How much is your time worth? Here's a thought experiment: If you offered out your services—maybe that's editing, support, sales, engineering—at an hourly rate, what would you charge?

Now that you have a number, what are some of the tasks that take you the most amount of time? If you're part of a small business, there's a good chance data entry, like creating contacts or adding emails to a newsletter, swallow a few hours of your week. Those lost few hours mean even less time to dedicate to the core of your job.

Take those hours and multiple them by your new hourly rate. That's how much money you're spending on administrative or menial work. The financial planners at Quarry Hill Advisors went through this exercise themselves.

They found that they were losing anywhere from an hour to two hours each week. And for a team of two, time spent moving contacts around is time spent away from clients.

So when Kyle Moore, Certified Financial Planner and co-founder of Quarry Hill Advisors, discovered app automator Zapier, he immediately set out to mark these tasks off their to-do lists.

"Zapier saves me at least an hour per week, which at my billing rate of $200 per hour, has quite an impact on my bottom line!" explains Kyle.

Automate Contact Creation and Emails

Generating new clients is the fun part of any business—you stretch your marketing and sales legs and (potentially) create new revenue streams for your livelihood. But a big pitfall comes around once you need to organize the new clients in your client relationship manager (CRM) or newsletter. It's plain tedious. You're lucky if you have a CSV or spreadsheet to import; otherwise, you're stuck with copy and paste.

To manage their clients, Quarry Hill Advisors use Wealthbox CRM, a CRM made specifically for financial advisors. With tight security and integrations with online portfolio systems, it helps the Quarry Hill team work efficiently in their CRM. They just needed a faster way to add contacts to it. Enter Zapier.

With a few Zaps—our term for automated workflows—Kyle automates contact creation, building an email list, and sending introduction email. These three tasks used to contain an immense amount of mundane manual work—a lot of copy and paste. Now, Zapier instantly sends emails, contacts appear in Wealthbox, and Quarry Hill's newsletter list grows bigger every day, without a single touchpoint.

Let's see how they're doing all this:

It all starts with an appointment. To make scheduling easy, Quarry Hill Advisors use appointment app ScheduleOnce. When that new booking is created, Zapier takes the client's information and makes a contact in Wealthbox.

Once the contact exists in Wealthbox, another Zap runs to add them to a list in MailChimp. But that's not all: With a third Zap, Zapier creates an introductory email draft in Gmail. With a drafted email ready to go from Zapier for each new booking in ScheduleOnce, Kyle provides a personal touch before he ever gets on the call—and without having to write out each individual email.

"I don't need to remember to send this or look up the prospect's email address," Kyle says. "It's just there waiting for me to personalize and click send."

Want to put money back in your pocket and time on your clock? Try using some of Quarry Hill Advisors' Zaps in your workflows:

Check out some of our most popular Zaps featuring Gmail, ScheduleOnce, MailChimp, and Wealthbox, too:

Your Zaps don't have to be complicated to be helpful. Quarry Hill Advisors shows that with 3 simple Zaps, they're saving time and money every single week—enough time to get a full work-week back every year, plus a little extra. And if you take a little of that time and use it to improve your workflows, the results are undeniable.

"The investment of time on the frontend to create or find Zaps that automate tasks will yield incredible time savings in the future," says Kyle.

All images courtesy of Quarry Hill Advisors.