The Situation
An 8-person DTC activewear brand had a strong product and growing revenue — but their operations were held together with spreadsheets and late nights. The operations manager was spending 12+ hours every week on three tasks:
- Pulling ad spend from Meta Ads and Google Ads into a master Google Sheet
- Checking Shopify inventory levels and manually flagging low-stock SKUs
- Compiling a weekly performance report for the founder
The work was repetitive, error-prone, and happening every single week. The team was about to hire a VA to handle it — which would have been another band-aid on a broken workflow.
What We Built
We started with a full Operations Audit. Their biggest time sinks were clear: reporting, inventory alerts, and dashboard compilation.
We built a three-part custom automation system:
Part 1 — Live Ad Spend Dashboard
- Connected Meta Ads and Google Ads to a live Google Sheet via API
- Pulled spend, revenue, and ROAS daily — no manual copying
- Added a Slack alert when daily spend exceeded the planned budget by 20%
Part 2 — Automated Low-Stock Alerts
- Set reorder thresholds for every SKU in their catalog
- When inventory hit the threshold, the system auto-emailed their supplier with the SKU and quantity needed
- When stock went critically low, the system paused the Meta ad campaign and alerted the team in Slack
Part 3 — Morning Dashboard
- Built a live dashboard pulling revenue, orders, AOV, and refund rate from Shopify
- Scheduled a daily 8 AM Slack summary with yesterday’s numbers and week-to-date trends
- The founder saw the numbers before coffee. The operations manager never compiled another report.
The Results
Within 2 weeks of going live:
- 12 hours/week of manual reporting eliminated
- 20 minutes/week to review the automated dashboard
- 0 manual errors in ad spend or inventory data
- System runs 24/7 — no human in the loop required
The operations manager went from spending Monday mornings in spreadsheets to spending Monday mornings on product development and supplier negotiations.
What Made It Work
Three things separated this system from a generic template:
- Custom logic for their catalog. Their reorder rules varied by SKU and supplier. A template couldn’t handle that. We built it into the system.
- Real-time alerts in their Slack. They didn’t want another dashboard to check. They wanted notifications where their team already lived.
- Full handoff and documentation. They own the system. They can adjust thresholds, add SKUs, and modify supplier contacts without calling us.
Want to see what your operations could look like on autopilot? Book a free audit.