Custom Beats Convenient

Read time: 4 mins

Welcome back, everyone 👋

This week’s Automation Playbook is about a subtle trap in modern tech:

• 🧩 Convenience is not a strategy

• 🧱 Templates scale sameness

• 🛠️ Your edge should be an asset you own

Let’s get into it 👇

If you follow me on LinkedIn, you probably know that I love my daily walk.

It is how I process my thoughts and take a break between meetings.

It’s also where I get almost all of my best ideas.

Well, Nikki has recently started joining me in the evenings for a walk.

So i’ve introduced a lunchtime walk to get some deep thinking time (sorry Nikki).

I will go out no matter what time of night it is, just to make sure I get a walk in that day.

On today’s walk, my mind was turning over a meeting I had earlier on Tuesday.

I had been explaining the exact type of businesses we work best with.

I realised something that gets to the absolute heart of what we do, and it is the inspiration for today's newsletter.

The companies that come to us are not startups trying to figure out their industry.

They are seasoned experts.

They have been in business for years, sometimes decades.

Over that time, they have built highly refined, specific ways of operating.

The unique way they handle a client, manage a project, or deliver a service is their competitive advantage.

It is what sets them apart from the crowd.

But here is the tragedy I see all the time.

In an effort to scale or modernise, they buy a generic, off-the-shelf system.

Suddenly, they are forced to abandon their unique, hard-earned processes just to fit the software's "default" workflow.

They accidentally erase the very thing that made them special.

This ties perfectly into a conversation I literally just finished with another business owner.

They said something that sounded perfectly reasonable:

"We just use what everyone else uses."

And to be fair, that is how most stacks get built.

You pick the popular CRM. The standard proposal tool. The usual automations. The same dashboards.

It feels safe.

But it creates a problem that only shows up later.

When everyone runs the same systems, everyone starts operating the same way.

Not identical, but close enough that differentiation becomes harder to maintain.

We let this happen because we confuse convenience with strategy.

Convenience is not a strategy

Most software is sold on speed:

• set it up quickly

• choose a template

• follow the recommended workflow

That is fine when you are starting out.

But later, the workflow you adopted becomes the workflow that shapes your business.

Your process bends around the tool.

Your team learns "the right way", which is actually just the default way.

And over time, your operations stop reflecting your competitive advantage and start reflecting the product roadmap of somebody else.

Nugget #1: If your tool dictates your process, your competitors can buy the same process.

Templates scale sameness

Templates are useful.

They save time. They prevent blank page paralysis. They give you a baseline.

But there is a hidden trade.

Templates do not just give you structure.

They give you assumptions.

They decide what matters, what comes first, what gets tracked, and what gets ignored.

So businesses copy the same funnels, the same outreach sequences, and the same "best practice" pipelines.

Then they wonder why growth feels like a grind.

Nugget #2: If you scale a template, you scale a business model that is not yours.

Your edge should be an asset you own

I worked with a company that had a good offer and strong demand.

But they were stuck using a generic stack that forced generic behaviour.

The data lived in separate tools.

The process relied on manual copying. (the human API)

The team kept adapting to the software instead of improving the system.

So we changed the frame.

/

Instead of asking, "Which tool do we need?", we asked:

• What decisions do you need to make weekly?

• What information should appear automatically before a call?

• What should happen the moment a lead takes an action?

Then we built the missing layer.

A small set of custom workflows that:

• routed work based on their rules

• pulled context from their real data

• produced outputs in their tone and structure

The tools stayed.

But their advantage stopped being rented.

It became owned.

Nugget #3: The goal is not more software. It is a system that compounds in your favour.

What you can do this week

• 🔹 List the 3 workflows that make you money (lead handling, delivery, retention)

• 🔹 Highlight where "the tool" forces you into a generic process

• 🔹 Build one custom asset (a workflow, dashboard, or automation) that reflects how you win

You do not need to rebuild everything.

You just need to stop outsourcing your edge to defaults.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

• You can check out the latest episode of the Ctrl Alt Dev podcast where I break down what's working right now in detail with my co-host Sean Sale.

• Take our Escape the Chaos audit to learn the critical factors to scaling businesses with automation in 5 minutes.

• Need a fresh perspective? I’m here to help. Book a free audit call with me, and we’ll figure it out together.