The louder one: SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor, the AI tool a lot of developers write their code inside, for $60 billion. While the big number got the headline, the real story is the direction. The biggest companies in the world have stopped just racing to build the smartest model. Now they are buying each other and folding the pieces together, assembling something bigger than any one lab could build alone.

The quiet one matters more to you. An infrastructure company called OpenRouter ran a plain test. Instead of handing a hard research question to the single smartest model, they handed it to a panel of models at once, then let one model read all the answers and fuse them into a single response. The panel won handily. A group of cheaper, lighter models, working together, beat the heavyweight models that cost twice as much. They even ran one model twice and combined its own two answers, and that beat running it once.

They call it fusion. The lesson is older than the tool: a good panel beats a lone genius.

Put the two stories next to each other and the same arrow shows up in both. The future of AI is not one perfect brain you pick and marry. It is many brains, combined. The companies are merging at the top. The models are fusing underneath. Over the next few months that pile-up is going to produce something that acts less like a chatbot and more like a room full of experts answering as one.

So here is the question for an owner. If the smart move is to use more than one brain, how do you set your business up to do that without a research lab’s budget?

You already know the answer if you read last week’s piece: ‘Own the folder. Rent the engine.’

Everything your AI needs to work for you lives in plain files you own. The brand, the clients, the way you write, the standing rules, the documented work. The engine that reads those files is a setting, not a marriage. Today you point Claude at the folder. This afternoon you can hand the same hard question to Grok for a second opinion and watch where the two disagree.

The disagreement is the gift. Two good models land in the same place and you move with confidence. They split, and you just found the exact part of the decision that needs you in it. That is the small-business version of fusion, and you can run it today with tools you already pay for. No API, no panel of judges. One folder, two engines, and the habit of asking twice when the stakes are high.

Notice what this is, a modern tech trick, but in reality it is how every good operator already runs when faced with a hard call. You do not bet your company’s future on one person’s gut. You get a few sharp people in the room, you listen for where they agree and where they fight, and then you make the call and own it. The lone genius who never checks his work loses to the well-run team every time. The labs just spent billions of dollars proving the thing you learned the first time you built a real team. AI is converging on how good businesses already work. Run your shop that way and you are already fluent in what the whole industry is chasing.

Here is why owning the folder gets more valuable as this plays out, not less. The engines are about to get cheaper and stronger at the same time. Every merger, every fusion, every new model drops more capability into the same socket you are already plugged into. Open Source creators and innovators are working hard at solving this problem, and that is a massive benefit to you. The owner who built the folder rides every one of those upgrades for free. He wakes up one morning and his system is smarter and he did nothing to earn it.

The owner who married a single tool gets whipsawed. He built his whole way of working around one company’s app and one company’s buttons. Prices change. Features move. The company gets bought. Now he relearns his business around someone else’s roadmap. One of those owners compounds. The other starts over every time the news cycle turns.

So do not bet your business on one AI. Not the one your neighbor swears by, not the one that won this month’s benchmark, not even the one I use every day. Bet on the system. Build the folder, write down how you work, and keep more than one brain in the room for the decisions that carry weight. The frontier is fusing. The smartest thing a small business can do is stop shopping for the single perfect mind and start building the room those minds work in.

You own the room. They supply the minds.

I’m currently in a testing phase with some of these new fusion models, and will be reporting back throughout the next months on where you can source this information and how you can begin implementing these models in the future (if I find that worthwhile for you & your teams).

Jeff Binek runs CBus AI Agents in Dublin, Ohio, building AI systems for small businesses across Central Ohio. More at cbusaiagents.com.

Your software is splitting into two piles. One pile your agent can reach into, pull data from, and run on your behalf. The other pile is a locked box. Almost nobody sorts their stack on purpose.

How we got the subscription trap

Walk it back a few years. You used to buy software the way you bought anything else. One payment, a disc, and the thing was yours. Office, the design tools, the accounting program, all of it sat on your machine and you owned the license. It had flaws, but it was yours.

Then the whole industry switched to renting. Every tool became a monthly fee. The honest reason was not better software. It was smoother quarterly earnings. A one-time release gives a company one big sales quarter and then a long slide until the next launch, and investors hate that gap. A subscription erases it. Now revenue is steady, predictable, and easy to grow: raise the price ten percent and revenue climbs ten percent, whether the product improved or not.

You feel the result as subscription fatigue. Even a business that barely touches software ends up carrying a stack of recurring bills, paying every month for tools it uses twice a year. I ran a gym for sixteen years, about as far from a software company as you can get, and we still carried thousands of dollars a year in subscriptions, most of them idle most of the time.

Most owners miss the real opening. Everyone hears “AI raises profitability” and jumps straight to replacing people. Wrong target. The easier win is replacing the pile of subscriptions you resent, taking back the ownership, and getting tools that work directly with your own AI. That goes straight to your bottom line, and it gets better the stronger your team is.

The two piles

Start sorting your software into two piles.

The first pile is the tools your AI can work with natively. I can sit in one window and say, go into the accounting software, pull my profit and loss, export the balance sheet to a PDF, and draft the email to my accountant. The agent goes and does it. The big accounting platforms are a good example of companies that are ahead here. They moved.

The second pile is everything that does not connect. Asking your agent to touch it feels like pulling teeth. Website platforms are the worst offenders right now. They make real money hosting sites and selling the tools around them, and most of them are slow to open the door to your agent. Some are catching up, some are decent, and at least one of the big names is still clunky and behind. You will know yours the moment you try to get your agent to update a page and hit a wall.

That gap is not a minor annoyance. It is a compounding cost. One owner asks a question and has the full picture before coffee. The other is still logging into six sites and stitching numbers together by hand, donating an hour a week to software that will not cooperate, and falling a little further behind every month.

MCP: the standard outlet

The reason any of this works is a standard called MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Skip the acronym and picture a wall outlet. Before standard outlets, every device needed its own custom plug. Then everyone agreed on one shape and anything could plug into anything. MCP is that outlet for AI. A company builds one door, and your agent can walk through it, pull the data, run the task, and hand back the result.

That turns into a simple habit. Before you fight a tool, look it up. Does the payroll company have an MCP server? If yes, connect it, and now your agent can run payroll, pull hours, and draft the tax summary for your accountant from the same window where it does everything else. Most forward-thinking companies already have this. Some do not. Go through every login your business pays for and check.

When it all connects, you run the business from one window. The books, payroll, expenses, invoices, the file share, the whole Google suite, the website, all reachable from one place. One spot, one agent, one question.

Triage: green, yellow, red

Here is the work for this week. Pull your bank statement, find every software subscription, and sort each one into three piles.

Green. Your agent works with it beautifully. A subscription you have carried forever just became far more useful, and now your agents are in it every day pulling better data than you ever pulled by hand. AI made it better. Lean in.

Yellow. Some of it connects. You can pull a little data, aggregate a few things, but you cannot do everything you want yet. Do not rip it out. Watch it, test it, keep your options open.

Red. No connection, no door, and it is blocking you. This is the pile to plan around. Not a panic, just a plan: what would I replace this with, and what would it take.

The escape hatch

The red pile used to be a dead end. Not anymore.

If a tool will not open its door, you route around it. Your agent can build the thing, a clean landing page written on your own machine in minutes, or a simple internal tool that does what you need and nothing else. Or you self-host the open-source version and own it outright, no subscription and no gatekeeper.

Websites are the easiest place to start. Build your site in code, keep it in your own folder backed up in three places, and host it for free or close to it. Drop your current site into your AI, recreate it, and you own it a hundred percent with no monthly fee. Then it gets more powerful, not less, because your agent can read the site for search and local visibility in real time, spin up a campaign landing page, or point you at a new market, all on command.

I think about the software we ran at the gym. The version from eight years ago did everything we needed. Then the company took on outside money, and the only way to justify it was to keep shipping features nobody asked for while the price climbed year after year. Today I would rebuild the simple version that does exactly what I need, save thousands a year, and take it straight to the bottom line. More and more owners, including people who are not technical at all, are already doing exactly this.

Own the system

This connects to what I wrote on Tuesday about becoming a super user: own the folder, rent the engine. Your brain, your rules, your files live locally and belong to you. The AI is the engine you plug into them.

That carries more weight than it sounds. A wave of these companies is heading toward going public, and public companies face the same earnings pressure that built the subscription trap in the first place. Pricing will move. If your whole operation lives inside one company’s locked box, you are exposed. If you own your folder, you point a different engine at the same files and keep working. The open and free models are improving fast and trail the leaders by months, not years. Most small businesses do not need the absolute cutting edge to run their business well.

So this week, take the test. Pull the statement, sort the stack, green, yellow, red. The owners who do this build an efficiency lead that gets harder to catch the longer it runs. The ones who keep renting locked boxes keep paying more for less.

— Jeff

Jeff Binek runs CBus AI Agents in Dublin, Ohio, building AI systems for small businesses across Central Ohio. More at cbusaiagents.com.

Full transcript

Auto-transcribed and lightly cleaned. Speaker is Jeff Binek throughout.

All right, guys, what’s going on today we’re going to be talking a bit of market dynamics software and Maybe even a little bit of theory This is something I’ve had the opportunity over the past probably two or three weeks to be doing a bit of a deeper dive into And I get this information a lot from a handful of different sources, right? I’ve tried to curate the content that I’m getting in a mix of two different people The first group of people are AI native people people who are working for companies Anthropic XAI Google Or maybe used to work at those companies and have gone off and started something on their own and they’re doing podcasts circuits or writing blogs They’re writing ex articles actually is a really good way to kind of keep up to date

The other group is actually investors and And people who are going on to investing podcasts or finance podcasts and talking a little bit more on the cutting edge and how they kind of see these Pictures going around the world like how things are changing consistently and the reason I think their viewpoint is very very important Is two things one they have a lot of skin in the game, right? It’s really easy for an AI company to get in there Somebody works for an AI company to get in there and start talking about, you know Oh, how great all of our stuff is and how it’s going to revolutionize this that and the other and of course they think that But when an outside firm who has an investment firm has done a bunch of research talked to all the managers of all of these different companies and can talk about the Things going on across an entire industry or across multiple companies. They know multiple different managers

Owners companies, etc They’re going to be giving you a much more broad viewpoint But they’re also going to a lot of times be talking about their book right or that’s kind of the the term in investing circles is talk your book right They’re going to be talking about where their money is and a lot of these people are putting substantial sums of money So their money is where their mouth is right they’re not going to be investing in something unless they really really believe that it is the future And it’s hard to get an edge in the investing world right now So that’s kind of where this has come up I’ve also been viewing it through my lens of the companies that I work with where I’m making recommendations where I have frustrations where the owners have frustrations and why those frustrations come up And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today is how this world of software

Has sort of evolved but also kind of where we’re at and what things are looking like future moving So just kind of a brief overview of this and we’re going to go through the slides here in a second if you guys are watching on YouTube We’re going to go on some some different tangents, but I just want to kind of give my brief history And how I remember things for myself right now if you can go all the way back all right I am a original real floppy disk put it in the thing lower the thing to lock it in and you’re playing Oregon trail In the library and it’s like the greatest thing ever because you know you’re in second grade And you’re you know your teacher has let you use the computers to play Oregon trail for a half an hour And you are over the moon because you know you’re losing ox for crossing the river and

You know, that’s that’s the exciting year old that’s software right is kind of where things started Uh, that’s that’s kind of where my brain goes So if we go through this evolution We have the these you know big revolutionary softwares that kind of started to come out as a subscription service The first one that I can remember is AOL So AOL was a you know a software that you would use to connect into the internet They I believe would do it by minutes at first and so you’d have this recurring subscription cost to use the service Eventually these things started to turn into like okay now. We’ve got some websites Websites at first were struggling to figure out how they were going to monetize them

They had all these big booms and bust you have the big 2001 a 2000 2001 Kind of like web boom right where these things went up and everybody had you know Pets.com always the popular version of this right Flies up like ridiculous stock everyone invests a ton of money and then everyone realizes like oh, we’re not there yet Now the funny part about that was the investment thesis wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was just poorly timed right The idea behind it was correct that Web and web services and software companies were going to actually be the winners right The problem was everyone tried to frontrun it and everyone got it wrong right like you weren’t Picking the Amazon’s and you weren’t seeing the Googles and you couldn’t necessarily see those companies born out of it yet It’s almost like the failures and the sacrifices and why they failed and sacrifice had to happen the way they happened

So that future software companies could have just changed course and figure out how to monetize properly And then obviously we we are where we are now where most of the biggest companies in the world are Generally software companies right now you’ve got a couple of really good hardware companies that have started to come in And take a big market share But when we start thinking about where software is going to go I think there’s still a huge chunk of the market the stock market the American economy the world economy that is pretty heavily invested in software and I think that that’s the number one thing the more that I do this the more that I see that area is actually rife for Disruption and so what you’re starting to see now I think is some people starting to recognize that

Starting to maybe pull money away from pure software companies and starting to invest more in either hardware companies Or some of these more future looking things which we’ll talk about in a second So When we think about this like when we think about SaaS right software as a service. Okay This has been the big thing. I also think that the culture and I’ll just I’ll speak for myself But I do think this annoyance is shared amongst everybody and here’s the I can give 10 examples of this right But I’ll give the most obvious one for me which is like windows Adobe is another one that comes to mind Trying to think of things that like you know a Microsoft office right where things that you used to be able to buy a CD

You would put it into your computer you would use the software you would pay one time And now you had the software and you could use you know the operating service you could or the the operating system You could use the software you could use Mike you know Docs and or sorry you could use word and excel and you know Adobe acrobat and Audition and premiering like you you had access to these things right and It worked right now there were some problems with it right updates and you know changing codes and you know So what these companies all had the idea around was this idea of you know software as a service So we’re gonna switch to a subscription model and now every single thing that you can possibly think of is a monthly subscription cost

And the real reason that they did this if we’re all being honest with each other is quarterly earnings right they did this because Before you had to have one big massive dump or drop so you would drop a new You know Microsoft operating system a new version of windows and it would drop as the CD and you would get just Millions of dollars of sales all in one quarter and that quarter would look absolutely incredible And then that sales would get worse the next quarter worse the next quarter worse the next quarter as you got further away from it And then there’s this big like wait For all the companies to unveil their new product okay, and

In that interim time people didn’t know how to invest right is your next product gonna be good as anyone even gonna want it right And what it did was it smoothed out These quarterly earning statements for these stocks, okay So now companies can go on and they can say oh we have this many subscriptions This was our subscription revenue. This is how many people we have and then if we want to make more money next quarter or more money next year All we have to do is raise our subscription cost by 10% and now our revenue went up 10% year over year And that’s how every one of these companies and you guys were probably like me you have subscription fatigue And what that is is those are all the pieces of software that you use, okay, so that’s Spotify if you’re if you’re a company

There’s probably hundreds of these right you have a Google subscription a Microsoft subscription You have a drop box or a share file subscription You’ve got all of your CRM subscriptions your website subscriptions any applications any products that you guys have to use all subscriptions, okay, and I know for Friendship, which is not a Software heavy business like a gym is not a software heavy business But we still had probably a thousand to two thousand to three thousand dollars of subscriptions that we would have to use All the time and I remember just like months and months going by where like we wouldn’t use that service We wouldn’t need it at all and we were paying the subscription costs all because at one time we would need to use it a ton right

And that’s super frustrating when you used to own the software right you’d own the license for that It made sense for me to pay one time cost of a hundred dollars to own the entire Adobe suite And then just be able to use that when I needed it okay and over time out or my money back But now with the subscriptions and the way that they work a lot of times is a losing proposition Okay, so that entire context is important for us to go into this conversation with Because not only that fatigue but that frustration with the actual business model is what we are going to be able to start Chipping away out and I think that if you guys are looking at this as an investor I think it’s very interesting to think about but if you guys are looking at this as an operator and a business owner I think this is like

Such an opportunity for you to drive things to your bottom line to make more profit to have more ownership To have more control and like same thing. I think all these people are thinking oh my gosh, you know AI everyone keeps talking about how AI is going to increase profitability how AI is going to increase productivity How it’s going to do this that and the other and everyone has taken that to mean. Oh, they’re going to replace people Know what if we can just replace all of these software subscription services that total 45,000 dollars a year Or a lot more for companies that are software native right if you guys are a software or a tech company You guys are probably way north of that 10 15 25,000 dollars a month So we’re talking about replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars Improving quality of use improving ownership and allowing things to work natively with our own AI agents

So we’re faster and more efficient with these things like this is where I have started to get really excited About the future and the cool part about this is like The more team you have and the better people you have the better this is going to be for you So this actually I think helps retention. So something I’m always kind of thinking about as I work with these small businesses Right So let’s start talking from a small business perspective, right There’s two piles of things that we are I’m starting to look at software in terms of two different piles The tools where our AI can work with them natively where it can connect and I can be working in VS Code or in Claude Or even you know in whatever system you guys are natively working in okay

Whatever AI, I guess you know agent system you’re working in um And I can just be in my agent window and say You know, hey, I want you to go into my QuickBooks pull down my P&L I need to send a quick snapshot of my balance sheet over to my CPA pull that down for me You know export it all into a PDF and then draft a Email to my CPA for me right and my agentic system can just go out fetch that and do that Okay, and Intuit is a pretty good example right now of a company that is I would say ahead of the game from a software Software subscription service again huge annoyance. I know if Grant’s listening is gonna be he hates He hates into it. He hates that QuickBooks is all online now is all the subscription service again

That was a company used to just be able to buy the floppy disk and or buy the CD put it in and you owned QuickBooks, right? So but they are doing a good job of integrating okay and then the other bucket of our or the other pile Is the software subscription companies that we have that are not integrating with our AI system or our AI tools and so It’s like pulling teeth for us To say you know, oh, I want you to go in so I’ve had this experience now a couple different times with WordPress and Wix I find that actually web providers website companies who are making a boatload of money off of people Hosting their website and using their software to create a website and we’ll circle around to this in a second They are like way behind and these companies are To me, I would say especially annoying

And I’ll tell you why as somebody who’s spent a boatload of time building websites, okay? They know That writing code in HTML and writing websites from scratch is a very hard proposition for 99% of people especially business owners They also need that know that business owners need to not only be able to run websites But be able to do all of these other things from like an SEO and a geo perspective to be able to be found locally And those things are integral to them running a good business And if they don’t have those tools their website again is effectively worthless So if we take WordPress as an absolutely egregious example of this, okay Their software is outdated antiquated not good, okay?

Squarespace is an example of another company that I’ve used I’ve built websites on both that is significantly better in terms of usability and helping Non coders make websites, okay WordPress then started doing this idea called plugins or add-ons Where you could start plugging in what I would call our essential features to a website And again, this is just one of those things that like people have started doing which I just think is such Bad business practice it lacks integrity to me To say like this is not an included service, okay, and I know like BMW has gotten hammered on this right where it’s like oh if you want to use cruise control That’s an additional so you know upgrade in your subscription service to your BMW if you want to be able to start your car

You know use the remote starter that’s an additional subscription service Like go screw yourself that is such a just dick move right you you built the car with the functionality And now you’re just gonna hamstring everybody like I just I absolutely hate those people like hate whoever sat in that office and had that idea Those people just need like a triple punch in the face they are such losers and I hate them right Take all of that, okay And like those like those ideas those people those companies those are the ones where like we’re gonna use AI and just completely Delete those people from the business world as they deserve to be deleted because that’s how they chose to run their business Okay, so let’s take that as our two buckets, okay companies that are integrating well with your AI and companies that are not okay Sorry, I got off of my I get I get hot talking about that stuff all right

So um, let’s start kind of thinking about this right what we want to do and I talked about this in my blog post on Tuesday I highly recommend reading that it’s a very important post to become a super user and Claude But we need to own the folder set, okay And I think a lot of people who are still using web-based AI are running going to run into this issue And it’s gonna be a nasty wake up call if and when it happens, okay There is a future that’s not too distant where these AI companies are going to have to start to make decisions On a financial perspective, right, but also what’s best for their company on how they are going to operate how they’re gonna monetize especially with these Upcoming IPOs, okay, so I know just this year you’ve got Databricks you’ve got

Claude or Anthropic you’ve got XAI and SpaceX you’ve got A handful of other smaller companies all trying to go public this year That’s when then these quarterly earnings calls start going public and live That’s when then they have to start figuring out how they’re monetizing how they’re driving revenue, okay So What you’re going to start to see is we need to be engine agnostic, all right There are a lot of open source models right now that are effectively free to use that we can shift our model over to if Let’s say Anthropic or let’s say because I’m using Claude and I use Claude the most right now

Let’s say they just change their pricey model and it becomes one of these egregious price gouging you know crazy things To be able to continue to use their service. Hey cool. I own my folder set. I own my brain locally on my External hard drives on my computer. I own them. They’re mine. I can point any system any engine any AI To that brain and just continue working now the intelligence might not be as good And I might see some drop-offs or some changes in that capacity But what we’re going to see over time is the free open source versions will catch up to where the high end paid Versions on are now and they might just be on a six to 12 month lag

Okay So we’re getting there, right and where this future can kind of go is if you want to be on the cutting edge You’re going to have to pay to use you know, Grok or Claude or Gemini Whoever is at the absolute cutting edge. You’re going to have to pay and maybe pay a lot to be able to use those Really, really high ends and you’re going to be able to do stuff that other people won’t But not everybody needs that right as a small business who’s maybe not trying to do You know reinvent the wheel or try you know trying to get people to Mars We probably don’t need the same compute power that the SpaceX team needs to be able to launch data centers in space and people to Mars And do like advanced telemetry and all that stuff like we probably don’t need the same compute power

To for us to be able to like whip up a CRM to help send blast emails to our clients, right? So This is why we need to build things the way that I’ve been trying to encourage you to think about building them We need to own those folders. That’s have those things locally have a series of markdown files and you know, Claude MD and you know our brain trust files there That can then be shifted and moved However and whenever we need them okay Now If our software that we already use in our organizations Is not native they are behind the curve at this point if they don’t have

You know MCP or some way For your AI agents to be able to just go grab data or upload data or push things live Right like I use Netlify to host my website and their CLI and their MCP that allows my AI to just work natively That means I can push websites like what you guys are watching these slides on right now is just on my website and I can push that stuff live in Moments from my cell phone Which is remotely into my AI system right like I can I can do all that stuff I can push things live to my website. I can say hey build me a perfectly optimized Google ad landing page for this new ad campaign that we want to run I can do it from my cell phone

And it can go in my AI agent can go in the Netlify and push the website live and I can have it all hosted and ready to go okay That is an example of a system that works natively not all softwares are going to do that right Wix is trying to catch up to speed They’ll let you do some stuff word presses behind clunky outdated Um, you know Shopify is pretty good Squarespace somewhere in the middle But like not every service not every hosting service and I web service is going to allow you to do that So again, what I would encourage you to get to is Own your html website like build your website in code from scratch and just own it in your own folder set It’s backed up three or four different places and it’s hosted live right you have a GitHub back up

You have all this stuff like and you’re you own it right you don’t have to pay WordPress You don’t have to pay Squarespace or Shopify you don’t have to pay any of those rips or fees because guess what Next year they’re going to raise the rates on you. It’s gonna go up The rip that they take on transactions is going to go up There’s all of these things now that you can just create your own code for and your agents can work with you And then they can push things live in real time and you just don’t need those services anymore I think that’s such an easy place for everybody to start especially if you already have a good website that’s hosted locally like If you put that website right into Claude Download those files and put it right into your agent

You can basically recreate your website that you own a hundred percent of you have no ongoing subscription costs No ongoing costs at all Hosted it Netlify for free or for nine dollars a month And all of a sudden you took this thing that was costing you Hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year and you had to go to some third-party company and rely on them to host everything And now you just took complete ownership of it forever and you cut your costs and you just take that straight to the bottom line And in reality what’s going to happen is your website is going to be ten times more powerful because your AI agents are going to be able to Analyze and read your site for SEO and geo in real time and be able to say hey You know, I want to be able to run this ad campaign or I want to be able to create this landing page

I want to do better for local SEO We’re going to go national or you know, I want to start hitting in Indianapolis, Indiana. We’re looking at a new location It can do all that stuff in real time for you and none of those other web providers allow you to do that So as we start kind of Moving on to this idea or this mental framework What I want to start getting to is all of our systems are hooked up And dialed in with our agent and our agent knows all of that right it has all the connections But it also knows our entire organizational frame We use this you know a new lead comes into the website they go where they go into this CRM the CRM is connected in and I can

Text message and back email and back we can set up automations we can do whatever I can do all that stuff just right from one window I pull up my VS Code and now I have access to everything all of our QuickBooks all of our Gusto all of our payroll all of our expenses all of our invoices Everything just from my one VS Code window Okay, all of my file share all of my entire Google suite all right there I can you know edit Google sheets. I can update the website and do it all from one terminal and that’s what I say here There’s a new way. It’s one spot one agent you know or one question and we are often operating and running our entire organization from one place That’s where we’ve got to get to but we need software that allows us to do that. Okay So MCP is the standard outlet for AI all right, so if we start thinking about this like

It’s a good practice for us as we start looking at building out our AI systems and integrating those with software Of going on to Google and just saying you know does Gusto have an MCP setup or an MCP hookup Do they have that answers? Yes, great And then you can go into your AI agent system and say hey, I want to hook up to Gusto So I can run payroll and get down information on hours and all this other stuff from my employees What’s my tax burden, right? I want to send this out to my CPA where you know some COVID happens again We need to operate for PPP help me set up the paperwork and tax documents for that All that stuff can be done, okay Some companies are there most of your forward thinking good companies are going to have this setup already

But not everybody does once you know that Your entire organization if you have a subscription if you have a login You need to go through and do the practice of getting the MCP server set up Telling your agents and organizing your agents in a way so that they know Where all those things are and that they are set up and hooked up So um This is like as we kind of Take this next step right as we start to go through this process

What I will find is that there are if we look at this bottom one there are a handful of Website software subscription companies that are closed out and You feel like or I feel like as I’m trying to build for these small businesses. I’m trying to build something cool and unique I feel like I’m fighting to try to Update things to make things better to help them out to you know They have a vision in their mind of oh, we’ve got all this data. We got all this stuff I want to be able to push this live or I want to be able to pull down this information and draw reports and build graphs and create a dashboard for this And I would be able to do all this up But the system where all of it sits is closed to me

And now we either have to find some pain in the ass work around Or we have to just shut the idea down because of some third party company that hasn’t caught up to the times So we need to understand what those are in our company and where they sit in that in that kind of trajectory Now here’s where I Want you to think about going and again. This is like if you guys haven’t been working in the system This is going to sound like overwhelming But trust me when I tell you my companies who these are like not tech people they are not coders They’re not anything like that. They’ve already started doing this. Okay, the closed tools

You’re going to start to look to create your own local version of Or find a better way to do it with your own local AI system Okay, so let’s just take the example Let’s say we use QuickBooks for all of our tax organizing and that’s our software Okay, and let’s say they did not have the MCP hookup and they didn’t have a connection within my AI agentic system What I would start to do is maybe using Google Sheets or Excel or something like that I would start to work with my agent to basically recreate my own version of QuickBooks And again, you could do this anyway If you’re paying a boatload of money to QuickBooks now my QuickBooks is like 20 bucks a month

So it’s not a big deal but If you guys are much bigger company like a you know ccorp multiple locations multiple entities all that stuff Maybe you are spending a lot of money there And there’s a lot of functionality in those big systems that you don’t need You’re paying for them to update stuff that you’re not going to use So then you can just start picking and pulling all of the little functions Okay, I want this to be able to pull down my credit card statements Can I MCP and pull down my credit card statements from my bank account like sure, okay

And you can start doing all this linking and connecting you can create your own software for your company that you own And again take out a subscription cost Now that’s not a great example because QuickBooks does allow you to do that So that’s going to be something we’re going to push to the future that maybe we’ll do sometime in the future Maybe we won’t What we want to do is take the stuff like websites I was telling you about the things that are closed to you Where our agent can’t talk to it our agent can’t do the tasks or has can’t do the ideas Because the system doesn’t allow us to work with them

And I’ve seen this with CRMs Especially I’ve seen it with websites I’ve seen it with little pieces of code Even things like now some of the design sweet and Adobe is like they’re kind of getting there Some people are using things online Fig was a good example of this trying to get there quickly And so this is how I’m kind of recommending people triage this Green software is stuff that like my AI agent can work so well with it right now That I actually am getting so much more out of this subscription that I’ve been holding forever

That now I’m using it all the time and my agents are in there every day And I’m using it a ton because now my agentic system helps me use all this stuff together in one place And I’ll be able to pull better data from there And so that’s like green it’s made better by the use of AI Yellow is maybe there’s some connections maybe I can kind of pull down data And I can kind of aggregate certain things But maybe I can’t do everything that I want to do And red is they are not ready at all There is no connection

It’s not good and they’re blocking me from it And in that case those are the things we’re going to try to delete And recreate specifically what we need from them on our own locally And this is where like things are trippy for people because you can just write your own software Right like you can just host your own web-based platforms for your team Again, and it’s a lot easier than you think it is So if we’re kind of going through this like mental process right the the thing I’ll kind of end on here Is I want you to think about owning your system All right, and if we circle back real quick to like an investing thesis right from that lens

I think what you’re starting to see is a lot of these top investors Have started to recognize this And there’s a lot of companies out there that are just pure software and pure subscription companies I think they face a really really tough road ahead it’s not impossible for them Because I think a lot of them have really good motes right like they have So much data and they have so much it’s like the app that people just always go to So take like Instagram for example like I hate Instagram. I think Instagram is a terrible app Right, I think AI is going to make it significantly worse already really bad so many sponsored posts all the time You see more sponsored posts than you see posts of your friends

So it’s a bad product already and then now the the paid posts and sponsored posts are all going to be AI And it’s going to flood you and it’s going to be more so I think people are going to be less likely to be on there I think it’s a huge headwind from it. I don’t know how they fix that right I think more people are just going to be dumping more money to them in the short term But eventually people will just realize like this just isn’t working anymore So they’re going to stop spending on ads on the platforms um And then I think all of these subscription software companies that are started to charge egregious prices right I even think like our CRM for

Friendship is a company called pushpress and Their functionality 10 years ago. I don’t know eight years ago. Maybe that’s too long to eight years ago Was plenty to run our gym today and plenty to run our gym Really forever forward Now they got you know invested in by venture capital and they were super excited about all the stuff But then what does that mean? Okay, so now we have to start pushing all of these different updates and all this stuff And like honestly none of them have Mattered much right like they don’t do anything. They’re just bells and whistles to show Oh look at the new development that we have like cool. Oh, and by the way your rates are going up 25% this year

Right, so something that used to cost us like 40 bucks now costs us 250 bucks over eight years right because it’s just been like oh Well, we took on all this venture capital mice And now we have to show increased revenue and to show the increased revenue look at all these new features that we are pushing all the time And you’re like, but it’s all crap. I don’t need it, right? So in my mind now the way that I look at this is like Could I just recreate the really super simple like version one Of pushpress that just does exactly what I need and gives me the reports exactly the way that I need them and nothing else And the answer is yeah really easily And if it’s gonna mean that I can save five grand a year or ten grand a year Why would I not do that

As an owner and it might not be like my priority But when I get a little time in the a is get a little better and I’m just slowly step wise working towards this Why why would I not just recreate it And again, I think when you start looking at that as just a person or an investor just looking at the economy That’s the kind of stuff where I think people are like oh man like so much is gonna change and just nobody has any idea and I can see a future where it’s like You you have an idea for an app or you have something that like you want to create you just go to your agent You create the mobile app you put it right onto your phone It’s you know just a locally hosted thing and

Your AI agent can interface with it and it’s like you’ve just got it and you own it You’ll need to put it on the app store. You’ll need to sell to other people It just does what you want it to do And because the AI is gonna be so good at creating these things it’s gonna work like a charm So this is where I think things are going and this is where I think the revolution to me is really starting to hit is This is going to be very very disruptive In ways that I think are really really good for the user so for the clients And for the business owners and employees right and I just think it’s better economics

But it’s gonna shift a little bit from these mega corpse these soft that you know these SaaS companies that I think have gotten Honestly, just cocky and egotistical with their price raises and they’re they’re gatekeeping You know every one of them is like oh you want you want that feature Here’s our next year like let’s take Amazon for TV It’s like oh you want prime video like how about prime video with less ads a little more How about prime video with no ads a little more how about prime video in high definition with no ads a little more It’s like You guys are just dicks right like just you’re just dicks like I mean I get it from the business end of things but like They have coming to them. I think something that’s going to be very disruptive and I’m not entirely sure that they are ready for it. So

So that’s where I think kind of things are going and again I think all of that is good right if you are the user or so in that case if I’m just the Amazon prime viewer And I just pay my subscription cost and I can just watch Prime video right without commercials like a norm like it just used to be normally Then like I get a better experience. I’m a happier customer. I’m more sticky because of that right That’s the way that the operation should work. And so I’m hopeful that this will all help us get there All right, so That’s it for today. We ran a little bit long and I hope that this all kind of makes sense to you guys

But if you guys are a business owner kind of looking at these things This is the kind of stuff that how I want you to start wrapping your brain around How these things will interface and kind of what you can do and why it’s important to host your own stuff locally And triage the actual software subscriptions that you guys are keeping. Thanks

I run my company out of Claude inside VS Code. A workspace, with my whole business in it: the brand, the clients, the content calendar, the financials, the standing rules for how the work gets done. The difference between those two setups is the difference between a tool you visit and a system that runs with you.

