Nine years ago, Jennifer Hall Goodwin decided that she wanted to grow her architectural drafting business. As sole proprietor, however, she was already at capacity, working 60 hours per week for existing clients, with little to no room for new ones. The problem, Goodwin discovered, was the inordinate amount of time spent on manual paper processes.

“I always knew that everything manual was taking up time that should have been spent on generating revenue,” Goodwin says. Determined to grow, she finally decided to automate her business, seeking out electronic equivalents for time-consuming manual tasks.

Her efforts paid off, and in 2006 Goodwin’s business evolved into internetGIRLfriday.com, her Framingham, Mass.-based virtual assistant firm. “Since automating everything I used to do manually I’ve been able to grow my business by 300 percent,” says Goodwin, who now has four employees. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Time Is Money

When small and medium-sized businesses automate their everyday workflow, they can save themselves time and make money—provided they automate correctly, like Goodwin.

“You can certainly find ways to streamline your workflow,” Goodwin says. “The key to finding the right [solutions] is really honing in on ones that don’t add any time to your process.”

In order to reap the rewards of automation—which include having a paperless office that is at once more reliable, more efficient and more collaborative than traditional paper offices—businesses must also understand the risks, according to Brenda Prinzavalli, founder and CEO of Balanced Organizing Solutions, a Las Vegas-based company that helps small businesses build more efficient business systems. For instance, take automation, which saves time over the long-term, but requires a substantial up-front investment of time and resources.

“Time is so important,” Prinzavalli says. “When things are automated, there’s an investment of time spent researching what technology you want to use, purchasing it, installing it, synchronizing it, learning it and getting in the habit of using it.”

With this time investment, your business should enjoy all the benefits of having an electronic workplace, not the least of which is having electronic information that’s more easily stored, shared and utilized. However, if automation creates more headaches than it cures, then perhaps the investment was not worth the effort.

Automation Opportunities

As an investment strategy, automation is worth embracing when it is appropriate, and worth avoiding when it isn’t.

To determine where automation can help your business most, Prinzavalli suggests taking inventory of your daily routine. “Take the time to do an assessment of processes most frequently used and determine if automation or electronic processing will create more efficiency,” she says.

While tasks that require considerable time or money are most ripe for automation, the possibilities are infinite—especially among paper-driven tasks, including accounting, bookkeeping, human resources and legal functions.

“Small businesses drown in paper in many cases,” observes business coach Jim Rochford, owner of Las Vegas-based ActionCOACH Business Coaching. “So, many businesses are trying to get away from manual files, scanning documents so that they’re available in digital format.”

Automation Implementation

No matter what tasks you automate, careful implementation is key, Rochford insists. “Software may sound perfect in the demo,” he says, “but you have to be able to say, ‘I have the resources to actually implement this.’”

To successfully automate your own systems:

• Establish objectives. It’s important to set expectations prior to automating so that you can measure ROI and success


• Choose electronic tools. The right hardware and software is key. For document management, for instance, consider purchasing a multifunction printer for scanning, faxing, copying and digitizing documents; Xerox offers an affordable Web-based document management application that lets businesses of every size rapidly deploy a world-class Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution to provide greater content control, collaboration and personal productivity.


• Assign data entry tasks. Automation is not, in fact, automatic. Automated processes still require personnel to initiate and manage them. In the case of electronic calendars, for instance, an end user must still manually enter calendar data, even though event reminders are automated.


• Build parallel document structures. Because the point of automation is to save time, make sure that electronic files are organized in the same way and under the same headings as paper files so that you can easily locate information, no matter how it’s stored.

Finally, remember that the goal of automation isn’t putting your business on autopilot, but rather employing technology to handle administrative tasks so that you can spend your time finding new clients and serving existing ones.

“If you’ve freed up all your time and automated everything, you can sit back and serve your customers,” Goodwin concludes. “That’s my goal: to have more time to spend with my clients because I’ve got everything else off my plate.”

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