 Okay, I'm going to start. We may have people joining as we start this intro and again, and when you first come in, you're going to be automatically put on mute. We're also recording today. So if anybody has any problem with that, please do flag that quite quickly for me. But welcome everybody to our next series of Recover and Rise. My name is Cheryl Tipton. I'm here on behalf of Freedom Works. I'm going to be your host for the next seven weeks. Before we start with our wonderful speakers today, I've just got a few slides I'd like to share so everybody knows what's going to happen today. I'm sure some of you joined us in the last series and the one before that. But just to make sure everybody's aware of what's going on, if you compare with me, I'm just going to share my slides. So we're here today as part of West Sussex County Council's Activate Your Online Recover and Rise series in conjunction with Freedom Works, Creative Bloom and Always Possible. We've got four webinar series going on. This is our third about systems and productivity and after Christmas we start growth and expansion. We've got seven webinars every Tuesday and Thursday throughout November, everyone starting at midday on a whole range of subjects, digital accounting, digital HR, online stock, productivity. And the last one is access to the experts. So the last one is everything coming together and your opportunity to be able to talk to those experts and get some more support. We've got two fab speakers today, Craig Willis from SCORE and Kelly Goss from SOLVA. Craig is motion director of SCORE and he's going to present to us for about 20 minutes and Kelly, again, founded SOLVA in 2016 and they're both going to be talking about how to simplify your processes online, how to save time, how to make things better, and I'll hand over to them in a minute. But just in case you're not aware, next Tuesday we've got a digital accounting seminar with Hayden Winter from Carpenter Box. So please do book onto that one and learn how to take everything online with your digital accounting. Next Thursday, we've got Laura Walker hosting a session on HR for us. So lots of really, really good webinars coming up. For those of you that have been here before, you'll know that also there is grant funding available out there. The business hot house, Gareth joined us in a series before he would join us at the end of this series to talk about the funding that the business hot house offered to small and medium sized businesses. Lowcase, again, that's an EU funded project to help businesses adapt to climate change. Very topical. Lots of grants to give away there as well. And Rise if you want to link with the university partners of Brighton and Sussex to really look at innovative ideas. So there's three business partners there that are offering grant funding to small and medium businesses. And also, if you haven't heard of them already, our digital champions are available for anybody who attends any of these webinars. You can access a digital champion for a day's support, which is absolutely free up to eight hours, which is absolutely brilliant, actually, across a whole range of subjects. All you need to do is our wonderful digital champions. I know some of them are here today. But there's seven of them and they all specialize in different areas. Andrew websites and CRM leases here about productivity and processes. E comms is Malcolm Rachel's marketing plans. Obviously we do send these slides out so you can go back through and see who you'd like to work with. Rob is about digital transformation. Gloria is about growth and Susan about service related initiatives. So whatever your challenges are in your business, there is a digital champion that can help you. And really, it couldn't be simpler. You can use a contact form, ask for the support, you'll have a quick chat with the growth relationship associate, and then you can access that support. So really, the whole seminar, the whole series is about saving you time and money and getting you access to funding and support so we can really recover and rise from this pandemic. I'm just going to stop this share for a minute and come back into the room. I think we've got quite a few people joined us since I started talking again, just to let you know you are all automatically on mute, and we are recording. So today, we're going to be hearing from Kelly and Craig. They're going to talk for about 20 minutes each. And then we're going to take questions and answers after that. If you've got any questions, please feel free to pop them in the chat and then I'll pick them up afterwards and we'll share them between Kelly and Craig, because the answers are quite interrelated. So that's how we thought that would work best. So without further ado, I will hand over to Craig. As I say Craig is mentioned director of score, and he's here to tell us how we're going to save money and do things better. Brilliant. Thank you Craig. Brilliant. Thank you for the introduction Cheryl. Really nice to see everybody here today. I'm going to share my screen and bring some slides up. Hopefully you can all see that. Can I get a thumbs up? If you can see my side's perfect. Okay, so in a second, I'm going to ask you all if you could. I'm going to ask you a question and it'd be great if you could pop something into the chat window. But just quickly before I do that, a little very short background on myself. I'm going to talk about score and what we do. Well, I think you'll get to see what we do in a second. But my background, I've worked in business, what we call business process improvement and consulting for around 20 years. I've worked with organizations of all sizes from small startups right through to global enterprises. And a great deal of the work that I do is really about helping organizations understand how they operate. It's a little bit like holding a mirror up to a business and so that the business can reflect on how things happen today and how they might want them to happen in the future. The topic I'm going to be talking about in the next 20 minutes is processes. And as hopefully you'll see it's one of the topics that I'm most passionate about in my life. So without further ado, as I said, I'm going to ask a question and that question is, if I could give you one day back a week, what would you do with that day? Now it could be that you're going to spend that time relaxing on the beach, perhaps with a nice book. Or I see someone's popped in surfing Stuart there. I was going to say maybe you're going to do some sort of extreme sports. I see this drinking wine, sleeping, walking the dog. Or perhaps you might want to spend some time or reinvest some time back into your business. You may have