Easily start automating your small business with these books

Written like a novel, Built to Sell tells the story of a business owner overwhelmed with having to do a lot of tasks himself. Because he’s not able to take a vacation and step away from his business at all, he’s over it and wants to sell his business. He has a mentor that guides him to streamline his business to make it more valuable & ready for sale. Those tips are also compiled at the end of the book.

It’s geared towards business owners with a team of employees, but even if you don’t have employees yet or want to stay a solopreneur and you’re not even remotely considering selling, there are still good nuggets to get you to think about how you can streamline your business so you can enjoy a vacation without hurting your business.

The SYSTEMology book will help you map out what you’re currently doing – your current systems (even if you don’t think you currently have systems), and use that as a baseline to measure & improve things.

When I was preparing to write this post, I saw there are some bad reviews on Amazon about needing to sign up for the email list to get extra resources, then being bombarded with emails and it being hard to unsubscribe. I really dislike when you need to sign up to the author’s email list to get the resources you need to follow along. I never sign up for extra resources, unless I’m already on the author’s mailing list for other reasons anyway. After seeing the reviews, I’m glad I didn’t sign up for the extra resources. I didn’t feel the need, and I didn’t miss them. The sheets you need are in the book, you can just re-create them for yourself in whatever works for you – Word, Google Docs, Evernote, etc.

Like Built to Sell, this book is geared towards agencies and business owners that already have a team of employees in place. That said, there are still good nuggets for solopreneurs. If that’s you, instead of having human team members map out their workflows, use the examples and SYSTEMology framework to map out your systems yourself and think about what you can optimize and automate to take the pressure off yourself.

Apart from introducing you to Zapier, including a clear overview of all the terms, Automate it with Zapier helps you to simplify your processes and identify what can be automated. It shows you how to build your first automated workflow (or Zap), then goes on to walk you through more complicated setups as well as troubleshooting. It also has a lot of examples to help you automate different processes in your business.

If you’re already familiar with Zapier, you can skip the explanations and just read “Preparing to Automate Your Processes” where you’ll map your processes, figure out what you can simplify, and then identify what can be automated. Then go straight to the examples at the back to get more ideas for things you can automate in your business.