No code required
AI Automation for Small Business
Take ten hours of admin off your week without hiring anyone — and keep a human checkpoint where it matters.
The honest promise
You will not automate your business in a weekend, and anyone who says otherwise is selling a subscription. What you can do in four weeks is remove the repetitive third of your admin: the replies, the listings, the invoices, the follow-ups. The part that needs your taste stays with you, on purpose.
Curriculum
Week 1 — Map before you automate
- Finding the work worth automating: frequency, tedium, cost of a mistake
- The four questions that kill a bad automation early
- Writing a procedure the model can follow — and a person can audit
- Your first win: one task, one afternoon
Week 2 — Inbox, invoices and paperwork
- Sorting and drafting replies without sounding like a robot
- Quotes, invoices and reminders: what to generate, what to check
- Extracting data from PDFs and forms into a sheet
- Where a single wrong number becomes expensive
Week 3 — Customers and content
- Support replies that keep your tone, with an escalation rule
- Product listings and descriptions at volume, without duplicate mush
- Follow-ups and reviews: timing, wording, and the unsubscribe line
- Brand voice: a one-page card the whole team can use
Week 4 — Checkpoints, measurement, and what never to automate
- Human checkpoints: which decisions need a signature, not a summary
- What to measure so you notice when quality drops
- Cost, privacy and the data you should not paste anywhere
- Your automation stack: three things running, documented, owned
What you build
Three working automations, chosen from your own week. Typically: an inbox triage and draft-reply flow, a listing or content pipeline, and one paperwork extractor. Plus a one-page rulebook for your team: what runs automatically, what waits for a human, what is off limits.
How the four weeks run
Self-paced, about four hours a week. Recipes are written for tools you probably already pay for; each one lists a no-code path and a cheaper manual path. No live sessions to miss.
What you need
Your normal work tools — email, a spreadsheet, whatever you invoice with — and a paid assistant account. No code. If you enjoy Zapier, you will move faster; if you do not, the manual path still works.
Who it is not for
If you are looking for a growth hack that triples revenue, this is operations, not marketing. If your business has fewer than ten repetitive tasks a week, the course will feel like overkill — take the free lesson instead.