heard the saying working on your business rather than in your business. And these are all opportunities when you start to think about processes and how processes impact your business. And there's this opportunity to free up more time to either go and do the things you love doing in your spare time or spending more time working on and developing your own business. And that's exactly what we've seen in many businesses we've worked with over the years. I'll give you a couple of examples who recently worked with a timber merchant who of small business where sales were driven by the owner managing director. And their customer base was largely building firms. And the sales operation was all about actually going out and meeting those different companies going out to sites, understanding what their needs were and then delivering the, you know, having the timber taking orders and having the timber delivered to the sites. And when the team sat down in the office one day to talk about the sales process, they were thinking about how do we continue to grow the business and therefore if we were to bring say another person in to help with the sales. What is it that the managing director actually does on a day to day basis that we could then start to create a job description and look at hiring and so on. And in that 90 minute discussion where they talked about what the sales process was, they realized that a lot of the work that the managing director was doing was when they when he took orders. He actually came back to the office and was doing an awful lot of administrative work, putting the orders together, putting them into systems and so on. And the manager in the room at the time was like, well, I can do that for you. You know, you could be out there selling more stuff and I could, you just send me what it is they want and I'll sort all the orders out. And what they realized is that the MD was spending almost a whole day per week catching up on all of this admin work that the office manager was able to do instead. So, often these things can be really staring you in the face. And yet once you sit down and have a structured conversation about them, you can start to identify these brilliant opportunities to save yourself time, save money, or potentially do something different or help the customers in a different way. So processes, what I talk about as processes are really visual representation of the work that happens within your organization. It's about painting a picture of how your business works. And by doing that, it helps you to see things that you don't normally see in the day to day cut and thrust of working within the business. So taking a little bit of time to sit down and map out the processes to draw the diagrams that represent what you do within the business, start to help you. So I talked a bit about how it can help facilitate discussions and that's exactly what we saw in the timber merchant. So for example, was in a training company that we worked with where the team in the training company, again, were a lot of the work was about managing the training courses so making sure that taking bookings from people that wanted to go on training and sending out the joining instructions, sending out certificates afterwards, arranging the venue, making sure that the trainer was available and the trainer had all the notes and all of those sorts of things. And we were helping them do a bit of work around a system they had. And again, that required us to get the team together and talk about the process they go through for managing the training courses. And during that conversation, they discovered that most of the team, when they sent out emails, when they sent out the joining instructions for courses, when they sent out the certificates following the courses. They were copying and pasting the customer names and email addresses from a spreadsheet into their outlook emails and then sending them out. And during that conversation, someone asked the question, well, how long does that take? And the first response was, well, it takes two or three seconds to copy and paste an email address from a spreadsheet into an email. But actually when they then multiplied that out around across the number of emails they were sending, the number of participants in the courses, the number of courses they were doing. They very quickly realized that they were actually spending about 80 days, 80 days in every calendar year copying and pasting email addresses. So this was a team of five, but that's essentially one person spending a third of the year copying and pasting email addresses. And the interesting thing in that conversation was one person in the room said, but we've got a CRM, a customer relationship management system. We've got the list of customers in it. And the system can automatically send emails, why are we copying and pasting? So again, through a conversation about this, about what they did and how they worked, they were able to essentially give themselves a third of a person back in that team to be able to do other things. So it's being able to visualize processes in this way, so the steps, the work that you do really helps with those discussions, but not just internally. You can also have those discussions with your suppliers and even your customers. So for example, if you are outsourcing something you do, let's say for example you're using a bookkeeper service to do your bookkeeping. If you can explain and map out, this is how I do my bookkeeping today, you can then take it to that supplier and be very clear about what they're going to do because they'll be able to explain clearly what they will do and what they won't do this importantly. And so you can have a much tighter relationship with them. And it's the same if you were selling a service like that, if you were able to describe, this is how we would look after your books, Mr. Customer. So these are the things we recommend you do. You can then have that much more structured conversation with them about how that would happen. Of course, once you've documented processes, they're essentially your instruction manual for your business. And I know that many people will go to IKEA and they'll buy the unit and they take it all out of the box and they start building it up without looking at their instructions. If something goes wrong, you have that piece of paper there that you can go and look at to remind yourself how to actually do it. And it's a similar sort of thing. It might not be something you need to look at every day, but it gives you that reference point that you can fall back on. And of course, in doing this, it also helps to make sure that everybody in the business is working in the same way. So you can start