run a small ad management business. 9 clients. meta and google. around $55k spend per month 3 months ago my biggest client (30% of my revenue) sent me an email subject: "we need to talk about performance" my stomach dropped their roas had dropped from 4.2 to 3.1 over 6 weeks and i didnt even notice til they pointed it out why? because i was spending 12 hours a day doing shit that didnt matter typical day was wake up at 6am panicking about what broke overnight. something always broke. spend an hour fixing budget overruns then like 4 hours manually adjusting bids across 40+ campaigns. moving budgets around. pausing shit that wasnt working then pull reports for clients. every single one wants a different format so im copying and pasting data into 9 different spreadsheets for hours then answer emails. "why did cpa go up $3" "why did we spend $47 instead of $45 yesterday" just endless questions about tiny fluctuations by 6pm im supposed to do actual strategy work but im too brain dead. maybe look at it for an hour if im lucky then build new campaigns. check everything again before bed. wake up and do it all over again i was working my ass off but i wasnt actually doing the work that mattered the big client? their roas dropped because their top competitor launched a new product and i was too busy adjusting bids to notice. too busy making reports to actually analyze the data. too busy doing busywork to do my actual job that email was a wakeup call i tracked my time for a week. 35+ hours on repetitive manual tasks. maybe 5 hours on actual strategy and creative work so i did what i shouldve done a year ago. started automating the bullshit tried a few tools. revealbot was way too complicated, spent a whole weekend trying to set up rules and still didnt trust it. madgicx wanted like $500/month which is insane for my margins. optmyzr only does google ended up using a mix of stuff. zapier for some workflow automation. adsgo for the ad management part cause it handled both platforms and didnt make me want to rage quit during setup. some google sheets scripts for reporting took like 2 hours to get everything connected and working together now the automation handles most of the boring shit. pauses campaigns that blow budgets. moves money from underperformers to winners. kills ads when they tank. i still use sheets for final reports but the data collection is automatic now. way faster than doing everything manually first 2 weeks i didnt trust it. kept checking every hour like a psycho but then i realized it was catching stuff faster than i ever did. budget overruns at 2am? handled. ad performance dropping? caught it in real time now my day looks completely different: wake up. check alerts for 20 min. usually nothing urgent spend 3-4 hours on actual strategy work. analyzing competitor moves. testing new angles. talking to clients about their business goals check again at lunch. handle anything that came up another 2-3 hours on creative direction and campaign planning done by 5pm most days the big client? saved them. roas back up to around 4.0 because i actually had time to notice their competitor and adjust strategy. they just renewed for another year took on 2 new clients because i have capacity now. raised my rates 25% because i can actually deliver results instead of just keeping shit from breaking whole setup costs like $200/month total , saves me probably 15-20 hours a week feel like an idiot for not doing this sooner. was grinding myself into dust and almost lost my business because i was too busy to actually run my business still do all the important work myself. strategy, client relationships, creative direction. but manually checking if a campaign hit its daily cap at 3am? fuck that if youre running a small agency or freelancing and spending more time on busywork than actual work, you might be making the same mistake i was almost had to learn this lesson the hard way not saying automation fixes everything, but it definitely stopped me from losing my sanity (and my biggest client)