The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #109
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- A No-Fluff Guide for Entrepreneurs to Automate Boring Tasks
- I Don’t Care, It’s Not My Problem: Never Say This as a Leader
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
A No-Fluff Guide for Entrepreneurs to Automate Boring Tasks
Want to automate all those boring tasks? Great! But before you start, ask yourself a few questions about use cases, tools, and benefits.
Once a month, all entrepreneurs roll their eyes because they have to do their end-of-month tasks: Payroll, investor reporting, backups, and updating various statistics.
Why do entrepreneurs roll their eyes at such tasks? Because they have nothing to do with their core business, but they are still necessary. And those tasks involve repetitive, error-prone, and time-consuming manual work.
Time to automate! Learn how to free up time by automating everything with AI from your armchair. Here is how this founder reclaimed his life using AI for automation.
Wait, no. For automation to be effective, you have to know what to automate. And that’s harder than described in all the life-saving automation clickbait articles you find on the internet.
How did I find out what to automate? By doing the same boring work manually multiple times. When you start rolling your eyes when you have to do a repetitive manual task, start thinking about how to automate it.
Believe it or not, AI is not always the best way to automate your repetitive tasks. Let’s look at some possibilities using my real-life experience as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.
Scripts
The simplest way to automate boring tasks is to use shell scripts. Even if you have limited technical know-how, you can build shell scripts for tasks such as backing up all your various cloud tools. Instead of manually starting each monthly backup (and trying to remember how to do it for each of your cloud tools), you place the instructions for each tool in a shell script and run it from your console. Then you walk away to get a cup of coffee, and when you’re back, all your backup files are neatly downloaded to the local folder you specified when you started the script.
No AI. Just deterministic instructions packed into a single .sh file. However, AI is a great help if you are not a proficient scripter. You can use AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT to write the code for your shell script. This works because hallucinations are minimal if you know what you want to automate.
Workflows
Scripts are great for single-tool manual work. But let’s say you want to copy time sheets in Microsoft Excel, put them in a certain folder on your cloud file storage, and send instructions by email to each of your employees to update their time sheets. For such cases, it’s easier to use a workflow tool such as Microsoft Power Automate, n8n, Zapier, or Make.
The big advantage of those tools is that they come with pre-configured APIs and building blocks for most cloud tools, so it’s easy to set up multi-tool workflows, mostly without coding.
But their disadvantage is that it’s easy to get lost, as there are so many possibilities with all those pre-configured APIs and building blocks. Before you waste your time with all those possibilities, ask yourself again: What exactly do you want to automate? Have the courage to say no to all the possibilities those tools offer.
Agents
Scripts and workflows are great tools for deterministic work, where the instructions and expected outcomes are always the same. However, whenever a task requires a little research, AI agents can cover you.
Let’s say you want to scrape statistics from a website each month, grab the latest FX rates from official sources, or pull together expense reports ready to be imported into your accounting system. That’s the sweet spot for AI agents.
Luckily, most workflow tools I mentioned above now have pre-configured AI agents that you can integrate into those workflows.
Conclusion
If you feel that all the other entrepreneurs out there have automated all their boring tasks, stay calm. Speaking for myself, I have set up just a handful of automations, and I still do many tasks manually.
Automation is like every digital transformation project: Take it step by step. Don’t try to build a super workflow that covers 47 different use cases. Build small workflows for each use case; you can always expand and merge workflows in a second step.
Last but not least, before you invest time and money into automation, be sure what you want to automate.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
I Don’t Care, It’s Not My Problem: Never Say This as a Leader
If there weren’t any problems, there would be no need for leadership. And there is definitely no room for leaders who say it’s not their problem.
A few days ago, I boarded a train as I do almost every day. I took out my laptop and started working. Then, in the compartment behind me, I heard somebody talking loudly on the phone:
“Listen, I don’t care. It’s not my problem.”
I’m not squeamish, and I don’t get emotional very quickly. But this statement struck me like lightning, even though I didn’t know the context of that conversation.
I have been standing on the bridge for 15 years in different roles — as an entrepreneur, a military commander, and a parent — and I learnt one thing during this time: If there is a problem, it’s your problem. Leaders can’t walk away from the problem. You can’t hope that miraculously somebody else will take care of your problem, and you certainly can’t blame other people for the problem.
Entrepreneurs Care
I’ve been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years. The best way to describe entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster: Sometimes you feel invincible, and the next moment, you think your company will tank.
Investors are walking away or changing terms at the last possible moment. Or you walk away from a proposed term sheet because you care for your team.
New deals are delayed again and again, leaving your budget looking like a clueless bad joke.
Customers are dissatisfied and threaten to terminate your services.
A new war breaks out in a country where you are in the final negotiations with a new enterprise customer.
I’m no different from any other entrepreneur. I suffered many setbacks, disappointments, and bad news. But I always found a solution before it was too late. And never did I think to walk away from those difficulties or say that I didn’t care. I always stood firmly on that bridge, made decisions with uncertain outcomes, and changed the course at short-term notice if needed.
Military Commanders Care
Switzerland still has an active reserve system in its Armed Forces, and I am serving as an active reserve battalion commander. Earlier in my military career, I served as a commander of an airlift company. Although I was thankfully never deployed in wartime, I have witnessed occasions when not everybody returned home from a military operation: I led search-and-rescue operations at the tender age of 26.
And that’s the core difference between entrepreneurs and military commanders.
The worst that can happen to you as an entrepreneur is that your company goes bankrupt and you fail to pay your employees’ salaries.
The worst that can happen to you as a military commander is that your troops pay for your failures with their lives. Never forget that.
That’s why military commanders emphasize intelligence, planning, and contingency plans. Commanders’ sole purpose is to make sure they are prepared to bring back as many of their troops alive as possible, no matter what the enemy does.
And when you are standing at the frontline, and despite all the intelligence and planning, the enemy surprises you with something you haven’t foreseen: Do you think you can walk away as a commander, or declare that the enemy’s actions aren’t your problem? Do you think somebody will deliver that wonder weapon out of nowhere and save you?
You will need to find your way out of the situation yourself.
Parents Care
Many people might not consider parenting as a leadership role. Being the father of three kids, let me reassure you it is — and I’m not talking about the everyday challenges.
In my view, the true leadership role of parents is to give direction to the lives of their children. This starts with the values you pass on and continues with how you support your kids during their education. It’s about showing them all the possibilities life can offer while making sure that they understand that you cannot have everything at once. Like for entrepreneurs and military commanders, resources are limited in a family, and I spend a lot of time teaching my kids this core constraint in life.
Furthermore, I try to pass on my conviction that very often, it pays off to grit your teeth until the storm has passed and the skies have cleared.
I do this in the hope that my kids will never walk away from difficulties in their lives and take care to solve the problems at hand.
Conclusion
Leadership is difficult. Leaders are there to solve the hard problems. And in our troubled times, there are plenty of hard problems to solve.
If there weren’t any hard problems, there would be no need for leadership. And there is definitely no room for leaders who say that they don’t care and the problems aren’t theirs.
About Me
Growing a company in uncertain times is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management — no AI bullshit, no promos, just my thoughts in plain text.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains around Zermatt.
Do you like this perspective? Here is how you can get more:
📌 Read all my articles in one place — without paywall, without popups.
📌 Go deeper with my eBooks — practical guides for tough times.
Don’t like any of these options? You can also tip me for my writing.