to make sure that if you're delivering the same service to different customers where you've got different people doing the same thing for the same customer, you can make sure that that customer is getting a consistent experience. And finally, the other point I'd bring up here is, of course, that if for any reason you're not there one day or you're away on holiday, you can have confidence that others will know how to do what it is that you need to do without them having to call you while you're sat on the beach reading your book or surfing or skydiving or whatever else it is. So it's really, really powerful tool for you to identify things in the business that you can fix or time that you can save or costs that you can reduce. But processors are also super powerful for helping you think about the future. And one of a good analogy, in fact, one one that I saw on LinkedIn today or commented on LinkedIn today was you wouldn't go and start building a house or a car without having some sort of plans first of all. When you build a house, you wouldn't ask a builder to come along and say, right, I want a three bedroom house, it's going to be yay, why so high. Off you go, let's see what it looks like at the end. What you do is you work with an architect and an engineer. And the architect helps you start to visualize what would that house actually look like both inside and out. How functional is it? Does it make sense to have the bathroom to have the bathroom on one side of a bedroom on the other side of the kitchen and everyone have to walk through the bedroom. No, you wouldn't do that. You design a layout to make sure it's going to work for everyone that lives in that house. At the same time, you they will work with engineers to make sure they're using the right types of materials that the building will be safe and sturdy. And this isn't going to fall down in the middle of the night. So why wouldn't you do that with your business? If you did this with a house, you're likely to end up with it looking something like this. Or if you got lucky and got it to look good, you could still end up with risking something like this going wrong. So again, why would you not put the same sort of thought into your business where you're often investing so much time and effort. So creating processes is actually super, super simple. And so what I want to do now is just spend a few minutes giving you some tips and tricks for how you can go and start doing it yourself if you've not done it before. Even if you have done it before, we'll talk about a couple of things here, which you may not have done or may not have thought about, which I hope you find useful doing it afterwards. So mapping out a process or processes is really all you need or the basic thing you need is a pen paper, some sticky notes if you got them, and some whiteboard and some marker pens really, really useful. So to map out a process, all you're going to do or all you have to do is ask some simple questions. The answers aren't always simple, but you as the expert in your business will have to find those answers. Just like the way that an architect is building a house or designing a house story that will work with an engineer to answer questions that they might not know the answer to. And it's the same thing. By doing going through this exercise, you'll actually ask yourself some challenging questions make you realize that sometimes there are gaps in the way that things happen in the business. And then that opens up possibilities for how you'd address those and fix those. So to talk about very simply, well, first of what processes is it you're going to map. I'm going to show you a very simple example. This is one, actually that we've worked on in our own business, very, very recently. So we're going to start with sketching out on a whiteboard or a piece of paper. And here we're going to look at the process of the new lead capture. In this example, this was around some events that we were running in our company. And we wanted to make sure that we were capturing the information about the people who register for those events. And then we're doing something with that information afterwards. So the first thing we ask is which process in this case it's the lead capture process. The next thing we want to know is what happens in that process. I what are the main activities or steps that happen in that process. So, you know, you can take your sticky notes and each sticky note will represent an activity and step in that process. You might use different colored sticky notes to indicate different types of things. So in my example here you'll see that I've written the main steps or activities in the process using yellow sticky notes, but I've used green ones to indicate different things. For example, the first thing that happens is that we've got somebody on our website looking at the registration form. So they're going to complete that registration form. So that's the first activity. Now what we need to do is once we've got their information we want to know, do we already know this person or not? So we want to check in our customer relationship management system, do we have this person recorded? Is there an existing lead that we can carry on? But if they're not, they're someone new, we then need to create that in the CRM. Then what we want to do is we're going to add them to a campaign so we know which event that they came from and then we're going to send them any confirmation email to back to that lead. So that starts to tell us what happens and you can start to see processes can get quite complex. They can branch off. And it's very hard to see that in a discussion or from texts. So laying out a process like this visually step by step allows you to see how those different branches come out and how they reconnect back together again. So the next thing I want to do is ask who does it or in this case who or what is doing it. So it obviously completing the registration form is the user that completes it. But in our particular system we've got a WordPress, so we use WordPress for our website and we've got a special plugin that integrates with our CRM system. And so the plugin has to be configured to be able to go and check whether the lead exists. And then as you see on the bottom branch to actually create that lead, if it doesn't exist. We have somebody who's responsible for our website and looking after it. So they'll ultimately be responsible for configuring it. Likewise, when the lead actually then goes into the CRM, it needs to be added to the correct campaign so that you can. So that we know, you know, what sort of lead this was what which event it was for example, what download it was. So again the CRM needs to do that