Automation / Fractional Growth
Your team spends hours every week copying data between tools, sending the same emails by hand, and stitching together reports. That work should run itself. I build marketing automation that replaces the manual grind, using n8n, Zapier, email lifecycle, and AI agents, all inside a fractional growth engagement so the automation serves a strategy, not just a wishlist of integrations.
Most automation projects start from the wrong end. Someone lists every tool they want connected, a consultant wires them together, and six months later there is a tangle of brittle zaps nobody understands and half of them have quietly broken. Automation is not about connecting tools. It is about removing specific manual work that costs your team hours and your funnel conversions.
I start from the work, not the tools. We find the repetitive tasks and the leaks where manual handoffs drop the ball, then automate exactly those, on the lightest stack that does the job. Sometimes that is a single Zapier flow. Sometimes it is self-hosted n8n with AI agents. The decision follows the problem, not a vendor preference.
Marketing automation is not one tool. It is a stack matched to the job. Here are the layers I work across, each with its own deeper page.
Self-hosted workflow engine for teams that want to own their automation and data, with direct AI-agent control and no per-task tax. See n8n automation.
The fastest path for lean teams: connect your existing SaaS tools and remove manual handoffs without engineering effort. See Zapier automation.
Behavior-triggered flows in Klaviyo, Braze, or HubSpot that recover intent and bring customers back automatically. See email marketing.
Claude-powered agents for content drafting, research, classification, and reporting, embedded directly in your pipelines. See AI marketing.
Automation is a means, not the goal. As your fractional head of growth I own the strategy first, then automate the parts of it that should not need a human. That keeps the build tied to revenue rather than to a list of integrations, and it means the automation is maintained as your funnel changes rather than abandoned the day a freelancer leaves.
Enrichment, scoring, routing, and CRM sync so leads move through your funnel without manual copy-paste.
Dashboards and recurring reports that pull from one source of truth, so nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every Monday.
Behavioral flows across email and product that fire on what users do, wired into the same data as everything else.
Documentation and training so your team operates and extends the system, not a black box only the consultant understands.
Start from the manual work. I map where your team spends repetitive hours and where handoffs leak, then automate those exact points first. That sequencing puts the time savings where they are felt soonest.
Lightest stack that works. Zapier when speed matters and the tools already exist; n8n when you need ownership, scale, or AI control. The tool follows the problem.
Build for handoff. Every workflow is documented and named so your team can read and maintain it. Automation that only the builder understands is a liability, not an asset.
Tie it to a number. Each automation maps to a revenue or efficiency outcome, so we can tell which ones earn their keep and which to retire.
You have repeatable processes consuming real hours, growing volume, and tools that already hold your data. Automation compounds when there is a stable process to encode.
Your process is still changing weekly or you are pre product-market fit. Automating a moving target just freezes the wrong workflow. Find the repeatable shape first.
If a task is run once a quarter, automating it rarely pays back. I will tell you which work is worth encoding and which to leave manual.
This is not theory I read about. I run my own marketing operation on automation: content pipelines, client reporting, research, and AI-search monitoring all flow through n8n and Claude agents I built and debug in production. As a growth operator I led acquisition at Elementor from roughly $200K to over $20M ARR between 2018 and 2020 as it passed five million users, led growth at cnvrg.io ahead of its acquisition by Intel announced November 2020 (TechCrunch), and drove 337% MRR growth at Riverside. When I automate your marketing, I am handing over patterns I depend on myself. See the Claude Code SEO and GEO skill build story.
I find the repetitive manual work and funnel leaks in your marketing, then build systems that run those tasks automatically, on the lightest stack that does the job, tied to a revenue or efficiency outcome.
It depends on the job. Zapier for fast connections between existing tools, n8n for ownership, scale, and AI control. See Zapier and n8n.
No. That is how automation projects fail. I start from the manual work that costs hours and the handoffs that leak conversions, then automate exactly those, not a wishlist of integrations.
Both. Discrete builds run as AI marketing infrastructure projects; when automation is part of a broader growth role it folds into an operator engagement. See fractional CMO.
You keep a documented system your team can operate and extend. I build for handoff, so the automation is not a black box that breaks the day I leave.
Yes. I build dashboards and recurring reports that pull from one source of truth, so nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every week.
Yes. I embed Claude-powered agents for content drafting, research, classification, and reporting directly in the pipelines, the same way I run my own operation. See AI marketing.
A fixed-scope diagnostic sprint runs $6,000 to $8,000. Infrastructure builds start at $5,000 per month. A full embedded operator engagement runs $8,000 to $18,000 per month.
Automation can be advised on, built as a discrete infrastructure project, or owned end to end as part of a fractional operator role.
2-4 week audit of your growth stack plus a 90-day roadmap. Fixed scope, converts to a retainer.
Full fractional role with automation owned alongside the rest of growth. See fractional CMO.
Book a 15-min call. I will map your highest-leverage automation, recommend the lightest stack, and tell you what is not worth automating yet.