Unpopular opinion: most small businesses would grow faster with half their marketing tools

I keep meeting owners running a CRM, an email tool, a scheduler, three dashboards, an AI writer, and a landing page builder, none of which talk to each other. They spend more time feeding the tools than talking to customers.

The pitch is always “this saves you time.” But ten time-savers that don’t integrate cost more time than doing it by hand.

So where’s the line? At what point did your stack stop serving the work and become the work? And has anyone actually cut tools and grown faster for it?