Starting 2026 Smarter: Practical Automation Wins for Small Business Owners
This isn’t going to be one of those reflections on 2025 posts but instead an opportunity to look forward in order to start 2026 with the best possible intentions. Statistically speaking, New Year’s Resolutions don’t work for most of us. About 23% quit in the first week, and a large majority (around 80%) abandon them by February.
Which is why it can feel more useful to set achievable goals rather than long‑shot resolutions. One area, for instance, where many small business owners can improve productivity is around delegating what others, or other tools, can do, especially repetitive tasks.
How often do you write a social media post and then copy and paste it into different platforms, when there are tools such as repurpose.io, Buffer and Hootsuite that can do that for you? Instead of manually creating every single post from scratch, you can also hand off parts of the creative process itself to visual tools like Canva or Adobe Express, using templates so you are simply dropping in your brand colours, logos and a few lines of copy rather than designing everything from the ground up.
You can also automate a surprising amount of your marketing and follow‑up. Email providers like Mailchimp or ConvertKit let you create simple sequences that welcome new subscribers, send lead magnets and follow up with gentle reminders without you having to remember who to email next. Workflow tools such as Zapier or Make can then connect everything in the background – for instance, when someone fills in a form on your website, they can be added to your CRM, tagged for the right campaign and sent a tailored welcome email automatically.
In the full article, I break down how to set these systems up in practice.
