"If I never have to do any more admin for the rest of my life, that would be amazing." A retur..."If I never have to do any more admin for the rest of my life, that would be amazing." A retur...
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"If I never have to do any more admin for the rest of my life, that would be amazing."
A returning client told me that on our discovery call.
She came back because client admin was eating her week. She was sending invoices and onboarding forms by hand... while still running everything else in the business.
She also had a social media manager posting for her. But nobody was checking if any of it worked.
No one tracked how many leads came in. And no one knew how many of those leads became clients.
So she was putting in the effort without knowing what it gave back.
But that's not her fault. She had people doing the work. She just didn't have anyone looking at the whole picture.
So the admin kept piling up, and the marketing ran without a scoreboard.
That's what happens when every task has an owner but the system doesn't.
And that's why it helps to have someone who reads the numbers and tells you what to fix first.
Because once you can see where the business is leaking, you stop guessing. And you finally know where your time and money should go.
Hot take: most businesses don’t need more marketing.
They need fewer leaks.
More leads won’t fix a broken follow-up process.
More content won’t fix a disconnected customer journey.
More AI tools won’t fix a workflow nobody understands.
And more automation won’t fix a bad process — it will just make the bad process run faster.
The work I enjoy most starts with a different question:
Where is the system actually breaking?
Sometimes it’s between marketing and sales.
Sometimes it’s inside the CRM.
Sometimes nobody owns the next step.
Sometimes valuable intent is there — but no one is recognizing it.
That thinking is behind a lot of the work I’ve been building lately: marketing operations, CRM workflows, automation systems, investor/customer journeys, event marketing, and digital growth.
I recently added several new projects and strategic case studies to my Contra portfolio — including an Investor Growth System exploring how content, intent signals, CRM, automation, and human relationships can work as one system.
My favorite principle from the project:
Automation should prepare the conversation — not replace the relationship.
If you work in marketing, operations, or growth, I’m curious:
What’s the biggest “leak” you see inside businesses today?
What if every new lead could be handled before you even open your inbox? ⚡
This AI-powered workflow turns a new email inquiry into a structured, ready-to-handle lead — automatically.
A new inquiry arrives → AI extracts the important details → Airtable/CRM is updated → the response goes through optional human approval → a personalized email is sent → Notion is updated → the team gets notified in Slack → performance data is collected for reporting.
The goal isn't to remove people from the process. It's to remove the repetitive work around them.
This type of workflow can be customized for B2B companies, SaaS businesses, agencies, real estate, e-commerce, recruitment, consulting, customer support, healthcare, finance, education, and other service businesses.
Already know what you want to automate? → Send me your current workflow and I’ll map out how we can automate it.
Still doing repetitive work manually? → Tell me the task that consumes your team’s time, and I’ll help identify what can be automated.
I'd use the human approval step to capture corrections, not just a yes/no decision. If a reviewer changes the extracted lead details, does the workflow update Airtable and the reporting record before sending the email?