Seven habits made the difference.

Organize the brain first

Before a single clever prompt, build the folder set (this is what makes up your local “Brain”). Everything Claude needs to act for me lives in files, not in my head and not buried in some old chat. One vault. A CLAUDE.md at the top that holds the standing rules: who I am, how I write, what I never do. A memory index for the facts worth keeping. One small state file that says where every project stands today, with the long history rotated into weekly logs so the current picture stays one page.

My sub folders include:

• Personal

  • Research (Podcasts + Articles I liked Transcribed & Summarized)

  • Finances, Budgeting & Taxes

  • Home School Resources

  • Gift Ideas & Reminders

• CBus AI Agents

  • Website Management

  • Task List (To Do)

  • Social Media Management

  • Clients (all Clients Folders & agents)

  • Agents (all Sub Agents)

  • Brand Guidelines

  • Contracts & Legal

  • Finance

  • Graphic Design

Inside of these folders exists the items I need to stay organized. That structure is the whole game, not housekeeping. A sharp model pointed at a messy ‘brain’ gives you sharp answers to the wrong context. Organize the inputs and every session after that starts smart instead of starting over. If you do one thing from this post, do this one.

Build skills for the work you repeat

A skill is a saved instruction, and the best ones run on code. When a task happens the same way every time, you should not pay a language model to reason through it again from scratch. You write the steps once as a script and let the skill call it.

My podcast audio runs through a processing script: same filter chain, same loudness target, every episode, no thinking required. My Saturday content batch, my investment research & planning, my site audits, the same. A script runs in a blink and costs next to nothing. A model reasoning through those same steps burns tokens and time for no extra value. Find the work you do every week. Turn it into a skill.

Hand the research to subagents

A subagent is a worker you spin up in its own context. It goes off, does a job, and reports back the conclusion instead of the mess.

Research is the obvious use. I send a subagent to read across forty files and it returns the two paragraphs that matter, while my main session stays clean. Research is only the start, though. Subagents also run several independent jobs at once instead of in a line: three content tracks, three workers, one wait instead of three. They take the heavy reads you do not want clogging your main thread, a stack of PDFs or a big spreadsheet. They give you a second set of eyes, a worker whose only job is to find the holes in what the first one produced. The main session stays focused. The grunt work happens somewhere else.

Becoming a prompting genius

Prompting is a skill, and it sharpens over time. When I sit with a client and they watch me work, the first difference they notice is how I talk to the AI.

The new user types one sentence. One task. Then waits. Then a follow-up, then waits again, one line at a time until the job is done. It is slow, it wastes effort, and worse, it wastes the intelligence sitting right in front of them.

Do the opposite. Write full paragraphs. Spell out what you want and how you want it. Name the parts you are unsure about and ask it to handle those. Give it bullet points, questions, the background and history, the context behind the request. Hand it the whole picture.

Feed it that and the AI goes to work on its own. It plans. It sends subagents out to fetch and research. It calls the skills it needs. It comes back with a fuller answer than any one-line prompt could pull. You finish in twenty minutes and three prompts instead of four hours and two hundred.

One session, one job

Open a session to start, work, and finish one thing. Then close it.

The fastest way to get slow is ten open tabs, each half-done, each carrying its own pile of context you reload every time you switch back. That drags on you and it drags on the model. Pick the task. Run it to done. Close it. Focus beats breadth here the same way it does in any shop. A session that knows exactly what it is for outperforms one that has been open since Tuesday and read everything you own.

Write it down in markdown

When a session ends, summarize it to a markdown file. Next time you need that work, you open the summary, not the entire session that chewed through PDFs, CSVs, and images to get there.

Few people build this habit, and it matters more than the flashy ones. Reloading a whole fat session is slow, it is expensive, and it makes the model dumber, because the one fact you need sits buried under a thousand lines of noise it has to wade through first. A clean markdown summary is the signal with the noise stripped out. You get a faster answer, a cheaper answer, and a smarter one. Document the session. Reference the document.

Why this matters to me

Three reasons, and they all point the same direction.

First, I believe pricing moves to a per-token model across the board. When you pay for what you use, waste stops being more than just time and turns into a costly line item. The efficient operator wins on cost without trying.

Second, this folder makes you system-agnostic. The vault is mine. The rules, the structure, the documented work, all of it lives in plain files I own. If Anthropic disappeared tomorrow, I point Grok or Gemini at the same folders and keep operating. That is leverage. While the labs fight a pricing war and leapfrog each other on intelligence every few months, I stay married to none of them. I own the system. They supply the engine.

Third, it makes the work faster. More output, less compute, more done before lunch. That compounds.

Train yourself right first

Now the part for anyone building a team. You set the standard by how you work, not by what you tell people. If the leader is sloppy with this, everyone downstream is sloppy with it, and you scale the mess.

Watch the metric you reward. Some companies started tracking token usage as a badge of honor, most tokens burned means most AI adoption, gold star for that person. It is a terrible measure and it backfires fast. Uber blew through its entire AI coding budget for the year by April. Reward consumption and you get consumption. The number that matters is output: the result delivered, the hours saved. The operator who produces the most with the fewest tokens is the one winning, and a usage leaderboard will never show you who that is.

Become the super user first. Then hand the framework to your team already knowing it works.

Jeff Binek runs CBus AI Agents in Dublin, Ohio, building AI systems for small businesses across Central Ohio. More at cbusaiagents.com.

The tools are getting upgraded constantly, improvements are shipping almost every single week and now we’re starting to see users requests for connections & interoperability happen within days (not months!). This episode builds toward one assignment; One workflow, One sub-agent, done.

Why I use Claude and Grok in tandem

Most owners ask me which tool to pick. The honest answer is both, but they’re used differently.

Claude is the strategically sound one. If you handed me an MBA student with a master’s in finance and a long memory, that is Claude. Sound advice, careful structure, will not panic when you give it a messy prompt. Grok is the operator who lives on the internet. Built next to X, follows the developers posting every day, knows what shipped this morning. Up-to-the-minute on what is changing in the field.

I will run a contract through both. They surface different problems. I will write a social media plan in Claude and then paste it into Grok, which comes back with five things Claude missed because they trended a month ago, and things have already changed. Different sources, different outputs, same project getting better.

You do not need to start with both. Pick one. Add the other once you have a rhythm.

What actually launched, and who it actually fits

Claude for Small Business has been slow-dripping for a few weeks. Two things matter from the rollout. First, the pre-built workflows. Not toy demos. Real ones, ready to run. Second, the connectors. QuickBooks, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva. You can sit in a conversation and tell Claude that the lunch on your card was a meeting with a prospect, and it will go into QuickBooks and recategorize it as meals with clients. You can ask DocuSign to surface every client you are waiting on a signature from, and Claude will draft the follow-up emails into your Gmail drafts box ready for one click.

Grok shipped custom skills, deployable tasks, and custom agents in the same window. The web portal is still there, but the more interesting use is wiring Grok into VS Code with an API key and running it alongside Claude in the same window.

The pre-built workflows are pitched at small business. They also fit the layer of organizations small businesses live next to. Local government. HOAs. Townships. PTAs. Teachers running an after-school program. The parent who used to be a bookkeeper and now keeps books for the local nonprofit. If you are running an organization on the side of your main job, this is built for you too.

AI does not fix messy

Small businesses are beginning to test out their own personal AI agents. What a lot of owners are finding is that it can expose as much as it can assist. Sometimes an AI Agent makes you look deeper at your systems and processes to see if they’re ready for handoff or automation. Just like it used to be with hiring an assistant, or a new employee, it can expose areas you haven’t solidified yet.

Forget the business for a minute. If you are an adult with kids, you should have a will and a trust set up. Where is yours? Is it a paper copy in a drawer? In a safe somewhere? Are there digital scans? Does the file include passwords for your accounts? Could your kids actually find what they need on the worst day of their lives? Most people answer that question and realize their estate is, in their own word, kind of messy.

Now imagine asking AI to organize that for you. If it is a mess, AI cannot help much, because the inputs are not clean enough to hand over. You spend the first hour cleaning up what you should have cleaned up years ago. Our lives exist in these millions of small little organizational items, bills, taxes, receipts, wills & trusts, insurance, bank accounts, credit cards, etc. etc. What if you had a personal assistant helping you keep things organized, and building documentation for your next of kin that is easy to read and understand. A chart of accounts, a graph of investments, contact lists for attorneys, etc. all organized for a purpose.

Scale that to a business. Now it is thousands of documents, thousands of images, company credit cards and bank accounts, employee contracts, healthcare items, retirement, every contract you have ever signed, every payment you have ever made. The mess is the same mess, just bigger. There is a line one of the AI founders wrote this month that I have not stopped thinking about. AI comes along and drains the swamp. It reveals what a horrible mess everything is.

I owned a gym for sixteen years. I thought our Google Drive was well organized at the time. Looking back at it now from inside an AI-first business, it was a disaster. I just did not know. Most owners think their stuff is not that bad until they go to hand it over to AI and realize they have no idea where anything is. That is a hard moment, and it is the most useful moment in this whole transition.

AI amplifies what you already are

This is the part I want every owner to sit with.

AI is a multiplier. It does not fix you. It does not fix the system. If you are a sleazy salesman, AI makes you a faster sleazy salesman. If you are a high-integrity operator who is bad at the technical part, AI takes the technical part off your plate and makes you a much louder version of who you already are.

I do not buy the “AI takes everyone’s job” narrative. I think a thin slice of coding and dashboard work shifts, and the people displaced were probably already on the bubble or they were providing dubious value to begin with. I think the much bigger story is the other direction. Small businesses are made of local people. They sit on township boards. They run the PTA. They give time to their communities while already running too thin. Give an owner back ten hours a week and a few thousand dollars a month, and that time and money go right back into the community they live in. Multiply that across a county and the story is not job loss. The story is local capacity coming back.

The readiness work, in three checks

Before you connect anything, run these three checks on yourself.

One. Do you actually know your own process? Could you write it down, step by step, so a fifth grader could follow it? Most owners cannot. The process lives in their head, it changes by the day, half of it is improvised. You cannot automate a process you cannot describe.

Two. Is your information clean enough to hand over? If you point AI at a folder of files called final, final-two, and final-actually-use-this-one, you will get a faster version of that same mess back. Iterate on the inputs first.

Three. Are you willing to be shown the mess? Hand your written-down process to your spouse. They will start poking holes. You will get frustrated and say it makes sense, it is obvious. That frustration is the data. They just showed you the mess. Iterate again.

Your call to action this week

Here is the actual assignment.

Move one. If you are not using one of these tools, sign up for Claude Pro at twenty dollars a month. The naming is confusing, Pro is their bottom tier, not the top. Get the connector. Open VS Code. Install the Anthropic Claude Code extension. Connect it. If you get stuck anywhere in those five steps, ask Claude itself. It will walk you through it in plain English.

Move two. Pick one workflow and run it inside Claude. A blog post you have to write. A monthly report. An email home to parents if you are a teacher. Anything you do every week that you would rather hand to someone smart. Then teach Claude your voice. Upload ten emails or fifteen social posts you wrote by hand. Tell it to learn how you actually write, not how AI defaults to write. Mine learned that I run on with long paragraphs and do not break every sentence into a new line. As you give it more context, the output gets closer to yours, and you edit less. That is the whole point.

Move three. Build one sub-agent. This is the move that separates people who play with AI from people who use it.

Sub-agents are different from the agent you talk to in the chat. The chat runs on your machine. It uses your CPU. It bogs down your context window. When you open a second terminal to work around it, both windows start grinding. A sub-agent runs on Claude’s own infrastructure, out on the web, not on your laptop. You can spin up thirty of them in the background and your computer keeps moving like nothing is happening.

Here is a worked example outside of business so the shape of it is clear. Say you are a golfer. You want new wedges. Build a research sub-agent. Give it your height, your weight, your TrackMan numbers if you have them, your stock yardage, your miss patterns. Tell it to come back with the three wedges that fit your specs. Then extend the task. Tell the same sub-agent to hunt eBay and the major resale sites for those exact wedges at fifteen to twenty-five percent below market, and return the deals as links. You went to bed. The sub-agent worked. Wake up to the shortlist.

Now take that shape and point it at your business. A research sub-agent that pulls your competitors’ homepages and flags the keywords they hit that you do not. An eBay-style deal hunter that watches the equipment you actually buy. A sub-agent that combs your inbox for client follow-ups that fell through the cracks. The shape is the same. The leverage is enormous.

Teachers, this is your summer

A note for every teacher in my audience, because I have been hearing from you.

Use this summer for your own AI education. Two things happen if you do.

One. You become the AI person at your school. Administrators and other teachers start asking you questions. You go from one of thirty teachers to one of one. That is leverage that pays off in every conversation for the next ten years.

Two. You actually understand what your students are capable of. Right now most of the kids who use AI in their work use it badly. If you can tell a student used AI, the student used it badly. A student using AI well would have trained it on their last five papers, given it the grades and the teacher’s comments, told it to write at their level, told it to use only the punctuation they already use, and asked for a 92 on purpose, not a 100. Cheat with some pride.

That is a separate conversation about integrity and what we owe our kids to teach them. I do not want to skip it. Kids still need to learn to read, write, analyze, research, and reason. 90% of getting value from AI is having logic and reasoning yourself, because you are the check on the AI. We do not get to outsource that. But the teachers who understand what the tool can do in a kid’s hands are the ones who can have an honest conversation about the line.

One workflow, one sub-agent

That is the work this week.

If you do it, email me at jeff@cbusaiagents.com. I will be so excited to hear about it. The people I started with a year ago are now running whole agent systems, building apps, shipping software they never thought they could ship. Once the snowball starts, you realize there are no real limits anymore.

The tools came down to meet you. The next move is yours.

— Jeff

Full transcript

All right, guys, what’s going on today? We’re going to be here talking about some new tools that dropped this past week. We’re going to have a little call to action today. All right, so I know I’ve been talking about a lot and a lot of people have been coming up to me and being like, hey, I’ve been listening and it’s like helping me keep up today.

But today we’re actually going to do something, right? And if you guys have listened to any of my previous podcasts in the past, you know that I’m a big call to action, guys. So we’re going to have something to do this week and I want you guys to try and just get out of your comfort zone a little bit and see if you can achieve a little bit. Okay, so that’s going to be, we’re going to talk about at the end.

But first, let’s just kind of talk a little bit about some stuff that dropped this week, some stuff that’s really exciting, specifically for small business owners, but I do think it’s exciting for just everybody, right? I’ve been finding that a lot of people, you know, whether it’s teachers or employees or people who are in service jobs or run service companies have been coming up to me and being like, hey, you know, I’ve been thinking about you or I’ve been talking about this and I really, you know, we’ve been struggling with getting some of these things across the finish line or to get something to look prettier or stuff’s delayed that shouldn’t be, and I’ve been thinking about you know, hey, how could we maybe use AI, which I think is awesome, right? I think that’s really cool that people are starting to see the functionality, the potential use cases and really seeing the dysfunction that exists in their organization. We’re gonna talk about that a little bit today, but they’re starting to find these inefficiencies and it’s not always like people driven, it’s process driven a lot of times, right?

And I think that that’s awesome because that’s, I think the first part, right, is we have these pain points that exist, we have this stuff that frustrates us, we have these processes or these people or these systems or these things or just we do it that way because it’s always been done that way and we’re annoyed by it and we’re like, but couldn’t there be a better way? And it’s like, yeah, for sure, there could be a better way and that’s what we’re gonna talk a little bit about today. Every tool every week that comes out, hopefully I can keep refreshing you guys on some of the cool stuff that’s coming out, but also this isn’t ever changing world. The stuff I’m touching on is like high level, right?

This is like stuff that is, I think, approachable for a lot of everyday users, but the stuff that’s happening underneath the surface, the extra skills and connectors and some of those things that are coming out are really, really cool. So if you guys start getting deep into the world, you’re gonna find a much more evolving space than what we’re gonna talk about on the high level stuff. All right, so the tools that I use most are Grok and Claude. All right, sorry, let me turn my levels down just a little bit.

So Grok and Claude are, I think, the two best and I like to use them back and forth in tandem, okay? I find that Grok does some things better in Claude does some things better. It’s a very rare case that combined between the two. I can’t get a lot of information, but, you know, for example, this week, I put some contracts through both and both found different things, right?

I put a handful of different social media posts into both of them and they came out with different strategies. They like to build off of each other, actually. So if I take my output, so let’s say I’m building out a social media strategy for one of my companies and I have it layout exactly a timeline how we’re gonna do what, you know, at what point are we gonna start doing Google ads at what point are we gonna start doing Facebook ads, et cetera, and then I take that plan and I copy and paste it over to Grok. Grok then is gonna run through a handful of alternative things and it’s gonna come out and be like, hey, that’s a great plan.

It’s really high level. Here’s some things that I would think about in addition to what Claude put out or here’s some new things that just happened. What I think that Grok is better at because Grok is working close with X and it’s following a lot of the developers that are posting every day on Twitter, they’re posting on articles, they’re posting tweets. I think we still call them tweets, I still do.

And it’s pretty current, right? So it does a better job, I think, of staying up to date with new things that are up and changing. As opposed to Claude seems a little bit more like high level, right, like it’s getting, it’s a little bit more strategically sound, but it may not be like to the minute or the day up to date on what you’re talking about. So I do like to use them in tandem, but they both just got a big upgrade.

And now, actually, in VS Code, you can actually attach Grok with an API key and you can actually use them both directly in VS Code working back and forth. Now, that can be an expensive setup. Again, that’s a pretty high level setup, so that might not be something that’s usable for most people. But as you guys start getting into this more, if you want to have the optionality for both, that does provide you that now just directly in VS Code, which is cool.

All right, so these are kind of the two things that came out this week, all right? So not this week, but Claude’s been rolling out the Claude for Small Business, has been kind of slow dripping a bunch of different things that it’s done. The biggest thing that I found is number one, it has some pre-done workflows that are really, really good for helping specifically small businesses. And I would also say like small business tangential people.

So this might be like local government, HOA, township, some of those things. It might be small business. It might be like a group of teachers or if you guys are on a parent network, like a PTA, something like that, it’s really good for those small to mid-level organizations who require people who maybe aren’t experts at a certain thing, so maybe you’re just a parent who’s also running financials for your HOA because you used to be a bookkeeper and accountant, whatever, right? But then the connectors are the big thing, right?

And this is what I’ve already found some of my clients are finding a lot of success with, is you’re able to connect the big ones that they did are gonna be QuickBooks for sure. That’s probably the biggest one. But DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, and that’s like all now connectable. And so what’s really cool is you can actually have your agents that are in there and you can have them connect in to your QuickBooks account and you can have it help with your bookkeeping.

You can have it sort and organize and you can do it. And this is what I think is really cool. You can do it in a conversational format. So just like you would with a CPA or with a real bookkeeper, it can just be like, you can be like, hey, you know, it pulls in all of your latest transactions, your credit card statements.

And you can tell it specifically, like, oh, well, that was a lunch I had with a potential client, you know, blah, blah. And it’s gonna automatically go in and change the category and categorize it as meals with clients, right? And it can run all the bookkeeping stuff for you. It can look for gaps or things that you’re missing in terms of expenses so that you could maybe expense some more home office stuff that maybe you didn’t recognize or you could just even ask it, what are my gaps in my own personal finances or my small business finances?

And it can help you with that. So again, some really cool functionality just with that aspect of it. But even DocuSign, like if you’re a realtor and you’re, you know, waiting on documents to be signed and your DocuSign account has that, like, hey, find all the people who I’m waiting on documents to be signed for, draft me an email and put it in my drafts box in my Google account and my Gmail and like, boom, done, right? It’ll go and read the document that needs to be signed, it’ll prepare everything, it’ll do all that for you and draft a followup email with maybe the DocuSign link in there and connect everything for you.

So like, again, some really, really cool functionality helps you go through processes number one faster but also help you make sure that things aren’t slipping through the cracks. So that one’s really cool. And then Grok custom skills and deployable tasks. So Grok is really like moving faster in the API key world.

So now it’s moving out of where I interface most with Grok is just a web portal. And a lot of that now is gonna be for programming things and new updates and then maybe some like financial stuff and legal stuff. But what they’re starting to do now is we’ve got custom skills and we’ve got custom agents now are available on Grok and so as we start thinking about the agents that we build and that’s actually gonna be our call to action today as we’re gonna go in and start working on building our own first sub agent. But as we start going through that process of working with it, having agents across different systems is really usable because they use different sources of information for how they train the AI’s.

And so now that you can do that on Grok, you might have a research agent or like you might do something like let’s say you’re gonna be looking at your website and you wanna have a research agent go and look at all of your competitors websites, right? And see where they’re hitting for keywords or for things that maybe you’re missing. And you can set up agents on Grok to run that in tandem with Claude and they’re gonna come back with different things because they’re using different resources. And they, the AI is how they read your website is gonna be different as well.

So you’ll get different outputs with that which is a really cool kind of thing that you can do now across these different AI’s. And that’s how I think it’s using it, right? It’s, again, think about these like the best personal assistant slash employee you’ve ever had in your life, who’s super intelligent and smart, like what’s better than that? Having two personal assistants who are incredibly smart, who have different skill sets, who are bring different things to the table, right?

And you can think about them as just think about them similarly like you would think about a person, right? It’s like this, you know, Grok is a, you know, older mid forties, you know, male who, you know, comes with this background and is super up to date with all of the newest happenings. And Claude is an incredibly intelligent, well-trained, you know, has a master’s in a PhD in finance and small business and all these things. And they, they can just communicate and talk and work together.

So some cool things out of both of them. But what they’re doing is they’re both trying to walk away from just that like web based chat box, you know, glorified Google interface of how everybody’s working with them. So they are now creating these tools for people to be working within their systems using some of these, you know, programs or third party programs like VS Code. Again, I highly recommend that you guys work within VS Code.

It is a phenomenal ecosystem. It’s very user friendly, has great security measures. And you can interface with either of these. So you can connect either of them or both of them, however you want.

And again, this will get back to kind of our call to action today. But those are some new things that just dropped with within those two tools. So a little stat for you here, stat checks. 72% of business are already testing, working with AI agents. So working on that next step, right?

If we think of the first step of AI is being just going in and interfacing with the chat functions. And that’s where a lot of people started. They met up gone to ChatGPT, asked a question, had some discussions, blah, blah, blah. Your second phase then is going to be to start working within the skills in the agent system and starting to build that.

So again, we’re already starting to look at these numbers ballooning quickly. And I think we’re still very early on this, all right? What we find though is AI does not fix messy, right? And so it says messy businesses, but I’m just saying messy, right?

If you are a messy person, okay? So let’s use a good example here, all right? If you’re an adult and you have kids, right? You should have a will and a trust set up.

Like you should have end of life thing set up for a bunch of reasons. Like if you don’t have that and you haven’t looked into that, go in your AI and ask why and it can tell you. But the big thing is is you don’t want your kids kind of struggling through probate court and dealing with all of these extra legal things when they’re dealing with your death, right? So you should have a will and a trust that lays out exactly what’s gonna happen to you and your stuff when you die, okay?

Let’s just say that. So where is your will and trust, right? Like is it still just paper copies? Did he need a safe?

Do you have any digital copies? Is it well organized? Is it easy to find? Does that include all of your passwords and or you know access to any of your digital accounts and your social media accounts and your bank accounts online and all these other things like there’s a lot of things.

So a lot of people when they think about this like they’re kind of messy, right? Like the paper copy exists. We did that a few years ago. It’s over here.

And so when you start working with an AI let’s say I was gonna task my AI with looking through my estate planning, right? I will, my trust, you know, some of those documents to ensure what happens to me if I go brain dead, you know, in my power of attorney and all those other things, right? Let’s say I’m gonna task my AI as to like give a double check through that and organize it for me so that my kids exactly understand where to find everything and it’s well organized. If I go through that process and I want my AI to do that, I need it to be organized in a way that makes sense to the AI.

And so right away as I start going through that process, if I’m messy with my organization, it is not going to be able to help me very well, right? And this is really true when you start taking that to the scale of something like a business, right? So if we start or a school or, you know, whatever organization you think you’re gonna bring AI into, when you start looking at that scale, then the messiness really exposes because like a will and trust is one specific small set of things, right, a handful of folders or documents. Now we’re talking about thousands of documents, thousands of images, thousands of legal items that we have to keep track of and contracts and payments and all these things.

As you start to go through that, if you’re very messy with your organization, you’re gonna get exposed quickly, all right? And I think this is a rude awakening for a lot of business owners, right? This is a great quote that one of the AI founders made this week and says, AI comes along and drains the swamp. It reveals what a horrible mess everything is.

And I think it’s so true, right? Like when I think back to my time in the Army or I think back to my time in friendship or, you know, just random small organizations, even like, you know, sports teams and some of those things I’ve been a part of over the years. When I think about the disorganization and how much clutter that leaves in my brain, it’s so nice and comforting to know that like now with this business, I’ve started it with AI and AI has helped me all along the way, organized and keep things organized. And so like, if I need to ask it a question or figure out where something is, number one, I can just say something like, hey, pull up my will and trust or, you know, pull up our marketing documents from last month or pull up my financial records or double check my bookkeeping is all up to date.

And it’ll just go and do that, right? And if I say, hey, where’s that folder? I can’t find it. It will literally bring it up for me in a finder box.

So you can like never lose anything, really. Everything is backed up three and four times across my, you know, devices. And so you get to this point where it’s like, I’m so well organized and so consistently quicker because of that organization that it does it like stresses me out to think back to like, oh my gosh, imagine going back into all of Friendship’s Google Drive, you know, in the thousands and thousands of documents and pages throughout all the years. And it’s just, it’s a mess, right?

And I thought it was organized at the time for what I was doing. But now working this way, you realize that it’s just messy. And I think that that is a revelation to a lot of business owners. I think they might think that their stuff’s not that bad.

They might not think they’re disorganized until they start getting into this. And it really is like, oh my gosh, like where is that? I don’t know, I know we have it, right? We did the work on it.

We spent a bunch of time. We hired somebody to do that. And I know it’s around here somewhere, right? And it’s like, and it’s like that times infinity.

All right, so again, it amplifies what you already are, right? If you think about this, like, it’s not, yeah, I can’t fix you, I can’t fix this machine. This is where I think a lot of people with the narrative of, oh yeah, I was going to come in and take jobs, are yeah, I was going to come in and displace people from whatever. I really don’t actually believe that that’s true.

The longer that I do this, I actually don’t find that to be at near as much of a talking point as people are making it out to me. And honestly, like quick side tangent on this. That’s a really weird pervasive narrative that’s getting pushed from somewhere, right? I don’t know where it’s getting pushed from, right?

It’s, I’m not sure if it’s like AI companies, if it’s news, like they just want something, because fear causes clicks. And fear if people losing their jobs is like one of the biggest fears that you can sell. But there’s some pervasive narrative going on that’s getting pushed from somewhere about this. And in reality, I don’t really think that it’s gonna be born to be very true across most industries.

I think certain industries that are very specific to like computer and tech and software design coding some of those things like maybe, yeah. But again, I think the people who are gonna get this place from those jobs are people who are underperforming. And more than likely probably would have been cut anyway, right? It’s just like now we just have more advanced, you know, the best coders or the best people are gonna be the ones who are kind of looking over things.

And then my hope, at least, or what I believe is that the people who are maybe getting laid off because they’re a subpar coder, maybe they can go and use some of these tools and actually bring things to the market that are gonna be more valuable than just, you know, working on, you know, the dashboard at meta to for, you know, to change colors and fonts or something like that, right? So again, as we think about amplifying what you already are, you know, if we think about small businesses, small businesses are people, right? Small businesses are the best things that we want to support because they are made up of the local people who live in your neighborhood, right? And so as much as we can buy from small businesses, as much as we can support small businesses, that’s really all we should be trying to do is consumers.

And a lot of that reason I think is gonna be, you know, they are the people, they are the heartbeat of our communities. And so AI helps amplify that, right? They are gonna help people be able to give more charitable time of charitable giving to our local organizations, you know, the small business owners like the ones I work with, they’re on the local boards of, you know, townships and planning committees and, you know, they’re running in PTAs and they’re doing all these things that are like, that’s big time community service doing that stuff, right? Going in and signing up for civic duty as a small business owner in the community, like, you’re already stressed, you’re already working a lot to then go and give more of your time for your community.

Like, these people really are the lifeblood of what exists around you. And, you know, if we can give them back some time and we can give them back some money, that is time that is gonna be given back to the cities, to the states, to the communities, to the neighborhoods. That is money that is gonna be given back to the time to the neighborhoods, to the local small businesses that they partner with. And things get a lot better from that.

And so I think that that’s kind of where I think, you know, again, it amplifies who you are. Like, if you are a, let’s just take the opposite end of it, right? Like, if you’re a scammer, if you’re a sleazy salesman who’s trying to get over on people, like, yeah, the AI’s gonna amplify that, right? It’s just gonna make everything you do a little sleazier, right?

