About Automation Thingies

One of the most common complaints by business owners (certainly ones that have been in business a while) is that they are always busy. And usually too busy.

A business owner will often say they are overwhelmed, exhausted, and never have time to do everything.

Now there clearly is an issue with prioritisation, and if you’ve been in business a while, you know exactly what I mean. Sometimes it’s not obvious about what you need to do next (this book is a good place to start).

However, I’m sure there are things that you do, where you ask yourself: “there must be a way to make this easier, or automate this?”

Often, there is.

• Perhaps there are things that are incredibly dull, and they could be automated?
• Perhaps there are tasks that are just not getting done every day or week, and can be automated?
• Maybe there are tasks that drive you (or your team) nuts, and you want it done more quickly?
• Are you spending ages getting data together for your KPIs?
• Perhaps you have a hunch that if something was automated, you’d have an opportunity to wow your clients?
• Maybe you want a way to avoid having to update 200, 300, 1000 pages on your website, and need something to make that easier?

Dan began tinkering with the WordPress platform back in 2005. Obviously, since then, WordPress has become incredibly popular in that time.

In 2010, Dan began to offer a range of WordPress-specific development services for business owners on a freelance basis. It wasn’t long after that when Dan created WP Doctors as a full-time business. Dan and the team have helped hundreds of business owners with WordPress-based solutions over the years, including bespoke themes, plugins and consulting.

Just between the period of time between 2020 and 2022, over 85% of the work that WP Doctors was doing was based around automating tasks for business owners. Due to this trend towards leveraging time through custom automations, we realised that there was an opportunity to better serve business owners with automation-focused software and bespoke coding.

From talking to clients, there were common problems that needed solving.

Rather than try to offer something to everyone (i.e. being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’), we decided to focus on just 4 specialisms to become true experts in those respective areas.

The 4 specialisms we chose include:

• Automated PDF creation,
• Client Portals,
• KPI Dashboards
• and WordPress automations

And of course, we create offer bespoke automation services outside these specialisms.

So that’s why we’ve evolved to create a business focussed specifically on automation.

Most business owners are not technically minded, so have no idea of where to begin (although some might look to Zapier for answers).

We’re focussed on offering bespoke automations, the things that tools like Zapier can’t quite do. But you might not know if existing tools can do what you need, so we’ll help you with that too.

If you can and want to create your own automations, then please do!

We understand and realise that some business owners are very comfortable getting involved with technology and will happily invest their time using them.

We’re here for those who want help and to have someone who can give them pragmatic advice on how to automate key processes. The business owners who don’t want to get involved in the techie headaches and want to be looked after.

Ah, well this one is really simple.

Many of our clients refer to their automations as ‘things’, ‘thingies’ and ‘thingamajigs’. So the name stuck!