Most conversations about automation stay pretty abstract.
"You set it up, connect your tools, and save time." Not really helpful information when you're just starting out.
We want to go deeper into the specifics: which tasks, which tools, what the automation actually does, and whether it was worth building. Here's a look at what automation genuinely looks like inside Strictly Savvy to give you some inspiration.
Small, recurring tasks are the best place to start.
It's tempting to go after the big, complicated workflows first. But some of the highest-value automations for us are the ones handling the small things that have to happen on repeat daily, weekly, or monthly.
Daily sales pipeline summary: Every weekday morning an automation pulls a snapshot from our CRM - current leads, where they're sitting in the pipeline, how the month is tracking - and posts it into our internal chat. Before this existed, someone had to remember to log in and check, which is easy enough on a quiet day, but also easy to forget when the day is busy and meetings start early. Now it's just there, waiting, every morning.
The same logic applies to team reminders: Things like leave forms, timesheet checks, and end-of-month tasks. These were being sent manually by a team member, same wording every time, several times a week into our team chat channels. Automating this may have only saved a few minutes for each message but it also removed the mental load of remembering to do it, and freed that person to focus on other work that needed them.
Automations that make people feel noticed
One of the more meaningful automations we have running right now tracks client start dates. Every day, it checks the client database and flags any anniversaries happening that day (six months, one year, two years, and every year after). When one comes up, the relevant team members get a notification in chat so they can reach out and acknowledge it, along with the account manager that looks after that client.
Before this automation existed, anniversaries were tracked across a calendar and a CRM, which meant they sometimes got missed, and were reliant on the right person checking at the right time. Now nothing falls through the cracks and the team genuinely looks forward to celebrating with our clients.
It's important to remember that automation doesn't have to be purely operational. They can also help you show up for people consistently.
Automation that protects your team from unnecessary friction
A very specific example for you now: we track time by client at Strictly Savvy, and public holidays create a small but genuinely annoying problem with our timesheets. When a public holiday entry gets added to a timesheet, it breaks the pattern that lets people copy their client timers over to the next day. So after every long weekend, team members were manually re-entering all of their client timers (in some cases up to 20 separate timers).
The fix was an automation that detects when a public holiday entry has been added, looks at the day before it, and copies all the client timer rows across to the next working day. It runs at 5am so everything's ready when the team starts at 8:30. Nobody had to change how they work, and friction disappeared.
This is worth keeping in mind when you're thinking about what to automate: sometimes the best reason to build something isn't saving hours on a single task, but removing a small irritant that was quietly affecting the whole team.
Tailor your automations to how people actually work
Your automations should meet you where you're at, not totally disrupt your workflow. A great example of this is our Client Success Manager Brenna, who does most of her planning from her calendar and inbox rather than logging into a task management tool. Our CRM was generating tasks for her based on client touch points, but because she wasn't naturally working from that tool, this disrupted her natural flow of work.
The solution was to have the automation pull her task list from the CRM and email it to her every Monday morning at 8am. She gets the information in the place she's already looking, the tasks don't get missed, and she didn't have to change her working style to fit the system.
Remember this every single time you set up an automation: they should work for the way you actually operate, not the way you think you should operate. If the information ends up somewhere you're not looking, the automation hasn't really solved anything.
You might need AI inside the automation
Not every task can be handled by a straight data transfer between tools - some tasks need an extra layer of interpretation. Previously this might have meant a human needed to step in, but now we're able to use AI to keep the automation moving.
We have a monthly subscription cost summary automation that's a good example of this. The goal was to flag any subscriptions that were going to cost over $500 in total for the upcoming month - including ones where multiple team members each held an individual account, making the totals harder to calculate (e.g. we have multiple team members with Adobe accounts which total over the $500 threshold per month, but since they are separate accounts, we need to make sure the automation treats everything labelled 'Adobe' as one subscription).
The automation we set up pulls the data, sends it to a Claude AI module, which reads and interprets the information, does the adding up across multiple accounts, and writes a clear summary. That summary then gets sent by email to our office manager.
This was the first automation we built for our internal systems with an AI module inside it, and it's a good illustration of where AI fits best in a workflow - not replacing the human judgement at the end, but handling the step in the middle that would otherwise slow everything down.
What to look for when you're deciding what to automate
After building a range of automations across different parts of the business, a few patterns become clear.
The easiest wins are recurring tasks with consistent inputs: reminders, reports, data that gets entered in one place and needs to appear somewhere else. If you're doing the same thing in the same order on the same day each week, that's a great automation candidate.
Look especially at any point where information moves from one person to another, or from one tool to another. That handoff is where things get forgotten, entered incorrectly, or delayed. Automating it removes the fragility.
And if an automation isn't working quite right, it's worth asking whether you're in the right platform for that task before assuming the concept is wrong. The same automation can run more smoothly in a different tool, just because the native integrations are better.
Where to start
You don't need to build something complex to see results. Start with one task that happens on repeat and costs you a few minutes each time (or something that frustrates you every time you see it pop up!). Build something simple. and see how it feels when that task just happens without you. Then look for the next one.
You're not going to build a perfectly automated business overnight. But you will notice processes becoming a little less reliant on memory, manual effort, and things that could easily be missed.
