The Automation Stack We Use to Save 20+ Hours Per Week
Running a lean agency means every repeated task is a liability. Here's the exact stack we built to automate proposals, follow-ups, reporting, and client comms.
Four tools, twenty hours
Every automation in our stack falls into one of four categories: capture, route, communicate, report. Here's exactly what we use.
Capture
Every form on our site dumps into one shared inbox. Nothing else. No "the marketing form goes to HubSpot, the contact form goes to email, the demo form goes to Calendly." One inbox. One source of truth.
The savings here aren't about typing — they're about not losing things.
Route
The inbox has rules. Specifically: if budget > $10k, ping #sales-hot. If timeline < 30 days, ping the on-call estimator. If the message contains "wedding" or "rush," ping our project manager directly.
These rules took ninety minutes to write. They've routed thousands of leads since.
Communicate
Every status change in our project tool fires a templated client update. Not a generic "your project moved" email — a real, sentence-shaped update. The templates run on the same variables our project tool already has, so we wrote them once and they keep filling themselves.
Report
End of every week, a script pulls hours-by-client, jobs-by-stage, and revenue-by-source, drops them into a one-page PDF, and emails it to me Saturday morning. I read it with coffee.
What we don't automate
Anything that's a judgment call. Pricing. Scoping. Hiring. Saying no. The automation is there so we have the time and clarity to do those well.