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Why Every Workflow Feels Broken (Until You Use Make)

Jun 27, 2025

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Transparency Notice: Some links in this post may be affiliate links. This means the website could earn a small commission if you click and buy something—at no extra cost to you. These links help keep the content free. Only tools or services believed to be useful are ever recommended. This disclosure is provided in line with legal guidelines from the U.S. (FTC), UK (ASA), and EU transparency laws.


It started like most Mondays: poorly masked panic disguised as a “quick sync.” Three different Slack messages asking for status updates on the same project. One needed a spreadsheet from marketing. Another wanted client notes logged in the CRM that hadn’t been touched since Q1. Someone else tagged the wrong “Caitlin” again.  


Nobody knew what was done, who did it, or why the hell we were still updating five different tools with the same info.  


And of course, the CMO did that thing where they ask, “Can we just get visibility here?” as if lack of visibility is a personal failing and not a direct result of the broken a$$ systems we’re duct-taping together.  

Hand holding pen near mind map on desk, labeled "Make.com," with colored branches for Graphic Design and Digital Marketing. Dimly lit.

Enter Make.  


Not as a Hail Mary. Not as a shiny new platform that gets a “Let’s circle back” during all-hands. Just...a way out.  

We wired it in to handle the data syncing that should've been automated two reorgs ago. A sales form gets filled out? Leads update in the CRM. Project status changes? Ops gets pinged. Data goes from marketing to finance without six human check-ins and three awkward “Just bumping this to the top of your inbox” emails.  


The noise dropped. The errors dropped. The mistakes people used to blame on “bandwidth” magically disappeared — because no one had to babysit Google Sheets anymore.  


Turns out, people don’t hate work. They hate redoing work.  


And Make kills the redoing.


What This Tool Does  

Let’s keep this simple: Make is an automation platform. Not the spiritual-awakening kind of automation. Just cold, effective AI-driven execution. It connects all the bloated, redundant systems you've duct-taped together and makes them talk to each other — without a parade of meetings or “alignment” sessions.  


You set up triggers and actions. A form is submitted? Someone gets notified. Data gets updated. A spreadsheet gets cleaned. You don’t need a CS degree — or worse, to open Jira tickets for “workflow orchestration.”  


It works in scenarios — basically a fancy term for rule-based automation. Like: If X happens in Tool A, do Y in Tool B, and notify Person Z in Slack because they missed it the last two times.  

Make gives you the power to do more

It pulls data across platforms, updates customer records, manages approvals, sends emails, flags finance, and tells someone Barry in Sales is ignoring leads again — all without needing you to manually nudge.  


Who uses Make? The overworked operations manager. The solo founder pretending they still have everything “under control.” The marketing lead who rage-quit updating Airtable for the third time.  


It’s not about changing how you work. It’s about finally fixing the bullsh*t you were pretending would work “for now.”


Why It Matters to Business Owners  

If you're running a business — especially one that still operates like folks remember what’s in a spreadsheet from February — then congrats. You’re the proud owner of invisible chaos.  


Here’s the thing: most of your “workflow problems” aren't people problems. They're spreadsheet-hopping, email-forwarding, who-the-f*ck-has-the-latest-version problems.  


And Make drills right through it.  


This isn’t some utopian fix. You’re not going to “unlock frictionless synergy.” But you will stop losing hours translating client requests from a form into an email… then into your CRM… then into a task platform… all before someone who wasn’t even supposed to see it signs off by accident and screws up your pipeline.  


It’s ugly. And common.  


Make eliminates the busywork that grinds your team down and yanks your focus — killing the one thing you actually care about: momentum.  


Need to grow your ops without adding two coordinators and another tool-that-sorts-tools? This is how that starts. By replacing five steps with one scenario you build once and forget about.  


And yes, it matters. Because “just handling it manually for now” turns into permanent process rot. One broken link at a time.  


Why It Matters to Your Team  

Let’s talk about your team. You know, the one quietly drowning in post-it notes, cross-tagged Asana tasks, and Slack pings that read like passive-aggressive hostage notes.  


They’re not underperforming. They’re surviving.  


Every “quick update” becomes a scavenger hunt across three apps. Every Friday check-in produces a new Notion doc no one reads. People are quitting, or worse — staying and silently giving up inside.  


Make doesn’t save their souls. But it does give them space.  


No more copying and pasting new leads into three different sheets. No more “just checking in” emails that delay actual work. No more repeating tasks that already got done, only to discover they were logged in the wrong goddamn tool.  


Build the automation once. Touch it never. Everyone knows what’s happening, when, and where — without turning every minor update into a productivity hostage crisis.  


You want to boost “engagement”? Try not treating your people like human middleware.  


Use Make instead.


Scale Without Breaking the Bank  

Hiring is expensive. Training is a gamble. Keeping people? That’s a hilarious concept at this point.  


