A 60-person services firm replaced their email-and-spreadsheet ops with a single automation layer. Here's what we built, what we cut, and what we learned along the way.
The client's operations team was running on email threads, Google Sheets and a calendar. Project intake, resource allocation, billing, and client reporting were all manual — and largely tribal. New hires took six months to be productive.
An audit estimated 240 hours per month of pure coordination work — at the cost of about $11,500/month in salary plus the slower decisions and missed handoffs that didn't show up on the spreadsheet.
The client had tried Zapier, but had abandoned it after a series of silent failures broke trust. Their CFO told us, on day one, that they'd already "done automation" and didn't want to do it again. We took it as a brief.
We picked the five highest-leverage workflows: project intake, resource allocation, weekly client status reports, billing reconciliation, and onboarding new hires. We rebuilt them on n8n (self-hosted, single-tenant) with a small custom Next.js admin app that gave the ops team a real cockpit.
Crucially, we built a single "watcher" service that monitored every automation, alerted the team in Slack the moment anything failed, and surfaced a dashboard of which automations were saving how many hours per week. The watcher was as important as the automations — it's what turned distrust into adoption.
The five workflows shipped over six weeks. Hand-over and a documented runbook took the final two. We're now on a $1,800/month retainer doing tuning and net-new automations — typical pattern.
We'd written off automation. Then they shipped the watcher dashboard and we finally saw what was actually saving us time. We've doubled the scope twice since.
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