Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a week.
Ready for the 65th edition of Podup? Enjoy the best bits from My First Million.
Efficiency is king. But how often do we question repetitive, low-value tasks in our daily routines? According to Steph Smith, this is where a Chief Automation Officer can make a significant impact.
Chief Automation Officer
A lot of companies have a CTO. Typically, your CTO is wrapped up in tackling infrastructure and cyber security issues.
They aren't focused on taking the technology that exists today and enabling everyone within your company to use it and become 3x more productive.
Most people aren't plugged into the technology, don't have the excitement to actually implement it within their job, or don't know what they don't know.
For every 10 employees you should have someone who knows how to automate. These automation experts shadow team members, learn their daily operations, and automate what they can.
Steph Smith
Hampton case study
At Hampton, the first hire we made was an automation expert. His name's Grant. All he does is automate stuff. He's a Zapier and Airtable expert.
We always aspired to be big but we didn’t want to hire loads of people. Right away we wanted to start automating stuff. It's fucking awesome.
Suppose you have a team of ten and have been running for three years. The accumulated habits make it difficult to pinpoint where to start when an automation expert steps in.
Doing this with 10,000 people is an impossible task. That's why we wanted to get an automation expert right away.
Sam Parr
Chief Dysfunction Officer
I’ve experienced how resentment and dysfunction accumulate in companies, leading to calls for executive coaches or team off-sites to resolve them.
I think you should embed a person like Wendy Rhodes from Billions into your team. They're like a psychologist but instead of one-on one, they sit in meetings, take notes, and identify dysfunction within teams.
Every week, they’d deliver insights like 'Sam, are you aware of how your words or actions affect your team?'
I think the ROI would be there if you had this. I'm surprised this doesn't exist.
Shaan Puri
Why it matters
We all have good habits and bad habits. One prevalent bad habit is tolerating tedious, low-value tasks. Instead, we should question how to automate them, or go a step further and challenge if they should be done at all. This is the value of a Chief Automation Officer.
They benefit from the 'outside looking in' perspective. They can challenge why things are being done the way they are and automate manual, repetitive tasks using off the shelf tools like Zapier or new AI software. This way, the rest of your team can focus on higher-value activities.
Next steps
Before hiring an automation expert, consider trialing an internal automation initiative. Here's a step-by-step guide:
Identify an automation champion. Find someone in your company known for proactively automating their own tasks.
Select a pilot group. Choose a small group of early-adopters who are open to new ways of working.
Shadow and challenge. The automation champion should shadow the pilot group and identify tasks for automation or elimination.
Measure time savings. Evaluate the initiative's effectiveness by comparing the pilot group's productivity before and after the changes.
Refine, expand, and repeat. If the pilot is successful, refine the process, expand the program, and continue the cycle.
Hire an automation expert. Now that you recognize the value of automation, consider hiring an expert to scale the initiative.
Your thoughts?
Thanks to Apollo.io for making this post possible…
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Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.
🆕 Future C-suite roles
I always have the idea of creating a business for those people who have great ideas that companies should pay to access and if said idea goes live they pay an additional amount.
Yes plenty are bringing in consultants or discussing at board level, a PE based business I was helping asked me to create something for the board on AI and leveraging AI. Became a project for CTO to own
Steph always brings so many good ideas. I’m sure you have a list like this Adam.
Fwiw Big companies will consume the proposed automation officer role and it will trickle down to smaller companies. Startups will likely look to growth to own this