If you have been following my marketing automation journey, you know about the 2am failures and the frustrations.
That was the learning phase. This is now.
From One Workflow To Three
Once I got a basic handle on Make.com and I mean basic, I am still very much learning, something has shifted. I stopped seeing it as a tool I was fighting with and started seeing it as infrastructure. The kind that, once it works, just quietly runs in the background while you get on with the actual thinking work.
I run several ventures simultaneously. Each one has its own voice, its own audience, its own content needs. A children’s brand that needs warm, emotional storytelling across social platforms. An edtech project in development that requires a completely different tone — punchy, curious, globally relevant.
And Phoenix Creates, which is this — my marketing and consulting practice.
Three different businesses. Three completely different content personalities. All needing to show up consistently online without me manually doing everything.
So, I am my own guinea pig.
What It Actually Looks Like
For the children’s brand, I built a social content pipeline. Content gets created, formatted, and scheduled across platforms and I just review, edit and approve. I put in my big ideas and they help me sort my messy midnight thoughts – so I don’t need to bug my social media team and scare them with messages at 1am.
The voice stays consistent. The rhythm stays consistent. I just review and approve.
For the edtech project, I built a workflow that handles content processing and distribution across the team. What used to require multiple manual steps and a lot of back and forth now moves through a pipeline automatically. My development team — who I assumed were miles ahead of me on this — turned out to have fewer scenarios running than I do.
I am not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy that moment when I was told they had a sound of disbelief that their non-technical boss (they have a technical one thankfully) had so many different scenarios live and running.
For Phoenix Creates, I’m still building. Trying to figure out what works for me and my style and time.
What This Actually Saved
I am not going to give you a made-up productivity statistic. What I can tell you is this: the kind of work that used to eat my evenings — reformatting content for different platforms, editing the voice from some of the newer social team members — largely doesn’t anymore. That time went back into actual strategy work, making new plans, and giving the team more stress and work. Work that requires a human to do, to do items that move the business forward. I would not have thought of the new edtech idea if I was still editing the voice every night.
That is the real ROI of automation. Not a percentage. A reallocation of your most finite resource.
What I’d Tell Anyone Starting Out
Three things I wish someone had told me before I started.
- Have two windows open, and two screens. One loads an LLLM of your choice and the automation screen on the other window. Trust me, your neck, mouse and fingers will thank you that you don’t need to keep switching back and forth. SIDE BY SIDE!
You will also be infinitely faster when you have to copy errors into the LLM to ask them to teach you what in the world you broke. - Build for your own business before you build for anyone else. You will break things, learn why they broke, and own that knowledge in a way no tutorial can give you. I purposely did not ask my development team to help me figure this out. The struggle was the point. How else would I have figured out that Haiku and JSON do not play well together? The team also was shocked hat I now have basic knowledge of JSON… another win for me.
- Start with your most tedious task. Not your most complex one.
Find the thing that is not hard, just endlessly repetitive and annoying, and automate that first. The need to get it off your plate will be your guiding light at the end of the tunnel. And when that is done, ahh bask in your win.
Where This Is Going
I have also started poking around in n8n, which is a whole other story still brewing. And I am increasingly curious about how much further this can go. Not just for my own businesses but for the clients I work with.
Because here is the thing. If I can build content pipelines across three businesses with completely different voices and audiences, I can help you build one for yours.
That is where this is all heading.
If you are exploring automation in your own business and wondering where to start, I would genuinely love to hear where you are at. Drop a comment or reach out directly at reachus@phoenixcreates.co