How We Saved 8+ Hours Per Week with a 2-Day Automation Hackathon

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🚨The market is changing! Top companies focusing on building systems to handle growth, not just hiring more. We learned this the hard way. As an automation firm (ironically), we were drowning in repetitive tasks. Solve this in 2 weekends with this MasterClass🧵

Manual work was piling up and slowing us down. The solution? We made a radical change. We ran a 2-day internal hackathon—dedicated to fixing our own systems. Here's how we went from overwhelmed to saving 8+ hours per week 👇

1️⃣ Focus on one challenge. → What’s the most broken part of your business you haven’t prioritized? For us, it was our sales pipeline—CRM, follow-ups, and calls were all over the place, and we hadn’t prioritized fixing it. So we dedicated these 2 days to just that.

2️⃣ Audit the mess. We mapped out every piece of our pipeline and it only took 2 hours to spot the bottlenecks: → Follow-ups took forever → Proposals were slow because context was missing → Call notes weren’t being used → Prospect research and CRM prep were eating up time

Manual work was killing our capacity to deliver. Sound familiar?

3️⃣ Scope the solutions. Once you see the problem, solutions become clearer: → Standardize processes → Clean and update databases → Automate repetitive tasks This took just 1 hour. Avoid the fancy fixes.

If you have an automation expert, plug them in to identify automatable tasks. (You don't know what you don't know.) [😄Shameless plug: Overdrive is the only automation team you'll ever need. enteroverdrive.com/ ]

4️⃣ Build fast (and right away). In just 12 hours of focused execution, we automated : → Call preparation flows synced with CRM → Enriched contacts and companies → Semi-automated proposals

→ Notes and research ready before calls → New calls in Calendly made visible for the team → LinkedIn connections with reminders for prospects Some we had procastinated for months - now built in a few hours. Here's an example one:

The best part? It was all built with no-code tools: 🔧 Ply, Zapier, Make, Relevance, PandaDoc, Pipedrive. No developers required.

5️⃣ Review & Test. We made sure to bulletproof each automation, checking for edge cases and getting feedback from the team. Testing was key to ensuring the systems were reliable and scalable.

💡 The result? We’ve already implemented 7/12 automations, and we’re saving 8+ hours of manual work every week.

The old approach—hiring more people, doing more manual work—is outdated. The new way? Systematize. Automate. Scale.

This simple 2-day hackathon changed how we operate, and it can do the same for your business. 👉 Considering your own automation hackathon? Drop me a message, and let’s talk about making it happen. (Shameless plug: Overdrive AI is the only automation partner you’ll need 😉)

PS: Who spotted waldo? 🎃