somebody's going to need to configure that. And finally where we send the email confirmation of it's going to be done by MailChimp. I can start to look at the different people and systems. And again, you might have different people are managing those systems are being very clear about which one you think is going to do it allows you to be able to decide who it is who's going to pick up that work to do that configuration and so on. And then the final point I've got here is the why. Excuse me. The we actually really like to ask why and when when I work with a team on their process as I'll actually make them go and tell me why they do every single step like why do you want the user to complete the registration form but you don't need to get that detail. But in this case, what I do want to do is I want to know the why of this process why are we doing it. Well actually what we want is we want to capture those leads so that we can nurture them into the future we can use this process with different in different use cases but ultimately what we're trying to do is is is capture them for nurturing. And that's why we then look back on the process and say have we captured all the information that we need. And of course you can always enrich your processes afterwards once you've got that framework, you can then go back and have all sorts of conversations with the team about, okay well what information do we need at the registration form. What sort of information are we going to send to them after that they've signed up and so on. And so it's actually putting this together is a very very simple, but can be very very powerful tool for making sense of what's going on today, or starting to explore what's happening in the future. I've given you a very very simple example here, but you could look at big processes like the wholesale process you could look at marketing processes, you could look at your delivery processes you could look at your accounting and finance processes, and so on. So on that note, I'm just going to summarize. If you're not doing it already there's no reason to not to start mapping processes today you'll be surprised at what sort of things you will learn about your own business and how you work with your team and colleagues. You'll undoubtedly find that it that you'll be able to identify opportunities to save time money and ultimately heartache in your business. You'll also start to see how it provides that almost foresight or agility in your business because once you start to feel very comfortable and understand how the business works today, or how you might want it to work in future. You can react to unexpected changes very very quickly. And I personally think that it's fun and I find it very rewarding to go and sit with teams and map processes. I know not everybody does, but it is pretty easy to do. It just takes the hardest thing in doing process mapping is getting started and a little bit of practice you can get really really good at it. And so I said at the beginning I'll talk a little bit more about what score is later on so score is it were a software company we provide a software, a cloud based software platform that makes it super easy to map share collaborate improve and manage your processes within an organization. So if you wanted to create your own user manual for your company for example, it's a great tool to do it. The reason why you can't start doing it on paper first and then migrate to a tool later. We provide a free trial on our website if you want to go and check that out. I'm also very open to connect with anyone so as my LinkedIn profile. I sometimes work in the freedom works office in Chichester and we also work out of Portsmouth from time to time as well so if you're in the area, it'd be great to connect anyway. And at that point I see there are some questions, but I think we'll pick them up later. So I think it's time to hand over to Kelly. Brilliant. Thank you so much, great. Thank you so much. I was scribbling away actually as you were going through that thinking I really should make more time to make more of the processes so I made some notes already so that's great. If we can hand over to Kelly Kelly is going to talk to us about how we can simplify and streamline these tasks even more. And so Kelly over to you please. Hey, thank you just give me a few seconds to show my screen. Just bear with me. Got to move so many things around and everybody see my screen. Awesome. Great. Okay, well thank you. First of all, Craig for giving that great presentation. I'm going to emphasize on a lot of stuff that Craig has talked about because it's so super important to map your processes before you even do the stuff that I'm going to talk about so we'll get into that in a second. So, first of all, just need to move a few more things around just bear with me. Just hello again, and thanks for joining us today. So I just wanted to give a little bit of an intro about me before we start. I'm going to be a guest founder of solver author of automated with Zapier business process automation specialist Zapier expert pipe drive certified expert and zero certified advisor. Now, with all of that in mind. I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story before I get started with the actual nitty gritty. And the stories kind of relevant to what I'm going to talk about today. So, this picture, obviously not me but represents me a few years ago. I co founded a veterinary practice and worthy that pretty much almost drove me to burn out. I worked countless hours, every week running the business with my many hats as most entrepreneurs do and I'm sure lots of people can can relate to that. And having launched that business in 2010 just coming out of the recession there wasn't really enough funding to start the business with enough staff to lighten the load so the majority of the admin workload fell to me to push through because I kind of ran the business and my business partner did all the clinical stuff. I had the right fit for purpose industry recommended technology to use to streamline our business, but nothing that we were using in the business was connected and very little was automated. I will never ever forget having to do VAT returns late on a Sunday when they would do the next day, and that happened all the time. And basically there wasn't enough time in the day for all the things that I needed to do. And that was before I knew that the average small business doesn't need to hire a developer to connect their tech together and put in place effective automations to increase productivity. And all of that can be done simply and cost effectively with tools that are very available to us today. I started that business in 2015, very