SPI 933: When Automation Does & Does Not Make Sense

SPI 933: When Automation Does & Does Not Make Sense

Pat Flynn: I just got off a call with a student who told me something that made my stomach drop. He said, “Pat, I automated everything that you’ve always taught to automate, my email sequences, my social media, my customer onboarding, even my sales calls.” Now, I don’t really talk much about sales calls. Somebody else helped him with that, but here’s what he said: “My revenue went up forty percent,” but he lost three of his biggest clients in two months. They said that he felt robotic. That’s what one of them said, and I imagine the others felt the same way.

This is the dark side of scaling a business that nobody talks about. And if you’re listening to this right now, there’s a good chance that you’re either heading toward this cliff or maybe you’ve already fallen off because here is what is happening.

We’re living in this AI everything, right? Automate everything, scale everything world where the advice is always remove yourself from the business, right? Passive income so that the money can come in and you can remove yourself entirely. Now, that advice isn’t wrong. I’ve lived that, but it’s incomplete, and that incomplete advice is destroying businesses faster than ever.

Now, I’ve been helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses for over fifteen years, right? It’s almost twenty years by now, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of scaling and automation, and I’ve done the good, the bad, and the ugly. And what I’ve learned is this: scaling isn’t just about doing more with less, it’s about doing more of the right things while keeping the soul of what makes your business special.

Let me say that again. Keeping the soul of what makes your business special. I want you to think of that word as we go along in this episode today. Soul. The business having a soul, having a personality, having something to connect with.

So today I’m gonna share with you a framework that I wish that I had when I first started scaling my business.

It’s called The Human Scale Matrix, and it’s going to help you figure out exactly what to scale, what not to scale, when to scale, and when to put the brakes on before you lose what made people fall in love with your business in the first place. This is a, a thing that I’ve learned over time. Many people have spoken about these things.

I’m not the original creator of this type of thing. I’ve just shaped it in my own way that’s easy for me to understand. So there, there’s like a million people who have talked about similar things, but I’m trying to distill it in a way that maybe is easier for you and something that makes sense, that is actionable, that you could take home with you after listening to this episode, or even implement immediately.

Now, the automation trap that kills businesses is, is really what we’re talking about here, right? ‘Cause automation is what we want. We want to automate and, and AI is helping us do that, right? But it’s killing businesses. I know a person who runs a marketing consultancy, and six months ago he was drowning, right?

He was doing everything himself. He had, uh, just a couple team members, and he wanted to scale. He wanted to scale to remove himself from the process. You know, he was working 70-hour weeks. He was handling every client call, every proposal, managing every project, and he was his own bottleneck. Oftentimes, we think we need to scale when we are the bottleneck, right?

So he did what most smart entrepreneurs would do. He started automating everything. He built email sequences for lead generation. He created automatic proposal generators with AI and, and built, like, an AI bot agent to do a lot of that stuff, right? He even hired two virtual assistants to handle all the client communication, and then he even went so far as having AI automatically write his content And it worked, sort of.

Similar to the story of the student that I mentioned earlier, this person, his revenue doubled in four months. Doubled his revenue, and he went from working seventy hours to thirty per week, and he was able to take his first vacation in a long time with his family. So all was good, right? But eventually, the cracks started to show.

His biggest client, it was a company that he had worked with for three years, they didn’t renew their contract. And when he asked why, they said, “Well, it just doesn’t feel like we’re working with you anymore.” They were always being handed off to somebody else or something that was kind of like this person, but not actually, right?

Like they were working with just a machine. That’s scary because that is the pathway many people are on, and a lot of clients might not be as open and honest. This person had a three-year relationship with this client, so yeah, I didn’t ask this person permission to l- tell this story, which is why I’m not sharing names, but I just wanted to share the story with you.

And yeah, he was in the automation trap. Scaled the wrong things, lost the human elements that made his business special, and this is why the human scale matrix exists. It’s a simple framework. It’s gonna help you decide what to scale and what to keep human, and it’s based on two particular questions.

