How automation saved time and money, and allowed our revenue to grow beyond our dreams

Aug 14
6 min read

The smartest thing we ever built multiplied our revenue while we slept.

During the first many years at Hawaiian Vacations, anyone booking a trip to Hawaii either contacted a travel agent, who called us, or came to us directly by phone or in person at our office. This meant we needed reservation agents to pick up a ringing phone or help someone in person and record the details of their vacation package in our in-house reservation system. Each reservation required checking availability, quoting a price, and getting that information back to a customer who couldn’t see any of it on a screen.

Multiply that by every booking that came in on a Monday after a big sale was announced, and you had a room full of good people doing the same steps over and over, and a business that could only grow as fast as we could hire and train more people to answer phones and take bookings. And sometimes the wait time could be quite lengthy, either waiting on hold or waiting in the lobby of our office to be helped. This did not create good customer service experiences. Both travel agents and customers complained loudly.

We made improvements by speeding up the hiring process, hiring groups of reservations agents at the same time and putting them through an extensive two-week training program, but we still could not keep up with the demand. And the complaints continued, along with revenue that could not grow beyond our staff's capacity.

So we built something new instead. It took two years and more money than I want to remember, and a lot of arguing about whether it was even worth it. On the other side, it eliminated our customer complaints about long hold times and let our business grow in both revenue and profits beyond what any of us thought it could.

Nobody on our team loved the phones, not really. Answering the same five questions over and over, apologizing for hold times, hoping the customer heard the dates right. So when we decided to build an online reservations system, it wasn’t about getting rid of people; it was about getting rid of the part of the job that made good people miserable and our service slow and painful. Two years of building, testing, and fixing, and on the other side we had a system that could book a vacation quickly and easily whenever they wanted to. And it freed up an entire team’s worth of payroll to go toward things that could make the business, and the service, better.

I wrote more about how that one decision changed our overhead and our growth curve. It's worth a read if you’re still running your business on phone calls and sticky notes.

“If technology can do it, use technology. Don’t rely on labor and humans.”

What’s the one repetitive, painful task in your business that a person is still doing by hand?

Nobody’s making a course about my credit card spreadsheet, and that’s exactly my point. Every month my bookkeeper drops the statement balance for each card into one spreadsheet; it totals itself, and I glance at it before the auto-payments hit the bank account. If needed, I can move money around to make sure the cash is there when it's needed. That’s the whole system. I used to run that math in my head at night, anxiously wondering if the payments would be covered by the bank balance. Now it’s a five-second glance instead of a middle-of-the-night spiral. So simple. And that's an example of an automated system.

It’s the same reason I moved everything off paper and into the cloud, creating a digital filing system for everything from leases to procedural manuals to the important data our bookkeeper and CPA need. I wrote a whole post on ditching the file cabinets if that’s still where your business lives.

Automation doesn’t have to be dramatic to change your life. Sometimes it’s just one spreadsheet that stops you from worrying at 2 a.m.

What’s the small, unglamorous task you’re still carrying around in your head instead of handing it to a system?

I’ve used the same productivity app for over ten years now, and I genuinely call it my brain, because it holds everything my actual brain used to have to hold: every bill, every follow-up email, every task I need to complete, every tax bill due date, every prescription refill, every birthday card I need to send. When I email someone and need to know if they got back to me, I copy the app's unique email address on it, and it turns into a task that I can track. I don’t remember things anymore. I don’t have to. The system remembers for me, and that’s freed up more mental space than I can explain to someone who hasn’t tried it.

I don’t know what I would do without it.

What are you still carrying around in your head that a ten-dollar-a-month app could carry for you instead?

I’ve gone through passport control at the Athens airport and waited forty-five minutes while a handful of agents processed hundreds of people by hand, one passport at a time. I’ve gone through Heathrow and been through in five minutes, because the whole thing was automated: scan the passport, smile at the camera, walk through, done. Same task, same volume of people, wildly different experience, and the difference wasn’t having more staff working harder. It was the automated system.

Your customers don’t care how hard your team is working behind the counter. They care how long they’re standing in line.

Where in your business are your customers standing in a line or waiting on a phone for tasks that technology could shorten?

Across the owners I coach, the pattern holds. When you put real systems and leverage in place, including the boring automation nobody brags about, owners see their hours in day-to-day operations drop by at least 25 percent, which is 10 hours a week based on a 40-hour week. Productivity climbs by more than 25 percent on top of that. That’s not hype. That’s just what happens when you stop doing manually what a tool can easily do for you. Imagine how that can impact your bottom line and your life!.

I’ve written before about the real ROI of documenting your systems if you want a deeper dive.

You can’t scale a business that only runs when you’re standing right in the middle of it.

If you automated just one task this month, what would you do with the time you got back?

This Week’s Exercise

Make a list of every automation or piece of technology you already use in your business.
Circle the one repetitive task that’s still eating the most of your time, or your team’s time.
Research one tool or system that could take it off your plate. You don’t have to implement it yet, just find it.
Ask yourself specifically how AI could help with that one task. Not everything. Just that one.

Expert Spotlight

This week's Expert Spotlight features Steve Ramona, host of Doing Business with a Servant's Heart (1,100+ episodes and 1.5 million views) and founder of The Business Network.

Steve believes the best business growth comes from serving first. Instead of chasing leads through transactional networking, he teaches entrepreneurs how to build genuine relationships that naturally generate referrals, strategic partnerships, and business growth. If you're looking to scale your business while surrounding yourself with motivated, relationship-focused business owners, Steve's community is worth exploring.

Learn more: https://www.skool.com/thebusinessnetwork

Final Thoughts

That room filled with sales agents answering phones at Hawaiian Vacations is long gone, and so is the version of me who thought being busy every single minute of the day meant I was doing my job right. The lesson didn’t come only from that big two-year automation build. It came from realizing the same principle applies just as much to a spreadsheet as it does to a charter airline's reservations system. If technology can do it, let it. Save your time, and your team’s time, for the parts of the business only a person can actually do.

This week, pick one task, big or small, glamorous or not, and automate it. Not next quarter. This week.

To your freedom,

Ral West

Livin’ the Dream