exhausted, but with a wealth of knowledge of how to run the front and back office aspect of a small business. I had no idea what I was going to do next. Prior to that business I'd worked in project management and process improvement in totally different industry pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing. So I really needed to find something that I would love doing and that would bring together all of my skills. So after taking on freelance work, helping companies with their bookkeeping I quickly realized that I had a knack for solving productivity problems by helping businesses streamline their processes and connect all of their tech tools together. I also realized that seeing the productivity benefits my clients got as a result really gave me my kicks. Now going back to the work I was doing for these clients, there was one problem. I could connect most of these apps together with existing integrations which were native to the apps, as many businesses can do. But so face say for example HubSpot CRM to MailChimp, I might want to sync the contacts between the two, but what was I supposed to do if two apps didn't connect with each other? So it's important to mention here that even though I find it very easy to use certain apps and understand how they function, like many people I don't have an IT background. I have a process background. I certainly didn't have the developer skills then to create an integration for my clients and to be quite honest, most of my clients couldn't afford to costly developer resource. So wouldn't it have been awesome if there was something that could bridge the gap that didn't require me or somebody else to use any coding to connect those tools together? Soon after I started on my new path with helping clients, I stumbled across Zapier, which is a no code automation connector platform that allows over 3,000 apps to speak to each other and automate their different tasks. So quite honestly, this totally blew my mind and it changed my life. I taught myself how to use it and with my business experience and process improvement experience, I was eventually building bespoke workflows for companies where their tools previously didn't communicate with each other. This allowed my clients to get rid of all of those manual and repetitive tasks and harness the power of automation to increase productivity. So fast forward several years, as a Zapier certified expert, I lead a strategically structured lean team and we work with all types of businesses from solar printers to those with loads of employees in different industries and located all over the world helping them supercharge their business productivity with better processes and automation. And I'm also very proud to say that I'm one of the only women on the Zapier experts directory and the author of Automated with Zapier, which has just been newly published. So I can truly say that I have found my calling in life and nothing makes me happier than solving a niggly painful problem for my clients no matter how small or large. So, as I said earlier, this problem that I went through is kind of relevant. So you may have been thinking to yourself why I spent so much time talking about it but what I did want to do was just emphasize that I've been there myself. I know what it's like to be extremely inefficient and I know now what it's like to run my business on autopilot. So that absolutely means that you can do it too. And all it takes is knowledge of how you do things. And you're the best people to know how that happens, how you can do those things better and take the time to invest in learning and then creating some totally awesome processes and automations. So this kind of emphasizes again on the stuff that Craig was talking about, about how important process mapping is, and we'll get to that in a second, and how that links to automation. So in no time at all, I'm going to promise you that you'll thank yourself for giving it a chance to improve your processes and put in place automations. So let's get started and have a look at what we're going to cover right now. So I'm again going to emphasize on a lot of points that Craig has mentioned already. And what I'm going to cover specifically is what business process automation is and how it can help with productivity, the benefits of automation, and then I will also go through some real life examples and case studies. So to understand a little bit more about business process automation. Let's first talk about a little problem that many business owners face. This is Jeff. Jeff is our typical busy entrepreneur. He runs a startup well being coaching business and he's in the process of launching the commerce website and merchandise sales platform. Jeff has a few staff members but as the sole director and with a limited budget, he has to juggle multiple roles within the business in any week, all those hats that we're all wearing. He often spends his evenings and weekends catching up on paperwork responding to emails and doing his bookkeeping. So Jeff also knows that his staff are stretched to the max, and he wishes that him and his staff have more time. Now the main reason that Jeff and his team of no time is because Jeff's business has many core processes that are manual and they don't communicate with each other. So they're all running, customer database, website, proposal management, payment processing, accounting, stock control, they all stand alone. And many of these processes are also very manual time consuming and undocumented. This means that Jeff and his staff spend countless hours on admin, manually moving data between their different tools and performing repetitive tasks. As his processes are time consuming, Jeff also does not have accurate and timely information about his business performance at a glance. And now that Jeff is launching his new website, he doesn't have the budget for taking on additional staff and he's worried that him and his existing staff won't be able to cope with the extra work and some of them might leave. So what's the solution. To simplify, improve and streamline his business processes, introducing cost effective cloud based applications where appropriate, connecting those business tools together and then using business process automation to automate and, sorry, to automate and improve those manual and repetitive tasks. And this is going to significantly reduce manual data entry and error, meaning increase productivity, more job satisfaction for his staff and more time for Jeff to cost effectively scale his business. For a lot of us can relate to Jeff and his productivity issues. And I think what we'll do now is we'll just go straight into talking about what business process automation actually