Question number one, does this task create or strengthen relationships? And two, does this task showcase my unique expertise or personality? And when you plot these on a matrix, right, you get four quadrants. First quadrant, high relationship, high expertise, right? This means that it creates a lot of relationships, and it really is about your unique experience or expertise or personality.

These are the things in quadrant one that should never be scaled. They are your crown jewels, the things that only you can do that build the strongest connections with your audience or customers, right? And think about what some of those things might be that offer high strengthening of relationships with your audience, right?

Personal connections, phone calls, one-on-one conversations on Zoom, direct messages. Never scale those. Now, I’m not saying don’t ever use automation in direct messages, but when it comes to actually talking to somebody and building a really strong relationship, those are things that we should never scale, in my opinion.

Quadrant two, which is high relationship, low expertise. These you wanna scale carefully, right? These are important for relationship building, but don’t require your specific expertise, right? You can delegate these, but you don’t need to maintain oversight and quality control. Still creates a high level of relationships, but it could be somebody else that does that.

It could be a particular task that doesn’t really mean it’s coming or necessarily, like, unique to you. Quadrant, quadrant… I can’t say quadrant. Quadrant three, low relationship, high expertise. These are the things that you wanna scale strategically, right? They showcase your expertise, but they don’t directly build relationships, right?

You can systematize some of this. These are the automated sort of webinars, right? They don’t really build a relationship when people know that they’re watching something that has already been recorded. YouTube video is a good opportunity to do this as well, right? It doesn’t create a direct, real relationship immediately, right?

It could start the relationship, but it does demonstrate your expertise, your unique abilities or personality. You wanna scale those strategically. In quadrant four, low relationship, low expertise, your administrative tasks, right, your busy work. These are the things that you wanna scale immediately.

Automate or delegate these as fast as you can. So let me walk you through some examples, right? Quadrant one, high relationship building, high expertise. These are things, again, you don’t ever wanna scale. Initial sales conversations with high-value prospects, right? If people are coming in for coaching from you, and they’re very high-value prospects, right?

This is the top income generation models or opportunities for you, the higher-end clients, high-ticket items. You should be the one to make those initial sales conversations, especially if you are the personality or you are the coach. Crisis management with important clients or customers. If something goes wrong, they wanna hear from you.

Your signature content. Imagine I outsourced this podcast. Then it wouldn’t be the same, not at all, right? Personal responses to meaningful customer feedback, right? The difference between somebody on your team saying, “We appreciate the feedback. Thank you,” to you personally responding with a video on a DM because somebody took a little bit of extra time to promote your business.

Those are the higher level superfans, right? Mentoring key team members. These are the things that if you remove yourself from them, you lose what makes your business uniquely yours. Quadrant two, this is where you wanna scale carefully. Again, high relationship, low expertise. Onboarding calls, regular check-ins with existing clients, right?

You can scale these things, but you gotta scale them carefully. ‘Cause if you do it too fast or, or too early, it can lose that touch, right? That human element. Responding to comments on your content. Thank you messages to new customers, right? These are the automations in your direct messages using tools like ManyChat, right?

You wanna do it, but do it carefully. You can delegate some of this stuff, but you need systems to ensure that they still maintain your voice, that your values are still there, that your level of care is still present.

Quadrant number three, low relationship, high expertise. You wanna scale these things strategically.

This is the educational content creation. These are the case studies that you create. These– This is course development, blog posts. This is general content creation here, right? Short form videos, long form videos, creating templates and frameworks, developing operating procedures. These can be systematized and even partially automated, but they need to maintain your unique perspective and expertise, and your voice has to be in them, or else it’s just gonna feel off.

And then the things that you need to scale immediately, this is probably the most obvious, right? These are, these are the administrative tasks. Data entry, invoicing, answering general email questions, and those kinds of things, right? Appointment scheduling, management type stuff. These are no-brainers, right?

Get them off your plate as much as possible. Now, knowing what to scale is only half the battle, though. You also need to know when to scale and also when to hit the brakes. Let me list a few moments in your business journey of when you would want to scale. If you are consistently working more than fifty hours a week on tasks that could be done by others, then it is time to scale.

