Kaffeen Espresso | Supercharged Agency New Business & Marketing
A podcast series from Charlotte Ellis Maldari, founder of Kaffeen, a new business and marketing consultancy for creative agencies. In short, Charlotte keeps your studio busy. Each episode, Charlotte interviews an expert in their field, takes listener questions and peruses topics of industry interest. This is a show that’ll inspire you to kick start your agency growth and generally to make creative agency sales and marketing feel more manageable and less grubby.
Automation gets a bad rap—and frankly, it’s not fair. In this episode, Charlotte breaks down why the tool itself isn’t the problem… it’s how people use it. If you’ve ever felt torn between “doing it all manually” or sounding like a bot, this is your wake-up call to stop choosing between authentic and efficient—because you can (and should) have both.
In this episode, we cover:
•The difference between lazy automation vs respectful automation
•How to use automation without sounding like a robot
•Why manual lead gen keeps you small and inconsistent
•What smart systems can do for your energy, confidence, and growth
•The role of automation in lead generation that feels human
Respectful systems aren’t the enemy. They’re your edge.
✨ Feeling like this might be your moment? It is.
Check out kaffeen.co/llo and get your system in place before the 10th of May 2025.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are four ways I can help you attract more high-value clients—without the hustle:
📚 Start with my free book
Join 3,000+ service providers and agency owners who’ve downloaded Client Magnet: 97 Proven Strategies and Tactics to Attract New Business and Scale Your Creative Agency Revenue.
(It’s written for agencies, but packed with advice any service provider can use.)
I work with a handful of clients each quarter to increase visibility, build authority, and land consistent £30k+ opportunities—with a system that runs on autopilot.
Hi, welcome to the Kaffeen Espresso Podcast. Today I wanna clear something up that automation isn't the enemy bad automation is. In today's episode, I'm tackling one of the biggest misconceptions I hear when I speak to people about the generation that anything automated, it's called spammy or lazy. You've probably had a few ugh moments when somebody's used automation really badly on LinkedIn or on Instagram or cold email. I have too, but that doesn't mean we should throw the whole thing out. So in this episode, we're digging into how automation when well used is actually the most respectful, efficient, and scalable tool you've got in your marketing toolkit, especially if you're short on time or energy. Okay. Real talk. Most people think that automation means blasting 300 cold messages a day that say, Hey Charlotte, I came across your profile. I thought we should connect. I can almost guarantee that at any given moment, your invitations section on LinkedIn has about 30 of thousand. That's not what I teach. That's not what I do. It's not what automation is supposed to be. The problem isn't a tool, it's the tactic. The tool is neutral. It's what you do with it that matters. So now I wanna talk about what good automation looks like and actually what it feels like you handpick the people that you want to speak to that are most likely to want to work with your business and who you would like to work with as well. You do that at scale. I'm talking a lot of people. I don't just mean picking 20 people out. You then write messages that sound like you. And that are highly customizable, but at scale, then you offer something genuinely useful in that message. So like a free training or a lead magnet, something that actually provides a solution to a problem that they have. And then when they respond, you actually show up and talk to them like a human. That's it. No pushiness, no pretending to be somebody. You're not just a system that helps you to start real conversations at scale without losing your soul. So we're not talking here about automating the entire conversation, we're just acknowledging that when you're doing cold outreach, you have to knock on a lot of doors for anybody to answer. That is just the reality of how it works. We are providing you a disproportionate advantage by using. Those pointers that I just gave you about how you should be doing that, what you should be including. But we need to be able to do it at scale for it to actually be feasible for it to pay off. If you sent out a hundred, which is the cap that LinkedIn allows you to a hundred of those connection requests with that customized message per week manually, it would take you. It would take you hours and hours. I would say probably even at least a day for somebody who's starting from the beginning or you're paying somebody to do that, right? You're paying for their time to do that. So that's why I want you to consider automation as a way of starting those real conversations with the right people at scale in a way that works for both parties and without losing your soul. So my account is no exception. At any given moment, I have hundreds of those invites to connect that are, I saw we have X in common or I see, I'm looking to expand my network on LinkedIn, or can we jump on a call? I think we can help you with XI have hundreds of those in my inbox. In fact, when I, present a live training to people. There is a chart on there where I've taken screenshots, of course I've anonymized them, but taken screenshots of many of those kind of messages in my own inbox and what they look like. And the thing is, when automation is done lazily and quickly, which let's face it, is how most people try out marketing. They try the quick and dirty way, and they. Then write it off because it's not working. It's just not been employed intelligently. And I think that's true of most marketing tactics, but especially of automation. Because if you do something without lots of intelligence, without lots of thought, you do the quick and dirty version, and then you plug in automation and do that at scale and at speed, you are seeing not just a negative result, but a negatively result. Amplified, and that's what puts a lot of people off. They may have had that experience themselves. They may have heard a story about it. What I'm encouraging you to think of is if you are putting the right inputs into automation, if you are setting it up correctly, if you're using the right language, you are using the right merge. Tag opportunities. If the content of that message is gonna hit right and actually be well received, and people come back to you and say Thank you, rather than delete get out of my inbox, then that is the opportunity that automation could present to you. If you start thinking about what it could be like if it's done correctly, what it could