Manual Mayhem: The Hidden Cost of Doing Things The Hard Way

In the latest in a series of articles reviewing common operational blockers, David Smithson-Rudd examines the perils of manual processes within your business.

Question: How much of your time is spent doing day-to-day tasks via email, spreadsheets and printing?

If the answer is anything above an hour per day, we need to talk.

Manual processes are one of the most common, and also the most overlooked, operational blockers in small-to-medium sized businesses. They often creep in with good intentions, but they quickly become thieves of time, magnets for risk, and stifle employee engagement.

Examples

Common examples include:

• Rota creation that lives in someone's head, or on a spreadsheet

• Staff onboarding and communication via email chains and text messages

• Tracking customer enquiries via email and notepads (yes, really)

• Manually creating reports, often taking hours

If you or your team member spends more time entering or processing data than they do acting on it, then to-do lists have effectively taken over your business, and sharply reduced

your focus on output.

The Impact

The business pain that is created from these scenarios can have damaging results, such as:

• Managers becoming bottlenecks

• Accuracy drops, errors creep in

• Both customers and employees lose confidence

• You, the founder, are stuck doing work that shouldn’t need doing

Your business will suffer greatly, and you will struggle to keep up, let alone get ahead. I once worked with a business where leaders were spending two-to-three hours preparing for a weekly performance meeting, as reporting wasn’t in place for them. The impact of that was approximately ten hours of leadership lost in the business every single week, as they weren’t spending that time leading their people to achieve results.

The Shift

The good news? With the right tools in place, we can overcome this pain.

Systems can start talking to each other.

You get real-time visibility without chasing updates.

Your employees feel trusted to operate within a process that supports them.

Your time is freed up for what matters most.

Key message: It’s not necessarily about automating everything, it’s about automating the right things so your people can do their best work.

Next steps

The first thing to do is identify your manual processes, and then audit them: where do delays, duplication and mistakes most often occur? Then, you need to ask yourself what else you could be doing if you didn’t have to do that manual task anymore.

Beyond that, it involves identifying the right tools available to help you reduce manual processes. This can be daunting, as the answer will be different in different businesses, even those in similar sectors.

At Consult DSR, I make solving these problems much easier – you have a trusted advisor and consultant who can help you flag the blockers, audit them, identify the right tools and implement them effectively.

Want to get started? Get in touch with me today for a free discovery session. At the time of writing, I’m also offering a Founder’s Assurance Check for £300+VAT – you can identify some of these challenges in as little as half a day.