If you’re turning down opportunities because you don’t have capacity and you do need to say yes to some of these opportunities, well, then it might be time to scale. If you continue to make the same decisions over and over and over again, then it might be time to scale. If your stress levels are affecting your health and/or your relationships, talked about that quite a bit here on the SPI podcast.

I’ve had guests come on the show to talk about how they’ve been hospitalized because of their stress levels. Um, it might be time to scale and automate. If you have proven systems that work consistently but you’re still in them, well, this is where you can begin to hand those things off to team or tools.

Here’s when you don’t wanna scale. When you haven’t figured out what makes your business special yet, you’re still gonna need to be in the trenches. Your core processes aren’t documented. You haven’t created standard operating procedures. The SOP, the standard operating procedure, is sort of the key to unlock automation and scale.

You’re still kind of experimenting with your business model. It’s always important to always experiment, but as far as your business model is concerned, if you are still trying to figure out even what your business model is, then it’s not time to scale yet. You wanna scale when that is discovered so that you can get time back and try experimenting elsewhere.

If you don’t have the cash flow to invest in team, then it might not be right, at least right now, to invest in team. There might be time to invest in creating systems or doing more research to understand what your target audience wants or tools. And then finally, if your customers are complaining about losing the personal touch, you don’t wanna remove yourself from that. That’s the worst time.

Now, here’s what the person that I mentioned earlier should have done. The person who has scaled his business. He went from eighty hours to thirty. He doubled his revenue, but he lost touch with his customers and clients. Here’s what that person could have done. This is what we call the soul preservation strategy.

So before you scale anything, you wanna ask yourself, what are the three things that if I remove myself from them, would make my business feel like every other business in my industry, right? Let me say that again. What are three things that if you were to remove from your plate, they would just essentially make the business the same as everybody else serving the same kind of people?

So for this person that I was talking about earlier, those three things were the initial strategy sessions with new clients because he was involved in them, and he connected and built a relationship right from the get-go. When he– As soon as he handed off those onboarding calls and the sort of discovery calls to his team that he hired, then sure, they had a lot more customers come in, but he lost his bigger clients because they lost… you know, he, he scaled everything.

So these people didn’t even have him to begin with, even though they found his content and came for him. Creative brainstorming for campaigns, he was no longer involved. That was a big superpower of his, is the sort of creativeness of the campaigns he was running, and that was gone.

And especially, and this was the big one for a lot of those longer term clients, he stopped checking in with them. He had somebody else check in, and so months went by without anybody hearing from this person. And of course, if you came on for them, unless the person who replaces them is demonstrating a personal connection as well, or is performing even better or getting better results, then it’s gonna be very difficult.

So he scaled quite a few things, but maybe a little too much. In the world of automation and scaling, here’s a principle that has served me very well. It’s essentially the Pareto rule, right? The eighty, eighty/twenty rule. You wanna maintain at least twenty percent human touch in areas that matter most to your customers.

For example, if you automate your email marketing, make sure twenty percent of your emails are personal, have personal stories, are continually being relatable, timely, and written by you, like literally in the moment, right? Not all emails have to be written by you from scratch. I would advise using AI for the purpose of brainstorming, being a creative partner, for proofreading, and even taking what you’ve written or dictated and transcribed and paring it down to be something that’s a lot more digestible.

That’s where AI can come into really, really good use for things like email marketing. But it’s still important to come from you. And if you hire someone to manage your social media, for example, make sure you personally respond to, I mean, as much as you can, but you wanna limit that because you, you are trying to hand some of that off, right?

But to twenty percent of the comments like that are meaningful, that are personal, personal questions. If you train somebody, train them to understand when you should still answer a question. This is something that Jess on my team, my business manager, former executive assistant, understood really well ’cause she was able to answer on my behalf a lot of questions, point people to the right direction.

But there were certain moments, certain emails that came through that she was like, “Pat, these, you know, these ten emails this week you have to re– like, only you can reply to these or deserve your attention.” And that was really, really key. And it keeps the soul alive in the business while still giving you the efficiency of scaling.

