Today I'm going to tell you about how I run my music lessons business with WinAutomation software robots. Now, this is cool. A few years ago, I had the idea, if I could find software that could click on my computer somewhere without me having to do it, then it could do that repeatedly, I could save myself a lot of time with all the repetitive tasks that I need to do running my business.
Luckily, I found that there is a whole industry online of businesses that create software that does that sort of thing. They call them software robots. Or just bots or macros.
After a few years of me using all various kinds of software, I found WinAutomation. I tried a bunch of different things too, before and after that. I landed on WinAutomation because it does the kind of things that I really need to do.
Let me tell you about some of the bots that I've created to help run my music lessons business, Teach 2 Teach. Let's run through this little list, these are the ones that we're going to be talking about today.
Reload Credits and Prep Credit Cards to Be Charged
This bot checks for mistakes, such as the wrong session type. Don't worry about what session types are. Session types are pay rates based on the type of lesson that we're giving.
Three-Day
I'll tell you more about that later.
Making Videos
We make videos, like this video, every day. there's a lot of repetitive tasks that we need to be done on the computer. They are necessary to edit and post videos every single day.
The Daily Current Student Report
We get some emails sent to us with information about how the business is doing. It includes what new things happened over the past day or so.
Keeping Our Email Lists Up-To-Date
That can be a very manual thing. We use many different pieces of software. Some companies use one big massive expensive piece of software that integrates all this stuff automatically. We use software robots that you that help us use different software and intertwine all of them so then they all stay up to date together. If you don't do that, you need to do a lot of manual copying and pasting of email addresses every single day. It's awful.
Craigslist.org
We have a robot that posts on Craigslist for us.
Thumbtack.com
We get a lot of customers and potential customers through Thumbtack.com. We need to reply to them right away or else they'll move on to somebody else. So, we have a robot that does the first reach out and then a follow-up reach out for us.
I'm going to talk through those a little bit more in depth. The first one I want to talk about is our Reload Credits and Prep Credit Cards to Be Charged robot. That is a very manual repetitive thing that you need to do and you need to get it all right. It's very important that you charge your clients the correct amount at the proper time. So, we have a robot that helps us do that.
Everyone knows that computers should do computer work, people should do people work. So, we have the computers doing the math and all the important things like that. We have the humans double-check it. They make sure we didn't hear anything about this client taking a break, or not wanting to be charged today, stuff like that. So, we make sure that at Teach 2 Teach we have those things the proper way. We have computers doing all the math and making sure it's all correct, and then the people looking over it and making sure that, yes, it's okay to hit charge on that.
This robot never actually charges anybody, it just moves them to the proper tab so we can come in, look at the list and make sure that's all correct. Then we can go ahead and process those cards.
The next idea is this idea of Three-Day. We have a policy right now that we need to have payment three days before each lesson. Some clients don't want to be charged until the very last second of our policy. So, we have a robot that allows us to offer this service. This would be a big pain in the butt if we didn't have a robot keeping track of our lessons three days in the future. This robot goes into each client, goes into their calendar, and looks at their calendar and sees if they have a lesson scheduled for three days in advance. If they do then it can move them to the payments tab so we can look that over and hit charge.
This is unique. We would not be able to offer this if we did not have a software robot helping us look through every single client’s calendar, every single day. Or twice a day! This one's twice a day.
Making Videos
We make videos every single day, which is cool. This is a new thing that we're doing. We haven't always done this, but it would be impossible for us to do all the editing and posting every single day ourselves if we did not have software robots to help us do all the things that are involved in that. I'm not even going to go into all the details that are involved in doing all this.
We also make a blog each day. To make a blog, you need to write a lot of content. So, we have that aided by downloading the subtitles off our YouTube video that we just posted. The software robots go through and it makes that into a blog post then we go through and we edit that make sure that it's all correct. We check the grammar and take out the nonsense, then we have a good blog post which also helps with SEO on our website. It's very cool. So, this is a unique, cool thing that allows us to be able to post great content like this on a regular basis, without having all the struggles of having to do each thing manually.
Daily Current Student Report
We get an email every single day that tells us about the students that joined our company, left our company, or went on break - all this kind of stuff. And because we need to keep a lot of things updated, we need to update all our tags in our CRM, and our email lists - things like that. All that needs to stay consistent and congruent. So, to do that, we need to see these lists.
Also within this email, we can see which students are on the Danger List. The students who haven't taken lessons in a while. These kinds of things are important. These are important things when you have your own business. I'd recommend that if you have your own business, that you consider having software robots to do all this tedious work that you might be doing manually now. Can a robot do it instead? It most likely can. Figure out how to do that and make that happen.
Keeping Your Email List up to Date
If you have several different software programs that might affect your email list, you don't want to have to go into all every single day and then update your main email list. We don't use autoresponders yet, but we plan to in the future. So, it's very important that daily we keep our autoresponders up to date. I would highly recommend that if you don't have a software robot doing this tedious work for you, you get on top of that.
Craigslist
There are some expensive subscriptions that you can get online that help you post on Craigslist.org every single day. We made one ourselves, which is cool. It posts on Craigslist a couple times a day. It keeps that up to date. Then we can do other things and still have these different Craigslist posts up there talking about the towns that we teach in, and stuff like that. Then we can find more people that want music lessons and serve them music lessons.
Thumbtack.com
We have a cool software robot that I paid someone to make for me because I didn't know how to do some of this stuff. It would have been a very hard bot to make.
Since then I've learned so much that I could do this myself now. This is a cool software robot that goes to thumbtack.com, where we get a lot of potential students, and it sends them messages. It massages the clients that are looking for music lessons that we offer in our areas.
It takes a lot of criteria and then it will send them a quote of how much we offer music lessons for and see if they want a free trial lesson. Then it also follows up with them, which is cool. It's hard to manually go in and stay on top of every single person that we send a quote to, but the software robots help us with that.
Then we do have a customer service person that comes in and gives that individualized touch. If they reply and say that they're interested, he’ll follow up. If they don't, it will send them a follow-up message and stuff like that. Thumbtack.com, that's a cool robot that we made.
Hopefully, you learned something! Check out WinAutomation. That's our favorite software program. We also have tried out Ubot Studio and things like that. Check out all these different robot software programs that can help you automate your daily work.
It's great to be able to take out all the tedious work that you might not be enjoying in your business so then you can focus on the important ones like moving your business forward rather than just maintaining. Check out our website Teach2Teach.com if you have not done that yet. We offer music lessons and academic tutoring. Even if you're not in our general area we can serve you with online webcam lessons, which is a cool new thing. They work well. So, if you'd like a free trial lesson, head over to Teach2Teach.com and check it out and we would love to meet you and give you some music lessons.