Can you scale a business without automation?
The short answer is yes, but it will be painful and you will not get far.
I think the answer to scaling without automation is not straightforward, but here are some general guidelines.
I look at automation in 3 stages.
First is the no automation stage.
This stage is normally from zero to around a couple of hundred thousand dollars in turn over each year.
You might have a website, some spreadsheets and a cloud accounting system.
Hopefully your turnover grows and you can move out of this stage
Then usually comes the hack automation stage.
This stage is normally from a couple of hundred thousand to a million dollars in turn over.
This is where you are trying to automate little things where you can.
Using built in features of your website provider or CRM, your cloud accounting system or automation tools like Zapier.
The pain points and bottlenecks are really starting to come to the surface here and the business can become very frustrating to manage.
Then comes the custom software automation stage.
This stage is normally from half a million dollars in annual turnover or more.
With custom software you no longer have the automation limitations you have in the previous stages.
Pretty much any part of your business data and process can be automated now.
This means you often can scale quickly and a lot more than in previous stages mentioned.
What stage is your business currently in when it comes to automation?
