5 Automations to Start

You just raised your Series A. The team is about to triple. Engineering has six new hires starting next month. Sales is finally getting traction. And every single one of those new hires is going to ask the same questions, do the same things, and accidentally break the same processes that worked when you were eight people.

This is the moment automation pays the highest dividends. Not after the team is big enough to feel chaotic — before. Get the foundational workflows in place now and your Series A team feels organised. Wait six months and you're rebuilding processes around bad habits.

Here are the five workflows I'd build first, in order.

1. New hire onboarding

Every Series A hire is going to do a version of: provision accounts, get added to channels, schedule intro meetings, fill out paperwork, get an org chart, set up a laptop.

The manual version takes ~6 hours of someone's time per hire. The automated version takes 6 minutes at offer-acceptance and zero time after.

Build it like this:

• Trigger: HR signs offer in your ATS

• Step 1: Provision Google account, Slack, GitHub seat, Notion access

• Step 2: Schedule day-1 intro with manager, day-2 with team, week-1 cross-functional

• Step 3: Order laptop, send to home address

• Step 4: Add to relevant Slack channels, GitHub teams, on-call rotations

• Step 5: Send welcome packet with org chart, mission doc, first-week guide

ROI: 5 hours saved per hire. At 20 hires/year, that's 100 hours of your ops person's time back.

2. Customer support ticket routing

Your engineering team's #1 complaint as you scale: "why am I getting tickets that aren't about my area?"

Automate the routing. Read the ticket. Use simple rules + AI categorisation to route to the right queue.

• Trigger: New support ticket created

• Step 1: Extract category from ticket content

• Step 2: Match category to team

• Step 3: Assign to least-loaded engineer in that team

• Step 4: Slack notification with context

ROI: Engineering gets ~70% fewer "this isn't for me" tickets. Cycle time drops 30-40%.

3. Lead routing from forms

You're spending a lot of money on demand gen now. Don't lose leads because a salesperson didn't see the form submission for 6 hours.

• Trigger: New form submission

• Step 1: Enrich with company data (size, industry, funding)

• Step 2: Route by company size: <50 → SDR, 50-200 → AE, 200+ → Enterprise

• Step 3: Create record in HubSpot with full context

• Step 4: Notify owner via Slack with one-click "book a meeting" link

ROI: Average time-to-first-contact drops from hours to minutes. That alone increases conversion by 20-30%.

4. Renewal alerts

Series A is when renewals start mattering. Mid-stage companies lose 5-10% of ARR to renewals that nobody knew were coming.

• Trigger: 60 days before renewal date

• Step 1: Check account health score

• Step 2: Route to CSM with full account context

• Step 3: Schedule check-in

• Step 4: If health score is yellow, escalate to CS lead

ROI: 10-15% reduction in churn. At Series A scale, this often pays for the entire automation platform.

5. Daily metric digest

Every founder I know spends 15-30 minutes a day clicking through dashboards to know what happened yesterday. Stop.

• Trigger: 9am daily

• Step 1: Pull key metrics from product, Stripe, HubSpot, support

• Step 2: Calculate week-over-week and month-over-month

• Step 3: Format as Slack message with sparklines

• Step 4: Send to leadership channel

ROI: Saves 2.5 hours/week per leadership team member. Surfaces anomalies faster — if a metric is off, you see it at 9am, not at 3pm when someone happens to check.

The pattern

These five workflows have something in common: they're all "event → enrich → route → notify" shapes. That's not a coincidence. Most business automation is some variant of this shape.

Build the muscle for these five. Then when something new comes up, it'll be a variation, not a new problem.

— Marcus Reid