Just when you thought you had it all figured out, the whole ruleset changed on you. It feels like you can’t get ahead because you are always trying to catch up to what just happened. What if you could proactively make the changes you need today that will make you ready for tomorrow?
Entrepreneurs like you have struggled with this concept for years. Instead of implementing our vision, we often get caught playing catch-up to somebody else’s demands. Does this sound like something you have experienced before?
This is what I call the Pendulum Principle. I’ll use an example from my brewery that I operate to demonstrate.
We have a number of supplies that we need to order every single week in order to serve our customers. Latex gloves, napkins, and hand soap are important in a restaurant setting! In 2019, when we opened, the prices of these items remained relatively flat from week to week. This allowed me to basically know which items I should order from which vendors when I needed them without putting much though into it. Then, we found ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic.
Do you remember how everybody went to the grocery stores and bought out all of the toilet paper? Well, we use toilet paper at the brewery. With the influx of healthcare traffic, latex gloves became difficult to find. All of my supplies were changing rapidly in both supply and price.
This made getting my supplies more challenging than ever. Not only did I need to be more careful about price, in a lot of cases I had to find new vendors who even stocked the items. I never had to deal with that before. The pendulum had swung from easy supply chain to difficult supply chain. The worst part about it is that every time the pendulum swings, it seems to swing farther than it ever had before. I can’t remember a time where supply chain was more difficult for a small business.
So what can we do?
All of this changing landscape made my weekly ordering way more difficult. Instead of trying to find ways to stay afloat during a time that I wasn’t allowed to have customers in my building, I had to scour the internet to try and find the sweet spot of availability and low price for my beer cans. My ordering process jumped from a 30 minute practice into a two-hour ordeal.
That’s when I decided to lean on a skillset I had built long ago. I tapped into Excel’s power to automate the vendor selection part of my process.
The setup was arduous. I had to choose a handful of vendors, find which of my items needed were available at each vendor, and grab a product number. Then, I wrote a nifty macro that pulls up each vendor’s website to check today’s price and availability for each item I need for the order that week. This gave the system a way of identifying the cheapest way to order all of my items based on real-time pricing. In 2020 alone, I estimate that it saved me over $2,000.
The beauty is that the AI platforms available today can do a lot of the manual coding work that I put into this project. That means even you can build automated systems into your repeatable processes without even knowing how to code! Just try it out. Ask Chat GPT to write you an excel macro that can turn your raw data into a useful chart, and you will see just how powerful these tools can be!
The point is that automation helps you futureproof your process against the pendulum swing. My prices have stabilized once again, but it is only a matter of time before they become unhinged once more. Automating your processes can minimize the additional work when the pendulum inevitably swings back the other way!
Need help identifying opportunities to automate against the pendulum principle? Let us help you. We can perform a free 30 minute Automation Audit to begin to identify areas that your business could work on. Schedule yours today!