Onboarding, invoicing and approvals, automatedA Canadian PR agency
$30,264a year of founder time, sitting inside the admin nobody had automated.
- 6Platforms holding client data, none of them talking
- Up to 2 weeksFrom contract signed to a client actually set up
- 36%Of the growth gap, going into friction. Found
- 19 hrsA month projected back, 17.5 of them the founder's
The challenge.
Six platforms held the client data, none of them talked to each other, and everything still had to pass through one person, by phone, before a client ever saw it.
The founder handles all client acquisition, delivery, invoicing and quality review personally, with part time contractors alongside. Nine or more tools in the stack, six of them holding client data.
Signing a contract triggers nothing. No folder, no invoice, no onboarding email. The same contact details get typed into three separate systems. A previous automation attempt was abandoned after it started producing duplicate folders.
So onboarding runs by hand. The welcome email copied from a template and sent when there is a gap, sometimes days after signing. The accounting profile built from scratch every time, name, address, phone, line items. More than an hour per client, and up to two weeks from signature to a client actually being operational.
Invoicing runs on memory. There is no fixed date, so invoices go out when the founder gets to them, sometimes a week late, which pushes the payment into the following month and makes cash flow a guess. Bank transfers have to be marked as paid by hand, so clients who have already paid keep receiving reminders.
Approvals compress the month. Some clients take a week or more to approve content, which pushes execution into the last two weeks. Two or three smaller clients do not use the project tool at all, so a coordinator screenshots every piece and messages it individually. Nothing reminds anyone that an approval is overdue. And revision rounds are not counted, so scope creep is invisible right up until it is a fee conversation nobody can evidence.
Then the quality gate, which is a person. Every piece of team output passes the founder. Each team member runs their own AI setup without the client's brand book or strategy deck, so one client can sound like a different company depending on who wrote that week. There are no written processes, so the process is the founder.
$30,264 a year of that time, identified. 36% of the gap between where the agency is and where it wants to be.
If that shape looks familiar, the consultation is where we go and find yours.
Start with the free consultationWhat we built.
Five workflows, and the first one starts at the signature.
Signing fires a webhook that creates the accounting profile, the storage folder and the project, and sends the personalised onboarding email, all within minutes. The details are entered once and flow everywhere from there, which is also what removes the duplicate folder problem the earlier attempt created.
Invoicing gets a calendar instead of a memory. Retainers charge automatically on a fixed date. Variable billing runs on a structured trigger on the 25th. Payment events sync, so a client who has paid stops being chased. Who owes what is a view rather than a reconstruction.
Sales gets a five stage pipeline with scheduling in the same platform, an automated follow up sequence on days 3, 5, 8 and 12 after a proposal goes out, and a nudge at 72 hours and day 5 for the leads that go quiet.
Approvals get automated client reminders at 24 hours and a day past due, and an email workflow that replaces the screenshot and message routine for the clients who live outside the project tool. Revision rounds become a tracked field, so scope creep is visible while it is happening rather than afterwards. And shared client specific AI configurations, preloaded with each client's strategy deck and brand book, give one client one voice regardless of who is writing.
Then a first pass quality gate that is not a person. Moving a task to ready for review sends the content to an AI along with that client's own quality reference, which checks grammar, spelling, brand voice and specification. It either advances the task to the founder with a confirmation, or returns it to the author with specific feedback before the founder spends a minute on it.
The results.
The founder stops being the bridge every piece of work has to cross.
Projected against the diagnosis: about 19 hours a month back, and 17.5 of those are the founder's, freed from manual onboarding, invoice chasing, follow ups, pipeline management and the first read of everything. The coordinator gets the other 1.5 back from delivering content by hand.
Payback projected at two and a half to three months.
The diagnosis is the evidenced part, and it sits almost entirely inside one person's time.
That is the finding worth sitting with. An agency where every piece of work waits for the same person has a ceiling, and the ceiling is that person's calendar.
I didn't realize how much time we were spending and losing from doing manual tasks that could be automated using AI tools and simple integrations. From onboarding to customer relationship management, task management and financing, I'm so happy we have a clear roadmap of how to better integrate AI tools to automate mundane tasks and help us improve our business productivity and volume.
Tell us what yours looks like.
Bring us the part of your business that runs on someone remembering. We will tell you what it would take to build it out.