is. So, every successful business strives to make the most of their resources and improve productivity so that there is more time for increasing revenue, pretty important. The idea is that many companies have systems that don't communicate with each other directly and as a result processes a manual time consuming and very prone to error. Fortunately, we live in a time where technology is continually evolving to help us make work easier and is now more than ever straightforward to implement ourselves and cost effective to run by introducing appropriate business technology tools connecting those tools together and automating manual and repetitive tasks, businesses can significantly increase productivity. So, by now you have probably already heard people talking about the term business process automation. And what that actually is, is it's all about using technology to improve the way that we work by automatically performing repetitive tasks that would typically require human It ultimately focuses on the human element in the process, rather than the actual applications or technology that are in use. Of course, the tools that you use are fundamental and need to be the right ones for the job. However, the real goal is to help the people who are using those systems to be more productive to focus on the tasks that truly matter for the success and growth of the organization. Let's go through a few examples of where business process automation can help you to get rid of manual tasks and increase productivity. So, for example, if you're posting the same information on multiple social media channels, manually, of course, if you're inputting new web form leads into your CRM manually. If you're manually importing sales information from your e-commerce store into your accounting software, if you're collating reporting information from numerous sources, so those are just a few examples and I know Craig mentioned a few of these earlier. So, following on from that great talk that Craig gave I want to emphasize on a few of those extra points that he mentioned. Now, although automation functions to make processes work better, it's very, very essential to bear in mind that applying automation to an already inefficient operation will increase the inefficiency. As a whole, business process automation therefore requires you to take really specific steps to look at your processes holistically, understand them, simplify them, identify what systems can be connected, and only then decide on which tasks can then benefit from automation. Now this can be done, like Craig said, as a simple brainstorming exercise involving the key people who are involved in the process. You can use post-it notes, whiteboard, a digital whiteboard tool like Nero or Craig's tool, the process mapping tool score to document all those tasks involved in each top level process such as marketing, sales, operations and finance. And you don't have to get complicated about it. Then you'll want to break those down into key granular tasks, flesh them out, cut out unnecessary steps to improve them and then identify if you can automate them. Mapping the process out visually will save you loads of time when you try to automate them. It doesn't take time to adequately learn the principles of business process automation, however, the resulting value for your organization totally outweighs the time investment. So now a few benefits of business process automation and there are countless more but you know these are the kind of basics so reducing manual data entry and error, reducing operational costs, putting more time into growing sales, providing better customer service and one of my favorites is increasing staff engagement and job satisfaction because people are not going to be doing manual and repetitive draining tasks. They can be focusing on the tasks that really make a difference for their jobs. Now before we focus on the practical aspects of improving and automating operations, we need to understand how web applications communicate with each other. Now, allowing your business process applications to sorry not your process applying your business application to communicate with one another and then automating tasks with possible is key to increasing productivity. And before we can explore how automation with connected tools comes into this picture, we need to understand how business applications can be connected using API integrations. Now, follow me with this, it's not that complicated. I just want to give you a bit of an introduction so an API, which is an application programming interface is a means by which multiple software programs can communicate with each other. Essentially acts to allow data from different systems to pass between them. When to software programs are connected in this way by an API they're said to be integrated. I've used that word earlier on. And when an integration exists, this allows specific requests to be sent by one app producing a response in another. So, similar to the example we used earlier on with the CRM and MailChimp. So another example here would be if you wanted to, if you want a new row to be created in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. When a new customer contact is added in your CRM so Salesforce or Pipe Drive or HubSpot, you will need to know that the contact is being created in the first place so there's communication between those two apps. I'm sure it's not a surprise to you that building API integrations requires software programming and development skills and can be a lengthy and costly process. Most applications that you're currently using in your business are likely to have a section on the website containing a list of other applications with which they integrate. So here's an example with Pipe Drive. Now these applications listed in these app marketplaces or app ecosystems have integrations created using APIs to enable the two apps to communicate with each other. So for example, you might want, so again so we've got Pipe Drive's example there but you know any number of tools will have their own app marketplaces zero for example zoom, etc. So software providers invest time and money and technical skills in building and maintaining these native integrations. And generally these providers will create an integration that satisfies the highest priority needs of most users to automate the most frequently used types of activities. They may also prioritize integration development resources on other more commonly used applications rather than smaller less popular apps. And in some cases a user of that software might need to connect another tool that is not listed in the app ecosystem, or may need to accomplish a specific task that's not available with the