It’s 8.40 on a Tuesday night in Rockingham and Todd Abbott is at the kitchen bench with a laptop, a cold cup of tea and a pile of job sheets. Todd runs Southside Plumbing Services: four vans, two apprentices, and Bianca in the office three days a week. (Todd and his business are made up. You’ll know someone exactly like him.)
He isn’t doing anything hard. He’s typing yesterday’s job sheets into invoices, texting tomorrow’s customers to say what time the boys will turn up, and trying to remember which of last week’s quotes he was going to chase. Same as last Tuesday. Same as next Tuesday.
That pile is what business automation is for.
So what is business automation, really?
Strip the buzzwords off and business automation is simple: the small, repeated jobs in your business doing themselves, the way you’d have done them.
Not robots. Not a new app your crew has to learn. The follow-up still says what you’d say. The reminder still goes out when you’d send it. You just stop being the one who has to remember.
For a trade business in Perth, that usually means four kinds of job:
- Talking to customers at the right moment. The booking confirmation, the “we’re on our way”, the reminder the day before, the follow-up on a quote that’s gone quiet.
- Moving details from one place to another. The job sheet becoming an invoice, the invoice landing in Xero, the paid invoice coming back marked paid.
- Chasing what’s slipped. The overdue invoice, the missing timesheet, the job nobody closed off.
- Telling you what’s going on. The Friday report you build from three spreadsheets, built for you.
A week at Southside, before and after
Here’s Todd’s week, side by side.
| The job | Before | With automation |
|---|---|---|
| Booking confirmations | Todd texts each customer the night before | Sent by itself when the job is booked, with a reply to confirm |
| “We’re on our way” | The boys forget, the customer rings the office | One tap from the van, or by voice while driving |
| Quotes gone quiet | Todd means to chase them; mostly doesn’t | A polite follow-up drafted after a week, sent with Todd’s OK |
| Job sheet to invoice | Typed up at night, then typed again into Xero | The invoice builds itself from the job and syncs to Xero |
| Overdue invoices | Bianca rings around on a Thursday | Reminders go out on the schedule Todd chose |
| The Friday numbers | Three spreadsheets and a calculator | A short report that turns up on Friday afternoon |
None of that is clever. That’s the point. Each one is a job Todd already does, done the way he already does it, without him.
What it doesn’t do
Good automation knows its place. In a trade business, that means:
- It doesn’t send money or sign anything off by itself. Payments, refunds and anything over a limit you set wait for a person. Every time.
- It doesn’t talk to your customers in a voice that isn’t yours. Every message is written the way you’d write it, and anything new waits for your OK until you’re happy.
- It doesn’t replace the person on the tools. It gives them back the half hour they spend on the phone to the office.
- It doesn’t hide what it did. Every run is written down, so when a customer says “I never got that”, you can see exactly what went out and when.
If someone sells you automation that can’t answer those four, keep your wallet in your pocket.
Why most Perth trades never get started
It’s not the cost and it’s not the tech. It’s that nobody has time to sit down and work out what to automate, and the apps that promise it all want you to change how you work to suit them.
That’s backwards. Your way of doing things is how you’ve kept customers coming back. The automation should fit around it, not the other way round. That’s what we do at Tross: we start from how your business already runs, build the automations around it, and change them whenever you ask in plain words.
How to start, this week
You don’t need a plan or a budget to take the first step. You need a notepad.
- For one week, write down every bit of admin you do twice. Not the hard stuff. The repeated stuff: the texts, the typing, the chasing.
- Circle the three that eat the most time. For Todd, it was invoices, quote follow-ups and the night-before texts.
- Ask what would happen if each one did itself. If the answer is “I’d get my Tuesday nights back”, that’s your starting point.
- Then talk to someone who builds it. In a free chat we’ll walk through your list, tell you what can be automated, what shouldn’t be, and what it would take, in plain English.
Back at the kitchen bench
Six weeks later, Todd’s Tuesday nights look different. The invoices are already in Xero when he gets home. The customers were texted when they were booked. The two quotes he would’ve forgotten got a polite nudge, and one of them said yes.
He still checks the Friday report with a cuppa. He just doesn’t have to build it any more.
If you’ve got your own pile on the kitchen bench, book a free chat, or read more about business automation in Perth.