---
title: Tech, Tools and Automation
summary: Audit your software stack, kill the bloat, pick the few, and automate the highest-leverage manual work.
est_minutes: 17
sort: 5
---

Welcome to Module 3.5.

Most operator businesses run on 12 to 18 SaaS tools. They use 5 of them well. The rest is bloat. The fix isn't more tools or more automation. It's killing what doesn't earn its keep and automating the right things in the right order.

By the end of this module you'll have audited your stack, killed what's bloat, and built a 12-month automation roadmap targeting the highest-leverage manual work.

**The Tech Bloat Pattern**

Operators add tools reactively. The pattern:

- Year 1: 3 to 5 tools (the essentials)
- Year 2: 7 to 10 tools (each one added for a specific reason that made sense at the time)
- Year 3: 12 to 15 tools (some are duplicates, half are barely used, the team uses 5 well)
- Year 4: 18+ tools (the stack is now a budget line item costing $1,500 to $3,000/month)

By year 4, most operators don't know exactly what they pay for. They don't know who uses what. They don't know which tools could be consolidated.

The audit fixes this in 60 minutes.

**The 4-Bucket Audit**

For every tool you pay for, sort it into one bucket:

**Keep.** Used daily or weekly. Earns its keep. No equivalent substitute. Examples for most operator businesses: accounting software, CRM, primary communication tool, calendar.

**Kill.** Not used. Low value. Or value duplicated elsewhere. Cancel today.

**Consolidate.** Overlaps with another tool you already pay for. Pick one, kill the other. The most common example: paying for Calendly AND Hubspot meetings AND Outlook meetings. Pick one.

**Add.** Gap in the stack. Manual work that should be a tool. This is where new spend goes, not because someone recommended a tool, but because the audit identified a specific gap.

The audit usually produces:

- 30 to 50% of tools end up in Kill or Consolidate
- 1 to 3 new tools added (filling specific gaps)
- 20 to 35% of total tool spend reclaimed
- A simpler stack that's easier to automate

**The Essential Operator Stack**

For most operator businesses doing $500K to $5M, the essential stack has 7 to 10 tools:

1. **CRM** — single source of truth for customers, deals, contacts (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close)
2. **Accounting** — books, invoicing, expenses (QuickBooks, Xero)
3. **Communication** — internal team comms (Slack, MS Teams)
4. **Project / Task Management** — where work lives (ClickUp, Asana, Notion)
5. **Email Marketing / Automation** — outbound plus nurture (HubSpot, ConvertKit, Klaviyo)
6. **Calendar / Scheduling** — meeting booking (Calendly, HubSpot meetings)
7. **Document signing** — contracts (DocuSign, HelloSign, PandaDoc)
8. **Cloud storage** — files, docs, drives (Google Drive, Dropbox)
9. **Cash forecasting / Financial visibility** — built in Module 3.4 (Excel or a tool like Float, LiveFlow)
10. **Integration platform** — Zapier, Make, n8n (the glue between tools)

If you have more than 10 tools in regular use, you probably have overlap. The audit surfaces it.

**The 5 Automation Categories**

Once the stack is clean, automation becomes powerful. Five categories ranked by ROI:

**1. Repeated data entry.** Moving data manually from one tool to another. Lead form fills to CRM. New deal in CRM to invoice in accounting. New customer to onboarding task list.

**2. Scheduled communications.** Appointment reminders. 24-hour-before-call emails. Follow-ups on stalled deals. Customer milestone communications.

**3. Cross-tool workflows.** When X happens in Tool A, do Y in Tool B. Lead becomes customer, Slack channel created, onboarding folder created, kickoff task assigned.

**4. Document generation.** Proposal from CRM data. Contract from proposal. SOW from contract. Invoice from SOW.

**5. Reporting dashboards.** Pulling numbers from multiple tools into one view. The MOR dashboard from Module 3.4 is the example.

The ROI hierarchy:

- Category 1 saves the most hours (data entry is the biggest manual time-sink)
- Category 5 produces the most decision quality (visibility equals better decisions)
- Categories 2, 3, 4 improve customer experience and consistency

Pick 2 to 3 to automate this quarter. The rest in subsequent quarters.

**The Automation Roadmap**

A 12-month automation roadmap has 4 quarters times 2 to 3 automations per quarter, which equals 8 to 12 automations.

For each automation, document the following columns:

- The automation number
- The automation itself
- Tools involved
- Hours saved per week
- Cost to build
- Owner

Cost to build matters. Some automations are 1-hour Zapier zaps. Others are 40-hour custom builds. Sort by hours saved per hour spent building.

Common high-ROI automations for operator businesses:

- Lead form fill to CRM record plus Slack notification plus email autoresponder (4 hours saved/week)
- Deal closed to onboarding task list created plus welcome packet sent plus kickoff scheduled (3 hours saved/week)
- Customer 30 days post-onboard to NPS request automated (2 hours saved/week)
- Invoice past due 30 days to automatic reminder series (3 hours saved/week)
- New hire to onboarding checklist automated across tools (5 hours saved per hire)

That's 12 to 17 hours per week saved with 5 automations. For an operator business with a $100K founder salary, that's $25K+/year of founder time reclaimed.

**What To Do Right Now**

Three things:

1. **Run the Tech Stack Audit.** Section A. 60 minutes. List every tool you pay for and classify it.
2. **Make the kill/consolidate decisions.** Section B. Cancel today.
3. **Build the 12-month Automation Roadmap.** Section C. Pick 2 to 3 automations to ship in the next 90 days.

Take the quiz.

I'll see you in Module 3.6, Meeting Architecture and Decision Rights, where we install the cadence that runs everything you've built.