So if you are starting from scratch and you’re thinking of scaling up in some way, shape, or form, you wanna do it in a systematized kind of way. First, you wanna make sure you document and systematize the things that you are doing. Like, treat it as an audit. Understand what is actually stuff that’s on the plate that shouldn’t even be on the plate to begin with, right?

This is, this is like the extra stuff that just is there because it’s legacy in the way that you started. It’s sort of what’s Frankenstein placed together. Use this opportunity in this audit to take away things that aren’t required anymore. But then document and systematize what is, such that you can actually have some sort of standard operating procedure, right?

That way, before you hand anything off, s- whoever you hand it off to will know exactly what your process is. Not necessarily the end goal of it. The end goal is important, obviously. But the way that you and your values and your style do it, I think that’s important for whoever ends up taking on that task.

Thinking about what makes your approach different, and it kind of creates like a thumbprint that even somebody else could place on it if that is understood. So really determining what is unique about the way you do things. Systematize that if you can.

The next phase is to scale, but with oversight, right?

You don’t wanna just, like, once you have these things documented and systematized, you don’t, like, just hand it off to somebody or put it in a tool and then walk away, right? You wanna stay involved at least for the first few weeks. Whenever I’ve hired somebody, even my first hires back in 2014, I quickly understood that you couldn’t just, like, hand over something and sit back and then all is well.

There was some training involved. There was some proofing. There was a little bit of micromanagement required up front so that I would then never have to touch that thing again, or there was a system in place so that, you know, I knew when I was needed for something, but the other times I wasn’t, and it was still done in the quality and to my standard that I wanted, right?

Gather feedback and then adjust the system. Those first couple weeks are critical after you hand something off. And then finally, you wanna optimize it and refine it. The more and more that you and whoever you hand this off to or the tools that you hand this thing off to, whatever the task may be, you wanna see what the results are and see if there are ways to continually improve and refine them, right?

Once the system is smoothly running, look for ways to make it run even smoother, to remove even more friction. All the while, of course, like I said, maintaining that human element, at least the ones that matter for the way that you wanna do what you wanna do.

So let me give you a real life example from my own story with my podcast, this podcast that you’re listening to right now.

When I started in 2008, it was all me, every bit of it, right? I planned the episodes, I recorded them, I edited them, I wrote the show notes, I uploaded them, I did my own graphics to promote them on social media, and I responded to every single comment and every single email about them. And as the show grew, I was spending 15, 20 hours a week on just podcast production.

All the while, I was blogging and email marketing, and I was starting to speak. I was wanting to write books, and there was no way I was gonna be able to keep this up unless I pretty much killed everything off and just did the podcast almost kind of full-time. And again, the whole goal was for me to automate this as much as possible.

But did I ever fully automate it? No. I mean, part of it, I, I couldn’t, and I knew because it was my voice, it was me, and I never would want to fully automate it, but there were parts that I did, right? I applied the human scale matrix. So let’s talk about it, the, the four quadrants like earlier, right? The never scale quadrant, planning the episode topics.

I still continue to do that. It’s one of my favorite things, and it allows me to make sure that I create episodes that are still in touch with the audience that I’m connected with. Recording the actual content. I am still here recording it. I’m not using AI voice tools, which I actually know a few podcasters, some of you might know them, that use an AI voice now and just simply type in something, a prompt into AI to write a script to then have a voice read it, and in many cases, people don’t even know.

But a lot of times those podcasts do fade because where’s the soul? Responding to meaningful listener emails. I get a handful of emails from Jess every week that I know I need to reply to, and a lot of those are people who listen to the podcast or watch the videos on YouTube and are either in a, in a tough situation or are very heartfelt emails about how I’ve helped them.

I owe it to them to reply. It’s something I never wanna scale. And then making strategic decisions about the show’s direction, right? Now, there are other players involved now with that, like the team and Liz now, uh, community director with our focus on Superfans and the Superfans System, but I’m still involved in those.

Next, scale carefully, right? Responding to comments on social media. Some of that is automated now through ManyChat. ManyChat’s been fantastic at helping people get what they want or where they need to go without me necessarily having to personally reply to each of them because they don’t necessarily need a personal reply to get the value from whatever their question might be or whatever the lead magnet might be that I’m promoting on a short-form video.

