and sending a text whenever a lead didn’t answer their call (very frequently), they could type a code number beside the contact. This triggered a middleware-powered workflow to send the contact a personalised text based on the code number that the staff member had entered. It saved a heap of time, and errors; staff were able to 3x their outbound call volume, and lead contacts no longer received grammatically retarded texts.
I found it very enlightening. When you automate one process, your eyes are opened to what’s possible with automation, and suddenly you start identifying stuff wholesale. Even if you’re not the one that designs and configures the automation, you now know what’s possible, and develop a thirst to push other mundane tasks into the background.
Recently I met with a prospect (let’s call him Drake) who, at best, was very sceptical that we could provide any value to his business. Drake agreed to meet only on the condition that it would be a sub-1 minute discussion (Drake was a super busy beaver). I visited his office, said hello and handed him a business card. 20 minutes later, Drake had identified 10 different tasks to automate, and I had to cut the discussion short so my calendar didn’t get too harassed. It all started when we talked about their process of checking supplier invoices against their POs. Drake didn’t know that that could be automated, and for that reason, didn’t know that a whole bunch of other tasks could be automated too. We discussed a couple of other tasks, then he began suggesting automation opportunities under his own steam. He pushed for a follow-up consult to decide on their first project and rope in his ops manager (let’s call him Kendrick).
‘Drake’ didn’t want to engage automation services until he unlocked what’s possible. It’s possible that you’re in the same boat.
I tried OpenClaw
I hated it heaps. I think it’s because I like being in control of everything happening on my laptop and at my company. If you don’t like doing work on a computer, and don’t get rage baited by prose that is clearly AI-generated, I think you’ll like OpenClaw.
I got it doing a bunch of tasks: drafting emails to clients, importing bank feeds to Xero, unsubscribing from a few campaigns I hadn’t signed up for and drafting messages to group chats. I told it to use my communication style when drafting messages and let me know if it found anything slightly untoward during other tasks. It did a decent job of the latter, and got horribly lost attempting the former (thanking clients for their email - please don’t do this, it’s unnecessary filler text and you’re perceived as desperate to provide value. Emails should be as short and concise as possible).
OpenClaw also only works when you’re not working. It’s installed as an application package on your PC, and uses your PC to work. Obviously, you can install it on a different PC and provide access to all your stuff so it can work uninhibited, but that means getting another PC and providing it access to all your stuff. It functions as an actual employee, a personal assistant, instead of an ‘automation’. Don’t think of OpenClaw as automation. It simply does tasks that you tell it to do, step-by-step, generally much faster than a human. Automation is writing a program or connecting background middleware to make those tasks happen instantly and automatically. Good automation is inherently more robust and impactful than poking a stick at a bot and telling it to do things and stuff.
If you don’t like computer work and don’t care about being in granular control of everything happening in your work life, OpenClaw is probably really helpful. Install it and give it a go. But it’s not for those of us that like to send good messages and have a handle on everything.
As a side note, I haven’t tried it on Windows. I use a Chromebook which uses the Linux environment for non-play store installed apps. In saying that, it worked exactly as expected and I had no issues with access or limitations.
-Fred
Corporate buzzwords
We’ve reached a point in society where saying the right combination of words and letters can earn you more respect than fixing actual problems. By no means does this apply to everyone - I’m primarily talking big corporate companies. Big corporations have untold levels of hierarchy and employ probably over a billion people worldwide. I often wonder how many of these people have a shred of purpose or drive to ‘outperform Q4 forecasting’ for their big daddy corporation. This phenomenon is gradually getting more attention on social media as individuals realise that being a mindless, guardrailed drone actually sucks; but it’s a job that pays their rent and it’s too risky to do anything else.
I don’t blame them. Financial security is paramount to living the 5-9 life we want to live outside of the 9-5. However, I find it fascinating, and quite funny, that corporations have developed a new dialect of buzzwords, a new LLM if you will. Being able to say things like ‘let’s circle back’ and ‘take a 30,000 foot view’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’ on those entirely pointless weekly Teams meetings makes you more important than someone with drive to solve actual problems.
It’s pure ragebait for me, to the point I deliberately avoid it. I hate LinkedIn because every post is just another chunder of corporate chat (‘here’s what the latest Avatar taught me about supply chain’). It doesn’t do any harm, but it’s silly how a mastery of the corporate language can be more valuable than ambition.
If you’re in a business that values your ability to hide behind a mask of buzzwords instead of actual productivity, it might be time to ‘pursue alternative career pathways’.
Anyway. That’s got nothing to do with automation, it was just fun to write. I guess you can at least be assured that you won’t get any of that garbage when you deal with us. Time to get back to my desk and work on results-oriented ecosystems that move the needle.
-Fred