be like if you are working with somebody who has a lot of experience with that, who's done a lot of tried and tried a lot of ways of doing this and has found a, kind of golden formula of how to make this work most likely to work for you. So the truth about time and bandwidth. Look, most of the people I work with are smart, busy service providers, and they do not have time to be posting our every day on social media and not just like one social media, right? How many social media platforms do you have in the footer of your website right now? I have such an aversion to social media, which may sound funny as somebody who's talking to you about LinkedIn. If you've been around on this podcast a while, you'd likely know that already and the kind of history of that. It's not just one platform you need to be posting on every day. It's multiple. If you are doing it right in Inver to commerce as modern Marketing Society like Sister Believe, then you know. They do not have time to be commenting on 27 LinkedIn posts before breakfast. They do not have the time to be writing a new blog post every week, most likely, and they do not have time to be keeping track of every lead in a spreadsheet from 2017. That's frankly petrifying. They're juggling client work. They are juggling delivery, they're juggling team stuff, finance stuff. They're juggling life outside of their business. And I work with a lot of female business owners, which means life often involves managing or at least partially managing a household. And being a primary or joint parent of maybe one, maybe more children. They don't need any more to do. They need something to do the heavy lifting for them, and that is what automation is for. You get to define the rules, you get to stay in control. You get to set the tone. It doesn't mean you have to join the squad of people who use automation to say, Hey, I'm expanding my network. I thought it'd be good to connect, and you do not have to log into LinkedIn every damn day just to feel visible. That is not what this is about. Why you're allowed to use automation even if you hate selling. So if you're still thinking yes, but it feels a bit impersonal. I wanna flip that for you. What is actually more impersonal? Posting generic content into the void and hoping somebody buys or reaching out directly to people you know who are likely to want to work with you, offering something of real value and starting a relationship. When you use automation you're not faking anything. You're just removing the admin so you can focus on actual connection. I've had clients tell me they felt more in control and more human using automation because they weren't stuck in overwhelm, that they could be fully present when it mattered, when that person replied and when they needed to continue the conversation. Let's be honest. Doing it manually is slower and scarier. I used to believe that I had to do everything manually to keep it authentic. I'm talking a decade ago now, and then I realized that belief was keeping me small. It was keeping me small for my previous employers. And it was keeping me small for my current business as well. When I first doing that at Kaffeen, and it was keeping both of us, my employers and myself in my own business, inconsistent. It was making lead generation harder than it needed to be. So whatever you call lead generation, marketing, new business, finding clients, sales, and when I finally embraced automation with the right filters, the right messages, the right offer, I started having better conversations with better quality client leads. And more of them. And my energy was completely freed up to think, to create, to show up fully and to deliver better work. And that's the real power of it. And on that note, I just wanna say, I was one of those people who thought automation was all the bad stuff, and then I moved from an agency into a tech startup. And if you know anything about tech startups, you'll know there's famous mantras, lots of them, one of them the most used is move fast and break things. And what was really liberating about being in that tech startup was that they were really open to trying as many things out as possible, seeing what worked, scaling, what did scrapping, what didn't. Now, that was the diametric opposite from my previous role where I had been a marketing director in a creative agency where the focus was really on. Getting things just right because as a business ourselves, our output had to be perfect for our clients. That was really important. It was really important when the artwork went to the printers that it was absolutely just so they didn't waste a print run. Financially, time-wise, lots of reasons. It was important. So it was understandable that within creative agencies in particular, or any business where the output has to be. Completely precise that they take the same attitude towards their own marketing. And no disrespect to that, I completely understand it, but there's a middle ground where once you find the perfect output, you can then automate it. Or you find a good enough output a combination of factors that has the most likelihood to be received. Then you automate it, then you scale it. And to me, the combination of those two experiences of working in creative agencies and then moving to be a marketing director at Tech Startup was really empowering. Because I got the best of both worlds. So I want you to think about it like that. I don't want you to think about the automated messages you've received in the past. I want you to think about the combination of those two experiences that I had and the power that came out of the process, the system that was developed based on those experiences. So if you are still doing all your lead generation manually or worse, still avoiding it altogether, this is your nudge. We've built a service called LinkedIn Lead Liftoffs, specifically for people like you, people who care about connection, who don't wanna feel gross about doing lead generation, but who do want more control, more consistency, and a little bit more ease in their business. It is a done for you setup that gets your lead generation running on LinkedIn in the background using smart automation that still feels like you. And we do all of this in just three hours right now. Right now the price is just 900 pounds until the 10th of May before it jumps up to 1400 pounds. You can get all the information and book your spot at Kaffeen.co/ll o. That's KA double f, double EN. Do co slash ll let automation work for you and not against you. So that's it for today. I really want you to consider as stopping demonizing automation and start using it wisely because respectful, scalable, connection driven systems, that's what's gonna help your business to grow without burning out. I'll catch you next week. Bye.
