Okay here's a thought experiment I ran on myself recently.
If I lost everything tomorrow and had to rebuild from scratch, what would I automate first?
Not what's most impressive, not what looks good in a demo. What actually buys back the most time and creates the most leverage in the early days of a business.
The answer surprised me a little because it's boring. Really boring. But boring is where the real money is and I'll explain what I mean.
There's a version of the 80/20 rule that nobody talks about in the automation space.
Most people spend 80% of their time automating things that save them five minutes. Meanwhile a handful of workflows are eating ten hours every week and nobody's touched them because they seem too complex or too important to hand off.
That's the trap and I've watched so many people fall into it over and over.
So if I'm starting over, I'm going straight for the 20% of automations that produce 80% of the leverage. Here's exactly what that list looks like.
The first thing I'm building is lead follow-up. Every single lead gets a response in under 60 seconds regardless of what time it is or what I'm doing.
This one alone is worth so much more than people realise because the business that responds first wins more than it deserves to, and most businesses are still responding three hours later when they get around to checking their inbox.
Second is meeting prep. Before every call I want a brief already waiting for me:
Who I'm talking to
What they care about
What we've discussed before
What I should be asking.
Right now most people spend fifteen minutes pulling this together manually before every single meeting. That's fifteen minutes multiplied by every call you take, every week, forever. One workflow eliminates it permanently.
Third is content repurposing. One idea, one video, one long-form piece becomes LinkedIn posts, email drafts, reel scripts, and newsletter sections without starting from scratch every time.
Content is one of the highest leverage things any business owner can do and it's also one of the biggest time drains when you're recreating the wheel every day.
Fourth, and this is the unsexy one that makes everything else work is internal knowledge. Every SOP, pricing doc, client context, brand guideline, and decision log living in one place that both humans and AI can actually read and use.
Most people skip this and then wonder why their automations keep breaking or producing garbage. The knowledge layer is the foundation. If you get it wrong, nothing on top of it works properly.
Fifth is weekly reporting. Every Monday morning I want to wake up to a clear picture of:
The business KPIs
Wins
Problems
And what needs a decision this week
All sitting in my inbox before I've had coffee.
Most operators go into Monday completely blind and spend the first hour just figuring out where they left off. That hour multiplied across fifty weeks is a lot of lost time.
The First Five Automations I'd Build
Here's the thing I want to flag before you go build all five of these.
Notice what's not on the list:
Sales calls
Strategy
Creative decisions
The relationships that actually move the business forward. Those aren't on the list because those are the job and I'd never automate them.
Everything on that list is the work around the job: The admin, the prep, the repetition, the reporting.
That's what automation is actually for, not replacing the things that require you, but clearing everything else out of the way so you can actually do them.
Automate everything except judgment. That's the main takeaway.
If you want to build any of these inside your business without spending months figuring it out alone, click here to book a one one session with me.
And if you're not quite there yet, I also put together a free automation course that shows you how to build your first AI workflows from scratch. It's the best place to start.
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