Five Things I Automated So I Could Run This Without Hiring Anyone

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

I run BL AdWorks as one person. That only works because the parts of the week that do not need judgment do not get my attention. Every one of these runs without me now.

I use n8n for most of it, self-hosted, because I would rather own the workflow than rent it. Zapier does the same job with less setup and more monthly cost. Either is fine.

1. What happens when someone fills out a form

The manual version is that you check your inbox eventually.

Mine: the form submission hits an n8n webhook, which pushes the person into Klaviyo, tags them with where they came from, and starts the welcome sequence. First email is out before I know the form was submitted.

Speed matters here and you will see enormous claims about how much. I am not going to repeat a number I cannot source. The defensible version is simpler: someone who filled out a form five minutes ago is still thinking about you, and someone who filled it out yesterday is not.

2. Chasing invoices

The manual version involves you feeling weird about it and then not doing it.

The automated version sends a reminder before the due date, on the due date, and at intervals after, escalating in tone without you having to write any of them. You only appear in person for the genuinely overdue.

QuickBooks, FreshBooks and Xero all do this out of the box. Turn it on. It is the highest-value checkbox in your accounting software and most people never find it.

3. Posting

Batch the month in one sitting, schedule it, stop thinking about it.

The saving is not really the typing. It is not carrying “I should post something” around in your head for four weeks, and not context-switching into a social app (which is designed to keep you) every time you do.

Buffer, Later and Hootsuite all do this. Their pricing changes often enough that quoting it here would just make this post wrong in six months, so go look.

4. The weekly report

The manual version is logging into four dashboards, exporting four spreadsheets, and pasting numbers into a fifth.

Mine pulls from the sources on a schedule and lands a formatted summary in front of me Monday morning. I read it for five minutes instead of building it for two hours.

Looker Studio does this free and connects to GA4, Google Ads, Sheets and BigQuery. If you need something Looker will not do, n8n into a Google Sheet on a cron is the escape hatch.

5. Knowing you are about to run out of stock

The bad version of this is finding out from a customer.

Set a threshold. When inventory drops under it, a message arrives in Slack. Shopify has low-stock alerts built in; WooCommerce has the threshold under Settings, Products, Inventory. For anything more specific, the inventory API into Slack is an afternoon of work.

Where to start

Whichever one wasted the most of your time last week. Not the most impressive one, the most annoying one.

And build the ugly version first. A workflow that runs is worth more than the elegant one you are still designing. Every automation I run started as something embarrassing that worked.

One caution

Automating a bad process gives you a bad process that runs faster and more often. Before you wire it up, check that the thing is worth doing at all. The best automation I ever built was deleting a report nobody read.