5 Automations Every Small Business Should Set Up This Week

You started your business to do the work you're good at — not to spend Sunday night copying data between spreadsheets, chasing unpaid invoices, or manually typing the same follow-up email for the 30th time this month.

But that's where most small business owners end up. According to a McKinsey report, 60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that could be automated. For small business owners who wear every hat, that number is even higher.

Here are five automations we build for almost every client. They're not flashy. They're not expensive. But they'll give you back 10-17 hours every single week.

1. Lead comes in → CRM updates → Follow-up sends automatically

Sound familiar? A potential customer fills out your contact form at 9pm on a Tuesday. You're at dinner with your family. You see the notification, tell yourself you'll reply later, and by Wednesday afternoon you've forgotten. Three days later you reply, and they've already hired someone else.

This is costing you more than you think. Harvard Business Review found that businesses who respond to leads within 5 minutes are 100x more likely to make contact than those who wait 30 minutes. After an hour, your odds of qualifying that lead drop by 80%.

The automation: When someone fills out your form, three things happen instantly:

1. They get a personalized email within 60 seconds acknowledging their inquiry
2. A new contact is created in your CRM with all their details
3. You get a Slack/SMS notification with their info so you can call when you're ready

No manual data entry. No forgetting. No lost leads.

Real result: One roofing client went from responding to leads in 4-6 hours to under 2 minutes. They closed 40% more jobs in the first month without changing anything else.

2. Automatic invoice reminders that chase money for you

Sound familiar? You finished the job three weeks ago. The invoice is sitting unpaid. You've sent one reminder and feel weird sending another. Meanwhile, that $3,000 is floating in limbo while you have payroll due Friday.

The ugly truth: The average small business has $84,000 in outstanding invoices at any given time (Fundbox). Late payments are the #1 cash flow killer, and most business owners are too uncomfortable to follow up aggressively.

The automation: Overdue invoices trigger automatic reminders — polite but persistent:

• Day 3: "Friendly reminder, your invoice is due"
• Day 7: "Following up on your outstanding balance"
• Day 14: "Your invoice is now 14 days overdue" (firmer tone)
• Day 30+: You get notified to handle it personally

The emails come from your business, in your tone. Clients don't know it's automated. They just know you're professional and on top of things.

Real result: Clients who set this up see average payment time drop from 23 days to 8 days.

3. Booking + confirmation + reminders that kill no-shows

Sound familiar? A customer wants to book a consultation. You go back and forth over email for three days trying to find a time. They book. Then they don't show up. You just lost an hour of your day and got nothing for it.

The numbers are brutal. The average no-show rate for service businesses is 20-30%. If you do 20 appointments a week, that's 4-6 wasted slots. At $150/hour, that's $600-900/week in lost revenue — over $30,000 a year.

The automation:

• Clients book directly from your live availability (no back-and-forth)
• Instant confirmation email with calendar invite
• SMS reminder 24 hours before
• SMS reminder 1 hour before
• If they cancel, the slot reopens immediately

Real result: No-show rates consistently drop to 5-8% — a 70% reduction.

4. Automatic review collection that builds your reputation on autopilot

Sound familiar? You just knocked it out of the park on a project. The client says "you're amazing, I'll definitely leave a review." You both forget. Your Google listing still has 12 reviews from 2023.

Why this matters more than you think: 93% of consumers say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. Businesses with 50+ reviews earn 54% more revenue than average. But the #1 reason businesses don't have more reviews? They don't ask.

The automation: 7 days after a project is marked complete:

1. Client gets a short email: "How was your experience?"
2. If they rate you 4-5 stars → direct link to leave a Google review
3. If they rate you 1-3 stars → routes feedback to you privately (so you can fix it before it goes public)

You're not being pushy. It's one email, sent at the perfect time. And it works.

Real result: One client went from 14 Google reviews to 67 in four months without asking a single person manually.

5. Monday morning reports that write themselves

Sound familiar? Every Monday you open 4 different tabs — QuickBooks, your CRM, Google Analytics, your project tracker. You copy numbers into a spreadsheet. You format it. You send it to your partner or team. It takes an hour and you hate every second of it.

The automation: A scheduled workflow fires every Monday at 8am:

• Pulls revenue and outstanding invoices from your accounting tool
• Pulls new leads and pipeline value from your CRM
• Pulls website traffic and top pages from analytics
• Formats everything into a clean summary
• Sends it to your email or Slack before you've had your coffee

Real result: You walk into Monday morning with a full picture of your business. Zero effort.

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Add it up

| Automation | Time saved/week | Annual value (at $100/hr) | |---|---|---| | Lead follow-up | 3-5 hrs | $15,600 - $26,000 | | Invoice reminders | 2-3 hrs | $10,400 - $15,600 | | Booking + reminders | 2-4 hrs | $10,400 - $20,800 | | Review collection | 1-2 hrs | $5,200 - $10,400 | | Weekly reports | 2-3 hrs | $10,400 - $15,600 | | Total | 10-17 hrs | $52,000 - $88,400 |

That's not a typo. The manual work you're doing right now has a real cost — and most of it can be eliminated in a week.

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Want us to build one of these for free? Get your free build — pick any automation above and we'll deliver it in 48 hours. No card, no commitment. Yours to keep forever.