Good Morning. This is the Method. We’re like the ladder in snakes and ladders and every week we try to help you skip a few steps on your bootstrapping journey.

This weeks theme is automation:

• A tactic to increase your contents reach 📈

• A framework to help you find more automation opportunities 🤖

• A thought on what automation allows you to do💡

Turning Thousands Of Video Views Into Millions

Thanks to Gary Vee, the pillar content model is now widely understood; some say it has even crept its way into the minds of Fortune 500 CMOs.

And if those notoriously slow-to-adapt people are paying attention, it's probably because it works.

Repurposing long-form content into meta-shorter takeaways for our various social platforms is efficient and, more importantly, effective.

But a problem for us smaller creators and businesses is the cost of doing so. Just because something is efficient to do doesn't mean we can afford to.

That's where this gem of an AI tool Opus Pro comes in.

It will help you take any long-form video 5min+ and turn it into multiple 1min or less clips suitable for any social platform with just one button click.

What would typically cost $200-$300 in editors' fees is now free.

Here's how we're using it at Rugby Bricks.

1. We're going through our Youtube content library and finding our most watched and engaged videos - like this one which has now had close to 100 K views and repurposing them.

   1. We're starting with these because our audience has already told us they are high value with their engagement.

2. We copy the youtube link for the video, then head over to Opus.Pro and paste it into the dashboard.

   1. Opus does its thing and creates a whole range of short-form clips like this - that's it.

3. Then we publish these shorter clips across Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok.

After repurposing the video above, we got another 1,000,000+ impressions. And it took less than 5 minutes of work.

Notes:

These tools offer little customisation out of the box, so as soon as Opus Pro takes off, our social content style will look like everyone else's.

But we expect them to be aware of this problem and give creators more legroom as they develop it.

FYI - We're finding most of these AI tools here.

Taking Advantage Of Automation In Your Business

In the early 20th century, when the world was introduced to billion-dollar companies, those behemoths took 100,000+ people to operate.

100 years, and we can do it with just 13. Yes, that's how many staff Instagram had when they sold to Facebook for north of a billion. And no, they're not the only ones who've done it; slash are doing it.

The keystone trend behind this change is the information era. We figured out how to capture information in all shapes and forms and repackage it for sale.

And because this information can be manipulated and delivered digitally via binomial computing, we can manage the information value creation process with software.

This means a single human can now create hard-to-fathom value via the gift of automation. And every business should want to take advantage of this opportunity, but most don't.

The basic framework to find these opportunities is as follows:

• Find actions you or others in your company repeat often.

• Identify the ones the most time is wasted on.

• Use software to do it instead.

We've explained in detail how to do this here.

Even at our gym, which are notoriously un-tech savvy businesses and people, we complete hundreds of actions a week with software at about $2 per hour in equivalent human hours of work.

Just this week, we're automating our referral program, which will free up ~50 hours of human time over a year at no extra cost.

Notes:

Across our companies, compared to the average Kiwi business, we are light years ahead in taking advantage of automation but still a long way behind those doing it the best.

At least at the moment, the primary value add of Software and AI for small businesses is productivity. The more productive you and your people are, the more money you can make and the more you can pay them to generate that money. When used right, everyone wins.

Working Smarter Beats Working Harder

You'll notice we never advocate for working hard in this newsletter. It's not cause we're work/life balance woke - we just don't believe that it's necessary to do well in business.

Hard work beats no work, but it doesn't beat smart work - The person who digs a hole with their hands is quickly passed by someone who uses a shovel.

What we do talk a lot about is the things we're doing that have made noticeable improvements to our business (like automation) that enjoy high leverage.

That's what half of working smart is; getting better outcomes from the same amount of effort.

So if anything, use this newsletter to find ways to make your business smarter and over time, you will become considerably better off.