Ran automation builds for a bunch of small teams this year. Same bottlenecks kept showing up before anyone touched Zapier or Make:

1. Lead intake → CRM → Slack ping

Most teams still have leads landing in a form or inbox and someone manually copying them into a spreadsheet or CRM. One Zap fixes this permanently: form submission triggers a CRM record creation + instant Slack/Discord alert to whoever owns follow-up. Saves ~30 min/day and kills the "did anyone see this lead" problem.

2. Invoice/payment reconciliation in Sheets

If you're on Whop, Stripe, or PayPal and manually pulling payment data into a spreadsheet for your bookkeeper — stop. A scheduled Make scenario can pull transactions on a cadence and drop them into a formatted Sheet with formulas already running (fees, net revenue, refund tracking). This is the single highest-leverage automation for any small business doing recurring revenue.

3. Client onboarding checklist automation

New client signs → auto-creates a project folder, sends a welcome doc, assigns tasks in your PM tool, and schedules a kickoff call — all from one trigger. Teams doing this manually lose 45-60 min per new client onboarded.

The common thread: none of these require custom dev work. They're all template-able. I've been building exactly these as ready-to-import Zapier/Make flows and Excel/Sheets templates — happy to share specifics if anyone's stuck on one of these.