My Make.com automation had me pulling my hair at 2 am, staring at a scenario that had failed. Again. For what feels like the umpteenth time. I’ve tried fixing it multiple ways. It is still not working. I said some words I won’t repeat here, closed my laptop with a resounding thock, poured myself a drink, and went to bed.
I gave up for that night.
There wasn’t a dramatic lightbulb moment that sent me down this path. No single client conversation that rattled me, no competitor that made me feel behind. It was more practical than that and maybe more urgent because of it.
It Wasn’t a Crisis. It Was Just Common Sense.
At Coeus Learning, we work with businesses on digital marketing, data, and training. Therefore, we needed to actually know what we were talking about. We believe in hands-on knowledge – in the weeds, hands-dirty kind of knowing, not just theory. We need to be able to connect the learning to real work scenarios.
And I am a firm believer that you cannot teach what you haven’t lived through. You can’t help a client build something you’ve never broken yourself.
So we decided to use ourselves as the test bed. Create and learn with our own workflows first. Figure out what automation can actually do for us, where it shines and where it falls flat; giving us that knowledge to be able to advise our clients and students.
The newest shiny toy, yes. But also a genuine necessity.
So I started building scenarios in Make.com.
For the uninitiated, Make.com lets you connect apps and automate tasks. We have been doing automation for a while now. I use project management tools that have automation built in for various purposes. We are now connecting our ecosystem together. Whether you live in Microsoft or Google, Meta or TikTok – these bring it all together, that everyone should talk to each other, with no or little human intervention.
Enter Make.com. Check Your Sanity At The Door
In theory, it’s brilliant. In practice, my early weeks looked a lot like: build something, run it, watch it fail, Google the error, try a fix, watch it fail differently, swear, drink more caffeine, repeat.
I was beyond frustrated at some points. But for those who know me, I am as stubborn as stubborn comes. And I was also weirdly curious every time something broke. Because the failure always pointed to a gap in my understanding and as a know-it-all, I wanted to, well, know it all. When you actually figure out the issue, you own that piece of knowledge. It will stick with you in a way, just watching a tutorial to understand it, never will.
It stuck in a way that watching a tutorial never quite does.
Being a beginner is uncomfortable when you’re used to being the person who knows things. You’re experienced in your field, you’re supposed to have answers, and suddenly you’re Googling basic stuff at 2 am and arguing with a workflow that refuses to cooperate.
The discomfort is the point; and we just need to get past it.
The moment that made it all worth it was the scheduling automation.
We have been manually copy-pasting and rescheduling tasks and various captions across our suite of tools for longer than I care to admit. The kind of work that’s not hard, just endlessly tedious. It is those brain numbing things that eats away slowly at your time, that you don’t even realise.
The Green Tick Approval
When the automation finally ran correctly, and I watched those green ticks appear one by one, my first reaction was genuine disbelief. I just stared at the screen.
OMG, it finally decided to work WITH me.
And then almost immediately after that: I can see exactly how to scale this across everything else. My brain works in mysterious ways I tell you.
Now? I’m looking for patterns everywhere so I can try to build another automation. Every repetitive task becomes a question: does this really have to be manual? Who knows what I am going to build next.
The Hard Truth About The Path
Here’s what I’d tell anyone who’s been putting this off.
You don’t need to be a developer. In fact, I purposely did not sit down with my development team to figure this out. They are working on even more complex things than I have done. So you do not need to be technical. You need to be willing to just be up late, consistently googling for answers, and feel like you are pretty stupid from time to time.
Because here’s the reality of where we are: automation and AI are not coming for your industry.
They’re already in it.
The question is whether you’re going to be someone who knows how to use them, or someone who’s always one step behind. As a training consultancy and as a marketer, we can’t afford to be the latter. And honestly? Neither can you.
I’m still going to be learning. There is so much more out there. And I am sure make.com is going to keep me building scenarios because I will fail first. But I will keep going. And every broken scenario is one step closer to being the people our clients call when they need to figure this out, too.
If you’re exploring automation in your own work or wondering where to even start. I’d love to hear where you’re at.