If you're running a small business, chances are you're spending hours every week on tasks that could run themselves. The good news? You don't need a massive budget or a dedicated engineering team to start automating. Here are five workflows that deliver immediate, measurable results — and you can set most of them up in a single afternoon.
1. Client Onboarding
The moment a new client signs up or a deal closes in your CRM, a cascade of tasks needs to happen: welcome email, contract sent, project folder created, internal team notified, kickoff call scheduled. Doing this manually means things get missed and clients wait.
The automation: When a deal moves to "Closed Won" in your CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.), automatically trigger a sequence that sends the welcome email, generates a project folder in Google Drive or Dropbox, creates a task list in your project management tool, and sends a Slack notification to your team.
One of our clients cut their onboarding time from 3 hours to under 10 minutes — and their new clients started commenting on how "smooth and professional" the experience felt.
2. Invoice and Payment Follow-Ups
Chasing invoices is nobody's favorite task. It's awkward, it takes time, and it often falls through the cracks — leading to cash flow issues that compound quickly.
The automation: Connect your invoicing tool (QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Stripe) to an automation that sends polite payment reminders at day 3, day 7, and day 14 after the due date. Escalate to a more direct message or internal alert if payment hasn't been received after 30 days. Mark the invoice as "needs attention" in a shared spreadsheet or dashboard.
This simple automation alone can improve your average collection time by 40% or more.
3. Lead Capture and Qualification
When someone fills out a form on your website, what happens next? If the answer is "I check my email and follow up when I get a chance," you're losing leads. Studies show that responding within 5 minutes makes you 21x more likely to qualify a lead compared to waiting 30 minutes.
The automation: When a form submission comes in, immediately send a personalized acknowledgment email ("Thanks, [Name]! Here's what happens next…"). Score the lead based on form data (company size, budget range, service interest). Route high-value leads directly to your calendar booking link. Add all leads to your CRM with proper tags and source attribution.
4. Social Media Scheduling and Repurposing
Creating content is hard enough without also having to manually post it across every platform at the optimal time. And what about all those blog posts, podcast episodes, or videos sitting in your archive?
The automation: When you publish a new blog post, automatically generate social media snippets (or use AI to create them), schedule posts across LinkedIn, X, and Facebook at optimal times using Buffer or Hootsuite, and create a follow-up post for 7 and 30 days later to re-share the content. You can even use AI to rewrite the same core message in different formats — thread, carousel text, short-form caption.
5. Weekly Reporting and Dashboards
How much time does your team spend pulling data from different tools, formatting it into a spreadsheet, and emailing it around? For most businesses, the answer is "too much."
The automation: Pull key metrics from your tools (Google Analytics, CRM, ad platforms, accounting software) into a single Google Sheet or Airtable base. Format the data into a clean summary. Send a Slack message or email to leadership every Monday morning with the key numbers and trends. Bonus: use AI to add a brief natural-language summary of what changed week-over-week.
Getting Started
You don't need to automate all five at once. Pick the one that costs your team the most time or causes the most friction, and start there. Most of these can be built using tools like Zapier, Make, or n8n — paired with the apps you're already using.
If you're not sure where to start, or you want someone to build it right the first time, we'd love to help. We offer a free workflow audit to identify your highest-impact automation opportunities.