And if you’re high have super high integrity and you’re really good at what you do, and you struggle maybe just to like, do the technical aspects of it. Like, AI’s just gonna make you better at sharing your message and getting the things out. So, so I think this is just like, again, really, really important for us to think about, conceptually and have a good AI radar of where we sit in the market and just kind of where things are going. So, this is what I wanna think about is, I think AI is fun to play with, right?

And this is where we have to think about, and I really try to get my operators that are working within our systems to have a very specific output that they’re going for and be laser focused on whatever that output is until you finish it and it has a bottom line impact, okay? 95% of projects fail, right? Because they, and when we say fail, it means they spent a bunch of time but it didn’t change anything, right? It didn’t have a bottom line impact. So we started playing around with this tool or this thing but it didn’t change any actions in the organization.

And you have never been more able to do that than with AI. So just keep an eye on that, right? It’s really important for us to do that. But that’s how I like to try to think about this in my head is start by planning more.

What is the intended output that we are trying to achieve and what is that going to mean for our business? How is it going to impact and then work backwards to get there, right? Again, and if you can say it’s gonna save the time of my employees, it’s gonna be a big quality of life improvement for my clients. It’s going to help us get the job done faster and more smoothly with less errors.

Those three things I think are going to be like your primary objectives and that’s where we want to be focused. All right, so as you go through this, this is kind of your ready checks we’re gonna start getting to our call to action for today. So do you know what the process is, right? And this is something again, like I think people very loosely understand what their process is, like if I ask them their sales process, it’s very loose, right?

Well, they kind of they do this or they might come in this way or blah blah blah and it’s, you know, get it buck buttoned up, get it dialed in, get it cleaner, get it written, make sure it’s clear, right, and iterate until it is very specific and very clear to where you can hand it off to like a fifth grader and they could understand exactly how your process works, right? That’s like extremely important, okay? Is the information clean enough to hand over against the same thing iterate until it is and are you willing to be showing the mess, right? So as soon as somebody else like me, right, a consultant or another person or if you really want a nice test, hand it to your spouse, right?

Show them the output and make sure that it’s clean and organized and if it’s not, they’ll be like, I don’t understand, they’ll start poking holes and asking questions and you’ll get super frustrated with them, be like, what do you mean? It makes total sense, it’s obvious, right? And it’s like cool, you were just shown the mess, right? It’s not clean enough yet, keep iterating.

So three moves, all right. This is where we’re gonna go just to touch off these slides because I was thinking about this as I was doing the intro and I want to get us doing some things, okay? So first, all right, I want us to think about number one, if you are not using a tool, right? If you’re not connecting clawed in somewhere, creating projects or working within any of these ecosystems, that’s your first thing is I would say my recommendation be to go and sign up for a clawed account, use the $20 per month, I think they call it Pro, which is confusing, right?

Cause Pro usually would be a higher level but Pro is their bottom level. Sign up for the $20 a month one, get the connector and connect it into VS Code, right? Like that’s our first call to action. And go through again, same thing if you don’t know how to do that, once you sign up for clawed, you can go into the clawed chat bot and ask it, right?

But very simple initial setup, okay? You’ll have to go into VS Code, go into the extensions and connect it with the Anthropic Claude Code and then you’re interfacing from there, okay? If you guys have trouble with that and you’re really struggling with it, again, keep asking the AI’s, you’re welcome to reach out if you really do get stuck, but keep asking the AI’s and it’ll help you walk through all the steps to make sure that you’re connected properly. Once you’re connected, I want you to start thinking about a workflow and start with something simple, right?

A blog post you have to do, an annual report, a, you know, if you’re a teacher, just do a student, you know, end of year, right? It’s end of year. So if you need to write something to a parent or, you know, highlight something about student, start a workflow. The workflow basically you want to think through, again, same thing like all the way from start to finish.

What is the process? Here’s the input, here’s what I need to think about. Here’s what I need to give the agent and then what do I want the output to be? How do I want that output?

Do I always have PDF? As a Word document, what do I want it? As you go through those, once you get your tool, you think about kind of what goes in and then where do I want to check and approve it? And what is wrong with it, right?

So a class example of this is let’s say I want it to write social media posts for me. And traditionally, when AI writes social media posts, it’s got all of these tells, right? It’s got not this, but that M dashes, like the little dash dash, right? And it’s got this like weird talking personality, right?

So then you might need to start looking at, okay, I don’t like that, right? I don’t want that. So I need to go in and either proofread it myself or better yet, find tools that exist to proofread it and make it sound more like you. So how would you do that?

In this case, if you’re a teacher or if you’re gonna be doing student thing, you might upload 10 of your emails to parents that you’ve written in the past by hand, right? If you guys are writing a blog or social media post, you might upload 15 different social media post copies that you’ve written in the past by hand so that it understands specifically and learns how you write, okay, very important to understand how you write, not how it wants to write or these other things. So it’ll learn all these things. Like for me, it was like, oh, you like to use really long run on paragraphs.

You like to use this, whereas AI likes to do like a new paragraph of everything. And so it’ll learn more, right? And then as you teach it, and it’s called give it context, as you give it more context as it learns more about you, the output will become closer and closer and you’ll have to change and edit less because it’ll be more to your liking, your standards and how you write, all right? So that might be like a specific workflow.

Then you just start kind of with very simple, right? Start read only and then widen the leash, right? So once we kind of knock out that first workflow, it’s like we do that, we give it the context, we train it. It’s doing all kinds of things in there.

One, it’s starting to write your Claude.md file, it’s starting to write your brand profile, starting to write and learn, you know, things about you as we go through this iteration and process. So that would be where I would like just really quickly, like just start, right? Start with one of these, either start with one of the workflows that comes preloaded or that the Cloud or Grot can already do or start working on creating your own. But where I really want you to do it, we don’t have a slide for this because what I want you to think about for today is I want us as a team to start working on building a sub agent.

And so this is a bigger ask, right? As you guys are going through this process of starting to download and use the tools and create a workflow, a couple of things you want to be thinking about, like you want it to, you want to tell it right out of the gate, like, hey, I want to start building a system of agents, sub agents and workflows. So that would be the prompt. I want you to learn everything about me and then give a brief, you know, little introduction and ask it what it needs from you to start building out this process.

But then I want you to start thinking about building a sub agent. Sub agents are really cool. So whatever you’re working on right now, right? You can start thinking about a potential sub agent that would do this.

I’ll give you just a handful of like examples of this, okay? Is let’s say you’re a golfer. Golf season’s coming up, right? Let’s say you’re playing in a golf outing on tomorrow.

And you want to research some different club choices, maybe you’re in the market for some new wedges, right? You could create a research agent to go out and research, you know, again, you would give it your height, your weight. If you have any swing analytics from like a TrackMan, you can put all those in that information in there. And you can say like, you know, hey, I’m a six foot three, 220 pound male, generally swing pretty hard.

You know, I tend to miss right on things, you know, whatever, you can put it in all this information. And then you say, I want to create a sub agent that can go out and research all of the wedges on the market and find things in this parameter. Like here’s kind of the yardage I’m looking for. Here’s my stock yardage is whatever.

So you can give it all this context. The sub agent that would go out and research all these things. Now you could go further and you could say, then I want the sub agent, right? So this is going to be the, we’ll call it the golf club research sub agent, okay?

I want it to come through eBay and use sites to find me deals that are out of the normal on those wedges that we decide on, right? So first step is going to be decide on what wedges are going to be best for me, okay? Second step is go out on the internet and find me deals for wedges that are 15 to 25% below standard market price, okay? Provide those to me in a series of links so that I can go through and look at those, right?

Now what’s really cool about this is sub agents a lot of times will go off of your system, go out back onto, we’ll call it like the clawed web based system. So they won’t be running locally anymore. What you do is you give it this set of parameters, okay? And then it’s going to go out to the clawed native system and it’s going to start coming through and going through these websites and doing everything that you tasked with doing.

All it’s going to come back with then is the report on the back end. And so these sub agents then what’s really cool about this is as you get better at this, you can be creating 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 sub agents to be going out and doing all these things but it doesn’t bog and slow your system down so they can be running in the background, like in the literal background. And these sub agents are going out and putting calls out onto the internet and it’s not using your CPU, right? It’s not using your data, it’s not slowing down your internet, it’s not slowing down your computer.

And so because of that, what used to always happen locally, where if we were just running one of our classic agent systems and that’s all happening on your computer, it would just kind of go slow. You go line by line by line, you’d be sitting here watching your terminal or watching your VS Code and it’s just like accept, accept. And you can see it just running these one task set of time and you’d kind of have to wait for it to be done before you could move on to the next thing. And then you would work around that by maybe opening a whole nother window, right, or a whole nother terminal.

So tonight you have two terminals working, right? But what happens then, if you start doing that is your context window start to get bogged up really fast, but because they’re both operating on your own computer on your own internet, they’re bogging each other up. So it’s all starts to slow down and grind down. But when we start building with these sub agents in mind, this is where you can really start cooking with fire, right?

Especially for things they’re going to be like web based research tools. So that’s where I’m going to task you guys today is just start working on your first sub agent, right? And again, I want you getting conversational and working within some of these systems. If you guys are teachers listening to this, right, you’re coming up on summer.

Like let’s use our summer for a little education of our own, right? And just start getting in. Number one, your students are going to pass you up quickly if you aren’t like staying up on this just a little bit, right? And it’s not like you have to be the world’s leading expert, but if two things are true at one, if in your school you can become like the AI person, right?

Somebody who’s on the cutting edge, you’re going to find all of these other teachers administrations and people are going to start to rely on you and lean on you and ask you questions which makes you really invaluable as a teacher, okay? And makes you more valuable to your school generally, opens up opportunities for US things change and adjust into the future, okay? But two, it’s going to help you from a student perspective understand what their capabilities are, right? And I’ve heard all kinds of stories from teachers this year about how students are interfacing using AI.

And like students are still not all the way there yet, right? Like if your teacher can tell that you’re using AI for something, you’re probably not using it very well, right? Like that’s the first thing is if you were using my systems, if you were using what we’re talking about today and you trained it properly to say, I’m an eighth grade student, right? Or I’m a ninth grade student or a fifth grade student.

Here’s my last five papers I’ve written, okay? And here’s my grades and here’s what the teacher knocked off on me for. I need to, I need help with this, right? And I’m gonna have it help me write a paper but with the context of my last papers it won’t write above and beyond your level, right?

It won’t put in punctuations and things that you’re unfamiliar with. It won’t use semicolons, it won’t use italics or things that like you have never used in the past and your errors, like you can even tell it. I don’t want you to be 100 out of 100 paper, right? I don’t want a 92 out of 100 so I need some errors and they’re like make mistakes intentionally, right?

Like if students were operating at a high level and I always go back to like when I was a student, right? Like if you’re gonna cheat, cheat with some pride, right? It’s like, but as a teacher, it’s a tale as old as time, right? Kids are going to try to figure out how to cut corners and yes, as teachers and as parents, a part of our job is to teach our kids integrity and what is the value of learning something for the sake of learning.

And I agree with you that generally like kids need a general education to be able to use AI or do whatever they want to do in their next life, right? Wherever they want to grow up and whatever they want to do. Like you still need to be able to read, learn, analyze data, research, write, and have a good analytical, logical brain, right? Like those are all things to be aspired to and you can’t just like outsource all of that shit to AI because 90% of AI work is actually having good logic and reasoning yourself to ensure that you are the check on AI itself.

So we still need to be able to get those things into the student’s brains. But if you’re in and working this summer on understanding its capabilities and building out agents and sub agents for that, I think you’re gonna find quickly why it is that students need to be using it and interfacing with not avoiding it or walking away from it or whatever. So just I think a cool thing for us to do but this would be like your initial step into getting layers deeper, right? And so we’ve talked a little bit about like what you can use an interface with now.

What I would tell you is if you guys have been following along and listening, like let’s take some action today. Let’s try to download one or two programs. Let’s try to connect our cloud into our programs and let’s try to start building out our own folder set and system, okay? If you guys need help with this or if you guys get stuck or if you guys want someone to help guide you, like you can reach out definitely willing to at least help triage a little bit, right?

A lot of my triages, a lot of times is like, do you ask your agents though? And hopefully we can get all get there. So that’s kind of our call to action for today. So one workflow, one sub agent, that’s our task.

If you guys do it, shoot me an email. I’ll be so proud of you. I’ll be so excited to talk to you about it. And then you’ll also see me get all hopped up on excitement and tell you all the other things that you can do with it and just watching people grow within this and watching what they create is just so, so cool, right?

The clients that I initially started with are building like these huge integrated systems, apps, programs, software. It’s like, once you see it, right? Once you start going, it’s like, it’s wild. Once the snowball begins, it’s really cool.

Once you realize that you have no limitations anymore. So I’ll talk to you guys soon. Thanks so much for listening.

That’s a phase change. Not a trend.

Most small business owners in Columbus think we’re a year or two away from this mattering. We are inside it. And on Monday, Google announced something that compresses the timeline further. Starting this summer, when a homeowner in Dublin or Westerville asks Google to find them a plumber, a dog groomer, or a hair stylist, Google is going to place the phone call for them. The customer never types your number. The customer never opens your website. The AI calls the businesses it decided to recommend. If your shop is not on that list, your phone does not ring.

There are talks of an agentic AI calling restaurants to book a table directly. Some of that sounds far-fetched until you remember the same announcement carried the data that one billion people are now using Google’s AI Mode monthly and that the query volume is doubling every quarter.

What’s actually happening

Two channels opened cheap in the last twenty years. Google Ads in 2010. Facebook Ads in 2014. In both cases, the owners who showed up early got leads for a dollar or two. The ones who waited a few years paid five to ten times as much for the same lead. The pattern is the same every time a new ad channel opens. Early window is cheap. Late window is competitive. The compounding only goes to the ones who built early.

Paid AI search ads opened two weeks ago. The fifty-thousand-dollar minimum on AI search advertising dropped to zero on May 6. Self-serve, any U.S. business, cost-per-click in the three-to-five-dollar range right now. That’s the cheap window. It does not stay cheap.

But here’s the part most owners are missing. The interesting move is not buying paid AI ads. The interesting move is locking in organic AI visibility while it is still essentially free. Four structural signals decide whether AI knows your business exists. Most owners have never heard of any of them.

Signal one. Schema markup.

Schema is the structured-data layer of a website. It sits inside the HTML where humans do not see it, and it tells crawlers: this is a business, this is a service, this is a price, this is an FAQ. Plain English version, it is a label maker for your website.

Without it, AI looks at your homepage and sees prose. It might guess what you do. It might not. With it, AI looks at your homepage and sees the answers tagged. Business name. Address. Phone. Service offered. Hours. Reviews. Pricing.

The cost of guessing wrong is real. AI tools that lack pricing data can quote dramatically low or dramatically high to the customer. Both end the conversation before the customer ever calls.

Signal two. llms.txt.

The newest of the four. llms.txt is a plain-text file you put at the root of your website. It tells AI crawlers what is on the site, in what order of importance, and what the business does. Think of it as the executive summary you would hand a smart visitor who has sixty seconds to understand your business.

Most small business websites do not have one. Most owners have not heard the term. It is the lowest-effort, highest-leverage move of 2026. A single text file. About two hundred lines if you do it right. Updated maybe once a month.

The owner does not write it from scratch. The owner gives the answers, an AI tool like Claude builds the file, and a developer installs it. That is a single ninety-minute session.

Signal three. Definition-style content.

AI quotes paragraphs. Not pages. Not site sections. Specific paragraphs that answer a specific question.

The structural rule: every page should open with a definition sentence. Business name is a category in location that helps customer do outcome. Plain. Direct. Quotable.

Most websites open with marketing copy. Hero headlines. Adjectives. Brand voice. Beautiful for humans. Useless for AI.

Before-and-after I see all the time:

Before: Transforming spaces with intention.

After: Company name is a home organizing business in Dublin Ohio that helps families clear kitchens, basements, and garages with a minimalism-first approach.

One of those gets cited by AI. The other does not. Same business.

Signal four. The review-rating threshold.

This is the cutoff nobody warned the local business community about.

The major AI search engines have hard rating cutoffs. The strictest engines now require 4.3 or higher on Google to consider recommending a business. Perplexity, 4.1. Gemini, 3.9. A 4.0 rating, the rating that used to be respectable, is on the wrong side of every threshold but Gemini.

And here is the cruelty of it. Google itself still ranks 4.0 businesses on the first page. The owner’s dashboard looks fine. Map pack steady. No alarm fires. Meanwhile customers ask Claude or Gemini and never hear the business’s name.

Birdeye published a study this month. Google Business Profile impressions are down fifty-three-point-eight percent year-over-year. But customer actions, calls, direction requests, website clicks, only dropped five percent. Fewer people see the listing, but the people who do see it are higher-intent. The funnel did not break. The funnel got smaller and more qualified at the same time. The owner’s dashboard does not tell them why.

Oleg Levitas, an eighteen-year local SEO veteran, wrote in Forbes last week: I’ve been in local SEO for eighteen years, and I’ve never seen a funnel compress this fast.

What to do this week

Three concrete moves. In order of leverage.

Move one. Write the definition paragraph today. Open your homepage. Look at the first paragraph. If it does not start with Business name is a category in city that... rewrite it. Ninety minutes. Zero cost. Permanent improvement. This is the highest-leverage move because it costs nothing, ships in a day, and feeds every other signal.

Move two. Audit your entity consistency. Google Business Profile. LinkedIn company page. Wikidata. Local Chamber of Commerce. Yelp. Local directories. Same business name everywhere. Same address. Same phone. Same description. AI builds entity recognition from repeated consistent signals. If your name is spelled three different ways across the internet, AI treats you as three different businesses with three thin profiles.

And while you are cleaning that up, work on your rating. Under 4.3 on Google is a problem you did not know you had. Ten reviews from your best customers over thirty days will move the average. Not all at once. AI tools pattern-match for review-velocity manipulation. Ask honestly: tell the customer you are trying to stay competitive against bigger companies, that reviews are how a local small business holds visibility in this new AI environment, that you would appreciate a fair review. People will write them when you ask.

Move three. Ship schema markup and llms.txt. These two are technical. Do not write JSON from scratch. Use Claude or Grok to generate the schema and the llms.txt with your business facts, and hire a developer for two hours to install both. The work is small. The compound is large. Once your schema is right and your llms.txt is clean, AI starts citing you within weeks. That citation flow keeps working with zero ongoing cost.

The closing window

I spent sixteen years running Friendship Fitness here in Dublin. I lived through every advertising shift of that period. Yellow Pages ads nobody read. Newspaper inserts. Direct mail. Radio. Local TV. Facebook ads that worked for a year and then stopped working. Google Ads that worked until the cost-per-click tripled. Every couple of years the customer would move to a new channel and the business owner would chase.

If the AI calling technology Google announced this week had existed in 2010, half my advertising budget would have been pointless. Not because the ads were bad. Because the customers were not on the channel I was advertising on.

That is what is happening to every small business in Columbus right now. The customers moved. Most owners have not noticed. And the businesses that get structured right before the rest of the field figures it out are going to compound for the next ten years.

Open Claude tonight. Type best [your business category] in Dublin Ohio. See who comes up. If it is not you, that is a problem worth fixing this week.

If this episode hit close to home and you want a free AI visibility audit on your specific business, there is a thirty-minute strategy call on the site.

Talk soon.

— Jeff

Full transcript

All right guys, what’s going on this week we’re going to be talking about when AI recommends your competitor, some new breaking news that Google dropped this week, how that’s going to impact the entire landscape, oh Google and ChatGPT, how that’s going to completely change the overall landscape of how people find businesses, how people interact with businesses. If you guys are a business to business customer, how that’s going to impact the businesses that you work with every day, this is really going to hit quick serve restaurants, you know your fast food places, any of your service businesses, so plumbers and landscapers and all those things, it’s going to completely change how we’re going to interact with those businesses. So we’re going to talk a lot about that and then obviously what I want to focus on for us is how we can kind of jump out and get ahead of this, understand that this is coming and understand the opportunity is that it presents and just real quick I’ll flash back. If you guys remember, there were two periods in time that you could advertise, the first was through Google and Google ads and the second was through Facebook and meta ads where if you got ahead of the game, you could grab a huge amount of market share and it’s more and more importantly, you could do it for extremely cheap. So there was times where people could get, you know, Google clicks for like under a dollar if they were running Google ads early enough and there was they were running Google banner ads on their website and they were making a ton of money doing this and if you were early to the Google ad game, you were able to jump way out ahead of other businesses that weren’t advertising it all during that.

The same thing happened with MetaWin, Facebook released their first opportunity to advertise with them and people started to kind of figure out the best ways to do this back then they took you off platform. So what you would do is you would actually run Facebook ads that would take you to a separate website and funnel. They’ve since changed a lot of that, but back then you used to be able to get leads for under a dollar and the like, if you I think back to that time, we were early, but like maybe a touch passed that we were getting leads for like $2 and he can tell you our first ad campaign that we ran at a friendship when he was just coming on as our sales guy. We were getting like $1 or $2 leads for this ad campaign. We were running and we literally turned it on and within like a day we had like 30 or 40 booked appointments, which is like normally we would do like 30 booked appointments in like a month or two months.

So we were like drinking from the fire hose and we were like, holy crap, this works really well. And then quickly what happens is businesses share ideas, leaders in marketing, start to understand this is a massive opportunity for you. And then that starts to dilute and more people enter the market. Now you’ve got competition, your cost per lead goes up and now your cost per lead is, you know, times 10 or 20 more cost prohibitive than that, right? So it’s more expensive.

And so what happens then is every time Facebook or meta or Google or these these companies, every time that those get diluted, it people actually have to make this decision every month if it’s worth it or not to advertise. And it kind of like levels out right around where it is or isn’t, right? So it ends up sort of being like a break even, right? And companies that have huge margins, like 50, 60, 70, 80% margins, so software companies. Actually you can actually tell exactly what type of companies have gigantic margins based on who floods your inbox with marketing, right?

So like for a long time it was like cold plunges, right? They were selling for like $3,000 and you’d get marketed like crazy because a cold plunge tub probably costs like 300 bucks. So they’ve got this huge budget potentially for marketing. Why does this matter for us, right? Well, what’s coming out and what we’re going to talk about today is a new new opportunities to market number one, but then also a complete flip reversal and change of how people are going to interact generally within these markets.

So this is what Google just dropped this week is they now are going to change the way that people interact with Google Maps and with googling local businesses generally. So this is going to roll out this summer, June, July and Winahome owner in Dublin asks Google for a plumber or a restaurant or a landscaping place or a dog room or whatever. Google is going to actually place the phone call for them, right? Now there are talks of an actual AI agent calling to book for you, right? So Google is actually going to look into and potentially get to a point where they have agentic AI that will call a restaurant for you and reserve a table, right?

So like and some of this I know sounds like a little bit wild and far fetch. But this is where Google is walking towards is being able to book and call businesses and appointments based specifically on AI and AI recommendations. And so like this is a pretty big shift in how they’re trying to make recommendations generally, but also how people are interfacing with Google. I think and again, if you guys have been reading the blog or listening to the podcast, you already know that I don’t Google match anymore. I will go to one of my AI’s and different ones and I will start to have a conversation with the AI, give it context, tell it what I’m looking for and why I need it and then start to look for like DIY things, right?

Is it something I can do myself? And if it’s not, then with context, I start to ask the AI for specific recommendations. You know, you can give it dollar amounts, right? You can say I’m looking to spend, you know, hey, I need a exterminator for my house, right? I’m not looking to spend more than $1,500.

Here’s what I’m looking for. And they might be like, you’re never going to be able to get an exterminator for under $1,500. Here are three DIY options. Here’s where you can order the product and you know, and they might just not recommend a local small business because I put in the context ahead of time. Can’t really do that necessarily with Google right now.

And so I think they recognize that that’s a huge risk to their business model and they’re going to start to shift and pivot as you can see with this new announcement. So this is the biggest thing that has started to change is last year it was 6% of US customers were asking AI for local business recommendations. It is now 45% with projections of being upwards of 70% by next year. All right. So now this is becoming, if you are a local business, this is going to be existential, right?

It’s it’s going to be you have to get on top of this and have some of these things or you will not be able to stay in business. So this is like the change, right? And we talked a little bit about if you guys haven’t been around for a while in business, if you guys are a newer business or you’re thinking about getting into business, this is going to be like this is kind of the stepwise shift, right? Somewhere around like 2008, 910 was when it was just like all Google and website and SEO and ranking and then Google ads, right? A few years down the road from that maybe 2014, 15 was when meta ads started to come in, Google started to get diluted.

It wasn’t as cost effective anymore. So people started to shift to meta ads and then it was meta pushed to your website or a landing page. And then you would start to kind of create this like funnel around Google to a landing page, Facebook to a landing page. This has been the trajectory, right? Now there hasn’t been a huge shift in that for eight years, I would say.

Okay. Facebook ads have got more a lot more complex. There’s a lot more AI and learning and they know a lot more about people and they’ve started to put the things that they know about you into ads, same with Google. But now this shift of how you rank on Google, SEO, as that’s called, right? How you rank across the internet is going to matter significantly less.

Okay, because Google in how you use to rank for it is not how Google recommends from an AI perspective. They are not the same thing at all. And really, unfortunately, they’re not actually even very linked. And so that’s what I think is throwing people off. I think a lot of people are like, oh, well, you know, I have all these five star reviews and I’ve been ranked really high by Google forever.

And so I’ve just got this kind of like leader mentality, like I just I’ve always led. And because I’ve always led, I always get more clicks. And because I’ve always led and get more clicks, I just have more business than everybody. So that’ll just keep staying that way. And it won’t necessarily be true for them.

So this is the the stat that people have been coming out with a lot of these local SEO experts have started like really diving into GEO, right? And really started paying attention to this. But 83% of restaurant locations are invisible to AI recommendations. So I’ve been talking about this with all of my clients. And I’ve tried to express the importance of getting some very low level, very simple things from a GEO perspective implemented in their systems.

Now the system that I give to my clients has the GEO like software audit, look fixes, everything that you need to do to be hitting and be number one recommended in AI, that comes preloaded with what I give all of my clients, right? But as we start kind of looking into what people are doing, there’s not a lot of urgency right now, even in the businesses that I’m working with that are very forward thinking with AI, they’re still not having a huge sense of urgency with this. Now a lot of the customers I work with are more business to business. They’re maybe not required or relying on being recommended by Google for their business. A lot of their stuff is referral based.

It’s because it’s business to business. There may only be a few options. There might be dashboards that they can go to find jobs and things like that. But if you guys are working with local restaurants, this would be something I would be suggesting to talk to with a more local service businesses generally. It’s going to start to become extremely important.

And if you guys are building quick server restaurants or if you guys are building or doing landscaping for clients and they’re not in this and you’re just kind of talking with the owner and going through these things, these might be things that it would be a conversation to start having if they’re thinking about it. So as we kind of think about this, this is the general, this is like what we need to just set up. And it’s not super complex. The big one I talk about on this list is number two is the LLMS.txt. So this is sort of like just a basic text file that LLMs or AI models can read very easily.

That gives them the information that they need in a very easy to read platform. It’s not something that like lives live on your website. It’s not like people are going to be able to like click this and then open it up and read this weird TXT file. It’s mainly just specifically because of how it’s named and what it is and how it’s read is just very easy specific to AI. Little like, you know, hey, read me AI who’s searching for my site.

Read me and understand what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to get business. That’s what it is. schema markup definition style content and review rating threshold. Some of these other things are just signals that the AI is looking for for brand authority, making sure you’re still in business, making sure you’re legitimate, making sure that you do a good job, trying to understand pricing structure like schema markup and some of that. Just kind of thinks about when customers are asking me the AI for recommendations.

What are the things they ask for, right? And you can just run this through in your head. If you guys have ever searched something or done a local search on AI, go back through like what you asked. You know, a lot of it is like, where are you located? Do they have good reviews?

Are they highly recommended? Or are they a piece of crap company who takes advantage of their customers? What are the pricing mechanisms? How much is it going to cost me? What are the next steps?

Right? Do they do a phone call? Do they do a quote? Do they do a proposal? Do they come out?

So like, you can kind of generally walk through some of those things that you might ask as questions when you’re looking for a new local business. And those are the things that we need to set up from a schema and these other pieces. That’s what these do. And they answer those questions so that the AI is even capable of making a proper recommendation for you in your business. So really important.

I know for us at friendship, like we moved locations, we changed phone numbers. You know, we had some time where we were on Yelp. We had some times where we were on not on Yelp, like in like local rev stuff and all these other companies that we advertise with and work for. And they all had somewhat conflicting information around there. So this is like your one-stop truth source for the AI.

So it doesn’t have to go out to all these other places. So this breaks down just a little bit more. Generally, schema markup is the label maker for your website. So it tells you and kind of gives you, you know, this is your general FAQ as people might ask it for the AI. Right?

So then if you don’t have this, AI is either just not going to show your business and make recommendations because it doesn’t have enough information or worse, maybe it’s going to guess, right? And what it’s guessing from, man, I don’t know, right? That’s scary proposition. Somebody’s like, hey, like what does it cost, right? To go to friendship.

Like the AI, if that information is not on the website, if it’s not in the schema, it might guess super low, like $40, right? A month and then somebody calls and they expect, hey, I heard your gym’s $40. That’s awesome. And you’re like, no, and, or they might go crazy high. It’s like, oh, it’s $1,500 a month.

And you’re like, what? And so then the person never calls. Both are bad for business, right? So it would just be better if it had the actual schema dialed in for it. This is the plaintext file, the llms.txt I was telling you about plaintext file that lives at the root of your system.

So again, this is not necessarily outward facing. This is not something that like other, you know, potential clients or leads are going to be able to see. As we go through these other two and three like, this is just kind of where we start thinking about how the shift is going to change, right? As we start thinking about what is important, if you Google review wise, right, a 4.0 Google rating would basically be your average Google star review, right? If you are looking at this, Google and the other AI, so this is your strictest AI engines perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT.

If you are under 4, you will not get recommended by AI, right? So that’s a cut off that they all just announced. They will not recommend sub 4 star businesses. So if you guys have some low ratings, number one, like you have to try hard to get new reviews that will hopefully outrank those and pull your rating up. But number two, you have to really start thinking about looking at this, your Google reviews as a way to be seen as an authority in AI.

I find that a lot of businesses just are not aggressive with this. They do a great job. I’ll go back to my tree cutting business, right? At some point, I probably need to reach out to these guys. These guys came in, did an incredible job, bang up job.

They were so impressive, right? And I had a great experience, right? Once they were done, they left. I wasn’t here when they left, right? So I was gone.

I was not the house. They finished their job and they left the house. Nobody ever asked for a Google review. Nobody called me. Nobody emailed me.

Nobody text messaged me. Nobody dropped back by the house, right? We spent a lot of money on this, okay? Not an insignificant amount of money, all right? And nobody reached out to see if I was happy.

Nobody reached out to get a five-star review. Nobody reached out at all to even know what we felt about, you know, a $10,000 plus dollar service. And because of that, like they’re missing out on free AI, I would give them a five-star review. I would write the review. And I still probably will because that’s who I am, but not every customer is that way at all, right?

