An automation is a decision you make one time instead of four hundred times.
Someone books a discovery call. They get a confirmation, a prep questionnaire, a reminder the day before, and a record in your CRM. You get their answers in your inbox an hour before the call, with a note about which program they're probably a fit for. That's six steps. You should be doing zero of them.
I build these with Make, Zapier and native integrations where they're good enough, and with webhooks, direct API work and a bit of Python where they're not. Then I write down what each one does, what breaks it, and how to fix it.