Why automation is worth the investment

Perhaps you stumbled upon automation because you were trying to solve a specific problem—like getting leads from your social ads subscribed to your email newsletter. But now, you’re not sure what else you can do with it—or how anyone else in your company can benefit. 

You might think, “I’m not spending that much time on admin work.” Or perhaps “Is the time saved really worth the money I’d spend? My business has a tight budget.”  

If you’re running a business or trying to get one off the ground, it’s easy to get mired in the details. But with an automation mindset, you can focus on the bigger picture and solve some of the larger problems at work. 

Our Zapier customers will tell you the same thing. Investing in automation not only saved them countless hours on routine tasks, but they also had better insights into their businesses—which allowed them to scale.

Automation saves you time

The first reason automation is worth the investment is obvious: it saves you time. And in the world of business, time saved is money saved because it doesn’t require human effort to make something happen. 

“When we were first thinking about launching the Let’s Talk Business Podcast, I knew that we couldn’t undertake the project without automating the most time-consuming tasks,” said host Meny Hoffman. 

Meny and his team use Zapier to onboard podcast guests and prepare for each episode, saving them two hours per episode. When you translate that into hourly salaries, that’s quite a bit of cost savings. 

Saving time isn’t just about money. It helps you get more done—and when your work is helping others, it feels great to get more time to focus on the most important work. The Georgia Innocence Project helps people who’ve been wrongfully convicted of crimes. It requires a lot of communication and paperwork to navigate the appeals process after a criminal conviction.

“As a nonprofit, we always have to try and do more with less, which means that we’re constantly running up against constraints of time and resources,” said Operations Director Matt Holbrook.

Zapier helps the Georgia Innocence Project do the work of two to three full-time employees, with better accuracy. This gives the team the space to litigate cases, raise funds, and keep clients updated.  

Automation can help you scale

The process that worked when you had five customers will not work when you have 100, 1,000, or 10,000 customers. Perhaps you’ve had trouble growing your business because you’re unable to handle more volume due to convoluted or manual processes. That’s money you’re leaving on the table.

When you invest in automation, it gives you the freedom to scale because it’s working for you. When Halo Cars, a rideshare advertising startup, launched, it took several hours to onboard each new driver. The process was incredibly high-touch and time-consuming—and the team could only bring on about 10 new drivers per day. After automating the process with Zapier, Halo Cars could onboard hundreds of drivers daily.

The scrappy startup found other ways to automate their business. Less than a year after Halo Cars was founded, it was acquired by Lyft. 

“At the time of being acquired, we had about 10 full-time employees,” Halo Cars founder Kenan Saleh said.  “Lyft was surprised with how small we were and what we were doing. They were shocked that we didn’t have a big engineering team.”

And while automation can help you scale processes, it can also ensure that you’re hiring for the jobs only humans can uniquely do. 

When David Laderberg joined Smart Charge America in 2016, they only provided services in Texas. After discovering Zapier and using it to automate their sales, it’s saved the company over $120k in just one year. 

“Zapier enables me to cut significant costs, which I can then use to hire skilled workers to grow my business,” David said. “It’s given us the power to scale quickly.”

Today, Smart Charge America has over 50 employees and caters to 18 major cities—including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Automation gives you better insights

There’s a lot of moving parts in any workplace. Maybe one team needs information from another team, or someone has to analyze how certain efforts are performing. When you don’t have all the information you need, it can be difficult to know whether you’re making the right decisions. 

With automation, you have better insights because you’re no longer hampered by data being in the wrong place. You can use automation to move all your information into one place, ensuring you can access all the data you need to make an informed decision.

Fluent matches brands to the right customers with targeted advertising, but they were having trouble getting online and offline data into one place. 

“We desperately wanted to get more data into Google [Ads], but we weren’t able to find a way to do so that fit our existing workflows,” said Sean Cullen, executive vice president at Fluent. 

Automation has allowed Fluent to leverage deeper performance data in Google Ads, which has made a direct impact on their marketing efforts.

Better insights can also make a difference when you’re trying to maintain compliance processes.

Poka, a manufacturing tech company, needed a system to support its information security and compliance processes. In order to remain SOC2 compliant, they needed to reduce human error and maintain accurate records. 

“Zapier was able to help us achieve that vision while keeping things simple,” Mathieu Marcotte, an information security, risks, and compliance analyst at Poka, said. “Zapier was the glue between all our internal tools.”

Zapier helps the team ensure that everyone has completed their security awareness training, assists with security reviews, and grants the proper permissions to SaaS apps. 

Experience the return on investment for automation

These businesses (and many more) have seen their investment in automation pay off. Whether you’re a business owner or knowledge worker, Zapier can save you hours on routine tasks, wrangle your information in one place, and allow your processes to scale.