So if we aren’t doing these things, if we aren’t thinking about this, we have to start setting up systems where the customers that we go out of our way to do a bang up job for are being asked to give reviews. And you can just tell it like it is. You can tell your customer, hey, we’re really trying to get more five-star Google reviews. You know, if you would just take a second to tell a little bit about your job, I’ve attached a couple of photos from the job that we did. If you could post those with them, it really helps the ranking system.

It really means a lot to us. It helps us, you know, stand out as a local service provider so that we can stay competitive in this crazy world, right? Like, that can be the message that you send, something very honest and transparent. But if you bring it home to people and just tell them, like, this is something that we really need to stay competitive as a local small business, people will do it for you, especially if you do a good job with your service. So add this to your thing, like, it is a cutoff.

You will not be ranked if you don’t have a high enough ranking, okay? All right. So this is what I would start doing. If we want to start thinking about, okay, we’ve got to start getting dialed in on our website, but also our AI readability. How do we get ranked ahead of our competitors from a AI readability standpoint?

So first is just kind of thinking number one, I would if you guys have an AI system locally, I would start asking it, right? Like, if you guys have one of my systems, you use GEO audit, it’s going to give you this lately list of things you need to do. But if you guys don’t, I would get on whatever AI you are currently using. And I would start to say, like, hey, I want to start ranking higher for all of these incoming AI recommendation platforms, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude. And I need to see where we have gaps, right?

Then I would start to run through these three things. So the first is just writing a definition paragraph super easy. Second is trying to think about are we universal across Google business profile linked in, if you guys are business to business, or this is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, other social medias, if you guys are business to customer. And then wiki data, which also kind of looks at like wiki goes to Wikipedia, making sure all that stuff’s the same everywhere. And then your last one is do your scheme and mark up in your Lllms.txt.

This is like a half days work and you can get all this stuff done. Again, you can use the AI’s to help you with this just to see have them pull because you want it from them because they’re going to be the ones searching and pulling for this data. So just ask them, right? Go on ChatGPT and ask them be like, hey, review my business and how I look to you. If you were making a recommendation for a Gem or a construction company or a landscaper in my area, how do I look to you?

Would you recommend me? If you would recommend me, what would the recommendation look like? What questions do you have that are unanswered from my website, from my web profile? And go through that and just take a little bit of time and ask it, you know, the same series of questions across, you know, the three or four main ones, which is like Gemini Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude. And see what you get.

And then just as they tell you things, how can I fix that? That’s all you have to prompt it with. How can I fix this? Right? And it’s got a lot of it’s going to give you these three things.

But, you know, once you have these done, it’s kind of like, what is the next question? All right. Now, as we start kind of looking at what is happening, this is what we were talking about a little bit with the ads perspective. So, ChatGPT just dropped what their ads platform is going to look like. Okay.

Now, it’s a $50,000 minimum for AI search ads. All right. Now, as we start kind of looking at that, they are, so ChatGPT has had this $50,000 floor on AI search. All right. So, you used to have to have a $50,000 minimum to even be able to apply and go into ChatGPT’s recommendation services.

Now that’s gone. They’re going into, they’re opening it up. They are expecting this to drive, get this $100 billion in revenue within the next three years. So, this is going to become big business. They use the $50,000 floor.

So, it was big platforms that were advertising with them. Major companies, big franchises, you know, a lot of pizza places were in there. And I’ll talk about this more what it looks like on the consumer. And so, you guys are aware of this. In a second, but I want to focus on the business end of it.

They’re targeting right now two to $5 cost per click and somewhere around a $20 cost per acquisition. So, as you look at that, like that’s pretty good. That’s competitive. That’s, I would say, ahead of the game. But the other thing that I look at is that is a very sticky customer.

That is a high likelihood to close customer. So, what you need to be thinking about and how you always think about ads, if you guys have never done this, you need to understand what your cost per acquisition is. You need to understand what your value per customer is or your lifetime value of a customer. All right. So, if we don’t understand those numbers, that’s like a whole different conversation.

I’ve done, but I’ve done it. There’s a handful of things I think that exist on the internet of me talking about those things in depth. But if you guys ever have questions about that, like reach out, I can send you those. Those are with another consulting company that I worked for. But as you kind of understand those values, you have to understand if a $20 cost per acquisition is worth it for you.

Most businesses that would be very much worth it. The average customer, like friendship fitness, for example, stays for a little over two years on average, the average revenue or lifetime value of that customer is somewhere around $25 to $3,500. If I spend $20 to acquire a customer that might spend $3,500 over the next two or three years, that’s worth it every time. So, that’s how you think about that generally when you’re thinking about advertising. Now, why this is important is different advertising platforms have different stickiness.

Or I would say really conversion percentage. Google costs more per lead generally. But the customer is a more likely buyer because they are actively going out in searching and googling. Compare that to TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or X, where honestly, if I’m on Facebook or Instagram and an ad comes across my stories or my platform, I’m more annoyed that it’s being forced or shown to me than I am likely to buy. It’s making assumptions that maybe I want to buy because I googled something.

Maybe somebody googled how to get a six pack and then all of a sudden, now all these gyms start getting recommended to you. But their infrastructure is just more annoying in the way that they present it. So people click on ads, but they are not necessarily likely buyers. However, if I’m interfacing with an AI, looking for a local gym and I’m asking it all these questions like, Hey, I’m interested in strength training. I really want to get stronger.

I’ve heard that lifting weights is good for our long-term health. I’ve heard that is good for your bone density. I’m a post-menopausal woman. I’m looking forward to doing whatever. And you’re asking it and giving it this context of who you are and what you’re looking for.

And then it says, based on everything that you just told me, I think the best gym for you is this. That person, then, like, if you can put yourself in that brain space and they say, like, this is by far the best recommendation. Here’s what it’s going to cost. Here’s what their, you know, next steps are they can prepare you for it. It’s almost like they’re teeing you up like a friend would or a family member would as a referral for that business.

That is a potentially very high likelihood to conversion clients. So I think the ads on these platforms are going to be very powerful, much more powerful than other ads on other platforms. And I can see exactly how these guys get to a hundred billion dollars in revenue when you look at how much Facebook and Google already bring in from an ad revenue standpoint if theirs is just straight up better, right? And they can quantify that. So that’s kind of like the business facing end of it.

Now, if you guys are in consumer, you have to understand that they will not tell you the AI’s will not tell you when they’re making a recommendation based on a paid-out, which I thought was fascinating. I actually just read a huge article about this. And it’s not like I don’t, I have a tough time with it. I don’t think it’s good, right? Like, I don’t think that we want to get to a point where AI, like what I just told you, right, I think about it again through the lens of like this local business.

So like a local gym, I started this. I wasn’t with a franchise. I didn’t have a ton of money. I started it with $5,000 in my pocket out of my garage, right? Like, I think about that entrepreneur who’s trying to like get this started up and trying to, trying to go through this, this world and navigate to start a business and what it takes.

And I think it sucks that like you might not be able to break through in that world because some AI, you know, some orange theory out there is going to have all this money and it’s throwing it all at AI so that the only gym that ever gets recommended in your area is just an orange theory. Well, based on everything you said, I think the best gym for you is this orange, orange theory on every road, blah, blah, blah. And what it doesn’t tell you is like, oh, I’m actually doing that because orange theory corporate is paying me a boatload of money every month, right? So, you know, pluses and minuses, right? Like, this is just the reality of the world.

It’s important that we understand this and it’s important that we understand it as a consumer that the AI is maybe making a recommendation based on its best bet, but, you know, you can also then prompt it and be like, okay, or, you know, hey, are you making this recommendation because of a paid ad, right? And if you are, please give me the recommendations outside of the paid ad. May or may not be able to do that. I’m unsure. I know ChatGPT seems to be the least ethical with this, right?

And so there are the ones kind of getting raked over the coals and hammered for it. Again, there are also the first who are doing it on a big level. So, I assume it’s going to make things worse for AI. Like, I do think Google got worse because of sponsorships. Amazon is the worst right now because of sponsorships.

You want to find something on Amazon. Now, the first six things you get recommended are just sponsored. They’re just paid. And then you scroll down a little bit. I don’t know if you guys have seen this.

You scroll down a little bit. You’ll find the exact same product for $10 cheaper. If you just scroll down beyond the sponsored, the sponsored one because they’re paying for it, they make it more expensive. When the exact same thing is available down below, maybe from a different seller, maybe from the same seller sometimes for just cheaper. It’s Asinine.

It makes me very angry. And I think the same thing is true. Obviously with all social media, social media has been completely ruined by ads and sponsorships. So it’ll be interesting to see how AI kind of combats that. I think Gemini Google specifically is still going to be the market leader once they roll these things out.

And how Gemini makes those recommendations. I think because they’re Google, I think they can do that in a transparent way. I think they can tell you these are the recommendations. Here’s what I would do for you. Here’s the two sponsored results, the two unsponsored results and just put them in those orders.

But we’ll see how all that stuff shakes out. For us right now, just important for us to make sure we’re doing everything we can to be seen by the AI. As I said, 83% to 90% of businesses right now are unsurchable by AI. They are invisible, blind. And that’s just insane.

That’s just opportunity for us. So if we get out ahead of that, more power to you. That’s you’re just going to crush it. And then as these ads start getting rolled out, again, if you can be on top of it, understand, pay attention to some of these things. And you can go out and get two dollar cost per clicks instead of ten dollar cost per clicks.

And you can do it with sticky customers that are willing to convert. And you have your margins and your pricing rate. That’s like you can start to really get ahead and compound your business. So I think it’s super powerful. I think it’s a cool thing that’s coming up.

So as you guys are kind of thinking about this, think go into your AI’s today. Take some action on this and prompt it for whatever you would search for. What are the best gyms in Dublin, Ohio? See what comes up? See who comes up?

Ask it. Why did you recommend those? Why are those recommended over insert your company? Why is the recommendation more powerful for those guys instead of us? What do we need to do to get ranked on this?

And just start asking those questions. I think that this is going to be something that is super important for us, especially if we are a business that relies on people finding us. If you guys are old school, like you guys have just been in business, you have great relationships. I think number one, keep on that. I think that is incredibly powerful.

Me practicing this, I am spending and spend a lot of time researching this and trying to make my site like incredibly searchable. But so far, guess how many customers I’ve gotten from somebody just searching, I don’t know what for AI, consultant, local business, consultant, whatever it might be, zero. All of my stuff has just been from referrals, word of mouth, all those things. And I actually think that as we get into this world where AI’s trustworthiness, sponsorships, paid ads, blah, blah, blah, as we get into that world, I actually think old school relationships, word of mouth, high trust, people I know and like, people I know and trust, making recommendations for me. I think that that actually becomes more powerful.

So I never want to tell people like, hey, just like stop focusing on customer relationships and all that like and focus on this. It’s just like, this is a yes and right. My primary is always word of mouth, doing an incredible job being personable, helping people to the best I can. And then hoping that they will tell their friends and family about me and that that will help me continue in business moving forward, right? That has always served me well.

I am a firm believer in that. But I can do that still and also put my best forward for my company online, right? On every platform. And I’m a big believer in that like, if you’re a business, if you say like, we are the best, we are excellent. Number one, like I always want to say that on every business that I’m ever involved with is like, I want to have that like, almost like cocky, egotistical.

Like, I think we are the best because if you don’t think that way, like, why the hell are you doing what you do? Right? And if you don’t think you’re there yet and you do agree and acknowledge and think that somebody’s better than you, like, bust your ass to competitor. Like, that’s just my mentality, right? And so I truly believe that like friendship and this is the best gym.

I don’t think I’ve been to a million other gyms. I don’t think any other gym comes close, right? So like, I truly believe that in my heart, right? A part of that is having everything else buckled up, dialed in best possible practice we can, right? So always staying ahead of the game.

And I always operated that way, right? Like, when we were starting to look at like, okay, some gyms have an app for their clients where they can book classes and see workouts is like, and we don’t have that right now. And we can’t say that we are the best if we don’t have that. So then you take immediate action that day, we’ve got to get on top of that, right? What’s next?

What’s next? What’s next? And constantly trying to stay aggressive on how we stay at that tip of the spear mentality. And I think it’s going to be impossible for people to say, oh, I’m at the tip of the spear when my website looks like it’s from 2010 or my website was made in 2014 or my website doesn’t have any of these little things that help us get seen by AI when 90% of the people who search for businesses are using AI, right? It’s not a huge ask.

It’s not super challenging. It’s not anything that we should feel intimidated by. And as we go through the process, we are using AI like our customers might like our other businesses might like people who interact with us might. And that teaches us something teaches us something about our business. It teaches us something about ourselves.

And we need to as business owners be trying to think about how do we stay the tip of the spear. So that’s it for this week guys. If you guys have any questions on this stuff or you guys are diving into anything, shoot it to me in an email. I always love to have kind of interaction on my podcast and a little back and forth on kind of what people are experiencing and seeing themselves. It helps me understand what to research, but also how if people are thinking and feeling about this stuff.

So I’ll talk to you guys next week.

If you stepped away tomorrow — vacation, illness, family emergency, whatever it is — would your business survive?

Sit with it for a second. Most owners have never honestly answered. They’ve assumed the answer is yes. They’ve never tested it.

I owned a small business for 16 years. I’m here to tell you the answer for me, for most of those years, was no. And I’m going to tell you why that mattered more than I thought it did at the time.

16 years at Friendship Fitness

Friendship Fitness opened in 2008. I was the head coach. I was the closer. I was the customer service manager. I was the schedule fixer, the dispute mediator, the website creator, the event coordinator. The gym worked because I worked.

That was a feature when I was 30. It was a problem by the time I was 40.

What I sacrificed in those 16 years and didn’t know I was sacrificing: time with family and friends, trips and travel, financial decisions that always came from gym security first and me second. Mornings I missed. Bedtimes I missed. Weekends I told myself I’d take but never quite did.

If I were building that business today, the hardware on my desk would do most of what I used to wake up early to do.

The book worth reading

There is a book worth reading on this. Built to Sell by John Warrillow.

The thesis is simple and it stings. Most service businesses are built around the founder, run by the founder, and kept alive by the founder. They don’t sell because they can’t. The founder is the product. Pull the founder out and the lights go off.

Warrillow lays out three structural truths a service business has to satisfy to be valuable to anyone but the owner.

1. The work has to be teachable and repeatable.

2. Operations have to run without daily founder input.

3. The system that delivers the work has to be documented well enough that someone else could step in.

Number three is where everybody gets stuck. You can have a great service. You can have a loyal customer base. You can have a strong brand. None of that matters at exit if the institutional knowledge lives in your head.

Key-man risk

“Key-man risk” is the technical term for “the business dies without you.” Buyers see it instantly. Bankers see it. Investors see it. Even your spouse sees it on the days you’re sick and the phone won’t stop ringing.

Most AI consulting frames AI as a way to save time. That framing is too small.

What AI agents do, when they’re built right, is reduce key-man risk. The system absorbs the work. The work absorbs the institutional knowledge. The knowledge stops being trapped in your head.

That is a fundamentally different kind of result than “saved you four hours this week.”

Three examples from real builds

I’ll keep these anonymized — same bar I set in this week’s newsletter post. No names, no industries that point to a specific company, no specific dollar amounts.

Example one — proposal generation. One owner had been writing every proposal himself for years. The entire process lived in his head. Every estimate had a hundred small judgment calls he’d never written down. Built him an agent that read his closed proposals and learned his voice. First-pass drafts now happen in minutes instead of hours. He reviews, edits, ships. The work that used to keep him up at night happens before his second cup of coffee.

The side-effect win matters more than the time saved. There is now a written record of how he prices, what he includes, what he excludes, and why. That record didn’t exist before. If something happened to him, his team had nothing. Now they have everything.

Example two — pipeline standup. Another owner had a quiet pipeline of stuck deals. Customers who’d asked for a quote, gotten one, and gone silent. He used to scroll through his CRM on Sunday nights and forward emails to his salespeople. Now an agent does it before Monday standup. Every stuck deal gets a recommended next move, drafted in his voice, ready to send.

The owner doesn’t have to remember anymore. The system remembers.

Example three — post-close communication. A third owner had a post-close communication problem. Customers signed, and then disappeared from the company’s view. The team meant to send follow-up notes. The work always lost to whatever urgent thing happened that day. We built a sequence of touchpoints that goes out automatically, in the right voice, with the right details pulled from the customer record.

The team didn’t get more disciplined. The system got disciplined for them.

The pattern in all three cases: the owner used to be the bottleneck. Now the system is the operator and the owner reviews. Same output. Less founder dependency.

The insight I didn’t see coming

The part I didn’t see coming until we started building this stuff: the same agent system that runs the business day-to-day can also write its own onboarding for the next owner.

If you sell, the buyer doesn’t inherit a stack of paper SOPs nobody reads. They get a working system that already knows how the business operates, plus an agent that can produce a custom training program for whoever takes over. The new owner learns by doing, with the system as a coach, in the actual environment they’ll be running.

That has never been possible before. SOPs go stale. Training videos rot. Documentation projects never finish. An agent system doesn’t go stale because it IS the system.

I think about what this would have been worth at Friendship Fitness. A buyer walking in could have run the gym in weeks instead of months. The valuation conversation would have been different. The buyer pool would have been different. My options at exit would have been different.

The three returns

Three returns operating at three timeframes, compounding.

Return one — immediate margin. The agent absorbs work you used to pay for. Proposals, follow-ups, pipeline standups, post-close communications, content drafts, daily briefings. All inside your existing AI subscription. Hours come back. For most owners I work with, the math closes inside the first 90 days.

Return two — stack collapse. Most service businesses run 10 to 15 subscriptions to do work an agent system handles natively. Marketing automation. Proposal software. Follow-up sequencer. Reporting dashboard. None of those are wrong tools. They’re stacked because nothing else could do the job. When an agent can, the stack collapses on itself. The savings aren’t the goal. They fall out as a side effect.

Return three — the asset on the way out. This is the largest of the three, and the one nobody sees on the way in. A service business with a documented, transferable, agent-run operating layer is a fundamentally different kind of sale than a service business that lives in the founder’s head. Bankers price it differently. Buyers see it differently. The pool of people who could plausibly run the company expands. None of this matters if you’re selling next quarter. All of it matters if you’re selling in five or ten years.

Three returns. One investment. Different timeframes. All real.

Even if you never sell

The honest reason to do this work isn’t the sale. Most owners don’t have a sale in their five-year plan. They want to keep operating. That’s fine.

But the same structural choices that make a business sellable also make it livable.

The owner who can step away for two weeks without the company faltering is the owner whose marriage doesn’t fray, whose kids see them at dinner, whose blood pressure goes down 20 points in the second year of the build.

You don’t have to be planning an exit to want that. You just have to be tired.

I was tired. For most of the 16 years I owned that gym, I was tired in a way I’d convinced myself was the cost of the work. It wasn’t. It was the cost of building a business that couldn’t run without me.

If I were doing it today, I’d build something that could.

Build the asset

Build the asset. Even if you never sell it.

The full reflection on this is up on the newsletter — link below. If this episode hit close to home and you want to talk about how it maps to your business, there’s a free 30-minute strategy call on the site.

Pairs with this week’s newsletter post: What I Would Do Differently As A Business Owner if I Had AI

Talk soon.

— Jeff

Full transcript

Auto-generated via faster-whisper (base, int8). Lightly cleaned for readability. Timestamps approximate.

All right, guys, what’s going on? We’re going to talk today about assets in your business and really just some long-term, small business strategy. You know, I’ve been very lucky when I started my first small business. I was 25, extremely confident, I guess you would say, in myself, and I knew nothing, right? I knew nothing about business, knew nothing about gyms or running gyms, or anything like that. I didn’t have entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have real estate people in my family. I didn’t have anyone who had sold businesses, anything along those lines, right? No experience, no exposure.

But what I did know is that if I really committed to something, whether it be learning or learning about the business, learning about the industry, whatever it might be, if I surrounded myself with the right people, read the right books, studied and worked hard, that it would work itself out. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that exact same thing where you take maybe a leap of faith. You have a little bit of imposter syndrome. You maybe think, you know, I think I can do this and you have trust in faith in yourself, but you also know that there’s going to be a little bit of figuring it out along the way.

Now, as I started to go through that journey, you know, I read a lot of books, all different kinds of books. And a lot of those books were, you know, brought to me or were, I found for specific situations, right? So now I was trying to work on building a team and creating a cohesive unit across multiple locations from a meeting cadence perspective. I read traction and I started to install that system, right? And, you know, then you’re trying to learn about different business systems. And I read there’s like six or seven different great books on, you know, how to run a gym business. And so you kind of put yourself into these,

into these different educational opportunities. And so I always think as we start talking about this, right? Your number one asset is always going to be your own brain, your own ability to learn, adapt and change. And what we’re gonna be talking about today is change, right? It’s adaptation to a changing world, a changing industry. And making sure that we keep that muscle flexing. And this is the unique thing about entrepreneurs different than employees, right? Why entrepreneurs have to be wired a little bit different, think different and be on top of this kind of stuff is we have to stay moldable.

You might have employees right now that are saying something along the lines of like, well, I don’t wanna work with AI or I don’t wanna install AI or I don’t believe in it or whatever they’re saying. They might be scared of it. You have other ones that embrace it and they’re working with it and they’re excited about it too. You have maybe a bunch of people that are really just like in a scarcity mindset and they’re just worried about like, oh, I’m just worried, I’m gonna lose my job. So a bunch of different people on that spectrum. What we need to think about as employers and entrepreneurs and people who have the livelihoods of others in our care is we need to be making sure

that we’re doing everything possible to keep those people paid well, keep our business in business and continue to build our own long-term value in wealth as we grow. Entrepreneurs are kind of put into this weird space especially small businesses are put into this weird space of like we don’t really have 401Ks that our company is gonna match, like we’re the match, right? We don’t have healthcare benefits unless we buy our own healthcare benefits. So some of these things that give other people safety and security are actually just like added costs and taking things off of our own bottom line. And so we need to be thinking about how we build these assets up so that we can eventually one day retire we can eventually have a succession plan for our business and what those things look like because you’re gonna come the time is inevitable you will have a moment where you have to figure out what you’re gonna do with your business, right?

And I just experienced this and if you guys haven’t experienced this before you will sometime in the future and even if that’s 10 or 15 years off that might feel like a long way off but it’s really not and we can start taking steps today to ensure that we are prepared for that inevitability because really it comes down to like three choices, right? You can pass it down to somebody else so you can build a succession plan and you can train somebody for that and you can hand it off to them or sell it to them. You can sell it out, right? Those are all kind of same things so transfer of ownership, keep the business running.

You can just flat out close it say hey, that’s it, fold up shop but still a lot of times you have all these assets and stuff that you have to figure out what to do with. What are you gonna do with everything that you own for the business? All the computers, all the desks, all the hardware all that stuff, like what are you gonna do with it, right? So that’s not always just as cut and dry as you say, I’m just gonna close the doors, right? And then your third option is to like downsize into something that fits you for retirement, right? So, you know, going from, you know, let’s say you’re running a gym, right?

Instead of running a huge gym, you know, with 500 clients and 10 coaches, maybe I switched down to a small personal training studio that I run myself with 15 clients, right? And I’m still working, I’m still helping people, I’m still doing something in retirement but I’ve taken my business and I’ve kind of downsized it to fit me for my retirement. And then when I die, that’s when it closes, right? It just ends with me. So, that’s really the three lifetimes or the three potential ends for businesses. So, as we think about that, I want us to start kind of staying in that mindset, right? What we’re gonna talk about today is how we prepare for these eventualities and how AI I think can help us and get us into kind of a different frame of reference for it.

All right, so our first one, right? This is our key man problem and this is the first thing when I started to get to a point where, you know, for us it was expansion first, right? But then also when you start looking at potential selling of your gym, if I stepped away tomorrow, what would happen, right? The test that a lot of gym mentors would always put on us is, you know, I want you to take like two weeks in Europe, right? For me, I did this with like 10 days in Aruba, right? Where you actively take steps to tell your team, I will not be available for context. You cannot reach out to me. There’s no email, there’s no text.

And, you know, the world we live in doesn’t really, that’s like not ever really true unless maybe you’re going to like Antarctica or something. But you’re putting it on your team to say, I want to see if you can close deals, if you can take a lead and close a sale and grow the business and continue on if I’m not here.

And a lot of times that’s a scary proposition for small business owners, right? We wear a lot more hats and we continue to retain a lot more control than we should have, right? And the longer that you let this go, the more this key man problem becomes to, it grows and it becomes this burden on your business long term when we start thinking about what are the next steps, right? So all of those eventualities that I talked about, the only one where key man allows you is if you choose to downsize into retirement and continue operating as the only key man where it’s like you are the only employee or you do downsize to a level where it doesn’t require any other employees or any other help.

That’s the only situation where key man is acceptable in any of the others, right? It becomes a bit of an issue. So as we start thinking about this, right? I spent a lot of time in my gym building the wrong asset. So building everything around me as this central information point, right? Everybody had to check, right? But with Jeff before they did anything, right? Or they had to run things by me or they weren’t sure. They were not empowered to make the right decisions. They weren’t trained in systems to be able to follow the structure and the system that I had created to thrive without me, which is a huge problem, right?

Especially when it’s like the livelihood for your family. You know, if you get hit by a bus or if you become incapacitated in some way and your entire family’s livelihood what pays for your health insurance can no longer function without you there. You’ve now compounded an already bad situation and made it a lot more stressful for your family, for your spouse, for your kids, for everything. So we want to be kind of thinking about this. The best business to run is also a business that’s always ready to sell. And so I was building this where I was the key man problem. When we started to look for expansion for multiple locations, that becomes a problem.

I can’t be in two locations at once, right? Managing two full teams and two full gyms where you’re the key man and everything’s got to run past you, that’s not two times as much work. That’s like five times as much work. So we become sort of the bottleneck then. And the businesses get held back a little bit by these key man’s if you’re looking for expansion or growth. So we have to start thinking about how are we going to build the asset to thrive without me and how are we going to build this asset to also be in that same vein, a sellable asset, right? Because that’s ultimately the dream, right?

For however any business ends, that’s ultimately where we would prefer to take it. So this is a good book. Got it right here. Show it to you. Oh, why did I make it fuzzy? All right. This is a book actually gifted to me by a friend and it was while I was kind of talking through COVID, what we were going to do with our second location and some of those things. And it really helped reframe for me the concept of businesses that are built properly that run the right way are also businesses that are ready to sell at any point. And as I’ve sold my business now and as I’ve looked at potentially purchasing other gyms or other businesses, one of the things I found is I find myself constantly saying, I don’t want to buy, that’s a good business, but I don’t want to buy that business because the owner is doing everything.

The owner is the key linchpin for all of this stuff and they’re still heavily working a job of manager or sales or whatever it might be. They’re doing all of that. And when we lose them, that business isn’t guaranteed to still be able to continue to operate at the same level because we’re losing the best employee, the one who’s the most bought in, the one who knows all the systems, the one who retains all of this information in their head that everyone else trusts. And so I started kind of thinking about this as a concept and how much I was holding things back by continuing to be a naive, young business owner and not move things forward.

So, really good book. It’s a quick read too. I mean, I think you can probably read that in like a weekend or a couple of days. If you guys are listening to the audio book, it’s probably less than a couple of hours.

All right, so what makes a service business sellable? All right, first we have to systemize, right? This is where AI can thrive. And we’ll talk about this more how AI kind of helps these, not just these three factors, but just helps us in our general business structure anyway. But the work is teachable and repeatable, right? How do we teach and repeat that? How do we log all of our processes? And this was the big thing when I did start gain rate itself was like, okay, I have to think about every little thing. Like, not just like, oh, I’m gonna write a little SOP and put it in a handbook and a binder as a piece of paper of how to like open the gym and disarm the security code.

But like for me, I was like, okay, that’s gotta be a video. If we need to have a part-time person in an emergency coming open to the location, they need to be able to know where to find the information of how to open and close the business, where to watch that video and how to do it. And then obviously they need a key. So then we had to start thinking about, okay, like, well, if we’re not there, do we have like a high to key somewhere, right? And then what’s the high to key code? And how does that fit in? So we start thinking about all these little things as they trickle down. What’s our sales process, right?

Can that become an actual system in a process that you can teach and train? And if not, that’s something that we have to really work on building because sales is a huge bottleneck where owners put themselves in there. So that’s the first thing. Is it teachable and if it’s repeatable? And if it’s not teachable and it’s not repeatable, then you likely are number one, like not operating a business in the sense of like a true business, right? You’re kind of working or you’ve created a job network, right? And you’re requiring yourself to be extremely,

not just like knowledgeable, but like this knowledge hub, right? And I think a lot of leaders are really good at the job. So there might be business owners that you know that are really, really good at sales. And they love sales and they wanna keep doing sales. But that’s very different than somebody who can train somebody else to sell. So a sales teacher, okay? It’s kind of like looking at it as an athlete, right? Just because you play in the NFL doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be a good football coach. And just because you understand or maybe intuitively are a really good athlete doesn’t mean that you understand the true X’s and O’s of how to teach somebody football, how to go down to the youth boosters and teach kids how to take a hand off and teach offensive linemen where the holes are and like actually teach the game in a repeatable way.

And if you guys have ever met a great coach, like I’m lucky to know some great coaches and you watch them coach, you’re like wow, they approach that totally differently than how I would. And it’s such a great learning opportunity when you’re watching people teach and teach kids and like teaching a kid golf, like watching somebody do that process, that’s crazy because it requires such a different skill set than like being a good golfer. So don’t confuse the two. Being good at the job doesn’t mean that you’re a good leader or a good business owner and making sure your systems are teachable and reputable making sure you know how to do that is actually your highest level job when you run a business, okay?

So if you’re not teaching and you’re not building it into a repeatable process, then you’re not actually running a business. You’re actually just doing one of the jobs in the business from a day to day perspective. All right, second, operations run without daily founder input. So this is like our where we wanna get to. You may not be here, this may not be something that’s viable for you in the next year, but this is where we want to get to, is that our team is fully trained, we’ve taught them so we’ve done step one, it’s teachable and repeatable, buy people that we hire, teach and train, and then the business can run, and this is the key factor, be as profitable or more profitable than if you were doing your daily input.

So if you were still in there, if we take sales as the continuing theme here, if you were still in there doing sales, this is where I got the company to in sales. But now when I’ve completely handed off sales, right? So for us at the gym, if you guys know the people, when Andy and Shelby were running all of the sales, if the gym continues to do as good or better, then awesome, that is like the key operation, that’s kind of the last operation that I handed off. And when we had a full year of that down, it was like cool, operations are running without my daily founder input, we’ve kind of knocked number two out.

All right, and the number three is documented well enough that someone else could step in. And so again, this is the hit by a bus thing. This is something that me and my cone are talked about all the time, is can we get to a point where like if I get hit by a bus, or if I go down or if I leave, that everything is in one place well enough that it could be done without me, right? And you have to kind of test this, right? And one of the best ways to test it is to travel or go out of town or be in Communicado for a few days. And then when you come back, sit down with your key leadership, or even sit down with your lowest level team and ask like, what didn’t go well when I was here?

