Before we automated our onboarding, this is what happened every time a client signed: someone on our team spent two to three hours setting up a Notion workspace, creating a Slack channel, sending the contract, chasing the signature, and scheduling the kickoff call. For every single client.
We were billing clients for strategic work while spending hours on admin that a script could do. So we fixed it.
Every hour your best people spend on repeatable admin is an hour they are not spending on the work that actually moves the needle.
What we automated
The full onboarding sequence now runs without any human involvement:
- Contract generation and e-signature via DocuSign
- Automated payment link and invoice creation
- Slack channel creation with the client invited
- Notion workspace cloned from template and shared
- Kickoff call scheduling via Calendly with automated reminders
- Welcome email sequence (3 emails over 5 days)
The trigger is a won deal in our CRM. Everything else runs automatically.
The stack we used
Make (formerly Integromat) as the automation backbone. We chose Make over Zapier for the more complex branching logic and better error handling at our price tier.
DocuSign for contracts. The API is well-documented and the Make integration handles template variables cleanly.
Notion API to clone workspace templates. We built a master template with all our standard pages (Brief, Timeline, Assets, Deliverables, Feedback) and the automation duplicates it for each client with their name and project details filled in.
Slack API for channel creation and initial message. The bot posts the kickoff agenda and links to the Notion workspace automatically.
Calendly for scheduling, with webhooks feeding back into Make to trigger the next stage of the sequence.
About 14 hours across Saturday and Sunday. Two people. One who knew Make well, one who knew our Notion structure. The ongoing maintenance cost is near zero.
The parts that were harder than expected
Notion template cloning. The Notion API does not have a native "duplicate database" endpoint. We had to build a recursive page copy function that handles nested content. This took about four hours of the weekend.
DocuSign variable mapping. Getting the contract fields to populate correctly from CRM data required more careful field mapping than expected. The template setup is straightforward once you understand the pattern, but finding the pattern took time.
Error handling. The happy path took a morning to build. Robust error handling — what happens if Slack is down, what happens if a client's email bounces, what happens if the CRM record is missing a field — took the rest of the weekend.
What we would do differently
Start with the error cases. We built the happy path first and then realised how brittle it was when something went wrong. If we did it again, we would define all the failure states first and build handling for each one before building the main flow.
Also: document as you build. Two months later, when we wanted to modify the sequence, we had to reverse-engineer our own automation because we had not documented the logic anywhere. Boring advice, but we paid the price for ignoring it.
The result
We now onboard clients faster, more consistently, and with zero admin overhead per new client. The client experience is also better — they receive everything within minutes of signing instead of waiting a day or two for a human to set things up.
The hours we recovered go directly into client work. That is the point.
Automation should free your best people for the work only they can do. Everything else is a candidate for a workflow.
What you can automate this week
You do not need to start with onboarding. Pick the most repetitive manual process in your business — the thing someone does the same way every time, with the same inputs and the same outputs. That is your first automation candidate.
Map the steps on paper first. Then build the automation. Start simple. Add sophistication once the simple version is working reliably.
Want help automating your business workflows? Let us take a look.