How Many Services Does Your 'Simple' Process Actually Rely On?

I read something recently that made me laugh, then made me a bit uneasy. Someone worked out that hearing their own doorbell ring involved five separate cloud services. A button, a hub, an app, a notification service, a speaker. Five things had to work, in order, for a very old and very simple piece of technology (a bell) to do its one job.

Business automation ends up the same way, and nobody plans it that way on purpose. It just accumulates.

How the chain builds up

It usually starts sensibly. A form on your website feeds into a spreadsheet. Then someone adds a step to email the sales team automatically. Then a step to add the contact to your CRM. Then a step to check they're not already a customer. Then a Slack notification. Then a step to log it in your accounting software for reporting. Each addition solved a real problem at the time.

Two years later, "a customer fills in a form" is actually: website form, a form-handling tool, an automation platform like Zapier or Make, your CRM, your email provider, a Slack integration, and your accounting software's API. That's six or seven services, each with its own login, its own uptime, its own pricing tier, and its own habit of changing its API without much warning.

Nobody sat down and designed this. It grew, step by step, each step reasonable on its own.

Why the length of the chain matters more than any single link

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, but with automation the real problem is that every extra link is another chance for something to break, another subscription to pay for, and another login someone needs to remember when the person who built it moves on.

If one of those seven services has an outage, changes its pricing, or gets acquired and shut down (all things I've watched happen to small business tools over the years), the whole process stops. Not fails loudly with an error message. Just quietly stops. The form still submits. The email just never arrives. Nobody notices until a customer chases up a quote three days later.

I've written before about what happens when an API you rely on changes, which covers the moment things do break. This is really about the step before that: understanding how exposed you are before it happens.

A quick exercise worth doing this week

Pick one process your business runs on repeatedly. Something like "a new lead comes in" or "an invoice needs sending" or "a job gets booked". Then physically draw it out, box by box, every tool it touches from start to finish. Not what it's supposed to do. What it actually does, today, including the workaround someone added six months ago that nobody's mentioned since.

Most business owners are surprised by two things when they do this:

• The number of boxes. Five or six is common for something that feels like "just sending an email".
• How many of those boxes only one person understands. Often the person who set it up, who may no longer be involved day to day.

Once it's on paper, ask which boxes are actually necessary and which are patches for a problem that could be solved a different way. Sometimes a step exists purely because two systems don't talk to each other properly, and a human had to be looped in as the translator.

Fewer, sturdier links beats more, cheaper ones

The instinct when a process feels fragile is often to add another tool to monitor the other tools. That's more links, not fewer. It rarely helps.

The better fix, in most cases I've worked on, is consolidation. Instead of five SaaS tools glued together by a general-purpose automation platform, a proper integration talks directly to the two or three systems that actually matter, with the logic written once, tested, and owned by one place rather than scattered across five dashboards. It costs more upfront than adding another Zapier step. It costs a lot less over three years, and it fails in ways you can actually diagnose, because there's one thing to look at instead of five.

This is exactly the kind of work I do: taking a process that's grown into a tangle of connected tools and rebuilding the part that matters as something solid, with proper error handling and a clear owner for the logic. Not replacing every tool you use, just removing the fragile joins between them.

What to do with what you find

If your drawn-out diagram has one or two boxes, you're probably fine. Keep an eye on it and move on.

If it has five, six, seven boxes for something that should be simple, that's worth a proper look, not because every automation is bad, but because you've built something with a lot of ways to fail silently and not much visibility when it does. Worth knowing before a customer tells you, rather than after.

If you want a second pair of eyes on a process that's grown more complicated than it should have, get in touch and I'll have a look at where the actual risk sits.