The signal you’re missing, the maintenance burden you keep paying for and the fix that makes most of your automations unnecessary in the first place.

If you build an automation to push deals from your CRM into your invoicing tool, ask yourself why all your business data isn’t in one place yet. (Remember our post on how to save on the SaaS you don’t need? This is it in practice.)

Your solution might not be another automation to babysit, but a central data repo instead.

Theunis Duminy runs Vertiqal, an SA AI implementation consultancy that spends most of its time helping companies connect AI to the systems where their data actually lives. He sees this pattern at every size of business. 

The fix isn’t a better automation; it’s recognising when the automation shouldn’t exist at all.

Automations either create leverage (doing work you couldn’t do manually at all, or doing it at a scale no human could match) or it patches a gap between two tools that shouldn’t be disconnected in the first place.

“Sometimes you need two systems to communicate; that’s automation moving data between systems. But often this is a signal you’re patching. The mere point of the automation is moving data between systems.”

If the entire job of your automation is to take data out of one tool and stick it into another, you’re patching. It will break. You’ll maintain it forever. And the real problem is upstream of the automation itself.

Before you build anything, write down exactly what the automation does. “It moves new HubSpot contacts into Airtable.” “It copies invoices from Xero into a Google Sheet.” “It syncs Slack messages into Notion.”

If the sentence is mostly verbs about moving, copying or syncing, you’re patching. The automation isn’t doing work. It’s reconciling a structural problem your business has.

If the answer is accidental: You bought one tool when sales started needing a pipeline and another when fulfilment needed task tracking, the automation you’re about to build is a patch between disconnected systems. A real business doesn’t have those.

Run the thought experiment. If your client data, deal data, project data and invoice data all lived in one connected system, would you still need this automation?

Most of the time, the answer is no. The automation only exists because the data is fragmented.

“If your data is centralised, lives in one place, properly linked, the only automations you need are the ones that become what they’re meant to be: leverage.”

Leverage automations look different: A workflow that scans your central database every morning and flags clients you haven’t spoken to in over a week, one that generates a draft proposal from meeting notes the moment a deal is marked as ready, or one that triages your inbox and surfaces the three emails that actually need a reply today. 

None of these is shuttling data between tools; they’re doing real work. And those are the automations that are actually worth building.

Once you stop building patches, two things change. Your automation backlog gets shorter, because most of the things you were planning to automate turn out to be data problems in disguise. 

You spend less time fixing what broke and more time building what compounds.

This test is one piece of Automations Every Founder Needs in Their Stack: A Practical Founder OS, Theunis’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab, which gives you the full toolkit:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.