If you’re a service provider coming off of a super busy season of your business, I bet you’re so ready for the summer, when you can finally enjoy a break with your family and take some well-deserved time-off.
But to actually enjoy your summer break, you need to make sure your operations are set up to run without you, otherwise you’re just going to be glued to your laptop the whole time.
Here are 4 automations that will streamline your client workflows and give you more time to enjoy your summer while also setting you up to weather the next busy season:
1. Streamlined Client Onboarding
One of the biggest time-drains for service providers is manually onboarding new clients, especially when you're trying to step away and enjoy your summer break. All those administrative tasks like gathering client info, setting up folders and files, creating records in different systems - it adds up quickly when you have to do it one-by-one for each new client.
Before implementing automation, my client, an accountant, struggled with a manual onboarding process spread across multiple tools. Every time a new client signed up, they had to copy/paste info into spreadsheets, create folders manually, draft invoices, and more. This process alone used to take a full day just to onboard one client! And during tax season, which lasts most of the year, my client found herself working every day, night, and weekend just to keep up.
She tried outsourcing more of this work to a virtual assistant, but found there were still too many potential points of error from manually re-entering data across different systems. They were constantly afraid of missing important steps in the process that would lead to a poor client experience and require my client to step in and intervene manually.
The solution was to streamline their client onboarding workflow so that it could run flawlessly without as much involvement and provide a seamless hands-off experience for the client.
Now, when a client fills out the Jotform onboarding questionnaire, it triggers a series of automated tasks:
First, it will update the client information in the project management tool they use. My client is an accountant. So in this case, they are using Financial Cents for all of their project management needs.
Then, it will calculate the name to be used for the client in their OneDrive and their Outlook inbox.
After that, it will add the client to their client tracker in Excel.
It will then upload the questionnaire submission as a PDF to the OneDrive folder that was created in a previous step.
And if this particular client is going to be a corporate client as well, it will create an onboarding project for that.
Otherwise, it will create the customer in QuickBooks and it will draft an onboarding fee invoice.
This entire workflow runs automatically in Zapier behind the scenes with no manual work required. No more wasting time on repetitive data entry across multiple tools. All the client info, folders, and records are instantly synced and ready to go.
With automated onboarding handling the tedious work, my client and her team can stay focused on mission-critical tasks like prospect calls and billable client work during busy seasons. And when summer comes, she can truly unplug and recharge, knowing that client onboarding is handled seamlessly without her involvement. It allows her team to serve clients without being bogged down by administrative overhead while she enjoys her well-deserved break.
2. Simplified Task Management
So many service providers think they can just power through and manage their increasing workloads themselves, especially if they already have operations support like a virtual assistant or online business manager. But no human can sustain that level of chaos and overwhelm for long before burning out. Trying to tough it out is no way to run a business sustainably. You'll end up too drained to actually enjoy the summer break you're working so hard for in the first place!
Simply piling more manual work onto your virtual assistant isn't the answer. That's just setting them up for the same overwhelm you're trying to avoid. They'll become just as maxed out as you are, and then no one will have the capacity to train or hire more people as you continue growing.
To set your VA up for success, you should automate your task delegation and project management systems to minimize the manual work and oversight required as your operations expand. Instead of manually building out every client workflow, you can save hours by having a system that automatically spins up full project plans for you and your team.
With a project management tool like ClickUp or Asana, you can create templates that include all associated tasks, timelines, team assignments, and more - no more rebuilding everything from scratch each time.
As part of your automated onboarding process, just add a step in Zapier to instantly set up their full project from that template with no manual effort required from you or your team.
You can even automate actions within your project management tool based on project milestones, deliverables, and client interactions. For example, if a client approves a draft you sent over, that could automatically trigger the next phase tasks to be assigned to a different team member.
Having these automated delegation workflows allows your business to effortlessly handle growth without requiring you to be hands-on with every single client. It ensures tasks are consistently and accurately assigned, reducing the risk of errors. This helps with delegation so you can actually take a step back and let your team run with their responsibilities independently.