Creating clips from the podcast episodes and videos and publishing them. I don’t fully do that. There are tools that allow that to happen. Riverside and other tools kind of do that automatically now. But I still am involved because I want to scale carefully. I don’t just take whatever the output is and put it on social media.

I vet those, or I have team members vet them first to make sure they are in alignment and that they make sense because AI is not perfect, and it does capture moments of podcast episodes that don’t make sense, or it doesn’t start with a hook, et cetera. Scaling more strategically now, phase three, quadrant three.

Writing show notes, creating promotional content, developing episode templates. And then scaling immediately. These are things that were the first things to go, right? Actually editing the audio, mastering the files so that the audio levels were correct, exporting them as MP3s and uploading them to podcast platforms, scheduling social media posts that go out to LinkedIn and other places as soon as those things are published, even reaching back out to guests with the information about those episodes.

Those are scaled almost automatically. And managing all the technical backend stuff. And the result is now all I have to do on the podcast is record and every once in a while, once a quarter, do a little bit of planning. But it maintains that personal feel. You’re hearing personal stories, and you get a glimpse of what’s going on in my life, which is kinda cool.

And I get to help you. Now, there’s a sweet spot, right? And with AI coming in, I’d mentioned this earlier, but there are smart or good ethical ways to use AI, right? You could use AI to do research for your content and then add your personal insights. You can use AI to draft emails and then personalizing them with your voice, so you’re not staring at a blank page anymore.

You could use AI to analyze customer feedback and then personally respond to the insights. If y- if you aren’t understanding something, you can pop it into AI to understand it or to help you analyze it. Bad use of AI in this case is using AI to write all your content without any personal input, using AI to handle all, keyword all, customer communications, using AI to make business strategic decisions, using AI to replace all human touch points because you don’t wanna pay people or you don’t wanna do it yourself.

There are still, and this is what we’ve talked about for months now, the human parts of the business are gonna be the kind of only things left that people really look forward to or really resonate with. Creating things that are relatable. And if e-everything is turned into a machine, you’re gonna be no better than those hamburger stands that have a robot arm making a hamburger.

It’s like, cool, the food tastes fine. I’m getting nourished, but there is something to be said for that cafe out in the middle of nowhere with the person who is a server who you get to know. Her name is Mary, and she has a kid, and she’s whatever, like the story behind it, right? The human part of it. But she’s working hard, and she’s making sure your food’s taken care of, and she gives you an extra coffee ’cause she loved the conversation.

That’s what we want, and that’s what you need to bring into your business in some way, shape, or form. Now, sometimes you might scale and, like some of my friends, scale too much, and you need to scale back. And don’t be afraid to do this. I’ve, I’ve had to do it multiple times in my business, right? For a while, I automated too much of the writing in emails.

The sequences were working, right, from a conversion standpoint, but after those things were working… This was before, even before AI. It was automated in the sense that the nurture sequences and the funnels were all flowing and, and everything was working, but then people, audiences, and, and time changed, and we didn’t change the nurture sequences.

We didn’t change those funnels. They just kept going, and over time, we saw conversions low, get lower and lower. Stories were kind of out of date or overheard, and it needed a refresher, so we went back in and, and, and readjusted that, and it worked. You know, I got back into it, right? You might even remember a point in 2021 to 2022 where kind of I wasn’t even involved really in the business as much anymore.

I was still doing the podcast, but even the website, it was more like a media company. It, it just felt like it had lost its soul a little bit, and then it came back in 2024, 2025 and brought some life back into it. And the SPI Community is now thriving, which is really great, and we have personalities like Liz coming in and our team members like David who are just crushing it in there and making people feel welcome and giving people something beyond just the information and just the info on the podcast and the YouTube channel.

They’re getting access to each other and support, accountability, all those kinds of things.

So I’m about to list a few things for you that if, if you get a sense that any of these– If you say yes to any of these, then you might wanna scale back a little bit, right? You’re getting customer complaints about losing personal touch, right?

