One thing I’ve learned working on n8n projects across different teams is that phone calls and text messages are usually where automation breaks first. When a lead calls or sends a text about a home sale, timing and accuracy matter more than anything. So the first thing I focus on is capture. Every call or SMS needs to land in one place with context attached. Who contacted us. Where they came from. What they asked. From there the logic matters. Leads are routed based on rules that make sense for the business not just pushed blindly into a CRM. Some go to sales. Some trigger follow ups. Some need a callback task created immediately. CRM automation ties it all together. Updates happen automatically. Notes are added. Status changes are logged. No manual copying. No missed steps. Reliability is the part most people ignore. Webhooks fail. Phone systems timeout. APIs return bad responses. In n8n I always build retries logging and safeguards so one failed step does not break the entire flow or create duplicates. When done right the team does not think about the automation at all. Calls come in. Messages are handled. Leads move forward quietly. That is usually the sign the system is doing its job.

A lot of automations look simple on the surface. A form is submitted. Data shows up somewhere else. Done. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more happening. I spend most of my time building workflows in Make and n8n that sit between frontend tools and backend systems. Forms from Webflow, WordPress, React apps, or custom setups flow into CRMs, databases, and internal tools through APIs and webhooks. The real work is in the logic. Validating incoming data. Handling failed webhooks. Retrying safely without creating duplicates. Making sure one bad request doesn’t break the whole flow. More recently, I’ve been embedding AI into these systems. Using OpenAI and LLM based agents to process inputs, make decisions, and push clean structured data into the right systems automatically. A good automation isn’t just about connecting apps. It’s about reliability, performance, and clarity. If something breaks, it should be obvious why. If someone else takes over, they should understand how it works. That’s the part most people never see, but it’s what makes the difference long term.

I recently built a workflow where publishing a blog post automatically handled social distribution without extra steps. Once a post is published on WordPress, the workflow picks it up immediately. The content is sent to ChatGPT, where it’s rewritten into platform specific formats for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Each platform gets its own tone, structure, and hashtags without manual editing. The tricky part was control. After generation, the content is parsed using regex and routed correctly so each platform only receives what it needs. Twitter gets short text, LinkedIn gets a longer post with an image pulled directly from the article, and Facebook combines the post text with the original link. Everything runs through one logic path with filters instead of separate workflows. No duplicates. No reposting errors. No copy paste. Publishing the blog became the only action needed. Distribution happens quietly in the background. This is the kind of automation that doesn’t look fancy, but removes a lot of friction once it’s live.

I recently worked on a workflow where everything was technically working but nothing was actually smooth. Content lived in Google Sheets WordPress pages were created manually Images had to be uploaded separately Small mistakes kept slipping in Instead of fixing things one step at a time I stepped back and designed the full logic first then translated it into a single Make.com blueprint. The scenario starts from Google Sheets reads structured data row by row validates what’s usable and only then pushes content into WordPress. Text and images are handled differently which was the tricky part. Images needed proper formatting media uploads and correct mapping before posts or pages could be published. What made the difference was building everything inside the blueprint with clear conditions fallbacks and checks. If something is missing the scenario doesn’t break. It skips logs and keeps moving. Once deployed publishing stopped being a task It became a background process This kind of build isn’t about tools. It’s about designing the logic once locking it in and letting it run the same way every single time. That’s the real value of a well thought out Make.com blueprint.

I recently worked on an internal onboarding system for a legal tech consulting business, and it reminded me how much friction exists in processes we usually accept as normal. Before this, onboarding depended on people remembering steps. Who sent the welcome email. Who scheduled the call. Who checked if documents were uploaded. We moved all of that into n8n. Once a contract is signed and payment is confirmed, onboarding starts quietly. Records are created, access requests go out securely, documents are collected in one place, and kickoff meetings are scheduled without back and forth. The interesting part wasn’t the integrations. It was making sure the system could handle missing info, failed calls, and delays without breaking. After it went live, onboarding stopped feeling like a task list and started feeling like a flow. No chasing. No guessing. Just progress. This kind of build doesn’t look impressive on the surface, but it changes how a business operates day to day.