🧞♂️ New to Exponential Scale? Each week, I provide tools, tips, and tricks for tiny teams with big ambitions that want to scale big. For more: Exponential Scale Podcast | Scalebrate | Scalebrate Hub
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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – If your business feels busy but not scalable, this episode shows how a fuzzy ICP quietly kills leverage, margins, and momentum and how dialing it in changes everything.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master - You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) - Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Interview with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier - How Zapier scaled with leverage, automation, and focus instead of hiring and organizational bloat.
Data Entry Abolition: Automating Information Flow
How much time did you spend last week copying information from one system to another?
Be honest.
Copying customer emails from a form to your CRM. Manually logging sales in a spreadsheet. Updating project statuses in three different tools. Re-entering the same data because two systems don't talk to each other.
Data entry is the silent productivity killer.
It feels like work. It takes time. But it creates zero value.
And if you're running a microteam, you can't afford to waste hours on work a computer could do in seconds.
Here's the truth: 95% of manual data entry can be automated. Not with complex code. Not with expensive enterprise software. With simple tools most founders already have access to.
Today, I'm showing you how to eliminate data entry from your business and reclaim hours every week.
The Founder Who Spent 8 Hours a Week on Copy-Paste
Meet David, founder of a 4-person consulting firm helping e-commerce brands with Facebook ads.
David's business was growing. But he had a problem: He was drowning in admin work.
Every week, David spent:
2 hours manually logging leads from web forms into his CRM
1.5 hours copying client meeting notes from Google Docs into project management software
1 hour updating a master spreadsheet with revenue, expenses, and customer data
1.5 hours sending invoice reminders and tracking payments
2 hours updating client reporting dashboards with performance data from Facebook Ads Manager
Total: 8 hours per week.
That's a full workday. Every single week. Just moving data around.
David thought: "This is just part of running a business."
Wrong.
One weekend, David sat down and audited every manual data entry task in his business. Then he spent 4 hours setting up automations using tools he already had (Zapier, Google Sheets, his CRM).
Result: 8 hours/week of data entry → 30 minutes/week.
Time saved: 7.5 hours/week = 390 hours/year.
At David's billable rate of $200/hour, that's $78,000 worth of time he got back.
"I thought automation was complicated. Turns out, most of it was just connecting tools I already used."
Why Data Entry Is Killing Your Productivity (And You Don't Even Notice)
Here's the problem with data entry: It doesn't feel like wasted time.
You're "doing work." Checking things off. Staying busy.
But busy ≠ productive.
Data entry is fake work. It's the business equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back in.
Think about it:
Copying a lead's email from a form to your CRM? The computer already has that information. You're just moving it.
Updating your revenue tracker from Stripe? Stripe already knows your revenue. You're duplicating data.
Logging a new customer in three different systems? The information exists in one place. The other two should pull from it.
Every time you manually move data, you're doing a job a robot could do in 0.2 seconds.
And the costs compound:
Time cost: Hours spent on admin instead of strategy, sales, or product
Error cost: Humans make typos. Robots don't.
Opportunity cost: What could you build if you had 8 extra hours per week?
The goal isn't to do data entry faster. It's to eliminate it entirely.
The Data Entry Abolition Framework
Here's how to systematically eliminate manual data entry from your business: