Workflow automation.
Marketing operations,
on autopilot.

Workflow automation is the set of processes that move data, trigger actions, and orchestrate tools without a human pressing buttons. The practical version: a lead arrives in HubSpot, gets enriched with Clearbit company data, scored against your ICP rules, routed to the right salesperson by territory, and a Slack ping fires with the full context — all in under three seconds, with no one touching a keyboard. We build those pipelines on N8N (open-source, self-hostable, vendor-neutral) and integrate them with whatever stack you already run.

Three reasons. One: cost — Zapier and Make charge per task, which becomes painful at volume; N8N self-hosted has zero per-task cost. Two: vendor lock-in — Zapier owns your workflows; with N8N you own the JSON workflow files and can move them in an hour. Three: capability — N8N supports custom JavaScript/Python nodes, SQL queries, webhook receivers and senders, and complex branching logic that Zapier simplifies away. We also build with Make.com and Zapier when a client already runs them and the simpler tool is the right call. We are not religious about the platform; we are religious about the pipeline working in eighteen months without three people maintaining it.

Five categories cover ~90% of engagements. Lead routing — capture, enrichment, scoring, assignment, notification. Reporting — multi-channel data pulls (GA4, Search Console, Meta Ads, Google Ads, HubSpot) into a unified weekly dashboard or PDF. Content pipelines — brief-to-publish workflows with approval steps, scheduled distribution, social cross-posting. Monitoring — uptime, rank tracking, brand-mention alerts, competitor change detection. Data sync — keeping a CRM, an analytics tool and a finance tool consistent without manual exports. Outside of those, custom builds for specific operational pain.

Anything that requires nuanced judgment, anything customer-facing where the brand voice matters, and anything that sits behind a brittle API that will break with no notice. We turn down automation work for sales-call note-taking (fails on accents and overlapping speakers), for cold-outreach personalisation (the AI-written variant is detectable and burns sender reputation), and for any process where the automation cost would exceed three years of someone doing the work manually for two hours a month. Honest scoping saves both of us.

Lead-routing pipeline with three integrations and basic enrichment: 5 to 10 working days. Multi-source reporting dashboard with eight data sources and a weekly PDF render: 10 to 15 working days. Content publishing pipeline with approval flow and social cross-posting: 8 to 12 working days. Custom builds with bespoke logic: scope-dependent, typically 15 to 30 working days. We deliver in iterations — version one in week two, refinements in weeks three and four, sign-off in week four or five.

Project pricing per workflow. Lead routing builds £1,500–£3,000. Reporting dashboards £2,500–£5,000 depending on data-source count. Content pipelines £3,000–£6,000. Custom builds quoted on scope. Most clients also retain us for monitoring and updates at £450–£950/month, which covers API changes, error handling, and small enhancements. Self-hosting on a VPS adds £15–£40/month in hosting cost; cloud-hosted N8N runs £20/month for typical usage.

API changes are the leading cause of automation rot, and the way to survive them is twofold. First, build with explicit error handling — every step logs success or failure to a monitoring channel, so a broken Meta Ads API call surfaces in a Slack alert within an hour rather than going silent for three weeks. Second, the monitoring retainer (£450–£950/month) covers the ongoing maintenance: API deprecations, schema changes, auth token refreshes. Without a maintenance plan, any automation has roughly a twelve-month half-life. With one, two-year-old workflows still run.

Existing stack, almost always. We build on top of HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Airtable, Notion, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Discord, Stripe, QuickBooks, and most of the standard SaaS catalogue. The only time we suggest migration is when an existing tool is fundamentally incompatible with reliable automation — usually because it lacks a stable API, lacks webhooks, or charges per-API-call rates that make automated use commercially absurd. That happens in roughly one in ten engagements.