What were the things that you found that you wanted to text me, you wanted to email me, you needed to put on my plate? Because those are actually the teaching things for you, where you need to go and start to get in and fix and document and teach right away, right? Because those are the things where people actually haven’t found that there’s another point of contact in there, or it’s not documented well enough for them to understand it when you weren’t there. So these are the three things that make a service business sellable, but also the three things that make us service business operate and run like a machine, like a business, not where it’s like, hey, the owners, or the owners ship level, actually is just like, we’re doing three jobs, right?

And like, one of the guys does sales and one of the guys does operations and we’re actually just like, we’re just in there and without us, there is no business, right? That’s not like, it’s weird because technically that isn’t business, but like in reality, that is, it’s really just like hiring or creating a spot for you to have your own job input. So that’s not what I think of as business anymore and it’s important that we start to kind of switch that. So we already talked about key man risk a little bit, but this is where we’re gonna start thinking about how AI can step in and we can start to download your brain and upload it to the AI and start to train it to reduce key man risk.

So all the ideas, all the stuff that you have in your head, it’s sometimes hard to teach that to just like all of it to one person, right? We might teach our sales team about sales. We might teach our operations team about operations. We might teach our hiring and firing manager about employment and you start thinking about like, we’ve got these little aspects of our business and we might teach those people individual components of it, but there may not be one central source of information for it and that’s where the AI can come in and really help. So we start thinking about just a couple of examples that I’ve seen here is a lot of businesses think about things that we’re going through a sales process and I ask people all the time, like, where’s that documented, right?

So let’s say we’re trying to train an AI to build proposals for us or to build a quote system, okay? And I ask them, great, where’s that documented? And they’re like, oh, it’s just kind of in my head. It’s like, okay, is it like a dollar per hour thing? Is it like a dollar per square foot thing? Is it an ever-changing, evolving pricing system because materials and material costs? If material costs are a part of that, where do we go to find where the new material costs are? How often do we update that? Is there a central source of information? So this is a key thing for us to start to think about one layer deeper and when I start working with people with AI, it’s great.

It’s very, it’s illuminating to the business owners because they have to start asking themselves these questions for maybe the first time where I say, great, where does that live, right? It shows us a couple of things. Like, one, have you ever even documented it? Is there actually a system? Or am I just like so good at the job, so good at understanding my business head to toe that I’m like licking my finger, sticking it up to the wind and coming up with a pricing mechanism. And I’ve just gotten so good at it that I’m able to do it. Like awesome, that’s great, you’re that good. But what happens when you need to sell the business?

Again, it’s a totally non-sellable asset. If everybody in the business knows that without your head being able to price stuff, nothing can get priced, nothing can get sold. No proposals, no quotes can be given, okay? And then the second tier is like, okay, if we have that kind of documented somewhere, how much, like for me, I know nothing about your business, if I’m going to start to work for you, maybe I do, maybe I don’t, right? But let’s say I don’t know anything. And so one of the first questions is I’m going to have for you is like, great, where’s that document? And it’s so funny when I ask that question because some people are like, it’s organized perfectly in our cloud sharing.

Here’s where it is. It’s in our proposals folder, quotes. And then it’s organized by price per square foot. How much a plumber costs, how much a lawnmower costs, how much a mulcher costs, how much a personal trainer costs, like it’s line items, exactly how we pay people, exactly how much it costs us, and then exactly what we have to charge the customer to make sure our profit margins are right. Some people are just hyper organized and all of that information lives in a very easy for me to understand and then thus a very easy for the AI to understand exactly where to go to get that information so that it can pull those things out and give a quote or a proposal for whatever we’re doing.

And I think that that’s been very illuminating. Number one to see if it’s all just in my head. And number two, if we do have a document of process, how organized is it? How quickly can you point me directly to where that is? And the businesses that are absolutely fine and thriving with AI are the ones who are that second. They’re like, yep, it lives right here. Here’s the folder set and it’s like take some 15 seconds to copy and paste to me at over. I take that, I copy and paste it into the AI. And then I’m running. Now I’m cooking, right? I’m off with fire and the AI is like, cool, got it. Awesome.

Now I can finish out my proposal. That also shows me that not only that business owner is on top of that business owner is building an asset. Now the AI is going to be this massive asset that’s really able to help them. And without those things, these are some of the questions you have to start asking yourself as a business owner. Now next we kind of start thinking about stuck deals, right? And this is a big one for people is maybe we have plenty of business, so our marketing and our sales and all that stuff, like it’s going really, really well. The thing, actual bottleneck for us is like completing the job or getting things done.

And so we have stuck deals or maybe at a gym, this is something like everything is kind of full and wait listed. So we have some of these issues. When we start looking at where things might get stuck in our business, we need information and data. Again, when we start thinking about we have to make the best decision for the business. We need some degree of data aggregation and one dashboard or one singular piece of truth

and information that feeds us that. Right, so let’s say I’ve got seven deals closed right now and we’re all bottlenecked on getting the contract signed. But I don’t have any actual system to feed me the information of who’s where, right? So we’re like doing these team meetings and I’m asking my people like, hey, where are we out with the Johnson deal? Where are we out with the, you know, with the Weisman proposal, right? And we’re trying to come up with these things and like we’re getting this like manual input. And so we have to call meetings and we have to, you know, have our people relay that information with words and so we need now we need to have these people are documenting in their own way and then they’re telling me and then maybe I’m retaining that information.

I’m giving them some feedback but there’s not like this one central source. As opposed to if we think about how that might work in an AI system, right? We have the team is updating one singular document or one singular CRM, one singular source of truth. That CRM is aggregating all of that data and it’s feeding it to us in a daily report that gets emailed to us at 7 a.m. Or a daily dashboard that I can pull up in two seconds on my phone when I’m laying a bed in the morning, check it real quick, see if there’s anything that I need to get done to unblock our bottleneck to get things moving forward.

Things that used to be this require a meeting, all hands, everyone’s gotta be there. We waste an hour and a half, nobody’s driving profit or a revenue, nobody’s moving the business where we’re all just like getting status updates. Again, these are things that slow businesses down that we just don’t need anymore that you can train in AI for.

And then the third one is follow ups, right? So a couple of things that I’ve seen here. As we move forward, one of the things I’m talking with all of my customers about is best practices on the internet and best practices specifically for how AI is going to learn about you and learn about your business, okay? This is extremely important for us long term to be doing best practices from a business perspective. So let’s talk about what that looks like, right? We sign the customer up, okay? And we can use gyms, we can use landscaping companies, we can use construction, we can use big business, whatever it might be, right?

You have a potential lead, lead signs up, lead experiences product, after lead experiences product, we should have some sort of a task that we do for follow up to make sure that they are happy with the product, that they give us referrals if they were happy with the product or we ask for referrals and that they review our product, right, publicly, okay? So that should all be a system, right? We should have numbers on that. From our leads, how many of those leads went to a quote or a proposal or showed up to the gym for a sales meeting? Of those people, how many signed up and became actual clients of ours?

Of the clients, how many of them gave us reviews, gave us referrals and we’re happy with the product, right? Gave us a rating in some capacity. Then to take that a step further, those reviews should be collected, those should be posted across the internet, they should be put onto our website for people to read, we should be trying to get a review for I would say probably nine out of 10 clients who complete our product, we should be trying to get Google reviews, stuff on LinkedIn, stuff on Clutch, whatever it might be for you. Different businesses have different areas where they look for reviews, but for the most part like Google Maps, Google reviews is a generally good area for us to focus on.

That shows web authority. Web authority then drives more people to our website which gives us more leads, which gives us more potential clients, which gives us more potential reviews and referrals and that’s the kind of engine we want to create. But what I find is a lot of people like they do a great job on the front end, right? They get the lead, they turn them into a client, great job, like that’s awesome. But then after the job’s done, they kind of forget about them. And maybe that person has a lot of reviews that they has a great raving review that they want to write, right? And they just don’t have your link, or they forgot about it, they don’t have time.

Or whatever the situation may be, you just never asked for it so they don’t care, right? Maybe they had some referrals, people who are really interested in your service or maybe they know a guy or actually I was having a conversation yesterday on the golf course you should reach out to this person, right? That kind of stuff, when you ask, when you’re prompted for it, when you tell them, like, hey, one of the best ways our business grows is referrals. So we love, you were a great client, we loved working with you. If you have anybody else who needs our services, please give them our contact information, I’d love to help them out.

And I find one of the best ways when things for networking, generally in the entire world is to give your friends a great recommendation, right? So if somebody says, hey, me and my wife are looking for a date spot, does anybody have a new restaurant or something that they’ve tried lately that they love? And somebody gives you a referral and then you go there for dinner and you have an amazing time and you text that person back and just like, we just went to that restaurant, it was so good. Thank you so much for the recommendation. We had such a great date night. Your friend just did you a solid.

Now that friend gave you something as a friend, there’s more value to the friendship. You’re helping each other in your lives, that’s what friendship is kind of all about. And the same is true when it comes to business, right? If you were looking for somebody to clean your house or make your landscaping, like for us, for like house cleaners, when we were just pregnant, we were like looking for a house cleaning, you got two young kids, you got a pregnant wife, it’s summer, you got all these things going on. And you know, Maria’s like she’s, we’re not gonna say a clean freak, right? But she’s definitely neat.

And you start to look at that, it’s like, okay, well, let’s hire a clean person. But it’s freaky having your little kids in the house and having a pregnant wife and bringing strangers into your home to go through your closet and be in intimate areas of your home without trust. So we got a recommendation, that recommendation was from somebody that we trusted a friend, that recommendation then had the people come in clean or house, they’ve done a great job, it’s been a great addition for us. Thank you, that’s amazing, right? That’s something that our network gave to us. So we have to build this into our system.

This builds long term, but again, these are things that now AI can help bolt on if we’re doing the front end right. If we’re already bringing people from, you know, lead to sale, to close, to client and we are giving a great product and we do an awesome job and we believe that we’re doing a great job and we believe that we are a great referral for people. Sometimes all we have to do is set up a system to ask. And AI can make sure that you never forget that. So this is kind of what I think about this. The, you know, agentex systems that we build for business. As we start looking at it, like, those are all things that can do tactically in the business.

But when we’re actually looking at what we’re building as a founder, if I was thinking about how it was gonna sell friendship again, you know, my last business I sold, if I was thinking about how I’d do that again, now what I would do is I would build out agents for every system we have. I would train the agents rather than having kind of these like SOPs and things that live in this weird area around the internet and trying to organize those as best I could, I would, you know, create an agent for everything, a programming agent, a sales agent, you know, what’s our sales, you know, what do our sales phone calls look like?

And an agent can pull up a script for me and I can be, you know, training new people and I can actually train the agent. I can give it a hundred of our sales calls and say, okay, I want to do some training weekly with my sales team. You’re going to act as the customer and I’m going to act as the sales representative and I want you to roleplay, right? Give me objections and help me overcome them. Help me handle these difficult cases and tough calls and you can start to train it with it. So I would systemize all of it, but within the AI, then the next owner or a potential salesperson, like a part of my sales process I would have them sit down and interface with the AI and I would tell the new potential owner, ask it anything about the business.

Ask it about financials, ask it about our sales sequence, our sales system, ask it about our programming system, ask them about how we do schedules, how we do coverages, ask them what our long term, you know, viability in terms of like client retention is, you know, what are, where are reviews at? How do we ask for reviews? What’s our system for that? Like ask it anything, right? Anything about our business, I try to download my whole brain. And then the AI can train the new owner and if the new owner has a question, it doesn’t always have to come back to me, the old owner, it can actually work within its own agentic system to learn and grow.

And I think it’s true for employees just as it’s true for owners. You can train, just like if I created those sales agent, if I want to train my sales team and work with my sales team, I would pull up my sales agent and I would start to roleplay with my team, right? Using that sales agent. So two things are happening then. One, my sales team’s getting sales training, which is awesome. Two, my sales agent is getting smarter because it’s helping my sales team learn where they’re each individually weak and we grow better and the AI grow stronger. So the whole system becomes better over time. I think a lot of businesses are still stuck in the, I’ve got paper, I’ve got a binder, that’s like an employee handbook.

Maybe some of them have gone further and made videos. Maybe some of them have those things like just kind of loosely sitting around in a Google drive that nobody’s opened in forever, right? I know this is true for us, right? We’ve been through all of those iterations and I think this is much cooler because it’s interactive by nature, but also it’s putting you on the cutting edge of what is actually available to train your team. And so I just think the possibilities that are so cool. So when I think about this, right? I think about like, again, what are we doing when we’re putting AI onto a business?

All right, the first thing we think about is like we’re gonna improve margin, right? So you’re not gonna need as many subscription services. Eventually you can change your website to where the AI runs your website. The AI creates your own website, runs your website, integrates everything for you and that’s done. So you can take all your web costs off. If you’re paying a local SEO person or you’re paying a marketing agency or an ad agency, that’s all gone. AI’s better than all of that, right? So that’s about tens of thousands, potentially, of dollars back in your pocket every single month.

Just trying to think about it like other things that you can start to kind of cut down on. Anything that you’re doing that’s like data aggregation, any services you’re paying for that, even eventually CRM’s like I’m a big believer now that everybody’s just gonna start to create their own CRM’s that do exactly what they need and nothing else. That don’t have all these bells and whistles because some of these CRMs like on the fitness side of things, they’re a thousand dollars a month, right? For us to have pushpress and to have a branded app and to have all this, it’s a thousand dollars each a month, right?

Close to it. And so pretty confident now that most of that I could create by myself and have my own full ownership, my own all of it. And if I wanna make any changes or updates or any improvements or anything like that, I don’t have to go to a help desk. I don’t have to struggle if the software’s capable of it. I just work with my AI and I keep building it. And again, I build an asset when I do that. That becomes more valuable in the sale. But it also shaves off margin immediately. So I save a thousand dollars a month today, right away. So I think that’s the first area where it helps you is it gives you margin back right away.

The second thing that it starts to give you is as we start to stack some of these things on it, we start to get this ability for us to drive extra outputs, right? So if we find bottlenecks in our business, we can start thinking about, okay, my tech stack now used to be the bottleneck or like we used to bounce back and forth between struggling to reach out to clients or struggling to get proposals out the door or struggling from proposal to get assigned contract or after the signed contract’s done to get the work done, we’re struggling in these bottlenecks. But as we start to build out this tech stack, all those things become faster.

So now we can get more jobs done in less time, we can do more business globally. So now we’ve cut down and increased the profit margin because we’ve taken unnecessary expenses out. And we are able to do and drive more top line revenue because we’re able to do more jobs, right? Because there’s less bottlenecks. And then the third one I think about is building the actual asset of the AI, right? If I think about buying a business right now, I look at it one of two ways. I can get a business at a huge discount because they’re still working old school pen and paper, Excel spreadsheets, bare bones like old business, and I know that I can come in, bolt on the AI and drive massive value, you know, 10X the company.

So I might be able to buy a company at a discount and then come in and plug AI in and take it to the moon, okay? Or I can buy a business that maybe sells for a premium but is already completely AI native. And I know that I’m gonna have to pay a little bit more for that, but I also know that I’m already operating at higher margins, at lower expenses, at, you know, a better business. And if the company’s already AI native, I already know where ahead of everybody else in the industry and I can start to, you know, separate a little bit and beat my competitors.

All right, so as we think about this, you know, all of this stuff is great in terms of making a sellable asset but that’s not everybody’s goal immediately. Well, we also think about this guys as more than anything is this reduces burnout, right? It makes the actual business itself more livable, right? In the most beautiful way to think about this is, if your business is ready to sell at any time, that also means that there’s probably very little headaches for you. The business is often running on its own, it’s not stressing you out, there’s not things that need to be done, there’s not things waiting on you.

We’ve built systems and the AI is helping our team implement those systems and then it becomes a choice, right? You’re like, I’m not burned out, I feel great. I love doing this, I could do this the rest of my life. And that’s like a huge asset for you, right? You can sell it at any time because it’s only a sellable but it doesn’t necessarily, like, you’re not selling it at burnout, right? You’re not selling it because you can’t do it anymore because you’re exhausted and you’re so tired because I see a lot of gyms right now, especially trying to sell that are in that boat. The owner is burned out their toast, they have no more energy left.

Because of that, their business has started to suffer. So then when I’m looking at the financials, it was like, oh, they had a really good year in 2022 and then 23 was yours, 24 was worth, 25 was bad and now 26 is like, they’re below 100 members and now they’re just trying to fire sell and get something out of it, anything that they possibly can’t out of it because they’re toast. And the company is effectively dead, right? It’s a zombie company and this person’s just trying to get out. And unfortunately in the gym industry, this happens a lot. I’ve actually bought equipment from businesses that this exact thing happened to and this will continue to happen to businesses because they don’t take these steps, right?

So we wanna think about building these things on an upswing and when we’re building them and we get there, if we wanna make the choice to sell the company, we have that choice in any time and when it does sell, it’s attractive. It’s not like somebody’s not gonna look at that and be like, oh, yeah, look, you want a million dollars, I’m gonna give you 240,000 because that’s my valuation, that’s what it’s worth to me. And then you’re like, oh, well, that’s, I mean, that sucks, that’s not that much money and this is what happens with every gym sale I’ve talked to is, you know, you talk to them, they’re like, oh, well, I’m asking $200,000 and then you do the numbers on the business and it’s like, I’ll give you $18,000 for the equipment.

And that’s a weird moment, I can tell you cause I’ve had that exact conversation with those exact numbers. It’s a very uncomfortable conversation to have with people but it is required because people need to know that like your business isn’t worth anything because you’re doing everything. The profit margin, if I had to pay somebody to do your jobs is gone, right? It would actually lose $2,000 a month. So why would I pay you $200,000 to have a $2,000 monthly expense on my plate? That makes no sense, right? And so it’s a tough realization for a lot of business owners and I wish I knew this earlier and I wish I could have trained more people on this early as what I’m trying to do as a consultant now is teach people these things, right?

As you’re building your companies, keep these things in mind because they are important and you don’t know, you know, when your kids are gonna get sick or when something’s gonna happen and you’re gonna get burned out tomorrow and you’re gonna wanna sell your company right away and oh, hey by the way, the company’s not sellable at all because you haven’t done these things and it’s a really, really bad spot to be in. So I hope to protect you all from that and hope you never have to deal with it. So, yep, even if you never sell it, that’s the idea, right? So that’s it for us today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.

I’ve owned small businesses for over 16 years.

Over those 16 years I sacrificed a lot. Time with family & friends, trips & travel, experiences and financial decisions that always came from gym security first, myself second.

If I were building that gym today, the hardware on my desk would do most of what I used to wake up early to do.

This piece is about the part I didn’t see clearly while I was in it. Not what I was earning. What I was creating. Whether the thing I was pouring my life into could leave my hands when I was ready for it to.

There’s a book worth reading on this called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. The thesis is simple. Most service businesses are built around the founder, run by the founder, kept alive by the founder, and worth almost nothing without the founder. They don’t sell because they can’t. The founder is the product. Pull the founder out and the lights go off.

I built Friendship Fitness like that for the first 10 years. I was the head coach, the closer, the customer service manager, the schedule fixer, the dispute mediator, website creator and event coordinator. The gym worked because I worked. That was a feature when I was 30. By the time I was 40 it was a problem with no obvious solution.

The fix Warrillow proposes is structural. Three things have to be true for a service business to be valuable to anyone but the owner:

1. The work has to be teachable and repeatable

2. Operations have to run without daily founder input

3. The system that delivers the work has to be documented well enough that someone else could step in

That last one is where most owners get stuck. We can hire help. We can delegate. But the institutional knowledge, the why behind every decision, the voice every email is supposed to sound like, the edge cases that don’t fit any process, all of it lives in our head. It walks out the door with us.

This is where AI agents come in. It’s the part I didn’t have access to in 2010.

Key-man risk and what AI agents do about it

The technical term for “the business dies without you” is key-man risk. Buyers see it instantly. Bankers see it. Investors see it. Even your spouse sees it on the days you’re sick and the phone won’t stop ringing.

Most AI consulting content frames AI as a way to save time. That framing is too small. What AI agents do, when they’re built right, is reduce key-man risk.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice, generalized from real builds we’ve shipped this year.

One owner had been writing every proposal himself. The entire process lived in his head. Every estimate had a hundred small judgment calls he’d never thought to write down. We built an agent that read his closed proposals, learned his voice, and on our first test it took 11 minutes, when normally it takes 4-6 hours. He reviews and ships. The work that used to keep him up at eleven at night now happens before his second cup of coffee. More important than the time saved is what the build produced as a side effect: a written record of how he prices, what he includes, what he excludes, and why. That record didn’t exist before. If something happened to him, his team would have nothing. Now they have everything.

Another owner had a quiet pipeline of stuck deals. Customers who’d asked for a quote, gotten one, and gone silent. He used to scroll through his CRM on Sunday nights and forward emails to his salespeople. Now an agent does it before Monday standup. Every stuck deal gets a recommended next move, drafted in his voice, ready to send. The owner doesn’t have to remember anymore. The system remembers.

A third owner had a post-close communication problem. Customers signed, then disappeared. The team meant to send follow-up notes, but the work always lost to whatever urgent thing happened that day. We built a sequence of five touchpoints over six months that goes out automatically, in the right voice, with the right details pulled from the customer record. The team didn’t get more disciplined. The system got disciplined for them.

In all three cases the owner used to be the bottleneck. Now the system is the operator and the owner reviews. Same output. Less founder dependency.

That’s what the work does.

The insight I didn’t expect

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming until we started building this stuff for clients.

The same agent system that runs the business day-to-day can also write its own onboarding for the next owner.

If you sell the company, the buyer doesn’t inherit a stack of paper SOPs nobody reads. They get a working system that already knows how the business operates, plus an agent that can produce a custom training program for whoever takes over. The new owner learns by doing, with the system as a coach, in the actual environment they’ll be running.

That has never been possible before. SOPs go stale the day they’re written. Training videos rot (remember sitting in some musty break room watching an old VHS training video?!). Documentation projects are the thing every owner promises to do and never finishes. The harder anyone tries to capture the institutional knowledge in a static document, the faster the document falls behind the actual business.

An agent system doesn’t go stale because it is the system. It teaches the new owner by being the thing they’re going to use. The institutional memory is built into the operating layer, not stored in a Google Doc nobody opens.

I think about what this would have been worth at my other businesses. It opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for selling, handing off or scaling. Buyers who lack specific industry knowledge, but are great operators can now dive into industries previously not open to them. Right now, this is a huge valuation upgrade for any business who is ahead of the game. In a few years, you will be completely uninvestable and unsellable if you do not have this in place.

The agent network I’m building for small businesses is on the same scale and caliber that JP Morgan and the other titans of industry are building.

It’s time for all small business owners to begin understanding the layout and lingo of how agent systems actually work, and what it means for your company long term.

I didn’t have that lever. The owners I work with now do.

The three returns

Right now there are three different returns operating at three different timeframes, and they compound on each other.

The first return is immediate. The agent absorbs work you used to pay for: proposals, follow-ups, pipeline standups, post-close communications, content drafts, daily briefings. All of it inside your existing AI subscription. The hours you get back can be billed at your hourly rate, or spent on the parts of the business that actually grow it. For most owners I work with, the math closes inside the first 90 days.

The second return shows up in the stack. Most service businesses are running 10 to 15 subscriptions and one or two contractors to do work that an agent system handles natively. The marketing automation tool. The proposal software. The follow-up sequencer. The reporting tool. The intake form processor. None of those are wrong tools. They’re stacked because nothing else could do the job. When an agent can, the stack collapses on itself. Some owners see meaningful savings on the software bill within the first few months. That’s not the goal. The goal is the operating leverage. The savings fall out as a side effect.

The third return is the one nobody sees on the way in, and it’s by far the largest. It’s the asset on the way out. A service business with a documented, transferable, agent-run operating layer is a fundamentally different kind of sale than a service business that lives in the founder’s head. Bankers price it differently. Buyers see it differently. The pool of people who could plausibly run the company expands. None of this matters if you’re selling next quarter. All of it matters if you’re selling in five or 10 or 15 years.

Three returns. One investment. Different timeframes, all real.

Even if you never sell

The honest reason to do this work isn’t the sale. Most owners I talk to don’t have a sale in their five-year plan. They want to keep operating. That’s fine.

But the same structural choices that make a business sellable also make it livable. The owner who can step away for two weeks without the company faltering is the owner whose marriage doesn’t fray, whose kids see them at dinner, whose blood pressure goes down 20 points in the second year of the build. The structure isn’t an exit move. It’s a life move. The exit just becomes possible as a side effect of building the life.

You don’t have to be planning an exit to want that. You just have to be tired.

I was tired. For most of the 16 years I owned Friendship Fitness, I was tired in a way I’d convinced myself was the cost of the work. It wasn’t. It was the cost of building a business that couldn’t run without me.

If I were doing it today, I’d build something that could.

One small note before you close this

If you’ve read this far and you’re an owner thinking about how this maps to your business, I’m not going to run a full pitch. The Personal AI Agent Build and the Business AI Agent Build at CBus AI Agents are both designed around exactly this. We do a free 30-minute call before any paperwork. No pressure, no tricks. The link is on the site.

The point of this piece isn’t to sell. The point is to name something I think every service-business owner should be thinking about, regardless of whether they ever work with us.

Build the asset. Even if you never sell it.

— Jeff Binek
Sentinel #563, Dublin, Ohio

The question would be something simple. How many active members do we have right now?

Seven tabs later, here is what I had. The booking platform with one count. The payment processor with another. A spreadsheet our CSM updated by hand. A QuickBooks export from the bookkeeper. An email list parked in a fourth tool, last cleaned a year before. A Google Doc the head coach kept open, because nobody trusted any of the official platforms to be current. And of course the one primary tool, that could never give us the correct answer, even though that is what it promised.

I did not have an answer at the end of those 7 tabs. I had six partial answers that disagreed with each other.

That was the business I was trying to grow on top of.

It is not just gyms

It is the same pattern almost everywhere right now. Tool sprawl. Login fatigue. Data strung across the organization like birthday streamers hung at random angles, half of them falling down. By the time you have logged into the six systems you need to answer a basic question about your own company, the question has changed.

The reason most of us want AI right now is the same reason we bought all those tools to begin with. Each one promised to fix a problem. Each one did, a little. Each one added a login. Each one added a data island.

You can’t put AI on top of a mess

Well, you can. It will just give you a faster mess.

If your customer list lives in three places that disagree, an AI agent will produce three different answers depending on which place it reads. If your team has 40 logins and no single source of truth for what closed yesterday, your agent will sound confident while it hallucinates, because the underlying ground truth is already a hallucination.

AI amplifies what you already are. I have said that for two years. It is true for people. It is also true for businesses. A simple, organized, decided business gets multiplied by AI. A bloated, scattered, undecided business gets noisier.

The owners who are winning with AI right now did not start with an AI strategy. They started with a deletion strategy. They cut tools. They consolidated platforms. They picked a single source of truth for each domain and enforced it. Then they brought AI in, and AI worked, because there was finally a clean substrate for it to work on.

There is a name for that approach, and it does not come from a small business consultant.

Elon Musk has a five-step process. Automate is step five.

When looking at the world of business, and specifically how to run & automate major businesses, Elon is the king. He runs the same algorithm at SpaceX and at Tesla, and he talks about it openly. Five steps, in this order:

1. Question every requirement. Who said this part of the business had to exist? Why? Is the reason still true?

2. Delete the part or the process. If you do not end up adding back at least ten percent of what you cut, you did not cut hard enough.

3. Simplify and optimize what is left. Only after deleting. You do not optimize something that should not exist.

4. Accelerate cycle time. Move faster on what remains.

5. Automate. Last.

Read that list one more time. Notice where automation sits.

Most of us want to start at step five. Buy the AI tool. Bolt it onto the way the business already runs. Hope it untangles everything from the inside out. Musk does the opposite. He spends almost all of his time on steps one through three. Only when the operation is at its simplest possible version does he automate any part of it.

I am not telling you to run your business like Elon Musk. I am telling you the order matters. Question, delete, simplify, then automate. If you skip the first three steps, the AI you bring in is just step five with nothing underneath it. A faster mess.

That is the algorithm I run in week one of every engagement. It is also why an off-the-shelf AI rollout almost never delivers what the demo promised. The demo skipped steps one through four.

The work nobody wants to do

Inventory every login. Every platform. Every spreadsheet. Most stacks I have audited carry between 15 and 40 active tools. The gym did. Half of those tools turn out to be doing a job another tool already does. A third are doing nothing at all. They are paid subscriptions for software somebody on the team forgot was running.

Pick one system of record per domain. One CRM. One project tool. One place where customer notes live. One folder for documents. One.

Then deprecate the rest. Put a hard date on the calendar. “Nobody opens [old tool] after May 15.” Move what matters. Let the rest die.

Centralize your data. If your agent reads the customer list, it should read one customer list. If it reads the pipeline, it should read one pipeline. The agent does not need the prettiest interface or the most expensive tool. It needs a single, clean, current source.

This is the unglamorous work. It is also the work that decides whether your AI investment pays back in 90 days, 1 year or never.

Every login is a tax

Watch your team for a day. Count the times someone asks “where did I save that?” or “what was the password for that one?” or “who has access to that platform again?” Then count the seconds lost on each one. Then count the small reset of attention each switch costs. Multiply by your team. Multiply by a year.

That number is brutal. And it is the tax you pay before AI ever shows up.

Now layer AI agents on top. Each agent is its own tool, with its own interface, its own login, its own dashboard. If you do not simplify first, AI just becomes the 41st thing on the list.

The phrase I have been using with clients lately is switching fatigue. It is not just slow. It compounds. Every platform your team has to remember the location of is one less platform’s worth of energy they have to actually do the work.

Simplicity is not the constraint on AI. Simplicity is what lets AI work.

How to start, this week

Open a blank document. List every tool, platform, login, and subscription your business runs on. Three columns. Tool name. What it does. Who actually uses it.

Most of us stop around 25 entries and realize we cannot remember what half of them are anymore.

Then three questions, in order.

1. What job does this tool do?

2. Which of these jobs is duplicated by another tool on the list?

3. Which of these tools, if I cancelled tomorrow, would nobody on the team notice for a week?

The last column is your starting kill list. Cut it. Do not migrate. Just cut.

Then do it again next week with the next layer down.

In a month, your stack is small enough that AI has somewhere clean to live. In two months, your team is not drowning in logins. In three, the agents you bring in pay back their cost in week one, because the data finally agrees with itself.

The main reason I prefer to do a hardware AI installation along with the AI Agents, is it gives each owner a chance to start fresh. A fresh computer, zero files, and then we give the AI only what it needs to be successful. What you find out, is that it only really needs a very small handful of documents and tools. And those documents and tools are actually the only things your company actually needs to hang on to.

Go ahead and delete all the project photos and proposals from 10 years ago. Sort your Google Drive by “date last modified” and cut everything that hasn’t been touched for over 3 years (double checking it’s not taxes or something pressing like that).

My analogy for this is it is like downsizing from a 5,000sqft 5 bed, 3 bath house to an empty nester 2,000sqft 2 bed, 1 bath ranch home. Purge purge purge, and you will feel so light, mobile and agile afterwards that you’ll wish you’d done it 5 years ago.

