There’s a pattern we see in our competitors that we’re deliberately not copying.
Most automation agencies pick one platform, become certified in it, join the partner programme, and then sell that platform to every client who walks through the door. Sometimes the client is a great fit for it. Sometimes they’re not and the agency sells it to them anyway, because that’s the only tool the team knows how to build in.
It’s not malicious. It’s rational. Specialising in one tool is how agencies scale. You train one team, you build one playbook, you deliver faster, your margins go up.
But it’s also how clients end up paying £300 a month for a platform that doesn’t do 70% of what they needed, because the only agency they could find only knew how to build in that one tool.
Northern went the other way. We’re system-agnostic, and we think the business case for doing it that way is actually stronger — for us and for our clients. Here’s how.
What’s Actually in Our Toolbox
At the time of writing, the platforms we actively build, run and maintain for clients are:
- Make.com — for visual workflow design, complex branching, and cost-at-scale wins. Our default for growing SMEs doing more than 20,000 operations a month.
- Zapier — for clients who need the widest app library, want the fastest learning curve, or need to connect to something niche that nothing else covers.
- n8n — self-hosted, no per-task fees, privacy-friendly. The right call for businesses with sensitive data, stricter compliance, or teams who want to own their own infrastructure.
- GoHighLevel — our preferred all-in-one for service businesses. CRM, email, booking, funnels, SMS and voice all in one login. Where Northern AI Suite lives.
- OpenClaw — custom hosted automations and AI agents we build in-house for clients with workflows that don’t fit neatly into any of the commercial platforms.
- HubSpot, Pipedrive, Brevo — for clients whose existing stack already sits in one of these and doesn’t need ripping out. We’ll tune what you’ve got rather than force you to migrate.
- Claude and GPT integrations — for drafting, summarising, routing, decisioning, and the bits of work that require actual AI rather than just automation.
- Custom builds — when nothing off-the-shelf actually fits. We’ve built things from scratch for clients whose use case was too specific for any platform (the Oxitec mosquito-delivery field app is the one we’re most proud of).
- What’s already in place? If you’re already running HubSpot and it’s working, we’re not going to rip it out just because we like something else better. We’ll tune what you’ve got.
- What’s the operation volume? Under 5,000 ops/month, Zapier is fine. 5k–50k, Make starts winning on cost. 50k+, Make or n8n pretty much always.
- Where does the work happen? Service business with a phone that rings and a booking diary? GoHighLevel. SaaS chasing PLG growth? HubSpot. Sensitive data, compliance-heavy? n8n self-hosted. Something genuinely bespoke? Custom build on OpenClaw.
- Who’s going to maintain it? If you’ve got a technical team in-house, we’ll set you up on something they can own. If you haven’t, we’ll pick something we can confidently run for you long-term.
- What’s the budget? No point recommending HubSpot Professional to a £400k turnover business. No point recommending a free tier to an enterprise with compliance requirements.
That’s seven platforms and a custom-build option. Nobody in the North East currently offers that breadth, as far as we’ve found. Most agencies pick one. A couple pick two. We run all of them because clients genuinely need different things.
The Honest Reason We Stay Agnostic
Three reasons, actually.
1. Commission-driven advice is bad advice
A lot of automation agencies are quietly earning affiliate commission or partner kickbacks for selling specific platforms. There’s nothing illegal about it, but it does mean that when they tell you their "honest recommendation", the platform paying them two hundred quid a month for every client referral has a thumb on the scale.
We take zero commission from any platform we recommend. No referral fees, no partner kickbacks, no rev-share. We make our money on the implementation and management work, not on what you’re running on underneath. That means when we tell you GoHighLevel is right for your business, or that Zapier is genuinely the right answer despite being more expensive, we have no financial reason to say anything other than the truth.
2. The same business needs different things at different stages
A business turning over £250k needs something cheap and simple. The same business three years later, turning over £1.5m, needs something different. And three years after that, at £4m, it often needs something different again.
If we’d locked that client into one platform at the start, we’d now be spending our time defending the choice instead of helping them grow. Staying agnostic means we can swap the stack when the business outgrows it, and we’ve done it often enough to know how to migrate without losing data.
3. Specialising in one tool is a moat that disappears
The agencies making "we’re certified GoHighLevel partners" their whole positioning are betting that GoHighLevel will stay dominant in their market forever. History suggests it won’t. Five years ago everyone was Infusionsoft. Five years before that, everyone was ActiveCampaign. Five years before that, everyone was Constant Contact.
Tools come and go. The moat that actually compounds is knowing how to pick the right tool for the job and swap it when the job changes. That’s harder to build than a one-platform specialisation, but it lasts longer.
How We Actually Decide
People ask us this a lot. How do you pick? The honest answer is: we have a decision framework that looks roughly like this.
That’s the whole thing. It’s not magic. It’s not a proprietary methodology with a catchy name we trademarked. It’s just noticing what’s in front of you and making an honest call.
The One Commitment We Do Make
We are committed to one thing: we won’t sell you a tool you don’t need, and we won’t pretend a tool fits when it doesn’t.
If your automation problem is small enough that you could genuinely solve it yourself with two hours on a Saturday and a YouTube tutorial, we will tell you that. If your existing stack is fine and you’re not leaking enough to justify a rebuild, we will tell you that too. If the platform we’d like to recommend isn’t actually the right one for your business, we will send you elsewhere.
That’s cost us work occasionally. It’s also built a client base who keeps coming back and keeps referring us, because they know the recommendation isn’t contaminated by what we’d rather be selling.
If you want us to look at your setup and tell you honestly which tools are right for you — whether that’s ours, theirs, or none of the above — the free audit takes 20 minutes. No slides, no sales pitch, no hype.
