A simple way to find it: track where the week goes for five working days. The tasks that keep showing up, that no one would miss, and that follow a clear pattern are your starting list. Usually it is reporting, manual data entry, follow-up reminders, and keeping records tidy. None of these grow the business, but all of them eat it.
Resist the urge to automate the interesting, complicated stuff first. Those projects are slow, fragile, and hard to trust early on. The unglamorous tasks are where you build momentum and proof.
We treat automation as infrastructure, not a one-off trick. Map the process, automate the obvious wins, put a human review point where judgment matters, and name who owns it. Done this way, a five-person team starts moving like a much larger one without adding headcount.