Workflow automation.
Marketing operations,
on autopilot.

Most automation work falls into one of five buckets. Each has a different ROI shape, a different risk profile, and a different hand-off requirement. We start every engagement by figuring out which category your problem actually sits in, because misdiagnosis is the leading cause of automation projects that ship and get abandoned.

Lead routing

The pattern: a lead arrives via a form, an inbound email, an inbound call, or an event registration. We capture, enrich (Clearbit, Apollo, or a custom data source), score against your ICP rules, route to the right salesperson by territory or specialism, and notify in real time. The lift is typically 20 to 40% in lead-to-meeting conversion because high-fit leads stop waiting in a queue, and the team stops manually triaging hundreds of low-fit form submissions a month.

Multi-source reporting

The pattern: data lives in eight different SaaS tools and the weekly report involves an analyst opening every dashboard, copying numbers, and building a deck or spreadsheet. We pull the data via APIs into a single warehouse or directly into a dashboard tool (we usually pick Looker Studio for clients already in Google Workspace, Metabase for clients who want SQL freedom), schedule the render, and email the PDF or share the live link every Monday morning. The analyst now spends ten minutes QAing instead of three days assembling.

Content pipelines

The pattern: a brief gets written in Notion or Airtable, an approver signs off, the content gets published to a CMS (WordPress, Webflow, a headless build), and cross-posted to LinkedIn, X, sometimes Instagram and a newsletter. We automate the entire flow from approval to publish with retry logic on every cross-post (the platform APIs fail more than you think) and a single source-of-truth status that tells the team where every piece is in the queue.

Monitoring

The pattern: the things you want to know about (downtime, ranking drops, competitor changes, brand mentions, review velocity) need to surface fast. We build alert pipelines that watch your priority signals, dedupe noise, and push only material changes to a Slack or email channel. The discipline is mostly in the dedupe layer — most monitoring builds fail because the alert volume becomes wallpaper inside two weeks.

Data sync

The pattern: a customer record exists in your CRM, your billing tool, and your support tool. They drift out of sync because a salesperson updated one and not the others. We build a bidirectional sync (or one-directional with a clear source of truth) that keeps the records consistent, with conflict-resolution rules for the inevitable edge cases. This work is unglamorous and almost infinitely valuable, because it is the foundation that lets every other automation actually trust the data it reads.

N8N is our default platform for new builds. It is open-source, self-hostable on a £20/month VPS, supports custom JavaScript and Python nodes for logic that goes beyond drag-and-drop, has webhook receivers and senders, runs workflow JSON files you can version-control, and (most importantly) does not charge per task, which is the variable cost that makes Zapier and Make.com untenable at volume.

We build with Make.com when a client already has substantial workflows there and migration cost exceeds the benefit, or when the client's team is not technical enough to maintain self-hosted infrastructure. Make is excellent for teams that prioritise non-technical maintainability over cost efficiency.

We build with Zapier only when an integration we need is uniquely supported there and not on N8N or Make. That happens roughly once a year. When it does, we build the Zapier component as small as possible and orchestrate the rest in N8N to limit the per-task billing exposure.

We build directly with code (Node.js, Python) when the workflow is high-volume, latency-sensitive, or involves logic too complex for any visual tool. A custom Node.js function on a serverless platform (Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda) costs less and runs faster than the same logic in a workflow tool, and we go that route when the maintenance cost is justified.

Automation projects that fail almost always fail at scoping. Three categories of work we deliberately decline:

• Anything requiring nuanced judgment. Sales-call note-taking fails on accents and overlapping speakers. Cold-outreach personalisation that passes for AI-written today fails for human-written tomorrow. Brand-voice copywriting at scale produces output that is detectable and burns sender reputation. We do not build these.
• Anything behind a brittle API. Some SaaS platforms publish APIs that change without warning, rate-limit aggressively, or charge per-call rates that make automated use commercially absurd. We catalogue the worst offenders and refuse to build production workflows on them, because the maintenance cost exceeds the value.
• Anything where automation is more expensive than the manual process.If a process takes someone two hours a month, the automation cost should not exceed three years of that effort. We do an honest ROI calculation on every proposed workflow before quoting, and decline the work if the numbers do not add up.

The discipline of saying no to bad automation work is the difference between a six-month engagement that delivers compounding value and a £15,000 invoice attached to four scripts gathering dust on a server.

Workflow automation is project-priced because the scope and duration are bounded by the integration count and logic complexity. Indicative pricing:

• Lead-routing pipeline (3 integrations, basic enrichment, scoring, notification): £1,500–£3,000.
• Multi-source reporting dashboard (8 data sources, scheduled PDF, live Looker/Metabase view): £2,500–£5,000.
• Content publishing pipeline (brief-to-publish with approval and 3 cross-post channels): £3,000–£6,000.
• Monitoring + alerting build (uptime, rank, brand mentions, dedupe layer): £1,500–£3,500.
• Data sync build (bidirectional, 2-3 systems, conflict resolution): £2,500–£5,000.
• Custom builds: scope-quoted, typically £4,000–£12,000.

Most clients also retain us at £450–£950/month for ongoing maintenance — covering API deprecations, schema drift, auth refresh, error handling improvements, and small enhancements. This is the line item that turns a workflow with a twelve-month half-life into one that runs reliably for years.

Self-hosting on a VPS adds £15–£40/month in infrastructure cost. Cloud-hosted N8N runs around £20/month for typical small-team usage. We size and recommend hosting on the kick-off call.