Stop building "Frankenstein" workflows (Do this instead)

Most agency owners are building their automations upside down. They usually end up with a monster like this:

But then one morning, their “perfect” step workflow stops working for no reason.

No more leads. No more revenue.

The worst part is that no alarms are sounded, and they don’t receive any emails, saying,

And because the business owner, let’s call him Bob, doesn’t know the first thing about nodes, API calls, MCPs, and ChatGPT 4, 4o, 4.11 & alpha, he naturally starts to panic.

He first starts out by sending a strongly worded email to his developer, asking him to get this fixed immediately.

Then, Bob has to process all his leads manually, so he doesn’t lose money.

So begins the worst 72 hours of Bob’s life, where he’s chained to his desk, copy-pasting data from Typeform to Slack to QuickBooks while chugging jugs of coffee at 3 am.

He misses dinner with his kids. He can’t go to the gym. He’s not a CEO anymore.

He’s a seaman bailing water out of a sinking ship with a small bucket.

And when the developer finally surfaces, the report makes Bob want to scream.

"Fixed it. The invoicing software changed its API date format. Step 47 broke."

Bob stares at the screen. Step 47?

How could something so small bring down the entire system? What does invoicing have to do with scraping leads? Why?

Bob fell into the trap that catches almost every business owner who flirts with automation.

He built a Monolith.

He built a "House of Cards" workflow where every single step depends on the one before it. If the wind blows on the top card, the bottom card collapses.

And I’m willing to bet my two cats that you are building the exact same thing right now.

Since we’re all emotionally attached to Bob now, it’s time we get to know him better.

I feel like we can all see a little bit of ourselves in Bob. He’s doing his best, but he’s just a bit overwhelmed.

One day, Bob was having a beer with one of his friends who owns a social media management agency, and he was telling Bob about some new AI tools he’s been using in the business that have saved him a lot of time and money.

Bob has always been a cautious guy, so he took all the AI hype with a grain of salt. But the conversation stuck in his head for a while until one day he decided to give it a shot.

So, he posted an ad on Upwork: “Looking to integrate AI workflows into my agency.” After sifting through 30 questionable proposals, he found this one guy who looked legit.

He’d shared a video showcasing this huge and complicated workflow that would create content automatically with a click of a button. He seemed like the right guy for the job, so Bob decided to take a chance on him.

They got on a call, and Bob told him about his problems. The developer sent him a proposal for a workflow that does the following:

When Bob got the proposal, he couldn’t believe it. If this worked, he could get his weekends back.

He could actually go on a date with his wife instead of fighting with CSV files.

It was almost too good to be true, but…

What if it worked?

For the first two weeks after he got his system, it was like magic.

Bob would wake up, sip his coffee, and watch the notifications roll in.

He felt like a genius. He had replaced three employees with one script.

But then, on a Tuesday morning, the silence came.

No dings. No leads. No revenue.

In his quest for the "perfect" all-in-one solution, the developer had stitched together a Frankenstein monster where the heart couldn't beat if the pinky toe was stubbed.

It was a nightmare. If one single point of the system fails, it all goes down. This time it was an API call gone wrong; next time it could be something as dumb as a missing comma.

This is the trap that catches almost every business owner who uses AI automations in their business.

You see a big and flashy system that handles a complicated task and you internalize this as a good sign. And why not? It always feels that big and complicated when you do it, right?

While that might be true, bigger does not always mean better. If Bob’s developer had broken down each service into different workflows, maybe:

If I were asked to rebuild Bob’s system today, I’d do a few things differently. First of all, I would make sure that it’s not a workflow, but a “Fleet.”

I would take that giant, fragile 50-step chain and smash it into three separate, bulletproof "Microservices."

Think of this like this. Submarines usually have sealed watertight compartments. If one section floods, you seal the heavy iron door, and the water is contained in that one room.

So, if the kitchen gets wet, the engine keeps running and the vessel stays afloat.

In the same way, here’s how I would compartmentalize Bob’s stack so he never loses a lead again:

Monoliths suck.

It’s like hiring one employee and asking them to do sales, marketing, and accounting.

Eventually, they’re going to break.

Call me a pessimist, but when I build automations, I’m always optimizing for the worst case scenario. What if this system breaks? What if everything goes wrong?

This has saved me from unhappy clients and endless revisions that increase my scope creep.

Bob’s mistake wasn’t using AI. It was trusting a system without watertight doors.

Don’t be like Bob.

Be paranoid, like me ; )