Fig. 02 — Where the month goes
36 hours of
nobody’s favorite job
A typical five-person shop, measured before we touch anything. The bar on the right is what’s left after.
TASKHOUR REMOVEDHOUR LEFTBEFORE → AFTER
Chasing unpaid invoices9 hrs → 1 hr
Copying data between tools11 hrs → 0.5 hr
Scheduling back-and-forth7 hrs → 1.5 hr
Asking for reviews4 hrs → 0
Weekly reporting5 hrs → 0.25 hr
Total36 HRS BEFORE · 3.25 HRS AFTER · ≈ 4 WORKDAYS BACK EVERY MONTH3.25
Illustrative
These hours are a worked example of what a busywork audit turns up, not a measurement ZZMEDIA has taken. Yours gets counted in the free discovery call.
Fig. 03 — Playbooks
Pick one. Watch it run.
These are the five we build most. Yours gets written the same way: one trigger, a few steps, a result you can check.
+ ANYTHING ELSE YOU DO THE SAME WAY EVERY TIME
Missed call, instant text back
CATCHES ~11 LEADS / MONTH
TRIGGER
A call rings out or hangs up before anyone picks up
01
Text the caller in under 60 seconds, from your business number
TWILIO02
Ask what they need and offer the next two open slots
CALENDAR03
Log the lead and the reply thread against their record
CRMRESULT
The caller books instead of dialing the next name on the list.
Illustrative
The hours and leads beside each playbook are worked examples of the kind of saving one can produce, not results ZZMEDIA has measured for a client.
Fig. 04 — Anatomy
Four parts, every time
No black box. Every automation we hand over is written down in these four lines, and you can read it in the portal.
01WHEN
Trigger
The one event that starts it. A form, a status change, a clock, an email landing in a shared inbox.
E.G. JOB MARKED COMPLETE
02ONLY IF
Condition
The rules that keep it from firing on the wrong thing. Amount over X, customer type Y, business hours only.
E.G. SKIP WARRANTY WORK
03THEN
Action
What actually happens, in order, across your tools. Usually the three or four steps somebody does by hand today.
E.G. DRAFT, SEND, LOG
04OR ELSE
Fallback
What happens when a step fails or the case is unusual. It retries, then it stops and tells a human.
E.G. ALERT THE OWNER
Fig. 05 — When it breaks
Because it will
An API changes, a login expires, a customer types something nobody planned for. The difference is whether you find out from us or from an angry voicemail.
LAST 90 DAYS · ONE RUN PER SQUARE93.3% CLEAN
CLEANRETRIED, PASSEDHANDED TO A HUMAN
Illustrative
The squares and the percentage beside them are a worked example of how a healthy month reads, not ZZMEDIA’s measured uptime.
01
It retries before it panics
Transient failures get three attempts with a backoff. Most hiccups resolve before anyone would have noticed.
02
A person gets told, not a log file
A hard failure texts whoever owns that process and posts it in your channel with the record attached.
03
Every run is on the record
Timestamp, inputs, outputs, and result for every execution, readable in your portal for a year.
04
You can shut it off
One switch per automation. Turn it off, do it by hand that week, turn it back on. No call to us required.
Runs on what you already use
Zapier
Make
Airtable
Google Sheets
QuickBooks
Jobber
Stripe
Slack
Twilio
Your CRM
You keep your own Zapier, n8n or Make subscription and add us as a member, so every build sits in an account you own.
STEP 01 · FREE
The busywork audit
A free 30-minute call with whoever actually does the task. We leave with a list of every repeated step and what it costs you in hours.
STEP 02 · QUOTED PER BUILD
First one live
We quote the single automation with the biggest payback, build it, run it beside your manual process for a week, then switch it on for real.
STEP 03 · AFTER HANDOVER
Yours to keep
The build lives in your accounts either way. Take it outright and run it yourself, or keep a hosting retainer and we watch it and fix the failures.
Questions
- How is automation work priced?
- Per build, or as a quoted package when several processes are being automated together. The first 30-minute discovery call is free, and it usually surfaces the one process worth fixing first.
- Do I pay for the automation audit?
- The initial 30-minute discovery call is free. It maps where the hours are going and what the first build would be, so you can decide with real numbers rather than a guess.
- What happens when an automation breaks?
- That is a decision you make at handover. Either we hand the build over to you outright, or you keep a hosting retainer, which includes coverage when a flow fails or a connected tool changes and breaks a step.
- Do I need my own Zapier or n8n account?
- Usually yes, and you add us as a member so we can build inside your account. That keeps the automations yours. Where a build does not need a subscription platform, we build it custom and that question goes away.
- Will this replace the tools I already pay for?
- No. The point is to connect what you already use, not to sell you a new system to learn. If a tool in your stack is genuinely the problem, we will say so, but the default is to make your existing tools talk to each other.