Five workflow automations every 20-person business should already have.

The cost of "we just do that manually"

Here's the math we run with every new client. Take the five most common manual tasks your team does. Multiply average minutes per task × times per week × number of people doing it × $50/hour fully-loaded labor. The number is always larger than the cost of fixing it.

The wins below are the ones we deploy in week one. They're not glamorous. They're cheap. They each save a few hours a week. Stack five and you've bought back a full work-week per month, every month, forever.

1. New-client intake → CRM → folder structure → Slack alert

Trigger: a new entry in your contact form or Typeform.

Steps: create the contact in your CRM (HubSpot/Pipedrive), generate a SharePoint or Drive folder from a template, post a formatted message in your #new-leads Slack channel with the key fields and a link, assign a sales owner based on round-robin or territory.

Time saved: ~5 hours/week for a 5-person sales team. Also kills the "did anyone follow up with that lead?" question forever.

2. Invoice paid → thank-you email + onboarding kickoff

Trigger: payment status flips to "paid" in QuickBooks/Stripe.

Steps: send a personalized thank-you email, create the project in your PM tool, schedule a kickoff calendar invite, drop a Loom welcome video link.

Time saved: ~3 hours/week, plus the client experience boost is enormous. Clients tell you it feels "high-end" — it's actually a 12-step Make.com flow you built once.

3. Daily ops report — auto-generated, auto-emailed

Trigger: 8am daily.

Steps: pull yesterday's numbers from QuickBooks/Stripe + your ticketing tool + your PM tool, format them in a clean HTML email, send to leadership.

Yesterday at Acme · Mar 14
Revenue:        $12,400  ▲ 8% wow
Tickets:        14 closed / 3 open
New leads:      6  (4 inbound, 2 referral)
Top client:     Riverside Group
Risk flag:      Project Aurora overdue 2d

Time saved: 2–4 hours/week for whoever was building this in a spreadsheet. Plus leadership actually reads it now because it's in their inbox at 8:01am.

4. New hire → accounts, hardware, training, day-1 calendar

Trigger: HR creates a row in your "new hires" Notion or Google Sheet.

Steps: provision M365 account, add to security groups, order laptop via Amazon Business or your reseller, send onboarding form, schedule day-1 meetings, send manager a checklist.

Time saved: 4 hours per hire. For a 20-person company hiring 8 people a year, that's 32 hours saved annually — and zero "where's my laptop?" Slack messages on day one.

5. Support ticket triage with AI

Trigger: new email to support@.

Steps: small LLM (running on your data, not exposed publicly) classifies urgency and category, auto-tags in your ticketing system, drafts a suggested response for human review, escalates anything urgent to Slack.

The goal isn't to remove humans from support. It's to remove the 90 seconds of triage that happens 200 times a week.

Time saved: 6+ hours/week for a small support team, and dramatically faster first-response on urgent tickets. This is the one most clients feel the most.

What it actually costs

For all five built, deployed, documented and handed off:

• Tooling: $20–$50/mo total (n8n + maybe one premium connector)
• Build: 30–50 engineering hours, one-time
• Total: typically $4K–$8K flat-fee, plus the small monthly tool spend

For a 20-person business saving ~20 hours/week of busywork, payback is usually inside 90 days.

Where to start

Pick the one that hurts most this week. Build it. Deploy it. Watch your team's reaction. Then do the next one.

If you'd rather have someone audit your stack and build the top five for you, that's a one-week engagement. We'll scope it, build it, document it, and hand it off so your team owns the workflow forever.