The clean version is in there

I am not anti-tool. I am anti-sprawl. There is a clean version of your business hiding underneath the platform pile, and most owners cannot see it because they are too tired from the daily logins to step back and look at the whole thing.

Question, delete, simplify, accelerate, then automate. The order is the whole point. Most small business AI projects start at the end of the list and wonder why nothing changes.

If you want help running the inventory or picking your starting kill list, reply to this email. I run this exercise with every Tier 2 and Tier 3 client in their first week. It is not the glamorous part of the engagement. It is the part that makes everything after it possible.

Dublin, Ohio. Coffee in hand. Four tabs open this morning, on purpose.

Jeff

I paused. Then I told him the same thing I am going to tell you.

If you are not taking care of your mind and your body, you are showing up at a lower percentage of who you can be. Not just for your business. For your family. For your friends. For anyone you come in contact with.

That answer is also the reason my dashboard is laid out the way it is.

The 95% and the 40%

When I walk around at 95, I am magnetic. Slept well. Ate well. Moved my body. Hammered my work. Low stress. Low ego. Calm. Patient. I can laugh at things. I can be easygoing. My wife gets a better husband, my kids get a better dad, my clients get a sharper consultant.

When I walk around at 40, everyone downstream of me pays for it. Slept late. Drank too much. Skipped the workout. Ate garbage. Road rage in the car. Short fuse at home. Annoyed by small obligations. Unable to be present.

The amount of people who can consistently show up at 95 is small. It is also a lower bar than most people think. Sleep. Nutrition. Movement. Mental input. Those four things.

This is the input that drives every other output.

The top of the dashboard is not business data

This is where most founders get it wrong. They build dashboards that surface revenue, pipeline, and hours worked, because those are the numbers they measure themselves by. None of those numbers move without the operator first.

So the top row of my dashboard is not revenue. It is:

• Sleep (hours, HRV, bedtime, wake time)

• Activity rings (move, exercise, stand)

• Steps

• Resting heart rate while I sleep

• Workout scheduled for today, yes or no

All of that pulls straight from Apple Health into the dashboard. I wear the watch, I sleep with it on, the data shows up. When I wake up, before I check anything else, I see whether I showed up for myself yesterday.

If I did not, I already know the 95% version of me is not going to show up today. I do not need someone to tell me. The data tells me.

Resting heart rate during sleep is the one I watch closest. On the days I feel terrible (tired, slow, unfocused), my resting heart rate from the night before was always elevated. Every single time. It is the most honest metric I have found for sensing where I am before the day starts.

The middle is family and organization

Underneath health sits the organization layer. Not the business layer. The organization layer.

This is:

• Today’s calendar with next block highlighted

• Today’s to-do list in high, medium, and low priority

• This week’s blocks: what has to happen by Friday

• The outdoor projects I am chipping away at

• Date night on the calendar, yes or no

The whole point of this section is not to make me more productive. It is to make me more present.

If I know that my to-do list is organized, that my high-priority tasks are clear, that my week’s blocks are accounted for, I can close the laptop. Go chop wood. Take the dogs for a walk. Take my kids somewhere. Have a real conversation with my wife.

The more organized you are, the more quality time you get with a free brain. Presence is the metric, not hours.

The business panel goes at the bottom, on purpose

Business data lives at the bottom. Pipeline. Content metrics. Inbox. Website analytics.

Not because it is unimportant. Because if the top two sections are not solved, nothing in the bottom section moves.

I lived this for 16 years running Friendship Fitness. A burned-out operator can grind through business tasks all day and not move the ball. A 95% operator can make two calls, send three emails, and change the trajectory of the week.

The layout is the argument.

A note on AI before you go build this

AI is only useful if it gets you time back. If it gets you to a more present version of yourself with your family. If it closes the loop on work faster so you can actually log off.

If it is not doing that, you are using it wrong.

I have fallen into this trap myself. You sit down with an AI and spend three hours tweaking a logo, running endless prompts, or having the agent “do research.” You come back and feel like you did a lot of work. You did not. I call that mental masturbation. Fun. Not productive.

This is the failure mode for AI tools right now. People sit with them, feel busy, watch output fly by. The tool confirms the feeling by generating a lot of stuff. Nothing actually moved.

If your AI work does not result in more revenue, more time back, a real problem solved for a client, or a simpler system, you did not do work. You played.

Phase 1 shipped Wednesday

I shipped Phase 1 of JB Command on Wednesday morning. It is password-gated on a subdomain of cbusaiagents.com, hosted on Netlify. I am the only person who can get into it.

Phase 1 is the health layer. Sleep, activity rings, steps, last night’s resting heart rate. That is what I see when I wake up. Nothing else.

Next week ships Phase 2. Calendar, to-do list, inbox. The organization layer.

The week after that adds the business metrics panel. Substack views, podcast downloads, GA4 sessions, pipeline. Six weeks of build, six weeks of content, one tool that gets me time back with my family. That is what AI is for. Nothing else.

If you missed the full walkthrough of the dashboard design and what goes on each layer, Tuesday’s post on the Substack covered it.

Closing

A thousand hours on a website is a number I have actually lived. That is roughly what I spent across 16 years rebuilding the Friendship Fitness website five or six times. The current cbusaiagents.com was rebuilt in about thirty minutes with Claude Design.

Thousand hours versus thirty minutes is not an efficiency story. It is a priorities story. What you do with the reclaimed time is the real question.

Use the tool. Log off. Go be with the people you love.

In life, what matters is your health, your family, your relationships, your loved ones, touching grass, having more time with them and having more quality time when you are with them.

The dashboard exists to protect that. Nothing else.

Talk soon.

Jeff
Dublin, Ohio

Transcript

All right guys, what’s going on today we’re going to be here talking about our owner dashboard that we are currently creating and At first I’m kind of building this out for myself for a couple of reasons one as I’ve you know started working on The new business. I’ve found that I have kind of a bunch of different balls in the air, right I’m working with a bunch of different AI agents for myself and my company and the things I’m trying to create and then I’m also doing that in tandem or in parallel With my clients agents and the things that they’re trying to create and when you work with a lot of different businesses Right, you’re jumping from back and forth you’re jumping from you know a fitness studio in a gym over to a construction company over to a landscape company And you’re just kind of bouncing back and forth. So trying to keep things really organized is Helping my brain number one B a lot more present in the moment when I’m working, but also be able to like shut the laptop and Log off and then be able to be present with my family and still focus on my priorities

So what I’m trying to build here is not just a like dashboard where we can get a one Look snapshot at our lives our priorities and everything But also be able to get to a point where we’re getting time back we’re getting hours back and we can see you know How we’re doing on what our individual and our business priorities are So

I’m a believer and I actually I spoke to our local high school yesterday and you know one of the questions that one of the students Asked me is what is your number one value and my belief is that if you are not Taking care of your mind and taking care of your body than you’re showing up on a day-to-day perspective at a lower percentage of who you are and what you can be For your family for your friends for your business for anybody you come in contact with right if I’m walking around at 95% I’m high energy, so I got a good night’s sleep. I woke up. I ate a great breakfast. I’m fueled properly. I get a great workout I hammer my business and you know It’s time for me to show up for my family and like I’m gonna show up at 95% of who I can be. I’m gonna be high energy I’m gonna be able to laugh and have fun and you know be able to be easy-going and not stressed out and That’s the type of person that we want to be that we want to show up to work that we want to show up with our friends and our family We want to put that best foot forward as often as possible and to do that we have to take care of ourselves And I believe that everything else is downhill from that

You have to achieve that first and then if you achieve that everything else will come to you And you can compare yourself to who you are when you’re at a lesser percentage, right? You’ve probably gone out too late drank a little too much not eating a good meal Wake up early because you can’t sleep because you treated your body like crap And then you’ve felt how you feel that next day when you’re hung over and And you’re low on nutrients and you’re tired and you’re lethargic You just want to lay around and take a nap and then anything you have to do feels like this big Obligation you get annoyed and you’re frustrated and if you’re in your car you have road rage and that’s that like lower percentage version of ourself All right, let’s say that’s like 40%

And I believe the entire key to life is walking around at 90 or 95% as often as possible and Avoiding walking around at 40% or letting people see you or experience you at that lower percentage level as often as possible And if you do that You’ll be magnetic right people will want to be around you people will want to feel your energy They’ll want to talk with you they want to engage with you build a relationship with you work with you have you on their team all those things The amount of people who can show up consistently at 95% Be low stress like easy going right? They’re not getting worked up about too much. They have a low ego You know, they’re calm and they’re patient. They laugh and they can have fun with things and You know, they’re cogent in aware. They’re not sleepy in lethargic. They show up on time You know like those types of people. I just believe that it’s such a separator And it’s actually I think a pretty low bar like it’s not that hard to do I don’t think right for some people. Maybe it is maybe it’s super unnatural for them but we’re gonna think about this and going back to this idea with our dashboard right we want Our priorities to be reflected in what the data and the metrics that we’re looking at every day so If this is our number one priority this idea needs to be front and center

So how I’m doing it right now is I’m tagging it into my Apple watch so really quickly. I can see steps. I can see sleep I can see HRV. I can see exercise hours You know all the things that come from that right daily clork burn, etc So I can get all that on my dashboard and that just pulls right from my Apple health, right? So that’s automatically put in there every day if I wear it and it’s charged and I sleep with it and all the data is there It just pulls right to my dashboard and I can look at daily I can look at weekly and again I can aggregate that data however I want Maybe I want to look at like my weekly trends of resting heart rate while I sleep That’s one I like to look at and if you guys have never looked at that on the day where you feel like holy crap I am operating at a low percentage. I feel like crap today. I’m tired. I’m slow I’m lethargic. I’m not focused go and look at what your resting heart rate was the night before I guarantee you was elevated So that’s a quick snapshot for me. That’s one that I look at a lot That’s kind of my general, you know health priorities then underneath that it’s like scheduled workouts. What am I doing? In the days where I’m not scheduled to work out then I have to start thinking about okay What’s my activity gonna be so right now that’s super easy? That’s like chopping wood and taking the dogs for a walk And I try to get both of those done for a day So if I can chop wood for 45 minutes to an hour and I can take the dogs for half hour 45 minute walk I guess pretty good amount of activity. I’ll push 15,000 steps easily and then my average heart rate when I’m chopping woods around like 120 so it’s like good low zone two and Core work if we’re getting into the nitty gritty of health and fitness So that’s kind of like how I think about building this dashboard out right on top of this What I’m starting to look at is how do I want to gauge mental right so I’m building this out right now And I’m probably gonna go through a few iterations, but iteration one is just gonna be a simple One through 10 test right so every day I log on to the dashboard I’m just gonna click one through 10 basically 10 being like I feel amazing. I slept great. I’m super focused I’m not stressed out et cetera one being the exact opposite right like couldn’t sleep last night. Got up early feel stressed like crazy You know not doing well not patient with the kids whatever it might be and I’m just gonna score myself as a quick one through 10 Second from there is gonna be probably some Assemblance of reading time podcast time or time in brain development learning right now I’m learning from a couple of different places that are a little bit unique different than how I was learning in the health and fitness space And so sometimes I’m in like different platforms. I’m in webinars I’m maybe on x watching a webinar from the claw design team or something like that and I’m getting a little bit of different exposure to learning so my mental is a little bit different there that might be Challenging for me to like automatically log and I have to manually log that and just in terms of you know Brain development space. So I have a couple of different ways that I think about that not every day is learning based sometimes It’s just like you know, okay, maybe I’m gonna read some philosophy or I’m gonna read like a history book or listen to You know more of a philosophical or a different topic maybe like a like a light business podcast, right which for me That’s like it’s like light easy going relaxing

So this is again We kind of talked about this already right the input that drives every other output, right? If you’re operating at a higher percentage then you are going to be the best version of yourself And I think if you just put that foot forward every day where we do take some dedicated time to work on you know mental physical An emotional health and you know our sleep hygiene or nutrition We put some extra focus effort and energy on that and then we get a really nice dashboard One of the things I’m not gonna do but you could very easily do is You could tie this in with something like a macro stacks or a nutrition tracking app and you could have it aggregate all your data Directly to you from a nutrition coaching app Or a nutrition logging like macronutrients or Types and qualities of food whatever you want to do with that again We could pull that data in and you could get your nutritional picture really quickly too So that’s kind of like our general health panel and for me that’s gonna be Probably my like front and center like that’s kind of where I’m focused first making sure that I’m checking the block They’re making sure I have some checks and balances on me and on my life and the way that I’m you know Trying to live and not just like making sure. I’m not just talking about it, but I’m being about it, right?

Now as we move on to our next one This is kind of the thing I’m creating this for right is I want a one-stop dashboard for me To be able to go through both my Business life and organization but also my family life and organization and My general to-do list. Okay, so right now you guys if you guys have been listening you know We have a lot of outdoor projects going on So I’m trying to kind of book and schedule time where it’s like okay I’m just gonna chop wood here for an hour 45 minutes or I’m gonna You know right now we have so much dang wood that I actually have to like build all of these extra stacks to actually hold the wood So I’m trying to like book and schedule some time into that then I’ve got you know general like okay We’ve got to go get the kids out of the house. We’re gonna go take them somewhere fun or do something together Date night these things right we got to organize that but for me to arrive at those things Focused and clear-brained. I have to make sure that my general work to-do list and the things that I know I’ve got on my plate that I have to get off my plate by the end of the week are either Organized and scheduled or are just done right so my hope with this for me is I can get a Quick snapshot and again, this will be a built-out iteration of how I do it right now from a work perspective It’s like you know things that have to get done this week So these are like high priority tasks and then things that need to get done within the month So these are like medium priority tasks and then like low priority tasks are things that maybe need to be done So a good example is I want to reorganize my entire file set for my entire AI thing like the AI is gonna help me with that and But that’s just gonna be kind of like a process to reorganize all of our files in the way that the AI reads and communicates the file system If I start to reorganize things things that point to where a file might live might no longer be read properly So we need to make sure that we don’t miss turning over any stones when we do that and that’s something that like I’m gonna do when I have like what would be actual free time like I have no other things on my Daily or weekly to-do list everything is done and caught up Once that stuff’s done then maybe I could spend some time doing that So those are low priority tasks. So that’s kind of how I think about them in my head high medium low adding things to the to-do list and making sure that those to-do lists stay manageable and That’s going to be a whole column for me right those will tandem in with my calendar in my gmail inbox and That’s kind of like just my general prioritization right These are things that are gonna help me stay organized and the whole idea behind this is being able to like Quickly before I log off look at the dashboard and then go and be with my family or go and do whatever the task that we had calendar Next is because everything is properly organized I have my to-do list I know exactly what I need to get done and then I can communicate effectively of like hey, you know I’m I’m gonna we have this on the calendar. You know, I’m gonna go work outside for 45 minutes But then I’ve still got a pretty decent to-do list for today that I need to get knocked out So I got to get back and that might be after the family goes to bed or that might be before they wake up the next morning, right? But that helps give me a nice snapshot of kind of how I’ve got to organize my day

So again, we’re thinking about it more as like You know my whole idea with this is AI is only actually useful right these agents these dashboards These things that we create with it the code that actually is generated from the AI is only useful If it allows us to Get better data show up and have more presence with our family have more hours with our family get more done faster Or get the same amount of work done faster be more efficient be more productive and then really in reality like Be able to truly log off and be more present with our family and if it’s not doing those things then number one I think we’re not using it right and we maybe need some like help or coaching around that But number two, I think it’s it’s then it’s being a detriment. It’s not being helpful to you and I will tell you I’ve told Maria this multiple times Yeah, I can definitely be that right. It’s a really fun tool to play with But not actually be productive with right so

It’s kind of this like and excuse the term It’s a little bit of like mental masturbation right where you’re just like okay You’re working with it. You’re interfacing with it. You’re doing a lot where you’re maybe creating new designs You’re doing all these things and like things are happening But you’re not actually like doing anything right like you’re not actually doing productive work That’s gonna help you you know get things done find new clients make more revenue get more bottom line get more time back Help your team, you know make it life easier for your employees pick whatever thing you want to do with it Like you can sit there with AI even for like four hours. Just like redesign logos and You you’ll be blown away. You’ll get it come back and be like oh my gosh. Hey, I was incredible This is so amazing look at the logo it created and it’s like have an in reality you just wasted like three hours or four hours Right, and I think a lot of people are falling victim to that and I mean, I’ve fallen victim to it too, right? It’s it’s easy to fall victim to and so we have to get to a point where We have a firm understanding of how we are driving our lives in our business forward To get more time back to move the ball forward and if we’re not really laser focused on that It’s gonna turn into this kind of thing that just spins our wheels makes us spend more time But doesn’t actually like help us in any real tangible way. So we’re trying to stay away from that

And again the more organized you are the more quality time you get with a free brain So this is a part of my morning routine It’s like check the dashboard. What do I have to do today cool? Do I have time to just have a loose morning with the family or like today? I don’t have time to have a loose morning with family. So I’m down here super early And I’m knocking out to do list because last night we had date night And I had a lot more family time and so you know, it’s like the to do list is still there right so I got to start knocking it out

All right, now we’re thinking about the professional dashboard

And as we start kind of going through this I’m in the Aspect of like I want to get this done First thing in the morning like this is my wake-up snapshot, right? I’m not a big roll over and look at your phone thing But I want it to be something like where if you roll over and look at your phone What are the things that you’re rolling over to looking look for right? Is it going to Gmail? Is it checking your credit cards? Is it you know like where are you at? What are the things that you check right now if you check social media? I can’t help you if you’re rolling over and first thing you’re checking social media That’s like an addiction problem you got to work on that on your own because I can’t really help you with that But if you’re rolling over and you’re checking your Gmail or if you’re rolling over and you’re checking You know bank accounts or calendar or to do lists or reminders or Whatever like thing or text messages anything like that That’s all stuff that we can get right in the dashboard Wouldn’t it be a little bit nicer for us to just kind of pull up a one-pager and it gives you everything Here’s the things you have to do today. Here’s your calendar and terms of task list priority A we’ve organized your email inbox into prioritization. Here’s your high priority emails that are sitting in your inbox Here’s the text messages that came over from last night like again, we can build all this out So there’s like a one-stop stop shop dashboard for you Also and it’s like it’ll be nice to because they’ll show you how you slept right away too And I’m building this out for people based on what their priorities are right different businesses different business owners different people have different priorities You might just be entirely focused on your health right like let’s see you had a health scare Let’s see you had like a heart problem or whatever and whether you’re a business owner or not Your health is just your priority your entire dashboard might just be health focused It might be like nutrition column on the left center column is steps general activity and sleep Right column might be general exercise and you know looking at like okay, total body whatever things We’re focused on scoring your workouts et cetera like you could have just a whole dashboard for this just for health and fitness You could change it and make it just business Maybe it’s a critical time for you and your business and your employees And you’re trying to sprint and you’re trying to you know hire more people and get software out the door Whatever it is your entire dashboard might just be you know all the stuff that you guys have going on in the business It might be all your project management software links in it might be slack it might be Gmail and all that stuff Just kind of links right in so this is fully customizable it can be whatever you want to make it and I don’t expect everybody’s to be the same

So I shipped my first phase one on Wednesday the really cool part about this is this lives right on my website It is password protected by me and so I’m the only person who can get into it or I obviously could share the password with it But as I start to build this out My phase one was my health aspect so I shipped that yesterday. That’s all I’ve been working And in the password protection was kind of a cool element Again, that the AI helped me with this wasn’t something that I was super comfortable doing myself But it helped me set up all the proper coding for that And helped me ship that on netlify and showed me exactly how to set up a password protected back end sub domain of my website So really really cool

And as we start kind of going through this Just think about you know what you want out of your life and what your goals are specifically And then this is something where we would start to have a discussion on like okay What would that dashboard look like you can brand however you want right you can make it light and airy You can have your podcasts live directly on there you can have live music like it can be like an old school My space page you can make it whatever you want and I just think the Potential or the possibilities in this domain are just so cool Right like this is something that before it just wouldn’t have made sense to spend the time To figure out how to manually go through and do all this But now the AI agents are just like building it in the background right like I’m working on other stuff right now Doing a podcast my agents are over here on my other screen working away with for my clients doing stuff and building things And they can just be doing that like while I’m out playing with my kids and they can be you know shipping the New dashboard items So when we ship next week we’re going to start working more on the business and productivity end of things social media Analytics we’re going to talk about all kinds of stuff next week and All that stuff when it ships like it’s all going to be doing that stuff or working with it while I am focused on other tasks And I just think that that’s so cool or while I’m out playing with my kids or working on my yard doing whatever we’re doing And I just think that that’s really unique

So it’s not like a huge extra time component It does take some brain power and it does take a lot of imagination for you to think about what those things are But if you already have that direction if you already have that focus if you already know exactly who you are and what you want What you want to work on and what you want it to look like in your head if you can visualize that if you can have that imagination Then bringing it to life is very realistic and very simplistic so

Hope you guys are following along for the journey. I hope you guys are sharing in that ethos and you know Staying healthy and staying focused and that’s kind of the biggest thing What I want to bring to people with this right is like I want you to have a better mental and physical health picture Because of the tools now because of the productivity and how how much we can get done with these tools that before Just used to be a three or four-hour manual task. I mean that’s what I’ve been talking about these business owners every week Is these people saying like man? I used to spend hours doing this like for me I used to spend hours building our website the amount of time. I’m probably you know A thousand hours down on the friendship website over 16 years probably like five or six full rebuilds Just continuing to work and work and work and grind and learn first one I had to write by me hand with Tom html like working on updating the blog post and whatever the Adobe website html builder that he put us up in was and Now it’s like the stuff that’s being built like if you go and look at my website now That was all clawed design and that happened in a half an hour and it’s better than anything I could have ever done and it’s just like having the imagination and communicating well with it And I just think that that’s amazing a thousand hours versus 30 minutes like what does that look like? It’s just like you think for these kids these days like they’re gonna be able to go so fast um And it’s exciting But it also really really Zooms in on how good you are at prioritizing logging off tuning out focusing on things that matter because remember like all these things are cool right but

In life what matters is your health your family your relationships your loved ones touching grass being able to have more time with them and more quality time with them And we have to use this as a tool to get us those things So that’s my message for today. Hope you guys are doing well. I’ll talk to you soon

Calendar. Email. Bank Accounts. Slack. A CRM dashboard. A content dashboard. And spreadsheets...so many spreadsheets. Every morning.

For 16 years I ran Friendship Fitness. I thought the moment I handed over the keys the chaos would stop. It did not. It just moved. Instead of a gym with a front desk and a back office, I had an AI consulting firm with five active clients, a weekly podcast, a newsletter, and a house full of kids who want breakfast made in a specific order.

Different business. Same admin creep.

The thing nobody tells you about running anything

Most small business owners think their problem is productivity. More hours. More focus. A better to-do list.

That is not the problem. The problem is that you have turned yourself into the glue holding information together. Your calendar lives here. Your tasks live there. Your inbox is over there.

Sometimes it feels less like running a business and more like logging into the same 8 apps over and over, with your own brain linking all of the data that makes up the business in your head.

AI agents fix most of that. A good agent reads your inbox, drafts replies for the monotonous emails, scores leads, can handle follow-ups, assembles proposals. They get hours back every week.

But agents need a place to report.

Right now that place is 8 browser tabs, three dashboards, and my own brain at 5:30 AM.

So I am building my own.

Why not Notion, Sunsama, Motion, or the one launching next week

I tried all of them.

Notion is a beautiful filing cabinet pretending to be a dashboard. Every view costs you 40 minutes to configure and breaks the moment you change your workflow. It is a tool for people who like to build tools.

Sunsama is a calendar with a task list glued on. It solves one problem. I have seventeen.

Motion moves your tasks around for you. It thinks it is smart. It spends more time rescheduling than I spent writing the task in the first place.

All three are built for the same person. A tech worker at a big company with a predictable week and an inbox that is mostly Slack. None of them are built for a founder running five client engagements, recording a podcast, shipping a newsletter, and reading to his kids before 8.

A founder’s dashboard has to do one thing well. Show me my life and my business on one page, at 6:15 AM, so I know what today is before today starts.

What I’m building

JB Command. One page. Near-black background, gold accents. The visual language of an editorial magazine.

Left column. Today’s calendar. Today’s tasks, pulled straight from my Obsidian vault where I already keep them. This week’s open threads below that. I can tell my agent to add things from anywhere using remote control, no more iPhone reminders or voice memos emailed to myself. As the agent completes tasks, they get crossed off the list (or removed, but I like the strikethrough for my own OCD).

Center column. The content engine. Substack views, podcast downloads, website metrics on top. YouTube and LinkedIn in a smaller row underneath. Easy to read graphs on each so I can see the trends without opening anything.

Right column. Body first. Sleep from last night, pulled from my Apple Watch. Activity rings for today. Steps. Exercise. Then the inbox, unread and high priority only. Then the weather, for the day.

The dashboard reports. Editing happens in the vault, in the calendar, in Gmail. One direction, always. My agent can act as my personal assistant directly from the dashboard to take any action I want, and then the dashboard updates in real time.

Lastly, this is fully customizable. If you’re a golfer, you can track your handicap, putts, scores, GIR or fairways hit through the season. See your trends. Get advice on an upcoming course. If you have kids sports engagements, have the agent organize meals, travel time, scheduling and more. Anything your life, brain and business need to be less stressed and more organized in one place.

Why this is a public build

A few reasons.

One. I am not the only founder drowning in tabs. When this is done, the template becomes an offering for clients. Branded versions for each business, wired to their own data. That is already where Phase 5 of the build is headed.

Two. Every week of the build I’ll detail exactly what I’m building and how I build it on Substack. If you’re on top of your own agents already, you can build along with me.

Three. I have spent the last three months telling small business owners that AI is something you can build for yourself, in plain English, without a developer. The dashboard is proof. If I will not do it for me, I should not be asking them to do it for their businesses.

Phase 1 drops Wednesday

April 22. The static shell goes live at command.cbusaiagents.com behind a password gate. Greeting. Clock. Grid layout. All 9 panels rendered with placeholder data. On brand. Fast.

For five weeks after that, one panel per week goes live with real data. Calendar and tasks the week after. Apple Health the week after that. Inbox and content metrics the week after that. Client productization in weeks five and six.

Every panel shipped becomes a Substack post, a podcast episode, and a Medium article. You will see the whole thing get built in public. Screenshots, decisions, what broke, what worked, what I swapped out.

If you read one post of the series, read the one three weeks out where I connect my Apple Watch to the dashboard and explain why sleep belongs on a founder’s screen before revenue does.

If you want to see what ends up on yours

Hit reply to this email. Tell me the one thing you would put on your dashboard if you had the quiet morning before your kids woke up to set it up. The most-interesting five go in next week’s post.

If you run a small business and you want what I am building, send me a note. I will be opening a small cohort for the productized version when Phase 5 ships in late May.

Dublin, Ohio. Still drinking coffee at 5:30. Still checking 8 apps. For now.

Jeff

I’ve been on both sides of this. I ran a gym for 16 years and dealt with the same problem from the business side. Members texting at 6 AM asking questions answered in an email I’d sent three days earlier. Staff spending hours a week responding to the same update requests. The information existed. Nobody could find it.

Every service business has this problem. Construction, landscaping, home services, fitness, consulting. The client signs a contract, hands over a deposit, and then hears nothing for weeks. Eventually they start texting your project manager. Your PM stops what they’re doing, digs through files, and spends 15 minutes answering a question that should take 30 seconds.

Multiply that across 15 active projects and your PM loses a full day every week to update requests.

What If the Client Could See Everything Themselves?

That’s what a client dashboard does. The client logs into a branded portal on your website and sees their project in real time:

Project status. “Design phase” becomes “Materials ordered” becomes “Crew scheduled for May 12” becomes “Installation in progress.” The client watches it move forward without asking.

Full scope. The plant list, the materials, the timeline, the payment schedule. Everything from the 12-page proposal they skimmed, organized in a way they can actually read.

AI chat agent. The client types “When does my project start?” and gets an answer in seconds. The AI pulls from the actual project data. Your PM never gets the text.

Change requests. Instead of a verbal request on a job site that gets forgotten, the client submits changes through the portal. Logged, priced, routed to the right person. Paper trail built automatically.

Progress photos. Before, during, after. Organized by date. The client can share them with family or on social media. That’s free organic marketing for your business.

Why Your Team Will Love It

The number one complaint I hear from project managers: “I spend half my day answering the same questions.”

A dashboard answers those questions before they’re asked. The PM’s phone stops buzzing at 9 PM. Change orders come through structured channels instead of text threads. Every communication is logged instead of scattered across five different inboxes.

One contractor I work with estimated 8-10 hours per week across his team on client update communications. That’s a full day of labor answering questions the dashboard handles.

Why Your Clients Will Love It

Most service businesses communicate by phone, text, and email. A branded dashboard with real-time updates signals something different. This company is organized. This company is professional. This company is worth the premium price.

The anxiety disappears. “Materials arriving Wednesday, crew starts Thursday” is sitting there on the dashboard at 10 PM on a Sunday. The client checks, sees progress, and sleeps well. No text sent. No employee interrupted.

And clients talk about it. The experience is memorable. Referrals come from companies that made people feel taken care of.

This Will Be Table Stakes

I saw this play out in the gym industry. There was a time when sending workouts through an app was a competitive advantage. People would transfer gyms specifically because we had that. Over time it became standard. If you didn’t have it, that was shocking.

Client dashboards are heading the same direction. In two to three years, the service businesses that don’t offer real-time project visibility will feel outdated. The ones that build it now will have integrated it into their operations, trained their teams, and refined it based on client feedback. Their competitors will still be figuring out where to start.

What It Takes

The dashboard connects to the tools you already use. Your CRM, your scheduling software, your estimating tool. An AI agent reads the data and populates a live page on your website. Your team doesn’t change what they do. When they update the project in their software, the dashboard updates automatically.

The heavy lift is the initial setup. After that, new projects get a dashboard automatically. The AI keeps it current.

You don’t need a developer on staff. You need someone to build it once and maintain it.

Watch the Episode

I walk through a live dashboard I built for a landscaping company client. If you want to see what this actually looks like, watch the full episode on YouTube.

If you want to talk about building one for your business, reach out at cbusaiagents.com/contact.

Jeff Binek is the founder of CBus AI Agents, an AI consulting firm in Dublin, Ohio helping small businesses across Columbus and Central Ohio install AI systems that handle the work their teams shouldn’t be doing.

Full Transcript

[00:00] All right guys what’s going on today we’re gonna be here talking about building client dashboards and really I want to start kind of just with a story and you know I told you guys that we’re getting some trees taken down at our house last week and we’re kind of just discussing about the flow of working with that business and this has been true with all of the service businesses whether you’re business to business or business to customer I find that there’s a lot of these disruptions in back and forth in communication errors and things that we can solve really really both elegantly right so you get this great customer experience but also it solves a lot of problems in your business and so we’re going to talk about our example with the tree removal company and we’re going to talk about how I would help this exact tree removal company build a client dashboard or a client facing dashboard that would solve a lot of problems for them help communication take time off of their plate and give it back to their employees you know stop like headaches and just all this kind of stuff that happens within the service businesses that we’re all used to dealing with so we’re going to talk about kind of what I’ve already built I’m going to show you guys that if you’re watching on YouTube and then we’re going to talk about how you guys might think about implementing this in your business whatever your business might be.

