Save time with automation: my systems for contracts, content and more using Make.com

So around this time last year I remember I was walking through my house and I noticed in our bathroom that our tub is dripping and it's dripping pretty bad. I'm a little ashamed to admit that just a couple days ago I noticed our tub is still dripping. It's because I have neglected to do anything about it and obviously it's not urgent, but I couldn't help but think about how many gallons of water I've let waste since this problem has occurred.

It made me think about how every week I talk to business owners about the systems and processes within their businesses and there are things leaking, tasks that occur every single day, every single week that don't get done well, and they're repetitive and can easily be automated to prevent those errors. Then there's actually tasks that end up taking maybe an hour or two at a time and could easily be automated to allow that person who was hired not to do that task but to solve problems and work on much higher leverage tasks.

In today's video we're going to talk about what are those tasks or projects within your own business that if we were to take a look at and streamline and automate them could earn you back hours if not weeks every year, and what are some of the even larger tasks that are worth considering streamlining so that you can invest time into higher leverage tasks. I'm going to be talking about the tool that I use that I think everyone should learn because it makes it really simple to automate these tasks and connect the tools that you use every single day to help those tools work together and work for you. So let's go ahead and jump into this.

Alright so I'm going to go over a few different scenarios where I have built some automations that improve some workflows and save some of that redundant time for my own business and then I'll share the tool that I used to actually perform some of these automations. The first one is in my customer CRM—this is the tool or the app that I've built to essentially maintain my pipeline of opportunities. I've created a test one for a company, have some info in here, and one of the things that I do that tends to just frankly take a lot of time is building and sending contracts. It's a necessary part of business, it's not the funnest part of the business, but once I have a proposal built and we've reached an agreement then I actually have to formalize that agreement and then send it to the client. I just realized I spent so much time and I don't love the legal side of this work, so I built an automation that took a lot of the time spent doing that activity and automated it.

For example, here if we say that we're in the negotiation stage with this client and I go over here to contract I can select that client and I can put some information in here. We can say, let's say, the project title—I usually copy and paste some info from my proposal here—determine a deposit, include the terms, have an address here, do a "for" here, set an arbitrary start date, expiration date, the duration of the projects, revisions if that's necessary. Now that all this information is here, typically I would have to go to some other tool and type all these things in and kind of start from scratch, or some people might use a Google Doc or Microsoft Word or something. I built an automation that allows me to draft this contract behind the scenes. There's some work happening in this tool that I'll talk about in the video and within just a few seconds you'll actually see that now I have this big button that says "Open Contract." If I go in here, this is a test version of my agreement, it takes a copy of some of the legal terms and I've sized them so it's pretty straightforward for every contract. Here's all the information that I put into Airtable and I can review it and if everything looks good I can go ahead and click "Send" and it's going to send this contract to the recipient. This is something that would take me a lot of time and this process alone probably every single proposal saves me around 15 or 20 minutes just going into another tool, context switching, inputting all these details, having to bounce back and forth between multiple tools to get all the information right and then ultimately sending it to the client via email. This is something that just saves a significant amount of time.

This is an example of an area where my business could be leaking, and you can imagine that those drips from contract to contract, week to week over the course of multiple whole years, add up. I built this automation maybe three years ago and so that time saving can add up and allow you to work on higher leverage tasks. Let's go to another example. I've used this—I think I've talked a little bit about this in previous videos—but potentially you have a podcast, you might have a YouTube channel, you might have a newsletter for your business. This is the workflow I've built to manage for me a podcast. It has a row for every episode and you can click in and see all the information about each guest. Quite honestly, I should do a whole video or video series probably just on creating workflows around managing a podcast or YouTube channel because this literally has everything associated with it from title to guests to the actual episodes, show notes, summary. There's a lot of things that just by systematizing the process make something like this a lot more feasible.

One of the things related to podcasting was just distributing it. Once you've done all the work to record an episode, to edit the episode, to write all the show notes and create these social media posts and cover artwork for your podcast, now you actually have to just get it out there and publish it. I realized every single episode I would need to probably mark it complete in Airtable, publish it to my podcast host, send it to my website, write an email that would go to the guest I interviewed saying it was live and send them some of these things. Honestly, that would take over an hour every single episode just to get it out there. So what I did for this process is I collected where this process was dripping and then helped automate the process.

For example, here I have a status field and you can actually go into the interface where I typically manage this. It looks less like a database and more like an app and this is the most recent episode. Every episode has a status—from unassigned, assigned, interview scheduled, ready to edit, show notes and design assets are created, it's reviewed, might be returned to the editor for some updates, has a little review process, and ultimately would be published and then complete. I created it so that when I click "Publish" it would kick off a series of actions that would publish the episode, post it to the website, email the contributor, and bring those details—like, for example, the website link and the podcast link—back into my Airtable database so that I can then use this. For example, if we go to the Webflow URL, there's the URL right here that was pulled in from my automation. If we go into Transistor, my podcast host, we can see everything from the analytics to the episode to the actual URL to go find it. As I said, 30 episodes, one hour saved per episode, easily saved me 30 hours because I was collecting where the process was dripping. Of course, those weren't urgent problems but they were important problems that saving up front can save you a lot of time. And it's because of this that I built a way to track and measure the time saved.

