It’s a typical Tuesday, and you’re doing the tedious tasks that you don’t want to do, but need to do. As a small business owner, you decided to start a business, not start a job. Research shows that most small business owners work over 50 hours a week, and many of those hours involve administrative work. Admin work is the biggest drain for a business owner, and it’s hours that could be better spent on building new products, talking to customers, or hiring more staff.
This story is the same for many SMBs, but the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and the tools that go with it have cut down on a lot of the tedious overhead you’re familiar with. You’ve probably seen ads promoting dozens of tools by now. AI isn’t magic, and there isn’t a single tool that will eliminate all your overhead, but AI tools can help you become more productive. This article will tell you how.
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Where Small Business Owners Actually Lose Their Time Each Week
You’ve heard the cliche that there isn’t enough time in the day, and that feeling rings true for many SMB owners. After a 12-hour day, you think back to what you did and wonder where the time went. The tedious tasks are small individually, but the time aggregates into several hours of your available work week.
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SMB owners report that the time goes to:
- Email triage and follow-ups: Email is the main way to communicate with customers, especially if service is national. Answering emails throughout the day seems like a quick read and response, but it can take about 1.5 hours each week.
- Scheduling, rescheduling, and calendar juggling: You make appointments, and someone cancels. You then need to connect and schedule again. This process takes time and leaves you with unfulfilled hours in the day when an appointment falls through. It’s a waste of about 45 minutes a week.
- Creating repetitive documents: Invoicing, quotes and estimates, contracts, and other templated documents must be filled out, printed (in some cases), and sent to recipients. The process takes about one hour a week.
- Answering common customer questions: Most of your customers have questions, and it’s the same questions over and over. Common questions are tedious but necessary, and they take about an hour a week to answer.
- Social media and basic content creation: Your marketing can be great, but it never ends. Creating marketing assets and content takes about 45 minutes a week.
As you can see from the list, the total time for each item isn’t too bad, but imagine these issues at scale. The fraction of an hour turns into several hours as your business grows. You could hire more staff, but most SMBs run on a tight budget.
Before You Start: The Right Way to Think About AI as a Small Business Owner
Some people expect AI to be black magic that removes all work from their plate, but it’s important to understand what AI can and cannot do for you. AI is like a tireless assistant that must be told what to do, supervised, and all output reviewed. It needs supervision, but it never forgets once you give it explicit instructions. Just like an assistant, you need to give AI instructions and never let it handle critical business activities without first reviewing its output. Never just “set it and forget it” with AI automation.
In addition to instructions, AI assistants also need time from you to train them. Take email automation as an example. You need to train AI to answer in the tone that you want and ingest your current policies, responses, and common customer questions. At first, this seems like a time sink, but as the weeks progress you’ll notice that it gets better and your time is freed up.
Once you have more time, you start to realize that AI gives you a significant return on your investment. Your time is valuable, and AI frees up that time so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. Annually, AI could save you thousands in lost time to tedious projects.
How to Use AI to Recover Those 5 Hours — A Practical Playbook for US SMBs
It’s easy to say that AI can help free up your valuable time, but it doesn’t help if you don’t know how. Here are a few common problems and what AI can do to help reduce overhead and the time it takes to perform busy work.
Stop Writing Every Email From Scratch
Let’s say that you have customers emailing you every day with common questions. One of those questions is how much a product costs, or maybe they want to know what is your typical turnaround time. AI can be the recipient of your inbox, scan for common questions, and reply to the sender automatically. Not only does this save you time, but it also sends a positive message to potential customers that you are good with communication and will get back to them quickly.
Let AI Own Your Scheduling Back-and-Forth
Cancellations are a normal part of business life, but they can take up too much time when your entire day is scheduled meetings. When a person cancels, AI can pick up on the context of the message and ask the sender to reschedule. Your AI assistant can pass along a link to your scheduler or make suggestions for a new time and day based on your current workload and calendar of events.
Automate Your Quotes, Invoices, and Proposals
This problem is where AI probably helps the most. Some SMB owners spend hours on quotes, invoicing, and proposals. You might have them templated, but you still need to fill out documents. With AI, you can give it the information necessary to fill out the form, and your AI assistant can fill out templates within seconds. In enough time, you don’t need to give it pricing or product information. You can simply tell it to fill out documents based on meeting notes or information it gets from customer emails, calls, or messages.
Give Your FAQs a 24/7 Voice
Instead of answering common questions in email, you also have the option to put a chatbot on your website. This chatbot acts like a customer service assistant ready to answer any questions. Web users can ask questions about your service, products, business hours, policies, and any other information you train it to use. Chatbots cut down on customer service time and your own. Providing quick answers to questions also gives potential customers faster responses so that they don’t need to take time to call you or find an email to ask questions.
Batch Your Content — Don’t Create It Daily
Marketing is probably the worst time sink in this list, but it’s also the most essential for business growth. The key to social media marketing is staying consistent with posts. Quality over quantity is a better strategy than uploading just for post numbers. Your AI assistant can upload posts for you in batches at a scheduled time. The advantage is that customers expect your content at specific times, and they will seek it out on days that you batch your content.
What to Watch Out For: AI Pitfalls Small Business Owners Should Know
As with any new technology, AI has its advantages, but it also has some pitfalls to avoid. We covered the first one. Never let AI continue to automate without any oversight. Always have a human reviewer edit and verify output. You don’t want to suddenly give potential clients bad answers to their questions. This pitfall will result in lack of trust and a loss in customer acquisition.
The next pitfall is giving AI too much private data. Whether it’s corporate secrets or your customer data, know that this information is fed to AI platforms and saved permanently. Customer email addresses will be visible when you use AI for email responses, but you should keep any personally identifiable information (PII) away from AI platforms.
Another common pitfall is SMB owners assuming AI can read your mind. With AI assistants, it’s garbage in, garbage out. You need to give AI explicit instructions, and when results aren’t accurate, spend time to optimize your input for better output. AI assistants require initial setup time, but its ROI is well worth the effort.
Frequently Asked Questions
Although each business process is 45 minutes to an hour to complete, AI saves about 5 hours for all various tasks you must do day-to-day. That’s almost 2,000 hours of saved time a year.
Most AI platforms have a free plan to try out the models, but you will pay about $20/month for a full subscription. This cost is an estimate. Some platforms include AI assistants with other applications.
Any task that involves sensitive data like corporate secrets, PII and sensitive data for customers (e.g., healthcare information, bank accounts, or social security numbers), and data that could be used to harm your customer base.
The best way to start is to try out one of the popular models and start asking questions. Check with your productivity suite provider to see if AI assistants are included with your subscription.
AI requires human oversight, so your employees still need to review output and give AI assistants input for automation tasks. Employees have more time to focus on other business activities when they save five hours a week doing repetitive tasks.
Your Next Step: Start With One Hour, Not Five
If you’re not familiar with AI, the first step is to start with one task instead of trying to tackle all five hours at once. Perfect one task with AI and then evaluate the time and money it saves. You can then calculate your ROI to decide if you want to continue using it.
If you need help with AI setup and have questions if your productivity tools include it, contact Corporate Technologies for help.
