If you look carefully, many public places have an AED — an automatic electric defibrillator — somewhere close to the fire extinguisher. The availability of that AED saves lives. According to the American Heart Association, “9 in 10 cardiac arrest victims who receive a shock from an AED in the first minute live.”
As a business owner or non-profit leader, you need an AED of a different kind. You don’t want your business to go into cardiac arrest!
Here’s a simple AED for your business or nonprofit.
As things scale and grow, you need a regular review, asking yourself these questions:
- What can I automate?
- What can I eliminate?
- What can I delegate?
I recently discovered the cost of having just one non-automated system in my business. All of my bookkeeping is done by Collective, with the payroll provided by Gusto. Collective provides a simple solution to add new contractors — just a few clicks and it handles the collection of W9s, direct deposit accounts, etc. Paying the contractors is just as easy. At the end of the year, it also automatically sends out 1099s and W2s.
I recognized just how much of a time-saver that was when I had to handle the 1099s for two vendors outside of that system. That key question of whether these vendors would meet the requirements of needing a 1099 had been overlooked. I saw them as vendors, not contractors, as we were purchasing services from them, so I didn’t enter them into my normal automated system.
The back-and-forth process of getting W9s, the proper tax ID number, a mailing address, and then getting all of that into tax1099.com, then filing all of those receipts and documents took a few hours of my team’s time instead of a few minutes.
This was a once-a-year process, but I still felt the cost of non-automation. For 2025, we’ve already sent those two vendors the one-click solution from Collective. We won’t have the same problem next year.
But it got me thinking: How much more would this have cost in time and energy if this had been a process that was monthly, weekly, or daily? How much back-and-forth and detail tracking would have added unnecessary friction to our team’s work?
What about your business or organization? Do you need an AED?
For Reflection
- Where are the pain points caused by non-automated processes in your business or nonprofit?
- How much time and energy and focus does this cost for you and for your team? What are you not doing as a result?
- How might you move towards automation?
Action Steps
- Make a list of candidates for automation
- Identify which are daily, weekly, and monthly
- Prioritize the ones that cause the most friction
- Make a plan and commit time to automating, one process at a time