Kartik Ahuja is an experienced tech entrepreneur and growth marketing specialist, but he still struggled to manage the ever-increasing workload of his marketing agency. When he turned to automation, despite his skepticism, to streamline operations, he was able to offload 50% of his business tasks. The following is Ahuja’s journey toward using automation for sustainable growth.
Hiring more employees wasn’t an option for Ahuja, but repetitive tasks and manual work were only becoming more common at his agency. He needed a way to reduce overhead costs and management, making it seem like an ideal solution. But first, Ahuja would need to identify exactly what was slowing his business down.
The Restrictions of Manual Operations
In the end, Ahuja focused on five workflow bottlenecks that were restricting efficiency and driving costs: manual lead generation, customer support overload, financial tracking and reporting, client onboarding and communication, and meeting scheduling and follow-ups.
Lead generation was a core component of Ahuja’s business, as he needed to look for companies that needed his services. Still, he had been manually searching through websites, social media profiles, and directories—a tedious process that was causing him to miss opportunities.
Looking into his business operations, Ahuja found that his customer support team was required to respond to every inquiry, manage complaints, and provide solutions manually. This created slow response times and overwhelmed his staff, exposing the need for change.
Meeting scheduling was a major pain point and another area where Ahuja and his management had been operating manually. Coordinating meeting times in one time zone is hard enough, but global interaction would lead to an endless cycle and risk client dissatisfaction.
Uncovering Automated Solutions
After identifying these issues and how to address them, Ahuja began looking into specific tools that would meet the needs of his team. Automated solutions were clearly a path forward, and he was soon integrating them into his operations. LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Apollo.io automated lead generation, AI-powered chatbots addressed customer overload issues. Quickbooks could monitor finances and HubSpot handled client onboarding.
“After all that automation,” Ahuja wrote in his opinion piece for the Entrepreneur, “I successfully streamlined manual tasks and boosted efficiency by a whopping 50%. The result was clear: My team became more productive, client satisfaction improved, and the overall quality of our work increased—without any additional employment.”
By slowly uncovering the tools that worked for his company, Ahuja was streamlining its operations and enhancing its capabilities—and by undergoing the process, he found what he considers the best approach to automating business processes.
The “Dos and Don’ts” of Business Automation
After the process of automating his business, Ahuja found that there were a few steps to take and others to avoid along the way. He recommends that business owners automate one process at a time, observing its impact and regularly reviewing results. However, he also recommends against keeping the process simple—there’s no need to sacrifice efficiency in these cases.
Ultimately, an automation tool’s application will vary from business to business, but careful implementation can significantly benefit entire operations.