[01:27] All right so we think about this as kind of a deal let’s say you know I didn’t sign a $30,000 contract but let’s say you know you’re working with a construction or landscape company or you know you’re signing some big deal right this is a big deal for you this is a big deal for your family this is a big deal for your company and you go through the process of getting a proposal and talking with somebody and you like the sales guy and they kind of walk you through everything they send you this proposal and you think about it and then you sign off and you’re like yeah all right we’re going to do it and then you sign it and then we go into this like black hole of silence and it’s like sometimes it’s you know as ambiguous as okay we’ll reach out and you know we have a project date for you or we’ll reach out when we can start we’re probably somewhere between two to six weeks out you know you maybe get one confirmation okay like you’re on the schedule but then you don’t get any updates so then the client starts kind of going back and if this is me you know you maybe check in like hey are we still good hey what are we looking at you know we’re going on vacation here in a few weeks I haven’t heard anything what did we agree to again what flowers were we going to do what was our project cost what colors did I tell you I wanted on the wall you know whatever specific business you’re working with you’ve probably sent some kind of a text message or felt that kind of black hole of communication.

[02:53] And this is what we want to start thinking about from a customer service and customer experience perspective if we think about the customer first if you’re the customer what do you want and so I started playing this out with all the companies that I’ve worked with because thankfully for all of the companies that I’ve worked with I’ve had a direct interaction in some capacity with either that exact type of business or you know some or that actual business right so I’ve been a customer of major commercial construction companies I’ve been a landscaping customer I’ve been a tree removal customer you know I’ve been a gym customer so you know these companies that I work with like I’ve had that experience and I can sit there and tell you what it felt like as the customer to be in this black hole of silence and then they can tell you what it’s like as the business owner or the employee side of having to deal with this constant barrage of change order requests like hey I decided I didn’t like that color so we’re going to change it and they’ve already signed the proposal and they’ve already signed the contract and so now you’ve got to go back and you’ve got to change it you’ve got to stop what you’re doing to call the customer to waste 15 minutes.

[04:04] And then we talk a lot about these change costs these transactional costs that all of our employees go through every day when they have to interrupt what they are supposed to be working on that’s going to help move your business forward or get you new business and they have to stop and talk with the client for 15 minutes to update them on the schedule and where we’re at and you know hey we’re waiting on confirmation from the city we’re waiting for you know confirmation the storms changed everything so now we’re pushed back four to six weeks we you know sorry we didn’t update you and you’re just constantly having to hire people to deal with all of this okay so if this is resonating with you if you feel this whether you’re as a customer or as an employee or a boss this is what we’re going to kind of work on this.

[04:55] All right so what we think about is building this dashboard all right so if you guys are on YouTube or if you guys want to listen to this on YouTube I’ve pulled up a dashboard that I created for a customer here and this is how I kind of envision it and on the dashboard on a desktop it’s beautiful right over here you’ve got a chatbot and so you can actually build this chatbot one of two ways right you can keep it a really surface level AI so it would connect with like a ChatGPT or a Claude and it can ask questions and it’s going to have the information of the project itself based on the dashboard and it can answer some simple questions so you can kind of see here like okay this is relatively simplistic what did we agree to where are we out with our project timeline like you know tell me about this flower tell me about that flower and you can go through and have a discussion on you know kind of what we agreed to.

[05:54] Now you could also go further and you could make this a fully functional chatbot right like you could go through the work of actually training an AI chatbot and you could make this fully functional and fully functional means that like if it’s flagging as a red flag and you know thinks that hey do you want to talk to a person right and then it could connect you directly with somebody in the office or it could give you a phone number to call or you know it could be much more detailed it could send you follow up emails with the summary of what happened on the chat with that specific client at the end of the day and so it can kind of go through a little bit more if you spend a lot of time with the chat function if that’s something that’s really important to your business.

[06:36] But what we think about is building this timeline out this is what I’ve been trying to get is most of our projects if we’re a project based company then we have some degree of a timeline we have periods of time where things move really fast in the lock it’s done and then we have these big lulls in time where like nothing gets done and that’s where the customer can start to get frustrated that’s where they can be they’re reaching out they’re trying to figure out where are we what’s happening next where is it where we are in the process and we can build out this thing so that they can just go to your website slash their name or their company name and they have a real life real dashboard that’s fully functional all the time right.

[07:23] And you can build it out to be whatever you want so like everything you know we can just like go through and we can talk about plant selections we can talk about design plans anything that we’ve uploaded to our project management software can populate in here once you have this all designed out and so the cool part about this is what’s possible depending on who you use is your project management software is we can API with that or we can actually pull that data down directly from the software that your company already uses and this is again most likely and if it doesn’t already it probably will soon in the future so that your team doesn’t have to change anything they do when they update something in your software and it moves the project forward or they you know do a change order or something adjusts and some capacity as that happens in real time the AI is going to notice that change and it’s going to pull that data down and it’s going to update your dashboard in real time.

[08:26] And so it’s no extra work once you have this build out for your team it just gives all the work that you’re already doing in your project management software it brings the client under the curtain or behind the curtain with that and it allows them to see what’s going on and just in the client facing way that they need the information that they need and I think you know I was thinking back to like the Tommy Boy it’s like it’s a warm blanket it makes you feel good right like this is just something for me if I was going through projects it even just as like a normal landscaping company right like not a big project landscaping company but just like when are you guys coming to mow this week like what are we doing when’s our next you know when do we go through the fertilizer and like when’s the next thing time that that’s going to happen and what have we already done what did that fertilizer do you know hey we’re getting a lot of like weeds what should we do for that like what’s your plan are you on top of it just this regular kind of everyday stuff that all of our companies are doing anyway.

[09:27] If I as a customer have a little bit more information number one I feel like I’m connected more to what you’re doing the work that you’re putting in the work that your company is spending time doing that makes me more sticky as a customer so it’s going to help retention but more than anything think about how much this makes you stand out from a professional perspective as a local small business and this is what I’m trying to help people with and this is the amazing part of AI is like if you were a nationally known landscaping company across 70 cities and you were doing 250 million dollars a year you could probably afford in the past to hire software engineers to build this out for you to have this in place and your moat or your competitive advantage would be showing up with a customer or with an iPad and bringing them this beautiful dashboard this incredible proposal done by a graphic designer and you would have a team to do these things for you and that helps you stand out against the small local guys.

[10:36] And then the small local guys are doing better just because they’re giving better service they’re usually faster there may be a little less expensive because they don’t necessarily have that same overhead but now with the advent of AI the things that we can do is we can provide national service level like top tier experience for our clients as a small business that’s not employing a bunch of backend staff doesn’t have to keep a software engineer on staff all the time and you can start to bring these ideas that you have to life these things that you’ve seen that you’ve always thought like that’s just above us that’s just beyond us we maybe can’t afford that you know that seems like something that’s outside of my skill set and we get to this point where we don’t do the thing that is best for customer service and is best for our employees and is best for our staff we don’t do it because we just couldn’t afford it in the past in those days are gone.

[11:35] All right so we build out this dashboard we think about building live project stuff and really this is just your own imagination right what I would encourage you to do is to talk to your best customers and the people who you have great relationships with who you felt like you did a phenomenal job on their project and they’ve reached out and thank you pull them aside and just talk to them and as you build this dashboard out be like would you like that would that be helpful would this be something as we’re kind of going through this in real time I was also just thinking if you wanted some free social media organic content you could do you could like take progress photos and clip them into Instagram or TikTok or Facebook size photos with like your watermark of your company on there and give it to them to download so they can upload the story to their Instagram and like you kind of show off the project to their friends or to their if it’s a company right show the progress of what they’re doing to reinvest in their business to grow it and that’s just free organic social media content right so there’s no limit to what you can build with this it really is just your imagination and working with your local AI agents to start to build this stuff.

[12:54] And I like this concept right because again I’m trying to take things off of employees plates I’m thinking so much right now about how we take the incredible employees that we have and make their lives better and easier so they’re not spending time in their day dealing with putting out fires and headaches from clients how do we get ahead of that that’s the question we’ve got to start asking ourselves is less of a let’s put out this fire and more of a hey this fire keeps coming almost every project we have these clients reaching out to me or reaching out to us sending us personal text messages on our phones reaching out on weekends reaching reaching out past work hours and that hurts employees happiness you know lifestyle retention longevity it hurts those things when clients do that to you.

[13:45] And I have there’s no greater experience than this than working inside of a gym network the amount of text messages that I’ve gotten you know before six a.m. and after seven or eight p.m. on weekends all the time asking me you know questions that probably were answered in an email that I sent out or probably were available somewhere on a website or probably are available through our app and some capacity you know it’s staggering and you’re never going to all like my point with that is you’re never going to all the way get beyond this right you do have to set limits and barriers but if we have somewhere with that they know that they can go and we direct them and set that expectation early so we tell the client you know hey we built out this incredible client dashboard you’re going to have full access to all the information everything to do with your project it lives on that dashboard and if you have any questions you should go there first because everything is going to be answered there on there is also our local chatbot and so you can ask any questions there and if something then is not answered we’ll get notified and we’ll make sure that we get back to within 24 hours and you set that expectation like that’s the best way to get in contact with us and my hope is that that would be an extreme reduction in the amount of personal communication text messages and emails that go directly to your staff.

[15:07] So I think this helps a lot with why your team would love it and so this is the expectation right 8 to 10 hours per week and this like the big thing is it causes a lot of change right so like if I if I’m working on a project and you guys have probably been here before if you’re working on a project and you pick up the phone and you start talking with a client for 15 minutes and then you hang up the phone and then you try to get back into your workflow it takes you a little bit to get going again and so if this is happening across your organization this is probably days of lost productivity towards things that actually drive revenue so this is what I kind of think about as we’re building this out we want to start getting ahead of this I think in two to three years this is going to be table stakes this is going to be what everybody does this is like the lowest common denominator in service businesses is you’re going to have all of these things that is just like everybody does this.

[16:00] There isn’t anyone who does it like there was a time when you know if you go all the way back that you know companies wouldn’t have websites right and then there was a time where companies wouldn’t have email and then there is a time where companies wouldn’t be able to text message with people or have a CRM or have you know some capacity for like automated text messages or automated email marketing like all these things there was a time where there was a huge swath of industries that would just say I’m not doing that right I don’t want to do that I’m not going to spend the time and now it’s just like everybody does it right because it’s you know best practice and I think a lot of these things are going to be the exact same way right I think a lot of the AI stuff is going to allow these companies to move faster and get ahead and the companies who jump on this early are going to start to number one integrate this into the way that they do things early because this is going to be a change for your company right and the sooner that we get that done the more you’re like oh yeah we’ve done that for years.

[17:04] Right and like I see this with Friendship all the time like when we were building out and having an app and you know the app would update and there were a lot of people that were still writing workouts up on white boards every day and they weren’t sending out the workouts to their clients and all this stuff and it just got to the point where you’re like no like we have everything fully updated on slides slides get sent out workouts get sent out everything lives natively in the app and you can see all this and there was a time where when we would have people looking to transfer gyms that was like a selling point people would be like oh my gosh like that’s amazing that’s incredible that’s great communication over time that became like not even impressive to people that was just the way it was if you didn’t have that it would be shocking to a potential gym transfer that you didn’t have that in place and I think that’s the way that this is going to be.

[17:54] So as we start kind of doing this what we’re going to do is you guys you guys already have your existing CRM you already have your software you already have your project management stuff in place right what we build then is effectively a bridge so we build your AI agent is going to read all the data it’s going to be able to connect to those tools and then it’s going to pull that data down and put it live on the dashboard update your website in real time for you and this is one of the things like I know it sounds like it’s somewhat techy and complicated but once we have the AI agent already trained on your small business it’s going to be able to number one just create the dashboard for you which is amazing right like that’s incredible number two it’s going to walk you through step by step exactly how to connect all of these things and then once it is connected it’s going to start to populate and pull the APIs for you automatically.

[18:43] And then you just iterate right you’re talking with your staff you’re talking with your clients you’re talking with the people who you trust to build it out to be perfect what would you like to see more of what would you like to see less of you’re talking to your employees what are they still reaching out to you about why are they not going into the dashboard what could we do to change that and you just start iterating that process so again I’m trying to get you guys ahead of this like these things are coming right and it’s important to understand and acknowledge that the speed of a lot of this is not going to wait for you right like it’s going to start going these directions and people will be building these out and the bigger the company the more they’re like hiring AI techs specifically for their companies to start building any idea they have.

[19:27] And so now I’ve gotten in you know and I’ve gotten to see behind the curtain with a lot of these small businesses and I see the ideas you’re pushing out to your teams you know I see these emails like this is what we want to build this is where I want to go this is what I see for the future and you’re pushing it out to your team and then your teams kind of like okay cool like that I don’t I mean that’s going to be what that’s going to take a while to build we have to make some decisions who’s going to make those decisions that’s going to be challenging and there’s kind of this like lag effect like we need to cut that out it’s like they needs to be you need to be working and asking those questions and telling those things directly the agent this is what I want to build in the agent system knows everything about your business and it’s like cool these are the exact exact steps for you to do that.

[20:09] And that’s what I do every day like that’s where I find in there working natively if somebody sends me a problem they’re trying to solve I’m throwing it in and I say this is what we need to build and create how do we do it what are our steps and it’ll tell me and sometimes I’m like holy crap like that seems really complicated from a tech perspective and they’re like nope your first steps are this your second steps are this I’ll walk you through step by step this is exactly how we’re going to do it and then you’re done it’s really cool so I hope you guys are getting interested in this if you guys you know have any questions on it please reach out happy to show you guys more if you guys really want me to like think about or build a dashboard for your business that like would be a mock-up so you guys could see what it would look like reach out I’d be happy to do that for you guys and we’ll talk soon.

Most AI content on the internet is a product demo or a prediction about 2030. Nobody walks you through the part where you are sitting in someone’s office configuring password managers, explaining what a vault is and how to begin building your AI ‘Brain’.

Here is what the first 30 days looked like for a commercial contractor I work with in Central Ohio. (You can read the full case study on our projects page.)

Days 1-3: I Just Listen

I do not touch a computer on day one. I sit down with the owner and ask questions.

I believe this is the benefit to having a background first as a local small business owner, second as a business consultant and then third as someone who sets up AI systems for small businesses. I want to look at things through the lens of what YOU, the business owner, is struggling with first. What is stressing you out, what is stressing your employees and customers out and where can we find bottlenecks to relieve stress and improve your bottom line.

We begin with a client life cycle discovery, walking me through everything that happens when a new client is interested in your business. From googling you, all the way to follow-up and asking for referrals or reviews and continuing to help them with any future jobs.

I then ask about their software. CRM. Quoting tool. Project management. Email. Calendar. What works together, what is connected and if things aren’t connected can we envision building a bridge to reduce meetings & transfer time costs. I’ve often found that one person carries information between all of these systems. (I broke down these four bottlenecks in detail in Episode 2 of the podcast.)

By day three I have a complete map of how work moves through the business, where it stalls, and which bottlenecks cost the most money & stress.

Days 4-7: Hardware and Security First

Security goes on the machine before any AI does. Password manager installed with unique passwords on every account. Two-factor authentication turned on across the board. Google Drive set up as the central file system with a clean folder structure: one main directory, then branches for clients, proposals, operations, and team members.

Then, I set up the designated laptop. Operating system updated, development tools installed, AI platform configured. A local knowledge base created that would become the company’s central brain. (If you want to see the three different ways to interact with this system, I wrote about that in 3 Ways to Use Claude Code If You Have Never Touched a Terminal.)

This part takes 3-4 working days spread across a full week because of the back and forth on logins and two-factor codes. With a local client I can sit next to them and finish it in a day. Remote clients take longer.

Days 8-14: Building the Agents

For the construction client, I uploaded their past proposals, standard pricing sheets, scope language, and brand guidelines into the knowledge base. The AI read all of it. It learned how this company writes proposals, what their pricing structure looks like, and what language they use with clients.

First agent: a proposal generator. Feed it the project details and it drafts a formatted proposal using the company’s own pricing and tone. The estimator reviews it, applies his judgment on the parts that need a human eye, and sends it. Proposals that took three to four hours of assembly dropped to 20 minutes of review.

Second agent: lead follow-up. A proposal goes out, the system schedules follow-up emails at three days, seven days, and fourteen days. Nobody has to remember. The leads that used to go cold started getting caught.

Third agent: daily lead feed from their industry database. Every morning the team opened their system and saw fresh leads scored by relevance, with pre-drafted outreach ready to review and send.

Days 15-21: Training the Team

The system worked. The team did not trust it yet. The technology was ready in two weeks. But then we get to the most difficult aspect, training the owner and team to begin thinking about problems differently. At this step, interfacing and working with the agents every day is imperative. We have to train ourselves to go to, and talk with the agents when we have problems or proposed ideas.

First training session over video. I walked the owner through every agent, showed him how to ask the system questions, how to correct it when it produced something wrong, and how to add new information as the business changed.

Second session was in person, we fixed some errors in the system and began making ground faster. I showed him how I talk with the agents directly and how to get more out of them. I asked it a simple prompt: “For you to give us the best advice, you need to know EVERYTHING there is to know about our business and how we operate. With that in mind, what do you feel like you’re missing from an information perspective in order to create the best systems for us in the future. Please ask me one question at a time until you have a full picture. We’ll do this once a week until you are fully ready.”

By the third session the team was asking questions I had not anticipated. “Can it do this?” “What if I need it to pull from this other database?” Those questions told me something shifted. They stopped thinking of it as my system and started treating it as theirs.

Beyond this, the team is off and running and typically is finding solutions on their own simply through interfacing with the AI & Agent systems.

I’m only involved if there are blocks that come up, or if we need to find some unique Claude Skills to download to complete tasks (like the AI reading pictures, videos, clipping websites for knowledge, etc.).

Days 22-30: The System Runs

The owner opened his laptop in the morning and saw fresh leads scored and waiting. Estimators can pull up a drafted proposal, review it, apply adjustments, and send it by lunch. Follow-up emails went out on schedule without anyone thinking about them. Status updates flowed to a shared dashboard instead of requiring a Monday meeting.

The six-week proposal bottleneck shortened. The team had their evenings back. The owner told me he went home before six for the first time in months.

Where It Stopped

AI won’t fix friction between two team members who disagree about project priorities. It doesn’t replace 20 years of estimating judgment on complex bids. And it does not turn the company into something new and scary overnight.

The businesses that get the most from AI are the ones where the owner has already done the work on themselves and their team. They communicate well. They run clean operations. They know what their business needs before they bring in a tool. (I wrote about why that matters in my first post, 16 Years of Obsession, One Big Pivot, and Why I’m Building AI Agents in Columbus Now.) AI made a good business faster. Struggling businesses with poor communication and burned-out leadership would have gotten a faster version of those same problems.

If you are running a company where you are the person carrying information between five systems, remembering to follow up, assembling proposals when the team is backed up, and answering the phone when clients call for status updates, this is what the first 30 days of changing that looks like.

You stop being the glue. The system becomes the glue. You go back to being the owner.

If you want to see what this looks like for your business, book a free strategy call. No pitch, no pressure. You talk, I listen, and we figure out if this makes sense for you.

You can also check out our FAQ for answers on pricing, timelines, and what industries we work with, or browse our services to see the three ways we work with businesses.

Jeff Binek is the founder of CBus AI Agents, an AI consulting firm in Dublin, Ohio. He builds AI agent systems for small businesses and spent 16 years running his own business before this. Subscribe for weekly breakdowns of what AI looks like inside real businesses.

Revenue is up. Clients keep coming in. There’s never enough time. The team scrambles. One or two people touch everything.

You became the glue holding it together. Nobody told you that happened.

Over the past few weeks I mapped how work flows through multiple businesses, from new lead to finished project. Each one had the same four problems sitting in plain sight. They had the tools. They had the people. But the middle of the business, the stretch between “we got a lead” and “the job is done,” ran on humans doing work that should have been automatic.

I think about this like land navigation in the Army. If you don’t have a compass direction and a distance, you walk in circles. Doesn’t matter how fast you move. As a business owner, you start through the forest, people follow, employees join, partners come in. They trail behind you. The only way to fix your direction is to get into the helicopter, look down, and redirect. These four problems keep you on the ground.

1. Moving Information Between Systems

At Friendship Fitness we had Facebook ads and Google ads for lead generation. Leads went into a CRM. We cycled through UpLaunch, MindBody, PushPress, GoHighLevel. Then email marketing, quoting, payment processing, project management across Slack, Monday, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace.

Each system meant logins, subscription costs, and time moving the same information from one place to another. Most of them didn’t talk to each other. So we had team members whose job was to be the bridge. Take it from Joey, bring it to Timmy, Timmy takes it to Sarah, Sarah puts it into the system.

That works until Sarah leaves. Gets pregnant. Gets fired because she’s toxic to the culture but she’s the only person who knows the project management system. Now you’re six months behind training a replacement. You step into her role. The business stops moving forward while you fill a gap that shouldn’t have existed.

Get your systems talking to each other. Build bridges that move data at the click of a button or on their own. Build a central brain that keeps its knowledge when you lose a team member. AI agents handle this now. Information flows. People don’t carry it.

2. Building the Same Quote From Scratch Every Time

I ask every business owner the same question during onboarding: what does your most typical job look like? What’s your 80%?

Most of the time, 80% of jobs follow the same pattern with the same pricing. Every proposal still gets built from scratch by one person.

A tree removal company came out to my property recently. I filled out a form online. Three days to respond. Another week before someone could visit. The estimator walked the property, went back to the office, and two days later sent a custom quote. We went back and forth adjusting it. Then six weeks until they could schedule the work. Start to finish: 10 to 12 weeks.

Most of that time was a human doing math and writing scope descriptions that follow the same pattern on every job. Red oaks over 50 feet cost X. Pine removal costs Y. Stump grinding costs Z. If the estimator could have plugged those numbers into a system on site, added margin, and handed me a quote while standing in my yard, I would have signed off right there.

We hit the same wall at Friendship Fitness. We built custom onboarding plans for every new member. Then we realized 80% of people needed the same path. We standardized it, customized for the 20% who needed something different, and cut onboarding time in half.

Build the pricing template. Train an AI agent on your standard line items. The estimator focuses on the 20% that requires real judgment. The other 80% assembles itself.

3. Meetings That Only Exist to Transfer Information

Picture a central brain where your team feeds information to an AI agent in real time. Email, Slack, text, whatever they already use. That agent pushes updates to a dashboard or project board visible to the whole team.

Monday morning standup. Your sales guy tells the project manager what closed. The project manager tells you what’s scheduled. You ask about three specific clients. Someone pulls up a text thread on their phone. Forty-five minutes pass. No decisions made. Pure data transfer.

Five minutes for phones away. Small talk. Thirty minutes of sharing information that could have been visible before the meeting started. Multiply by everyone in the room.

When a deal closes in the CRM and the project schedule updates on its own, when a crew finishes a job and the dashboard reflects it, when a client signs a proposal and the team gets pinged, your Monday meeting shrinks to 15 minutes. You meet to decide. Not to update.

4. Chasing Follow-Ups and Status Updates

I build client-specific project dashboards for the businesses I work with. A landscaping client signs a project. Their information goes into a database. The AI creates a client folder, learns the scope, costs, timeline, contacts. It populates a page: landscaping.com/binek for the Binek family project.

That page shows a timeline with checkboxes for each stage. The next scheduled date. Invoicing and receipts. A contact form for questions. When the crew finishes a stage, one voice command to the AI: “Move the Binek job to the next step, schedule them, update the dashboard.”

The client stops calling to ask where things stand. The business owner stops walking over to the project manager for updates. The AI keeps the dashboard current.

Construction version: weekly schedule, change orders, scope notes. Gym version: onboarding progress, upcoming sessions, billing. The format varies. The principle holds: give people a place to look so they stop interrupting each other.

One Brain

These four problems share a root cause. Your tools don’t talk to each other. Humans fill the gaps. After a while, that gap-filling becomes “how we do things.”

One connected system fixes it. Your CRM feeds your quoting tool feeds your project schedule feeds your invoicing. Information moves without a person carrying it.

In three or four years this will be standard. The businesses that adopt it now will move faster, communicate better, and operate with less overhead. They’ll handle more jobs on the same team. They might cut margins and still profit because their cost structure is lower. Faster, more professional, better client experience, and cheaper. That’s a hard combination to compete against.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Jeff Binek is the founder of Cbus AI Agents, an AI consulting firm in Dublin, Ohio. He builds AI agent systems for small businesses across Columbus and Central Ohio.

Timestamps

• 00:00 — The Forest Analogy

• 02:41 — Why Your Business Isn’t Broken (But Still Stuck)

• 04:55 — Moving Information Between Systems

• 10:17 — Building the Same Quote From Scratch

• 17:20 — Meetings That Only Transfer Information

• 19:52 — Chasing Follow-Ups and Status Updates

• 24:05 — The Fix: One Brain System

• 26:07 — Wrap Up

Full Transcript

[00:00] All right guys what is going on today we’re going to be here talking about the four things eating your day that really aren’t actually your job and aren’t moving the business forward.

[00:12] And what I want us to think about is we’re going to use this analogy as kind of our baseline for this episode and I was kind of use the military analogy of okay we’re going to be leading a team or a group of soldiers through a forest all right.

[00:29] So when we started doing land navigation in the military we had these different concepts that you would use but generally the rule of thumb is if you don’t have guidance compass direction and distance then you’re going to have a really tough time finding a fixed point.

[00:46] And when we think about this as a business owner what I think people start with is they start trekking through this forest and they’re trying to get somewhere. So let’s say we’re trying to build a business we’re trying to our first thing is like we want to replace our old income right. So we were working a job before we started a business I want to replace my old business income. That’s our first place to get to.

[01:08] Then our next one might be to get to you know more profitability so that we can buy more equipment we can start to expand and grow. Then our next spot might be we want to get to a million dollars a year revenue then 10 million dollars a year revenue then 20 million dollars a year revenue and we just keep kind of moving those goal posts and that’s kind of the life of business right.

[01:28] Well as you start in that journey you start kind of going through this forest people start to follow you you start to hire employees you start to hire business partners or consultants or other companies to come in and you tack those things on to your business and they start trailing behind you. Now as they’re trailing behind you they can only follow you. They are not going to know where to go if you don’t know where to go.

[01:56] So what we think about is as we get going the best possible thing for us is every now and again to like get into a helicopter get up above the forest look down at our team and where everybody’s at in the forest and where we want to go and then get on a radio and radio down and say actually guys hey we’re going the wrong direction I want us to pivot left and then you’re going to walk a hundred paces and then stop there and I’ll guide you from there and we have to do this kind of constant pivot and redirection otherwise we start tacking more and more team members and things behind us and we just end up going in circles and because everybody’s following your lead they’re not going to break that cycle until you break that cycle.

[02:41] So the things we’re going to talk about today are the things that cause us to start walking in circles and they stop us from the ability to get up into that helicopter and pull back and zoom out and realize that this is actually what’s happening to us okay we’re stuck or we’ve been stuck and we can’t get past this point and I just feel like you know we’ve had two or three years in our own it’s just kind of the same year we just keep going in a circle we can’t break past it and as I do a lot of business consulting and talking with different styles of businesses these are the four themes that I’ve found are kind of plaguing every business and stops us from moving forward towards the goal and also takes all of the time effort energy life force out of us as entrepreneurs and business owners and leaders so that we don’t have the capacity to like pull back and think about what are we doing where are we going and how are we going to get there so let’s dive into it.

[03:48] Okay the biggest thing here is most businesses actually aren’t broken right they’re operating and they’re going like smoothly mostly and we’ve got a system that works that we’ve got a team that knows how to work the system that we have and we’re going one direction but we know that we’re not going fast enough we’re not going where we want to be maybe and if one person from that team quits retires moves you know is a toxic employee and needs to be fired just from a company culture perspective we know that that’s going to throw the whole system into disarray we know that maybe the team is scrambling and we’re not as quick to our clients as we need to be and we get this system where the business isn’t broken we wouldn’t sit there and say like hey we’re not going out of business we’re not failing we’re not going to close up any time like things are running smooth but I also know that it doesn’t feel like we have a lot of momentum all right that’s where we’re going to try to get back today.

[04:55] All right so biggest thing number one here is moving information between systems okay so I’m going to use the analogy that we had when I was a gym owner all right when a new like when we were looking for new leads and new clients we had Facebook Facebook advertising Instagram we had Google SEO Google my business profile Google ads right I know there’s a lot more in there for like lead generation potential okay so you’ve got that hole that’s like subset number one to get leads once you get a lead then they go into your CRM we had up launch and you know you have your classic email in email marketing you’ve got a sub stack of blog you’ve got your general CRM so for us I was like up launch then mind body then push press then go high level then you have maybe quoting software and you have like another thing that you’re going to put them into and for us that’s like push press core where they’re going to have their plan they’re going to have where this is going to be potentially where you you know are taking transactions so you’re you know bringing dollars and cents and storing payment information then you might have project management software so we went through Slack and Monday and Microsoft Teams and Google Workplace and all of those systems every one of these things guys is logins it’s time it’s a bunch of subscription costs that continue to go up as more team members grow it’s a lot of moving information and a lot of it’s like the same information across these systems.

[06:33] But what I find with this is number one a lot of them don’t talk to each other so we need to build bridges or even worse there is a manual team member that has to actually move them from A to B or B to C and through the system and so then you might have people who are in charge of each little cog or each little step in our machine you know bring that to Joey and bring that to Timmy and bring that to Sarah and then Sarah is going to take it to you know getting them into the system so we have these little transactional costs and those costs cost us time but they also make us have people problems because if Sarah who’s in charge of project management who’s the third cog in our machine you know Sarah gets pregnant and is going to take a year off or she’s now going to stay home she’s not going to work anymore so she’s going to quit now we have this gap our cog our machine has grinded to a halt and we’ve got to hire somebody new to take that role and now we’ve got to train them up on all of these different steps and all of this different software and that is a pain if you guys have had to do that we’re had to do that a bunch sadly it is so hard to lose somebody who knows the whole system who’s been native in the whole system who has all their logins already ready and they’re like good to go they plug in and they can just execute right away and then we lose them and we bring somebody in who doesn’t know any of it and we have to train them up on everything and then it’s six months to where they’re even decent with it and then maybe a full year before we get back to where we were with Sarah so now we like take this big step back as a business.

[08:07] So we lose transactional costs and time costs by having all of these manual processes in the way but we also have this really challenging personnel issue because we can’t take a lot of steps forward in our business when we lose employees every six months every year every two years and it takes a year for them to get up to full speed where we can run fast as a business and we can operate smoothly we can operate well and everybody’s on the same page what that does cause us to is it also makes us like second guess or stop if we have to fire somebody let’s say you have somebody who’s just toxic to your culture is not doing well and everybody knows that it’s time for that person to move on and they’re all looking to you as the business owner to make that decision but you’re sitting there looking at it just being like but man if we lose that person they’re the they’re the main person who runs our project management software and they’re the they built that system and they know it like the back of their hand and like gosh if we just lose them we’re going to lose but we’re I don’t know what we’re going to do we have all these projects in the pipeline and we’re going to have to get in there and I’m just going to have to get in there and do it manually until we can train somebody up and if you’ve done that before you know like oh my gosh that now you’re working weekends now you’re working longer now you’ve taken on your role which is the leader and the rider and you’ve stepped back into like okay everybody stop we’re not moving forward in the forest anymore everybody stop where you are I’ve got to go back and I’ve got to do this like manual job and we’re just not going to move forward for a little bit until we can get somebody who can do that job so that I can focus back on guiding the business.

