30 Ways that Any Business can Automate to Prepare for a Recession

If you've been paying attention to the main-stream media at all during the past few months, it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that many people are calling for another economic recession - possibly, even, a depression comparable to what was experienced during the 1920s.

It can be seen with the rise in oil prices and commodities, leading to more money coming out of consumer's pockets, and stock market charts such as the Dow Jones technically due for a major correction, perhaps down to levels not seen since the 90s.

This can all lead to very anxious feelings - anxiety about your job, the jobs of others, the future of your business. What would a recession or a depression mean for your sales? How much would you operating expenses increase? Would you be able to sustain a major downturn in the global economy?

Economic swings happen. Since the late 90s, there have been at least 20 swings or more in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 20% or more downturns followed by 50-100% rises.

So, the economy shifting is nothing new, although it can still be unwelcome as a business owner, manager and decision maker.

While macroeconomic factors do and will impact your business to some extent, there are things that you can and should be doing to strengthen your business. Things that would help your business and operations to be less of a victim to external factors.

And these are things that any business, of any size can and should consider doing. I'm speaking primarily from a business automation standpoint and leveraging technology, web and software to help you establish automated processes to handle time- and cost-intensive operations.

The best way to think about this for your business is by asking yourself what tasks or responsibilities are repetitive? What do I or others do every day, or perhaps even once a month at the beginning of every month, but it's always the same thing or close to it.

The goal is to set up processes and automate any and every part of your business that you can, in order to free yourself and others to be able to focus on the most important things - such as growing your business and managing it well.

Below is a list of ideas that I've compiled and sorted by category to help get your ideas flowing. Many of these are based on automations and processes that we've helped businesses establish - with the focus being to make their business more efficient.

By leveraging one or multiple of the automations below, your company will be in a stronger position to not only last but succeed in any economy.

Human resources

• Employees managing their timesheets
• Messaging back and forth with employees, or groups of employees
• Company-wide or location-specific announcements
• Generating and distributing paystubs
• Onboarding new employees
• Creating and distributing schedules
• Sharing important documents

Marketing

• Managing and optimizing paid search campaigns
• Email marketing, drip campaigns, form responses
• Social media scheduling and posting, messaging
• Upselling current customers
• Cross-selling
• Database management
• Analytics reporting

Finance

• Scheduled reporting
• Accounts payable (invoicing, subscriptions)
• Creation and distribution of customer receipts

Sales

• Lead generation
• Sales funnels
• Customer contact messaging
• Proposal development
• Scheduling of calls and meetings
• Customer relationship tracking (CRM)

Customer service

• Chatbots
• Support pages
• Filtering support requests to correct person or department

General production

• Project management
• Website publishing, image resizing
• Email inbox management
• Team meetings