The Problem I Walked Into
When I joined REEF — a delivery-only food truck company operating out of parking lots and underutilized real estate — I noticed something right away. The people responsible for launching new projects, called Launchers, were spending enormous amounts of time doing something that should have taken minutes: setting up projects in Asana.
Every new site meant manually entering data, creating tasks, assigning team members, notifying stakeholders, and connecting the Asana project to the corresponding Salesforce record. Over an hour per project. And it happened constantly.
On top of that, headquarters had no clean way to track all active projects in a single dashboard. That made executive visibility — the kind needed for fundraising conversations and partnership development — nearly impossible to get without someone manually pulling data together.
Building the Automation
I used Microsoft Power Automate to wire everything together. Here's what the workflow does:
- A Microsoft Form collects the essential project data from Launchers — a clean, structured input instead of scattered manual entry
- Power Automate fires on form submission and creates the Asana project via API calls
- Stakeholders get automatically notified when a new project is created
- The Asana project gets linked to its corresponding Salesforce record
- The project is added to the right portfolio and team members are assigned
The entire thing went from over an hour per submission to under one minute. The data is clean and consistent every time, because a form enforces the structure that manual entry never could.
What It Was Worth
The workflow has been used 1,500 times since I built it.
At 1+ hour saved per use, that's 1,500+ hours of Launcher time. At $30/hour, that's $45,000 in direct labor costs that didn't have to be spent on administrative setup.
But the dollar figure undersells it. The intangible value was significant:
- Improved team collaboration because everyone was working from the same clean data
- Faster project timelines because the setup delay was gone
- Standardized project data that powered executive dashboards used in fundraising conversations and partnership development
The Principle Behind It
"Whenever you see your teammates doing repetitive tasks, see if you can automate them."
That's the whole thing. You don't need a sophisticated understanding of AI or machine learning. You need to watch how work actually gets done, identify where the repetition lives, and figure out whether a form and some API calls can eliminate it. In most organizations, the answer is yes — and the tools to do it are already available.
The ROI on this particular project was clear and immediate. But the bigger point is that this kind of opportunity is everywhere. It just requires someone paying enough attention to see it.