So let's put it in numbers your CFO might actually read:  

Man in a white suit smiles joyfully, arms raised, with golden dollar signs around him. Background shows a billboard reading "MAKE.com".

Hiring a coordinator to handle status updates, lead routing, and basic ops admin? $45–60K/year — if you can even find one who sticks around.  


Monthly cost of Make? Chump change by comparison. And it doesn’t need a laptop, a login for five systems, or a manager whose entire job becomes “tracking down missing info.”  


Now no, automation isn’t free. You’ll pay something — time to set it up, small recurring costs, occasional scenario break alerts. But the difference is daily.  


With that coordinator? You’re stuck in the loop. More chaos = more headcount = more chaos.  


With Make? You just build smarter systems. Ones that don’t rely on human memory and caffeine to function.  


Revenge of the lean ops model. But this time, it doesn’t come with burnout.


Impact on Ops, Financials, Marketing, and Learning Curve  


Operations  

Let’s start with the obvious: your workflows probably suck. Not because your team’s dumb — but because your systems are stitched together like a mediocre group project.  


Make pulls your triggers, dependencies, and task flows into one coherent timeline that doesn't require “reminders” disguised as 6 p.m. Slack pings.  


No one wonders who’s got what. The data moves — automatically.  


Financials  

You stop paying for headcount just to nudge data around. That’s it. The ROI shows up in reduced payroll bloat, cleaner project turnover, fewer reworks, and sanity-preserving transparency.  


You don’t need a CFO to understand that “less rework = more margin.”  


Marketing  

Ever sent the wrong welcome email to a lead who filled out the form two weeks ago? Yeah, that.  


Make fixes that. Syncs customer engagement. Builds flows that respond now, not “next Tuesday when someone’s back from PTO.” You finally look like a functioning company, not a jumble of disconnected inboxes.  


Learning Curve  

Is it plug-and-play? No. Don’t be lazy.  


But do you need a dev team? Also no. That’s the point. Build a few low-stakes scenarios. Connect apps you already use (Google Sheets, forms, email). Get payoff fast, adjust as you go.  


The learning curve isn’t steep if you have basic logic and a near-dead tolerance for repetitive manual tasks.


How It Integrates with Other Software  

Here’s the blessing and the curse: integration isn’t optional anymore.  


If your tools can’t speak to each other, your business devolves into “who updated what, where?”  


Make connects with over 1,000 apps. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, CRMs — more than enough to wire up whatever Frankenstein stack you’re cobbling together.  


It does this through scenarios: you set up the rules, triggers, and actions so apps pass data around like grownups. No more chasing updates across tabs. No more “we lost the file” meetings.  


Your janky legacy tools? Still usable. Your pretty new dashboard? Still readable. No dev work needed unless you’re getting wild.  


Integration is survival. Make gives it to you without the enterprise markup.


Why This Will Keep Changing  

Using AI tools like Make isn’t about being cutting-edge. It’s about keeping the lights on without handing over your entire life to admin sludge.  


And yeah — expect it to break sometimes. AI moves fast. The APIs change. The integrations glitch. Welcome to software in the 2020s.  


But if you’re not iterating, you’re stuck. And stuck looks like business-as-usual until your best employee quietly rage-quits because they got tired of pretending “Just following up :)” was part of their job description.  


Make doesn’t freeze time, but it gives you a fighting chance to evolve faster than another reorg.


Solutions (Visual It)  

Before Make, ops looked like this: Karen manually copied lead info from Typeform into Google Sheets, pinged sales on Slack, and then booked a demo herself because no one checked the CRM.  


And then leadership asked why conversion was “lagging.”  


Laptop displaying colorful graphs in dimly lit room. Warm glow from lamp in background. Focus on financial data on screen.

After Make? The form submission instantly updates the CRM. Sales gets pinged — not buried in a sea of Jira alerts. A calendar invite gets sent. Status gets logged without anyone clicking anything but the original submit button.  


Zero dropped balls. Zero circle-back emails. Karen stopped praying for red wine by 10 a.m.  

Efficiency happened not because the team pushed harder — but because finally, the system stopped dragging them back down.


Conclusion  

Automating workflows doesn’t make you future-proof. It just stops you from bleeding out on the inefficiency knife your org’s been twisting for years.  


Make isn’t here to inspire. It’s here to dig you out of the graveyard of half-finished documents and forgotten follow-ups.  


If business is survival, workflow automation is the shovel.  


You decide whether to aim it at the mountain of busywork — or your own a$$.



Transparency Notice: Some links in this post may be affiliate links. This means the website could earn a small commission if you click and buy something—at no extra cost to you. These links help keep the content free. Only tools or services believed to be useful are ever recommended. This disclosure is provided in line with legal guidelines from the U.S. (FTC), UK (ASA), and EU transparency laws.

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