Once you see evidence of automation accumulating and you're taking those drips and understanding the gallons of water that could have been wasted, it really helps motivate you to continue finding those things that are dripping in your business and those processes, and then helping to collect the drips. Here, for example, is a simple tool that I built. I'll include the link to this in the description if you want to use this and actually input some of your own processes into it. But here is an example of a few tasks that could be automated. One, automate your YouTube publishing. For this channel I'm going to post this and just like my podcast it's going to take time to go over to YouTube and upload and do the necessary tasks of a YouTube channel. If we were to automate this we could save some time. Two, transcription. Maybe you have a podcast or YouTube channel yourself, you take audio voice notes or record a meeting and you could transcribe that, which saves you some time in the workflow. Or here's another one that I did with a client: a CRM or a business development workflow that saved them time on something similar to the first example. In this we essentially calculate how much time is saved over time. We estimated that this first task takes about 30 minutes but the automation is going to save us 30 minutes. How often do we do that task? We do it once a week, so it's 30 minutes every single week. The hypothetical start date for this automation was November 1st, 2023. This is from when I actually created this template and through a series of math that is kind of hidden here, we can see the difference in increments. It's 72 weeks between November 1st and today, March 25th, which turns into minutes, and ultimately we're saving 36 hours. So over the course of not even two years you're saving 36 hours by saving one 30-minute chunk of time every single week. Think about what you would do with an extra 36 hours—that's a significant amount of working time. If we were to save 30 minutes a day, you can calculate how many days occur between the time period; 510 days multiplied by our 30 minutes turns into hours saving 255 hours. What would you do with 255 extra hours in your life? You could reinvest that into your business or you could go ahead and enjoy your life. And if you get just 15 minutes saved only in your weekdays, that could add up to 91 hours. This is an example of not only a few things that you can automate but also shows that if you can identify tasks that take 30 minutes every single day or even every week, once that starts turning, you can identify things that are feasible to be automated. And in the age we're living in with AI you can also identify things that you probably didn't think you could automate might be possible now with innovation in technology.

Let's find an example of something that you might do on a recurring basis that would save you time. For this we're going to demonstrate make.com. Make.com is the tool that I use for, I don't know, 90% of the things that I automate and it allows us to connect thousands of different tools together to do work for us. For this example, I'm thinking we should create a Google Form and when new submissions to the Google Form are made then we'll send an email, which could save you the time of constantly checking if form entries are made and might just allow you to act on them quicker. So let's go ahead and create a simple form. I love doing forms. You create a form, very simple, and we're going to say this is our demo form and we're just going to do a simple question. Let's say, "What is your name?" as a short answer, and then another question like, "What are you doing?"—say, "watching this video." Simple form, we click publish, publish the form, copy the responder link, and then fill it out. For example, "What's your name? Test prow" and "I'm recording the video." Now we can go into make.com and add the Google Forms module. We're going to watch for responses. I connect it—it's already connected to my Google account—and click add, log in with my credentials, search for the document, and this demo should give us our form ID. We only want one response at a time. This isn't the best way to do this so keep an eye out for other videos on the channel where I'll show you how to improve this workflow. Very simply, every 15 minutes you can set this to every hour or every day; we'll check for new form responses. I don't think this is necessarily my form ID so we'll look for the demo form, click it, and wait. Lots for new form responses—nothing came through. Let's go ahead and do another response: I'll do "Test pcow" again, "watching the video." Run this module again. Since we created this form, here is our form. The next thing we want to do is email it to us. We're going to go to Gmail and send an email. This is my development Gmail account and similarly you can add a new one. It looks like I need to sign in with Google myself; a screen should pop up and there are a million email addresses I have access to. I'll click allow and now this is allowing make.com to use our Gmail. We're going to send an email to ourselves with the subject "New Form." The content we're going to choose from the answers here; so let's say we had "What is your name?" we'll just say "Name: [text answer]." We're going to dig into this, there's the value which shows my name, and then we'll say "What are they doing?" It's a ridiculous example, but there's the answer. We're going to run this module and nothing comes through. We'll test it out by filling out, say, "Test prow, test answers, watching, recording the video." Now this is going to send an email to me and I'll check my email—I should receive an email from our automation. There it is. So let's go ahead and save this, turn it on, and we can run it again to simulate this happening. I'll run one once and then fill out the form. There's our name, "Test prit scow," watching the video—click submit. This is happening in the background and grabs the form response to send to our email. I can go ahead and take a peek at my inbox and, very simply, I have this email. We can customize it, make this workflow a bit more useful, but this is a very simple example of connecting two tools—Google Forms and Gmail—and bridging the gap between what would have been a manual process. The nice thing about make.com is that we can edit this; we could add a router and then say if the form response says yes we'll send one email and if the form says no we'll send a different email, creating more opportunities. We could do something after we send this email—maybe add something into a Google Sheet, or upload files to a Google Drive. My goal is to get you into the tool so you can see what is possible and then yield those time savings so that you can reinvest that time in higher leverage activities or simply take a break.

I hope you found this video helpful and that you were able to identify some of these tasks that you could automate or systematize so that there's time saved that you can invest in higher leverage tasks and even cost savings that you can reinvest into things in your business that matter. I'm curious what you found—what kind of things are you looking to automate if you're able to use make.com to automate tasks. What are the first ones on your list? I'd really be curious to know. You could leave those in the comments and then potentially I could create some content on this channel that would be of value to you. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, I'd love it if you would like or share it, subscribe to the channel if you're not already, and I'll look forward to talking to you in the next video. See you next week.