Digital Transformation Without a Tech Team – AI for Small Business in Edmonton

Digital transformation sounds like something that needs a budget and a tech team. It does not.

Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces on how a small business works smarter and saves time using simple tools, what a good AI prompt actually looks like, and the inventory sheet that gave one client back a third of a wasted day.

What digital transformation actually means for a small business

Small, simple and to the point

Bruce: People hear digital and transformation and assume it is big and complicated. It is not. It is small and to the point.

We are talking about automating a few things. Everything is typically on paper. Get it off paper and onto a form. People still keep the traditional rolodex. Instead, put your customer contacts into a CRM. AI is going to make all of that better, but start small, with the paper based and manual things. Get them online. Automate them.

Where to start without feeling overwhelmed

The fairy godmother question

Bruce: Ask yourself what you do every day that takes so much time and is so manual. If your fairy godmother turned up and you had one wish, what would you wish for to make that easier?

Filling out forms. Sending emails. Invoices. Those small things are where you start automating, and where you take the manual administrative burden off yourself.

The easiest AI wins right now

Automation and communication

Bruce: Take a new customer going into your CRM. Then you remember you have to create the recurring invoice. With one client, adding the customer details now automatically creates the recurring invoicing, creates the client folder with all its subfolders, and, assuming it is connected to something like QuickBooks Online, sends and receives depending on what you are doing with payments.

The other quick win is email templates. Traditionally you go into whatever system you use and think, I have to respond to this client this way, so I need this template, and you go searching for it. AI automation selects the right template and makes recommendations. Give me three ways I could respond to this customer to achieve this objective. Small things like that go a long way.

How to write a good prompt

Who it is, what to create, how to deliver it

Trevor: How do you write a good prompt if you are not technical?

Bruce: A well engineered prompt is not that different from giving clear expectations to an employee on a performance objective.

First, before you write anything, decide who you want the AI to be. Whether you are using GPT, Claude or Perplexity, give it a character. I want you to be my certified financial advisor, and I want you to do the following.

Second, what you want it to create. I want you to be my certified financial advisor and provide me with three strategies I can use to do this.

Third, how you want it delivered. Once you are done, complete it in a Google Sheet and email it to me at the end of every month.

So, in summary: who you want it to be, what you want it to create, and how you want it delivered. That is it, and it is a simple, powerful prompt.

The digital foundation

Three basic tools, before you add any AI

Bruce: Leaving AI out of it for a moment, a digital foundation means three things.

First, a good email system. Outlook, Gmail, any client that gives you calendar and email integration and a few tasks alongside it.

Second, a project management tool. It depends on the industry, but every industry has projects, projects have stages, and a big part of each stage is keeping up with the tasks that have to be completed. And these do not have to be expensive. In most cases there are good free options.

Third, and this one is significant, a password manager. Most people are either writing usernames and passwords in a little black book, or putting them in an Excel file or a Google Sheet. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the sheet is password protected, though from a cyber security standpoint it is not exactly right.

What matters here is convenience and efficiency. A good password manager saves your username and password and fills them in so you can sign in quickly. Most also handle two factor authentication, that six digit code people struggle to find. All of it exists to make things seamless.

Why any of this affects profit

Profitability is money and time

Bruce: Profitability is made up of two core components. Money, and time. If you save the money and use the time efficiently, profitability goes up.

A digital transformation is not there to make you look fancy. It is there to save you time. If you are doing these things and saving yourself the time, you are creating a more profitable process and a more profitable business. That is what it is all about.

Rolling out new tech without stressing your team

Run a pilot, and say the word pilot out loud

Bruce: As soon as people sense the boss is making them roll out a new tool and it is going to be a brutal experience, they reject it.

So take any process that is administratively burdensome and pilot it. A pilot means a small group, say three people in the sales team, for thirty days. And tell your team it is a pilot, and that you want to test whether it is worth implementing.

As soon as you say worth implementing, the team understands you are giving it a try and it may not be the system you end up with. You get a lot more from people that way. Through the pilot and at the end of it they give you feedback on what worked and what did not, and that speeds up adoption.

A live inventory sheet, and a third of a day back

What happens when the process lives in one person’s head

Bruce: We went through a process flow exercise with a client yesterday, walking through each step. We got to the project coordinator and asked what her position does at that point. She said she checks whether there is any inventory. If there is not, she goes and purchases. If there is, we move forward.

One of the machinists spoke up and said that is where the problem is, because it is not accurate, it is all in your head. I stopped there, because it is a perfect opening. Why keep it all in your head? She said she has been there fifteen years and knows her job extremely well. I asked what happens if she goes to Mexico for six weeks. Who does it then?

That is one problem. The other is that she simply cannot hold it all. By the time she gets to the machinist and asks for the job to start, it cannot, because there is not enough stock.

So we implemented a live sheet. A simple Google Sheet, connected with Zapier so that when this happens, that happens. Whenever material or inventory is used, it updates the quantity for that item. It creates a live inventory record the machinist can see and she can see. As soon as a new job comes through it prompts him that something needs ordering before the job can start, and she raises the purchase order.

That has taken out something like thirty to forty percent of the time wasted going back and forth because you think you have something in inventory and you do not.

The one thing to do today

Bruce: Sit back and ask what you do regularly that is manual and administratively burdensome. Back to the fairy godmother. If you had one wish, what would you automate and simply not do any more?

Think about the steps. Say there are five. If you did not have to do this every day when you came in, what would make it disappear? You will be surprised what you come up with, because at least nine times out of ten that process can be automated. Start there, ask whether it can be automated, and then ask what you need to do to make it real.