The marketing team at a growing SaaS company had two things in common.
They refused to automate anything. They also refused to write their monthly team updates.
Sarah from ops asked me to help.
The CEO wanted visibility. The team wanted to be left alone.
Monthly reports sat in draft limbo for weeks.
Here was the missing update every month:
Dig through campaign data across three platforms
Hunt down content metrics and social numbers
Ask each person what they shipped
Wrestle it all into a readable summary
Send it late and incomplete
I got sneaky. No automation talk. Just a simple form.
"Hey, drop your wins here when you finish a project. Takes thirty seconds."
The form fed an Airtable base. Zapier pulled campaign data. GPT wrote clean monthly summaries from the collected pieces. The CEO got updates that actually shipped on time.
Six months later the team asked how the reports got so much better.
Takeaway
Sometimes automation works best when people do not know it is there.
Still occasionally being sneaky,
Jamie