existing integration. So under these circumstances, a business could employ a programmer to write code to create a custom integration with the API provided. But for most companies the process of developing an integration is not a financially viable option. Therefore, there is often a reliance on what the integrations are available to do within the app ecosystems and how flexible they are. Now thankfully, as technology has developed is now become possible to create digital processes without the need for writing any code. Therefore, anyone can learn how to build a website, create email templates and connect their systems using in very many cases visual drag and drop editors. These editors give you the ability to add and remove blocks and templates rather than writing code in a computer programming language. So instead of you needing a developer to write the code that average person with basic it skills can create these processes themselves. And these advances are generally described as the no code revolution as software providers have pushed forward to develop solutions that will help the non IT workforce to execute tasks that could only previously be done by software engineers. Now no code connector tools are part of these technology solutions. They allow you to automate and manage your business processes without writing any code. The tools essentially act as a bridge between thousands of cloud based applications that may not have direct native integrations with each other, or for which the events are more limited. They enable users to build business specific workflow automations with a visual editor using pre built integrations to seamlessly perform manual and repetitive tasks without human intervention. So basically as businesses we no longer need advanced technical skills to be able to use the power of integration automation. Now, Zapier automate.io, Integromat and Microsoft Power Automate are four of the most commonly used connector tools. There are of course our pros and cons for using each of them but as I personally love Zapier and know it's the easiest of all of them to use. I'm going to focus on this today. So Zapier connects over 3000 apps and has a powerful free version which allows you to get started and see how easy it is to use the paid versions of Zapier allow you to do more. You can include multi step processes, access to premium apps and additional task automations in your monthly subscription. So it's very user friendly and for each application it suggests popular integrations which is really useful for into inspiration especially when you're getting started so you just basically say which apps you're using and it'll give you ideas of things that you can automate. The real power of Zapier lies in its ability to manipulate data with built in apps. So for example, things that you can do on spreadsheets but within the app so formatting text numbers performing calculations using filters and run conditions and those are just a few. And that is all without any additional cost and without the need for using any code you can do it all yourself within the platform. So I just want to give you a few examples. Case studies really real life case studies that are going to highlight the benefits of business process automation. So IQ glass are the UK's leading architectural and structural specialist glazing company. They use employed and self employed glass fitters who are overseen by a team of project managers and supported by warehouse staff. Business and management teams are based at an office alongside others who perform admin and finance support functions and duplication of data entry for them was really time consuming cause inevitable human error gaps in their process and a lack of visibility across departments. And when they're creating their processes with Zapier, they save on average 45 hours per week that that is huge that's actually the equivalent of a full time member of staff who could be doing better things with their time and delivering a host of other benefits such as providing up to date apps that is visible to everyone calculating overtime correctly having better reporting visibility managing leads more efficiently and giving staff more time to focus on doing their jobs more productively. So this is a great example of how spending a little time on process improvement system integration and automation can deliver massive exam results. Ascent dental group is another example, they're based in the Midlands with 36 reception patient care staff plus 35 dentists across four different practice locations. And they wanted to implement automations to increase productivity reduce manual administration tasks and improve communication with patients. It was really vital that they maintained the personal touch that their reception staff were giving to patients, alongside increasing their productivity. So now they automate their lead capture and nurturing with SMS emails and core reminders as well as appointment reminders on boarding, missed appointment reminders and reporting processes. And as a result, they have more productive staff who can spend more time with patient care rather than admin, more accurate data recording and leads that don't fall through the cracks, which is obviously really important. They can increase their revenue since we've done that work with them and they can focus on growth rather than having mundane repetitive tasks weighing them down. And now I've given you a couple of examples of larger companies with high volume transactions or thousands of automation tasks running but if you're a smaller business, the benefits of automation are often more impactful to the people that's wearing all those multiple hats like I was doing and I'm sure many of us here do. Now one way to explain this is to demonstrate the increase in turnover you could achieve if you had one extra hour available time a day because of the automations that you've put in place. I had a question earlier on about what what would you do with the extra time that you that you had if you if you had it. So for example, if you're a service provider that charges 50 pounds an hour, and you say one hour a day with automation that equates to 250 pounds of additional billable time per five day week. So 1000 pounds in a month 12 grand in a year. If you didn't take any holidays, of course, and who wouldn't want to have 12 grand and obviously you know this is speculative but it's just to demonstrate to you how much you could actually convert in times of your time and billing and conversely that extra hour in the day could give you shorter working days and weeks and more downtime to be on the beach. So extra hours also give you the opportunity to scale cost effectively without having to budget for more manpower and staff salaries in order to grow. So, wrapping up very quickly now, I know that we're very short on time so if you want to find out more about Zapier and how it can help you as a business owner, you just have to head over to my website I've got a resources tab. I've got free resources like ebooks, cheat sheets, checklists, and if you are using Zapier already, you can take advantage of my free ebook and there's a bunch of great content on my blog as well. