Saving 10 Hours a Week Is Not Saving Money

Somebody quotes you £8,000 to automate a process. How do you know whether that is a good deal or a terrible one? Most people answer that question with a feeling. This video gives you the arithmetic instead. It is the same set of calculations we run with clients before we agree to build anything, and it is the reason we sometimes tell people not to. The goal was never to automate everything. It is to find the processes where the benefit is real, the complexity is low, the risk is manageable and the effort to implement is small. That is how to think about it. Go at the numbers, and use the numbers. Your action this week. Pick the process that annoys you most. Work out the hours it consumes in a year and multiply by what that person really costs per hour. That single figure tells you what you are allowed to spend fixing it. What is the process in your business you would automate first? Tell me in the comments. CHAPTERS 0:00 The three numbers to calculate before any automation 0:23 "This will save us 10 hours a week" is not the end of the sentence 0:46 Capacity, cost reduction, more sales, or nothing at all 1:10 What to work out before you commit 1:32 Start with the process, not the software 1:56 What a manual lead workflow actually looks like 2:18 Hours per year times fully loaded hourly cost 2:43 Five hours a week is £9,880 a year 3:06 Time saved does not equal money saved 3:29 What the recovered capacity has to be spent on 3:51 The subscription is not the real cost 4:13 Setup, migration, testing, training, maintenance 4:37 Why £50 a month is not £50 a month 5:01 The real first year figure is £2,980 5:26 How much will you realistically recover? 5:50 Use the conservative number, not the potential one 6:40 Where the saved time actually goes 7:30 Does this make financial sense? 7:52 The ROI formula, and roughly 135% 8:18 Payback period, and ranking one automation against another 8:28 Sometimes the biggest value is revenue 9:04 Errors, missed opportunities, capacity, consistency 9:27 A £1,500 problem and an £8,000 quote 9:51 The questions to ask before anyone builds anything 10:16 The three numbers, recapped 10:52 The goal is not to automate everything 11:24 Running the calculation for yourself 12:11 Who I am and what we do --- I am Uwa Ujam, founder of Autore. We help businesses adopt AI inside their actual business processes, and we build the automation that goes with it, across property, charity, food and beverage, manufacturing and professional services. The calculation in this video is the one we run before we quote. If the numbers do not work, we say so, because an automation that takes two years to pay for itself is not a project worth either of us starting. Book a call and we will run it properly against your own figures. Website: https://autore.ai Email: hello@autore.ai AI Opportunity Scorecard: https://autore.ai/scorecard Slides from this video: https://gamma.app/docs/7obcgvayhtfo2au #AutomationROI #aiforbusiness #businessautomation #ROICalculation #smallbusinessgrowth