Case Study: We Helped a UK Personal Development Brand Cut 4 Hours a Week from Their Content Operation

The Snapshot – Content Creation

The Challenge

When this UK-based personal development brand launched its newsletter, it already had an audience. A following built across Twitter/X and Instagram meant there were people ready to read — they just needed a reliable way to reach them consistently.

The problem wasn’t ideas. The founder had those. The problem was the content and the production process that turned a single piece of writing into content across multiple platforms.

Every week, the same cycle played out. Write the newsletter. Manually work out how to turn it into a Twitter thread. Write 10 standalone tweets to build a backlog. Then figure out what the Instagram carousel should say. Format it, create it, schedule it.

None of it was hard. All of it was time. Running a content business alongside other work means 4 hours a week on mechanical reformatting is 4 hours you’re not spending on writing better content, building relationships with readers, or growing your audience.

The goal when they came to us was simple: spend the available time on the work that only a human can do — the ideas, the voice, the writing — and let the repetitive production work take care of itself.

The Solution

We built a content pipeline automation using Google Drive, Make.com, ConvertKit, and OpenAI.

We built the workflow around how the founder already worked. There were no new systems to learn, no change to the writing process, no disruption to the creative side of things. We only changed what happened after the writing was done.

Here’s how it works:

When a finished newsletter draft is added to a specific folder inside Google Drive as a Google Doc, the automation triggers. Make.com detects the new file and kicks off a sequence that runs three jobs in parallel.

Job one: the newsletter draft.

The workflow takes the Google Doc content and automatically creates a formatted draft inside ConvertKit — the email platform the brand was already using. The newsletter arrives in ConvertKit ready to review, tweak, and schedule. No copying and pasting. No reformatting. Just open, check, and send.

Job two: Twitter/X content.

OpenAI reads the newsletter and generates a long-form Twitter thread built around the core argument of the piece, plus 10 standalone tweets that can be scheduled individually over the following weeks. A single piece of writing becomes a month’s worth of Twitter content.

Job three: Instagram.

OpenAI generates the slide-by-slide content for an Instagram carousel post based on the same newsletter. The copy is ready — it just needs designing in Canva or wherever the brand creates its visual content.

The whole sequence runs automatically, without any involvement from the founder once the Google Doc is in the right folder. The total time from dropping in the doc to having three platform-ready content sets? Minutes.

The Results

• 4 hours saved every week — time that now goes back into writing and audience growth
• One writing session produces content for three platforms — newsletter, Twitter/X, and Instagram covered in a single workflow run
• A permanent backlog of social content — with 10 standalone tweets generated per edition, the brand always has posts ready to schedule
• Zero manual reformatting — it removed almost all manual work from the content production process

Client Quote

“When it comes to AI and automation Phil is the only guy I go to. He leads with massive value and provides the exact solutions I need in my business. He takes a bespoke approach to my business’s needs and creates solutions that make life a whole lot easier.”

— Mac B, The Brotherhood Newsletter

What This Means In Practice

Four hours a week doesn’t sound enormous in terms of content operation.

Until you think about what four hours a week actually represents across a year. That’s over 200 hours — roughly five full working weeks — spent copying, reformatting, and republishing content that had already been written.

The deeper issue is what that time was displacing. When you’re running a content business and your Monday afternoons are locked into production work, that’s Monday afternoons not spent on the things that actually grow the business — better writing, sharper ideas, conversations with the audience, collaborations with other creators.

This automation didn’t change what the brand does. It changed how much of their time the production side of the business gets to keep. The creative work still requires a human. The mechanical work no longer does.

That’s the distinction worth making when it comes to automation: it’s not about replacing what you do. It’s about making sure the time you have goes to the parts of the work that actually need you.

Running a content operation that takes more time than it should? Let’s look at where automation can help.

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