Implementing automation like this is the difference between being buried under your own success or having an efficient business that gives you the freedom to actually enjoy life outside of work during breaks like summer.
3. Client Communication Sequences
As service providers, we all know how crucial it is to maintain high-quality client communication and experiences as our businesses grow. You really start to feel the pressure of this as you navigate growing your business.
Processes like client onboarding can already take up a significant portion of your administrative time. You want to treat every new lead with personalized attention and your biggest priority is ensuring a flawless and seamless client experience from onboarding to service delivery.
But at the same time, scaling your business means you’re probably ramping up marketing and social media efforts to accelerate growth. But without efficient client systems in place before you start these efforts, you’ll quickly find yourself backlogged trying to keep up with increased client demand, and risk dropping the ball on delivering an exceptional client experience.
In this kind of situation, one potential solution is to automate client communications in a way that still feels personalized and high-touch. By setting up automated email sequences tied to your client milestones and interactions, you ensure no one gets forgotten or falls through the cracks.
Create sequences in an email marketing tool or your CRM to automatically trigger follow-ups at key intervals - like after onboarding, mid-project check-ins, invoice reminders, project wrap-ups, and more.
These sequences run on autopilot, keeping your clients looped in and setting expectations without you having to manually send each email yourself.
With automated communication workflows and sequences handling that piece, you're free to be fully present with your family during your time off. Your mental energy isn't constantly depleted by the effort of remembering to send every single follow-up email.
It's a key piece of delivering consistently exceptional client experiences at scale without sacrificing your team's bandwidth or your own peace of mind when you should be unplugging for summer break.
4. Automated Administrative Tasks
One area perfect for automation is all the repetitive administrative tasks that come with running a service-based business - things like invoicing clients, tracking payments, managing financial records and contractor payroll.
For many small teams, these back-office duties end up being huge time sinks that distract from revenue-generating work. Hiring employees can help offload some of the workload, but then you're stuck with new administrative headaches like tracking their time, crunching payroll numbers, and invoicing clients accurately for that contract labor.
Rather than resigning yourself to spending hours every month managing the data and the manual entry, look for ways to automate and streamline these processes. You can set up automated workflows to export time entries from your tracking tool, run calculations and analysis, and even generate invoices - all without any manual effort on your part.
Imagine this scenario: your team uses a time tracking app to log hours against each client. Instead of downloading those time entries into a spreadsheet, calculating the billable amounts, and manually creating the invoices, you could fully automate that entire process.
One automation grabs the tracked time data, applies your pre-set billing rates, adds up the totals, and organizes it by employee and client. Another automation generates draft invoices with customer details, payment terms, line items, and an assigned invoice number
With the click of a button, you've got accurate invoices ready to be issued - a process that may have previously eaten up half a day now done in minutes.
By piping these kinds of administrative workflows through automation, you minimize tedious data entry and free up mental bandwidth. You can focus on high-impact priorities instead of getting bogged down in mundane tasks. And when things inevitably get busy again, these automated systems will allow you to maintain high service levels without being perpetually stretched thin.
Perhaps most importantly, automating these periodic time-sensitive tasks gives you much-needed flexibility. Rather than having to block out chunks of time every month/week to manually run payroll, invoicing, etc., you or a member of your team can trigger the automated workflows anytime and be done in a fraction of the time. This allows you to adapt to your own schedule and truly unplug when you need a break, without these recurring processes hanging over your head.
Don't make the mistake of thinking you can simply power through administrative bloat yourself or by throwing more hands at it. Finding ways to strategically automate these processes is what will give you the ability to refocus your energy on growing your business sustainably, all while having the freedom and flexibility to enjoy restorative breaks when you need them.
Conclusion
By implementing client experience automations like these, you'll be able to streamline and scale your client workflows, allowing you to step away and truly enjoy your summer break without things falling apart on the operations side. And when that next busy season inevitably rolls around, you'll have efficient automated systems in place to handle the influx of new clients without all the added stress and overwhelm.
If you found this post helpful and want to learn more automations that can give you the flexibility to step away from your business when you need to, make sure to download my Free Guide, where I share plenty of tips and strategies on how to do this!
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