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube where I've got loads of demos and prebuilt templates that you can use. Alternatively, if again if you're using Zapier already, you can dive in and get my book, Automated with Zapier, it's available on Amazon and through the publisher PACT and we're offering a discount 25% until the 17th of November, you can just head over to PACT.pub.com, which is the publisher and use the code 25Zapier at the checkout. And one more thing, I've also got some big news in 2020, I'm launching the Solver Automation Academy, which will be jam packed with courses to help you and your employees simplify, streamline and automate your business processes using tried and tested techniques that my team and I use with our clients. And I've got a wait list if you're interested in that, which is just there, Solver.co.uk forward slash wait list. And of course if you need help with your processes, don't hesitate to get in touch I offer a 30 minute free discovery call for you for both of us to assess if we can work together. So, thank you very much. And without further ado, happy automating. Thank you so much, Kelly. That was absolutely marvelous. Thank you. Thank you. And to Craig as well. We've got a few questions that have come up in the chat. I'm assuming that both you, Craig and Kelly can see the chat. So are you happy just to have a quick flick through? We've got probably about five minutes before we finish. If you wouldn't mind just having a quick flick through and answering as much as you can, that would be brilliant. I think we started off with a question around GDPR issues. Are there any GDPR issues that need to be considered around using any of these platforms? I'm guessing that's to do with the automation side to Kelly. So with regards to Zapier, it integrates with so many thousands of different tools. I would always recommend that you have a GDPR or data protection, data processing plan in place with any software that you put in place. Not just Zapier anything to assess whether or not they're GDPR compliant but Zapier is GDPR compliant. OK, that's great. And I like this one because I think this is quite relevant to probably all of us. What's the most common mistake you can see small business owners making with regards to business processing, apart from not having any? That's from Jody. Maybe Craig should go first. That's a massive question. I suppose the thing that I see most of all is, I hate to say it, it's the word Excel or spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are amazing tools because they allow you to very, very quickly structure information and almost start to automate some things very, very quickly. But they also very, very quickly get out of hand or out of control. And Kelly talked about those problems of one of her clients getting into a situation where they were doing lots of data duplication. And then that has the inevitable mistakes that get made. And so often I've worked with businesses and it's not just small businesses, businesses of all type of all time sizes. Where what started off with the best intentions of let's quickly put to spreadsheet together has now become like a core part of the business. And it forgets the point where it's kind of creaking at the seams. In fact, not so long ago I worked with a business in West Sussex. So I'm not going to talk too much about what area they're in. But when I present that they came with a specific problem they had in the business and when I presented back to the team what the problem was, I called it the exploding spreadsheet. And it was a situation where they had gone out and had a spreadsheet to capture some information from the staff, and they sent it out and each member of staff have gone, Oh, that spreadsheet's all right but actually it's missing a couple of columns so I'm going to make a copy of that with my extra columns on. And this kept happening until they had like 60 spreadsheets and they couldn't work out why they couldn't control all of the data. And so maybe it's not so much a process problem but it's when you look at processes where you see this sort of thing all the time. I just that kind of reminds me of some things I've seen going around and around different companies as well those Excel spreadsheets that get bigger and bigger and bigger. I think we've all seen those. And so brilliant. Thank you. And I think the last one. Richard has asked would process mapping support obtaining an ISO 9001 accreditation. Yes, definitely. So ISO 9001 is a quality standard. And it's, in fact, I think since 2015. It's very much a process based approach. So it's really important that an organization is able to understand their processes, clearly have them documented. Staff can clearly follow and understand the processes and then when you when you're audited to be able to show what those processes are. Now I know a lot of organizations document procedures and call them processes and they're actually end up just being sort of text based lists like that. Because that can work. And organizations a certain size but as soon as your organization gets any sort of complexity you really need some sort of visual process. And those processes need to be easily accessible by everyone in the organization because at some point an auditor is going to come in and say who's who does that job in your company. And then I want to go and talk to them and make sure that what they say they do matches what's in your processes. Brilliant. Okay, thank you. I think we're probably out of time, but we will be sharing these slides after the session and Kelly and Craig have both got their details a contact details. So I'm sure they'll be more than happy to follow anything up with anybody who's got any questions queries or, you know, anything more to add. All that it really remains me to do is to say thank you so much for joining us and please do book on to join us next Tuesday. When we're going to learn a bit more about digital accounting I for one and definitely looking forward to that. So please do join us for that. And we look forward to seeing you all next week and thanks again to Kelly and Craig. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Okay, bye bye now. Thank you.