Entertainment Automation

Let’s hire robots!

Small business owners have trouble with automation and outsourcing. Let’s talk about automation — setting up systems to run themselves.

Entertainment companies are often small-profit-margin organizations who end up competing with larger-margin companies. Eg: a couple friends could go to a play or to a bar. Competing in this way means amusement companies need to get every leg up they can.

Automation can take the humanity out of entertainment and it can also do the opposite.

Over-automating

Some people are trying to save themselves all the time in the world. They want everything to be a hands-off system before it’s even a system. They want all the tools to do all the cool things tools do. I can fall victim to this.

Symptoms:

1. You pore over the latest productivity apps trying to find what’s new and next
2. You get dragged into ads that promise an all-in-one package or some efficiency
3. You hate paper
4. You spend time figuring out how to do something for the first time instead of doing it for the first time

Under-automating

Some people are stuck doing the tasks that are better done by machines. Machines are good at repetitive things and memorization (storage).

Symptoms:

1. Every task takes your brain
2. You’re using your mind to remember things like schedules, contact info, what you are doing, your goals, etc.
3. Your day to day has many easy tasks

This is better use of resources

I think of time, energy, money, etc as one collective of resources called “jellybeans”. Automation might not save you time, but it might save you a lot of decision fatigue, so overall may save you more jelly beans. Choosing the wrong automation could cost you jelly beans, so who has the jelly beans to really figure all this out?

Solve the problem at the right time

If you’re in the “over-automating” category, you might start a project with a perfection mindset of “what do I want this to look like at the end and how do I get there the fastest” If you’re in the “under” category, you can probably just jump into something and start going. Then, you keep doing it the same way for the duration.

The happy medium is to jump into a project. Start doing the next task. Then, when you know what the project is, and you know what tasks are required, sort thru the process and find repetitive and storage needs.

If you go to early, you’re gonna waste too much time trying to solve issues that might not even be issues. You might say “I’m going to need to organize thousands of clients” then you later realize that you get three clients that pay for your year of operations.

If you go too late, you could be totally drained, and have let a lot of work that fall aside — the work that only humans can do… the work that humans want from you!

Easy evaluation

The easiest way to assess your automation potential for stuff is to take inventory of your jelly-bean-heavy-tasks (JBHT) and then compare them to the value you provide. See, I’m starting with the tasks, not the tools.

• Look at your books and see where you spend all your money. Look at each one to see if there’s an automation solution that will save you money.
• Spend a week or a month tracking all the time you spend on your business. Figure out if there’s automation to save you time, even if it costs you money.
• Look for things that take your energy leave you exhausted.
• Keep a journal for a week and see what burns through your emotional currency where are the headaches, what drives you to a feeling of helplessness?
• There are a lot of other resources you can examine too, like social currency, equipment damage, etc.

You don’t want to automate your main value. If people come to you because of original thinking, you don’t want a robot to post quotes randomly on your instagram. You want to spend all your jelly beans on sharing original thoughts and ideally automate or outsource everything else.

For example Scot Nery’s Boobietrap

The main value we provide is curation, communications, and community. So, even though it takes a lot of time and emotions for a neurotic person like me to go thru act submissions, respond to emails, and write good comedy newsletters; I do it. Co-producer Meranda spends a lot of jelly beans on connecting with people and building the community. These things might feel repetitive, or like they don’t always warrant a human brain, but they do… if we don’t offer them, we don’t have anything proprietary to offer.

Here are some examples of automations

We do things with light automation like using an abbreviation app for repetitive chunks of text that we need to add to messages. When someone asks us how do they submit an act, or if i need to send a rejection email, or a piece of contact info, this is crucial.

I use Copia. It’s an app for keeping a clipboard history. Basically, you copy and paste something, then you copy and paste something else. If you wanna go back and paste that first thing again, it will store that for your easy access. It keeps a long history so you can move a bunch of chunks around to different things.

We use apple’s reminders for storing and syncing shopping lists. We use calendar syncing for day-of special todos. We use air table to store data that we need to share but doesn’t need to be constantly easily accessible. We use Asana for weekly repeating checklists.

We also have a heavy duty app that I built that organizes all the acts in our database and all our ticket buyers. It lets us send out emails to acts as soon as their booked with all their booking info. It sends them an email the week of the show to let them know what they need to do. It allows us to keep and organize the lineups for each week. It sends out a playbill of the show to everyone in attendance. It manages our staff and warns us if we’re low on staff. It helps us keep track of the diversity in our shows. We wouldn’t have been able to manage 5 years of weekly shows involving 30 volunteers per week without it. It would have been expensive if we had to pay to develop it.

We use Buffer for automatically posting to social media on a schedule. We create the posts ( communications are part of our value ) but Buffer schedules and distributes (scheduling, and repeating are not part of our value).

Repeat

The biggest gap companies face with automation is forgetting to reevaluate. You might have had a JBHT years ago that was too expensive to automate, but maybe now it’s costing you more jelly beans, maybe your jelly beans are worth more, or maybe the automation solutions are cheaper.