You’re getting a, a further decrease in engagement with your content. You’re seeing less comments and replies. You’re seeing less likes and saves. Lower conversions despite there still being traffic. If you’re getting the same amount of traffic, but conversions just continue to lower, well, then okay, the automation needs to stop.

We need to come back, put ourselves back into it, at least audit things, and then we can come back to it and re-automate it, if you will. Again, you wanna maintain these things, but that doesn’t mean walk away forever. Customers asking to speak with the real you, that’s, that’s a big one. We’ve had that before.

“Hey, I know this is a bot,” or, “I know these are sort of templated, boilerplate emails, but I was hoping to reach the real Pat Flynn.” So if you’re seeing any of these kinds of things, if, if you are even feeling disconnected to your business, this is a good time to consider going back into it, right? Scaling back the scaling.

But here, here’s what I believe. Like, let’s talk about the future now, ’cause I think the future is bright. You’ve heard me talk in previous episodes about the renaissance that we’re in now, that’s starting, the renaissance of people, of connection, of live things, real life things coming back, getting back out into nature even.

That is happening. It’s almost a response to the over-AI-ification of things. And as AI and things like automation become more prevalent, the businesses that maintain the authentic human connection are the ones that are gonna win. They’re gonna have a massive competitive advantage, right? People are craving real relationships.

Some are even just sick of everything that’s online. You might even be that. You might even be sick of all this stuff. You wanna talk to a real person. I mean, I– that’s how I feel when I call any customer service line, and I get the, you know, “Press one for this. Press two for this.” That’s what businesses have become like.

Like, cool, you can get a person to where they need to go and who they need to talk to only after five minutes of listening and not giving them what they want. That’s kinda where things ended up. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t scale or shouldn’t scale. It just means you need to scale intelligently, keeping the human elements in there as much as possible without disturbing the things that matter most.

So here’s what you can do now. You can audit your current processes, the things that you’re doing using the human scale matrix, right? The four quadrants. What are the things that can never be scaled all the way through to the things that you should scale immediately. Identifying your soul elements. What are the soul parts of your brand?

How would you define that? What are three things that make your business uniquely yours, right? Remember that question from earlier. If you were to take away three things and then your business just became like everybody else’s, what would those things be? Yeah. What are those? Start small. If you just pick one thing that you absolutely hate doing or shouldn’t be on your plate, pick that and start to let it go.

And you will need to let go to grow. I will say, if you take on everything, you’re going to get overwhelmed, and you might even become unhealthy. It’s happened. And then you wanna see that– set up feedback loops. Create systems to continually check in with the systems that you’ve built and ways to connect with your customers in a way that allows them to tell you how things are going, right?

Are they feeling the human connection that they need.

Scaling isn’t about removing yourself from your business. It’s about removing yourself from the right parts of your business while doubling down on the parts that only you can do.

Chris Ducker is somebody who comes to mind ’cause he said this, “Do what you do best, scale the rest,” or delegate the rest, or automate the rest.

However you wanna finish that. I absolutely love that. Do what you do best, delegate the rest, right? In a world that’s becoming way, way too automated, your humanity is your competitive advantage, so don’t scale it away. Remember, people don’t buy products or services. They buy relationships. They buy experiences and feelings.

Make sure your scaling strategy preserves these elements rather than destroy them. And the goal isn’t to build a business that runs you, right? The goal is to build a business that amplifies the best of what you bring to the world. How might you serve this community? Use scaling to make that even more apparent, to amplify that.

Scale smart, stay human, and watch your business grow in ways that feel sustainable and fulfilling, ’cause that’s the best part about this, is when you do it in a way that’s genuine, when you scale the human parts and the parts that you love that only you uniquely can do, I mean, it never feels like a chore anymore after that.

It’s sustainable. It’s fulfilling. Even though it’s work, let’s stop worrying about doing zero work. We have to do work, but we might as well make it fun and enjoyable and something that shows the best of us. So if this episode helped you think differently about scaling, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Let’s talk about it in the SPI community. Let’s talk about it on social, @PatFlynn. Love to hear what you think. And until next time, keep serving your audience, and remember, your humanity is your superpower. Thank you!