[09:55] So if that resonates with you this is like number one all right is we have to get to a point where we have systems talking to each other and bridges for our communication for our data information that happen autonomously or happen at the click of a button or happen at light speed as we can do now with AI and that’s like one of the most important things for us and next we need to get to a point where we’ve got like a central brain system where if we do happen to lose one of those people the central brain doesn’t lose any of its information this is like again for thinking about like we build out these AI agents that can do a lot of this for you we don’t have those major transactional costs of losing employees.

[10:38] All right next up we start thinking about building the same quote from scratch every time and this is when I’ve been working with both gyms and with you know landscapers construction companies painters trying to think real estate agents right we we think about some of these things where really for the most part if we were to break it down I ask this question in all my onboarding when I’m working with businesses is like what is your 80% what does your most typical job look like and how can we number one get more of that business so that we can standardize things a little bit but number two like how can we get to the point where we build a software system or we build an agent system that can understand your independent pricing quoting estimating package and be able to like feed it the information and have it spit out things in real time are incredibly fast.

[11:30] Because if we have to so like if you can think about it as like we’re getting trees taken down out of our property what was their system right I filled out a forum online it took them three days to get back to me right after three days what was their next step they had to book a time for somebody to come out that person couldn’t come out for a week okay so now we’re 10 days away from when I filled out the information to when somebody can come out okay then the person comes out they look around they look at the trees the size of the trees different things like that and they get me a customized quote okay from the time they came out to when I got the quote was two days right then I get the quote then I you know we go back and forth like hey let’s get rid of these trees let’s skip those ones I don’t need that right now I send it back they recustomize the quote they send me back a final I check off on it and then it’s six weeks for them to get back out here so from start to finish of the process it’s going to be about two and a half maybe three months so 10 to 12 weeks.

[12:34] Okay and again like this business is a great example because I don’t think they’re hurting for business obviously with the storms and stuff a lot of down trees but 12 weeks from start to finish and a lot of people in those processes doing things by hand doing things with their brains doing things custom what if if I take that business what if we were to say okay like red oaks that are more than 50 feet tall that’s this cost right any pine trees that are a medium size tree that’s this cost right anything stump grinding is this cost you know removal is this cost like and they just are plugging in numbers right okay we have two red oaks we have four down pine trees plug it in plug it in plug it in and then at the end as they plug in those numbers it spits out an automated standardized quote.

[13:26] All right now what you want at that point is like it should be done in almost real time right by your AI agent that you feed this information so we create the agent we train the agent your best estimator is going to train train train and work with it and we’re gonna test it test it but then once it’s live all we’re gonna do is enter it get the quote we’re gonna add our margin in to make sure that we have a little bit of wiggle room and then we propose that almost in real time to the client then if the client is like ah like for me I was like okay those trees in our backyard that was maybe slightly more expensive and honestly it’s like not that big of a deal for us so just go ahead and take that off you change the two to a zero and that’s taken off your quote in real time right and it’s just updating in real time.

[14:10] Now as we start to believe out you can see already that we can move faster it’s almost like the estimators job the quoting you know the person back at their home base who’s the administrator who’s sending things out manually their jobs basically done right it’s done in real time so in that estimator goes to the next job it’s like that whole box is checked they can almost sign off in real time if we could have done that in real time with the estimator who came out to me to talk to me to trees I would have signed off in real time that whole process would have been done they could have moved to scheduling and then scheduling is like a whole different thing like AI with scheduling finding gaps finding distances between jobs all those things like it’s amazing at those kinds of things right so we can take some of those little faults and failures and scheduling problems and we can just outsource it to something that’s way smarter and can use way better data than we can.

[15:04] All right but like that’s a decent example of they’re building out everything custom every time we used to do this at friendship we used to build out we would do an assessment with the individual client and then we would build out a custom onboarding plan for them and then we’d execute that onboarding plan what we realized is that like 80% of the people came through and really just needed the same onboarding right now you would have 10% of people who are more fit and 10% of people who are less fit who needed something custom but we would start with everybody in that initial path and then once we started going and we learn more about it we could customize that as we were going.

[15:43] Now that’s not going to be true for every business but what it helped us with doing is we were able to have a standardized pricing template a standardized sales process and a standardized sales number that we could quote to people in real time before they came into our initial sales process so again if I called that tree company and they picked up the phone they were like hey Jeff what’s going on what are we working with and I’m like yeah listen I’ve got this 150 foot red oak that’s leaning after the storm it’s leaning right over our house and we want to get that down most importantly we’ve also got like six or seven down pine trees in our ravine that we’re looking to get done you can just really quickly be like all right cool here’s your general idea you know red oak we do a thousand dollars per 50 foot of trees so if you have a hundred and fifty foot oak that’d be about three thousand dollars pine trees down depending on their size we usually look for somewhere around that five hundred dollar range for every pine tree so if you had ten you’d be looking at somewhere around five thousand that so just to give you like rough ideas you know we still want to come out there and look at it but rough ideas going to be somewhere around that eight ten thousand dollar mark how does that sound.

[16:47] Then I know it’s like holy crap that’s way out of my ballpark like don’t even come out to my house save you the time there but if I’m like yeah that’s about what I was thinking that’s pretty standard that sounds good why don’t you guys come out and look at it we can move forward then I’m also ready for the sale when I come in and that’s like a sales and an estimation in one so just some ideas of kind of how we can think about templating some of these things and hopefully that gets you in the mindset of building something more standard because it’s both quotable it helps your sales process but it also helps us with speed to quote and we can get more clients done in a month.

[17:20] All right third thing meetings that only exist to transfer information boy this is a huge one all right again if we had this idea of a central brain right where I was able to upload and disseminate information with my AI agent who remembers everything and you could send me data and information in an email in a Slack message in a text message and as I get that information in real time I’m feeding it to my own personal or the businesses own independent AI agent that we build and you’re feeding it that information in real time it can be shooting out information on a website on a dashboard in your Slack channels that’s saying here’s our to-do list today here’s what we have on our docket here’s updated information from our estimator here’s updated information from our sales guy here’s updated information from our administrator and we’re saving meeting time and we’re also getting information out quicker things don’t have to wait for this you know well on Monday we have our all hands meeting and we’ll put out this information then so you give time back to your employees you give time back to yourself.

[18:36] We don’t waste all this time in meetings that we know it’s like okay it takes five minutes for everyone to get their cell phone put away and handle their personal shit then we bullshit a little bit for a little bit we’re you know joking and laughing about this and we talk about the stuff we got coming up and 90% of the time that could be an email 90% of the time that could be a text message or a memo 90% of time we could have a dashboard that gets updated in real time by our AI agents to everybody keeps everybody informed fully informed all the time and we can reduce our meetings scheduled down to almost nothing because we don’t need to share that information it’s already been shared we don’t need to transfer that information it’s already been transferred now we’re moving faster right we have to start thinking about these transactional costs because it’s time back for everybody in your business so that improves employee happiness that improves your happiness as a business owner improves your longevity it allows you to continue growing and feeling like you’re moving forward and you actually should be able to get more done faster so this is like one of the these are these ones are just killing businesses and when we compound all four of these things this is where we really start to see businesses stuck in the mud right or owners stuck in the mud.

[19:52] All right so last one guys is follow-ups and status updates so when we kind of start thinking about the follow-ups and status updates with this guys this is things that now I would say is just like table stakes for businesses is having a lot of this stuff up automated if we don’t have these things automated then this is a manual task that you have to hire somebody for and if we don’t have the manual task and we don’t have the automation built out then honestly like we’re probably losing business we’re losing dollars and cents.

[20:23] So I’ve already started to work with my businesses on like do we create a project dashboard that’s client specific so let’s take the let’s take a tree removal company or a landscaping project are like great examples of this is for every client that comes out right we feed the information into this database we create a new client folder for our AI to handle the AI learns everything about that client you know if it’s a landscaping project where do they live what’s their total project costs what’s the scope of their project you know name contact information put all that into our folder as we get more information from the estimate and the proposal or the bid and everything signed off on we go ahead and upload all that information once the project is signed off on it populates a website that would be like let’s just say landscaping.com backslash binic right for the binic family tree removal project and it brings up a dashboard and the first thing on that dashboard is a timeline right and it’s got sections one through five right like new lead estimation blah blah and it’s got little check blocks little check blocks and then it shows me next thing all right we’re at the last step which is tree removal and it’s got a date and a time and it tells me exactly when we’re going to be out here tells me how long the project’s going to take what’s the scope of the project underneath that we have our invoicing and receipt information and then next to that we can have like a contact us block so that I could shoot them an updated you know information.

[21:53] Hey guys just a heads up we’re actually going to be out of town in April it’s fine if you guys can still come out just want to let you know we’re not going to be there boom that sends that out to the project manager for our job or tap you know puts it as a little thing a note on our file and whoever comes out to do our job isn’t surprised that we’re not home now so when we start thinking about building these client dashboards I think you can do this for almost anything like for construction jobs I think it’s really cool to have a timeline what are we doing this week what’s happening right do we have change orders do we have updated things actually I don’t like that color I changed my mind on change the pink color change order comment form as we start thinking about some of these follow-ups and proposals like we can get I want us to think proactively what are the problems that we experience with every job that slows us down how do we get ahead of that build a system to where we don’t get that question where the person doesn’t have to ask hey guys you haven’t been here in two weeks what’s going on they just go to the dashboard it lives on the dashboard right.

[22:56] We don’t have to get there and say hey what’s the status of this or as a business owner if I’ve got 15 you know landscaping projects going on at one time I don’t have to sit there and go to my project manager and be like hey what’s going on with the binic job what’s going on with the binic house hold you know they’re sending us a bunch of text messages asking us where we are what’s our status update there and now we’ve got again these transactional costs we’re sharing data and information we’re trying to do it through text message or through email or through Slack message it’s like time off of everybody’s day when that could all just the AI can just be updating the dashboard and then as things change in the dashboard all we do is we just type one little command line or we can even do voice to text from our car to our AI agent and be like hey the binic job is signed off on go ahead and move it to the next step get them scheduled and put that date on their dashboard right done.

[23:53] So these are things that we can do now that are that are like this is the beauty of what AI can do for us as a business it can cut down on every one of these costs so what I like to think about is this one brain model we want to create a native AI system for our business that is this central hub that improves the quality of communication with our customers it improves the quality of information sharing and communication across our team it allows us all to get time back and it really more importantly it allows you to get to a point where you can step back and say I now have the tools that cut down on all of this extra time effort energy transactional costs employee problems it can fix so many of these things.

[24:47] So this is kind of how I’ve started to build these out and how I’ve started to rethink about how I think about business how I think about just general flow of information and how we can use these tools to create something truly unique and this is what is going to separate businesses in the future I can guarantee you that this is going to be table stakes in like three or four years you’re not even going to be able to get to play at the business table if you’re not on top of these things because the businesses that do do these things are going to stand out so far they’re going to look so professional they’re going to be so fast to information to the client they’re going to be so effective that they maybe don’t need as much overhead or they can do more jobs so if I can do more jobs maybe I can cut my margin down a little bit and now I can under bid you so now I look more professional I give you better communication you have a better experience as a client and I’m cheaper how is that business going to lose right.

[25:50] So again I think about this as table stakes I think it’s incredibly important I think we all need to stop and start thinking about this and we need to get out of the forest walking in circles we need to stop doing things the way we’ve always done things because the tools that are being created now are total game changers for every business and it’s just going to be something that’s adopted by everybody in a matter of time better to be the first right.

[26:13] So that’s it for this week guys I hope you enjoyed thank you so much if you guys are watching on YouTube trying to do a little more visual today so again if you guys like this these slides right made by my AI told it what I was going to talk about today and here we go so thanks so much for watching guys I appreciate it or listening if you guys are listening to the podcast thanks so much see you next time.

I run my AI consulting business in Columbus with it. Proposals, client files, websites, emails, social media, my knowledge base. My background is as a soldier, and then a gym owner...I am not a developer. Yet, Claude Code is the most useful business tool I have touched in 20 years.

The first question I get from small business owners is the same one: “I’ve used [insert generic search AI] where do I type?”

I use three different ways and I have used all three this week for different reasons. I will walk through each one and tell you which to start with.

1. VS Code — The One I Recommend

VS Code is a free program from Microsoft. It looks like a text editor with a file browser on the left side. Developers use it to write software. I use it to run my business.

Claude creates a file for me, a proposal or a content calendar, and I can see it in the sidebar the second it saves. I click it and it opens. Claude mentions a file path in conversation, I click the link and I am looking at it. Claude suggests a terminal command, I copy it and paste it into the built-in terminal without leaving the window.

My setup: the main panel is my chat with Claude. Underneath it, taking up about a quarter of the screen, I keep a terminal open. The chat is where I talk. The terminal is where I paste commands.

Download VS Code. Sign in to your Claude account. Click the Claude icon at the top of the window. Five minutes and you are talking to Claude with your full file system available to it.

I have built entire client deliverable packages in this window. Proposals, timelines, templates, content calendars. If you try one of these three, make it this one.

2. The Terminal — More Power, Less Polish

Install Claude Code (one command), open your terminal, type claude, and start talking. A blinking cursor and a conversation.

I use the terminal when I need Claude to do something technical. Install a program. Connect to an email account through Zapier. Set up an API key. The terminal gives Claude the deepest access to your system, which makes it the right choice when you are wiring services together.

The key habit: point Claude at the right folder before you start. If your business files live in a specific directory, navigate there first, then type claude. Now it can see your files, read them, edit them, and create new ones right where they belong.

You want to connect Claude to your email, your calendar, your CRM, or your social media accounts? The terminal is where you do that. It is also where you install new skills and plugins that expand what Claude can do.

The trade-off: no visual file browser, no clickable links. You are working in plain text. For me that is fine because I know where my files live. For someone starting fresh, it can feel like navigating without a map. Start with VS Code, then come to the terminal once you know your way around.

I can open a terminal, type claude, and be working in three seconds.

3. Claude on Your Phone — Remote Control

This one came out earlier this year. If you spend most of your day away from a desk, pay attention.

Claude has a feature called Remote Control. You start a Claude Code session on your computer at home or at the office, then pick up your iPhone, open the Claude app, and connect to that same session. Your phone becomes a window into your machine.

Your files stay on your computer. Your email connections, your CRM, your calendar, all running locally. You talk to Claude from your phone and it executes on your machine as if you were sitting in front of it.

I use this at the gym, around client meetings or coffee or on the golf course. A client asks a question, I can pull out my phone, ask Claude to find the proposal we drafted last week, and read it right there. I ask it to draft a follow-up email and send it through the Zapier connection we already set up. The work runs on my machine, miles away sitting at my home office.

Setup takes two minutes. Start a Remote Control session from your terminal. Claude gives you a code. Open the Claude app on your phone, enter the code, and the two are linked. What you type on your phone runs on your computer.

All traffic is encrypted. Your files never leave your machine. Only the conversation and tool results travel between your phone and your computer.

The contractor on a job site, the fitness studio owner between classes, the realtor between showings. If you are rarely at a desk, this is how you keep your AI system running while you are out doing the work.

Where to Start

VS Code. You can see your files, click through them, chat with Claude, and run commands in one window. Free. Five minutes to set up.

Once you know your way around, add the terminal for the wiring work. Connecting services, installing plugins, configuring your system.

Then set up Remote Control on your phone so your business system follows you out the door.

I use all three on a given day. VS Code is home base. The terminal is the workshop. My phone is the remote. Two years ago this setup would have required a full-time assistant and three software subscriptions.

If you are a small business owner in Columbus and want help setting any of this up, that is what I do. Reach out at cbusaiagents.com or reply to this post.

If you missed last week’s post on what AI agents are and how they differ from AI search, start there: From Google to Grok to AI Agents.

Jeff Binek is the founder of Cbus AI Agents, an AI consulting firm in Dublin, Ohio. He builds AI agent systems for small businesses across Columbus and Central Ohio.

That is why I started Cbus AI Agents.

AI is the tool that gave me my time back. And now I build AI agent systems for small business owners in Central Ohio who are drowning in the same work I used to drown in. Content schedules, lead follow-up, proposals, training plans, marketing copy. The stuff that pulls you away from the work you actually started the business to do.

In this first episode of Central Ohio AI, I talk about why I believe so deeply in small businesses, why Columbus is the right place to build this, and why the businesses that figure out AI search and AI agents now are going to be the ones that win the next decade.

I also get into a few things that have changed:

• Social media organic reach is collapsing for local businesses

• Facebook ad costs have tripled for industries like fitness

• AI search is replacing Google for a growing number of people

• The businesses that AI recommends are the ones that will get the customers

If you are a small business owner in Dublin, Columbus, Powell, Worthington, or anywhere in Central Ohio, this podcast is built for you. One episode a week. No jargon. No hype. Just honest conversations about what AI can actually do for your business.

Subscribe at newsletter.cbusaiagents.com and follow along.

Jeff Binek
Founder, Cbus AI Agents
Dublin, Ohio

Timestamped Chapters

• 00:00 — Welcome to Central Ohio AI

• 01:05 — My backstory: Friendship Fitness, 16 years of small business in Dublin

• 02:10 — The entrepreneurial drive and why small businesses matter

• 04:30 — AI is lowering the barriers for starting a business

• 05:45 — Why I want to help people bring their passions to life

• 07:00 — The shift: social media organic reach is dying

• 08:30 — Facebook ad costs have tripled ($8/lead to $25/lead)

• 10:15 — Fake leads, bots, and the saturation problem

• 10:50 — People are leaving social media and moving to AI search

• 11:30 — How local businesses get found on AI search

• 12:15 — The Google-to-AI shift and the early-mover window

• 13:30 — Why getting time back is the real goal

• 14:15 — The two buckets most business owners fall into

• 14:45 — Shoutout to Laura Young at Bakes by Lo in Hilliard

• 15:25 — The stuff business owners hate doing (and AI can handle)

• 16:15 — AI as your personal assistant, subject matter expert, and business coach

• 16:50 — What I wish I had five years ago at Friendship Fitness

• 17:30 — AI agents working while you drive to your second location

• 18:10 — What this podcast will cover going forward

• 18:45 — Subscribe at newsletter.cbusaiagents.com

Full Transcript

All right, guys, what is going on? My name is Jeff Binek from Cbus AI Agents, and I’m excited to start our new podcast here, really going over what’s going on in the landscape of being a small business.

We’re going to be trying to talk as much as we can specifically about the city of Columbus, Ohio and the surrounding suburbs, what it means to be a local small business and how we can better serve our community.

So really what we’re going to talk about with this and where this podcast will go is first we’re going to tell the stories about how we are working with small businesses to integrate AI and AI agents specifically into their business to help them complete tasks to achieve their goals and really help pick up the slack of whatever they are struggling with inside of their own independent business.

We’re going to talk about that a little bit today, but we’re also going to try to give real detailed X’s and O’s of things that you guys can start doing now and how to prepare for what is coming.

Quick backstory on me. I’ve owned a handful of different small businesses. The one that most of you probably know me from is Friendship Fitness in Dublin. I founded that business and ran it for 16 years and recently sold that company off to Andy Era, who’s doing a phenomenal job running that company now. Could not be more proud of what we accomplished there and then also what they’re still accomplishing today.

But I know what it means to start something from scratch and to try to grow local SEO so that you show up on Google, to try to get five-star reviews, to try to deal with the bad reviews, to try to get yourself found now on AI search and to get local people to hear about you and to go to trade shows and farmers markets and to do grassroots business-to-business linking. We’d do lunch and learns, outreach, just everything that it takes to run a small business. All of the people, all of the alignment, having a mission and working towards that every day. I really deeply understand that.

At the same time, while I was doing that, I was also running a couple of other side businesses. Those were just things that I got interested in over time. My entrepreneurial journey for me really probably started when I was like 16, my mom would tell you. I’ve just always been interested in and loved the idea of my brain having some imaginative idea, some creation, and then just going and bringing it to life and bringing it to other people. If I’m interested in it, maybe there’s other people out there that are interested in it. I’ve always just thought that was so cool. It’s been something that I’ve really enjoyed just starting and creating.

So I am just a huge believer in small businesses generally. And I see a future now with AI where more and more people can take those little side hustles or those ideas. Whether you’re a teacher or you work at Ohio State or you run a full nine-to-five job and you’re starting to maybe get interested in some other stuff or maybe you’re picking up a couple of side hustles to pay off your student loans faster, whatever it is for you. I think it’s faster and easier and better now than it’s ever been with AI.

It’s taken some of the bottlenecks that used to stop people. I would have a lot of conversations consulting people for small businesses, and when I saw what would stop them from actually going and doing the thing, I think a lot of those barriers are gone now, which I just think is so cool.

So that’s really my goal with starting this new company is I want to help people bring their passions to life. The things that they love doing, the things that they’re interested in, whether it’s full time and you want it to completely take over, you want to leave your current job and start a full-time business for you and your family, or whether it’s just a side hustle, or whether you’re interested for your kids.

This is something I’m so excited about. I want to own my own small businesses. I want Maria to run her own small businesses. And I want our kids to grow up in a world where if they have an idea, if they have something they’re passionate about, or they have something they want to do, that they understand how to create it, how to market it, how to build it from scratch and give it out to the world.

I just think that’s a beautiful thing. I think if we all get closer to doing that, number one, I think our society would generally be a little more happy because you have a little bit more control. You’re doing something that you care about, even if you end up making a little bit less money. I do think at the end of the day, having control over your time, control over your growth, control over what you’re doing matters. As I build this business, I remember how much it doesn’t feel like work when you’re doing something that you decided you’re going to do. You decided that you’re going to work on it. It’s different than having somebody else tell you this is what you have to do because this is what I decided I want for my business. And now I’m going to tell you that now you have to do it. It’s a totally different feeling.

So as we kind of go into this, there’s a handful of things that have changed. And I want to just briefly touch on that before the later podcasts where we start to get into more of the nitty gritty.

What has changed, I think, for me personally, is I have started to use AI search for almost everything. I really replaced Google in terms of being my key search engine of how I would maybe find a business that I want to be a patron of. And I’ve gotten off of most social media now. We’ll talk about that a lot more in episodes moving forward.

A lot of social media is currently right now AI created and AI driven. It may still be video or pictures from the actual business, but most of the captions are AI created. And what you’ll start to see is people will create these things called AI avatars. A website for that would be arcads.ai. And what you can do is you can upload videos of yourself and it will create an AI avatar that is almost completely indiscernible from you for certain features. It’s very good at like you talking directly to the camera in a full vision shot. What it’s not great at is still action. So if we’re talking about gym marketing, it can’t have somebody doing a pull-up or a push-up and the naked eye can’t tell it’s AI. It’s not quite that good yet, but it is close.

So more and more, when you’re on social media and you’re scrolling, you’re going to be seeing comments from AI and bots. Reddit is 90% of this now. You’re going to start seeing more videos, images, ads that are AI bots and AI creating and being pushed by AI. I think that’s going to, number one, really saturate the market and drive people away from the platforms, from being able to enjoy them.

Number two, as a local business, you’ve probably already experienced this. The organic side of social media used to be very powerful. When we first started, I had a rudimentary blog, a Facebook page, a Facebook group. If I posted on Facebook, I would say like 95% of my clients would see that and engage with it. Now, if I were to post on Facebook, it would get like 13 views. If you post something on Instagram, it’s gone in a matter of moments. A very low percentage of our actual clientele, even though they follow our page, even though they engage with all of our content, a lower percentage is still going to see that content. It becomes less and less powerful as time moves forward. I think that’s going to be a major challenge for the social media companies as local small businesses start to realize that they aren’t having as much success with them.

What I’m doing now, I have a lot of consulting clients that are gyms specifically. And a lot of what we spend our time on is marketing. It used to be that you could get Facebook ads, you could get leads for around six to eight dollars a lead for a gym. Now that’s more like $25 a lead. So you can imagine if you spend $1,000, that’s 40 leads that you would get for $1,000. It’s not very good, considering that of those 40 leads, probably 10 are fake or bots or AI. They’re not real people. They don’t even respond to you. Another 10 of them are going to forget that they clicked and not even remember you. So by the time we get down to the actual people who sign up, it’s less. So your thousand dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to. A lot of that is because there’s major saturation in the advertising market and the marketing world, but also because I think there’s less real people of the customers that you want engaging with those platforms.

So if I’m somebody who you would want to be a customer for your business, and I’m not on Facebook or Instagram anymore, that’s a potential lead that you were trying to achieve in doing Facebook or Instagram marketing. That’s just not where your eyeballs are. But what am I doing? I am searching a lot on AI. I am going to Grok or Claude now, and I’m searching on there for where can I get my car fixed, playgrounds for my kids, travel plans, where to get the cheapest gas. I’m going to AI for that now.

So how do you, as a local business, how do you get onto that? How do you start to score for that? That’s stuff that we’re going to be breaking down. That’s really what I’m working on with local Central Ohio businesses. I think we’ve got a small window, just like if you go back when Google first started and you look at who are these powerful websites that were absolutely crushing it in SEO and Google Ads when it was new, a lot of those businesses became super powerful. That’s like how Amazon was created.

If we can get ahead of teaching and training the AI to find our business, to know our business, to see our business, to understand our business and be able to read reviews and recognize that we are a high quality local business and who we serve and what we serve, then as more people start to search there, this year it might only be about 14% of all search traffic that has shifted to AI. YouTube and Google are still the power players. But every year, AIs are carving something like seven to 10% out of the market from the old way to the new way. And when that starts to shift and AI gets north of 50% or 60% of our searching, then we want to be the number one in our local market for whatever our small business is.

Now, that’s just a marketing piece, and that’s a focus, not the focus. The really big one for me, guys, is I want to help business owners get time back. I have a small and growing family of young kids, and I understand the challenges of what it means to be a small business owner. There are things right now in your small business that you know need addressed. That you know could be better, that you know you probably should be doing. And you’re maybe just not, or you’re not focused on it, or you don’t have anybody in your organization focused on it right now. A week goes by and a month goes by and the thing just doesn’t get addressed. Every small business suffers from this. How big or small that problem is is probably equal to the quality and the success of your company.

The reason that I find most business owners deal with this is most small business owners are usually fit into one of two buckets. They either are great with people. They’re a great networker, they’re a great communicator, they’re personable, they’re fun to be around. Or they’re great with what they do.

I’ll use Laura Young. She bakes cookies. She has a bakery. So she does more than cookies. I love cookies, so I love her cookies specifically. She’s in Hilliard. Check her out. Bakes by Lo if you haven’t. Her cookies are phenomenal and she is phenomenal at what she does. She did my son’s birthday cake. It was incredible. It was amazing. It was customized. It was so good. And Laura has a smile that’ll light up the room, is personable and engaging, is fun and nice, kind and sweet. If you get Laura in front of you and you’re talking to her about your son’s birthday coming up, the sell of what she’s going to get you kind of happens naturally. And then you taste the product and you’re like, holy crap, I’m hooked. I’ve got to go there all the time. And that happens very naturally and organic.

Now, if that’s who you are, if you’re really good at that portion, doing the work or networking and talking with the people, a lot of times what happens is you absolutely despise sitting behind a computer screen and droning on in QuickBooks or Excel over the books. Or you absolutely hate organizing a content schedule for marketing and copywriting your captions for Instagram. Or you absolutely hate building out your website, communicating in email with clients, looking for lead generation, following up lead nurture. You hate doing that stuff. Most small business owners do.

And this to me is where AI really comes in. You can now have a personal assistant, a subject matter expert, somebody who can work 24 hours a day for you, who can help you plan and organize, who can put those things into a branded, easy-to-understand guide for you and your team, and does all of this while you can be out doing the work that you do and enjoy. And it takes less time, it moves faster, and honestly, it’s better work than you’re going to do, and it’s better work than most of your employees are going to do too.

If I had the tools now, if I had the agent network and system that I’ve set up for myself now, if I had that five years ago, that would have totally changed the way that we do business. I also think that would have totally changed our development or growth. When I opened a second location, I think with the AI agents working for me, that would have been significantly easier. I would have been able to do a lot more faster. I would have been able to be in two places at once because I wouldn’t have had to sit there and work so much on the digital aspect of things. It could have just been done for me. If I want a presentation branded, I’m not sitting there on Canva or Google Slides and trying to figure things out. The AI agents are doing that perfectly for me while I’m driving to my second location. My AI agents are going through and making sure that my team has the proper training and marketing plans that they can execute on without me having to sit there and type them all out and brand them all up.

It can all just be pushed out and well organized for us. This is what we can create now. This is what exists today, and it’s getting better every moment.

If you guys are a Dublin small business and you’re interested in this, I hope you follow along. If you like the podcast format, I’m going to do a blog and a podcast every week just to start explaining some of these tools and some of these items that you can start to implement. Usually the podcast flow will be me free-forming a little bit about what I see and how I see this best integrated for small businesses. Some real X’s and O’s, where we’re actually going to sit down and go through a workflow of something that you can do. And we’ll talk to clients who have actually implemented this in their business and how it’s helped them.

I hope you guys can follow along. You can also go to newsletter.cbusaiagents.com and follow along and subscribe to our podcast as well. Thanks so much, guys.

Show Notes

Mentioned in this episode:

• Friendship Fitness, Dublin, Ohio — friendshipfitness.com

• Bakes by Lo (Laura Young) — Hilliard, Ohio

• Arcads.ai — AI avatar creation tool

• Grok, Claude — AI search tools Jeff uses daily

• Cbus AI Agents — cbusaiagents.com

Key takeaways:

1. Social media organic reach is collapsing for local businesses — Facebook and Instagram are showing your posts to fewer and fewer of your actual followers

2. Facebook ad costs have roughly tripled — from $6-8/lead to $25/lead in fitness, with a large percentage being bots or fake leads

3. AI search is growing at 7-10% per year — the businesses that get found by AI now will dominate when it passes 50% of all search

4. Most small business owners fall into two buckets: great at the work or great with people — but struggle with the computer/admin side that AI can handle

5. AI agents act as a personal assistant, subject matter expert, and business coach all in one, working 24/7 for less than $100/month

Subscribe: newsletter.cbusaiagents.com
Website: cbusaiagents.com

I used it for golf club recommendations (seriously, it was good at this), finding deals, DIY projects around the house, financial theory discussions. It was impressive on certain topics and I got real value out of it. But after a few months I found myself opening it less and less. I cancelled the subscription and stuck with free versions here and there.

That was search. You ask a question, you get an answer. Not that different from Google with a better vocabulary.

What happened next was different.

When AI Stopped Being a Search Engine

Around last year, I started paying for Grok and changed the way I used it. Instead of opening a new chat for every random question, I titled each conversation and kept going back to the same ones. “All Things Golf.” “DIY Home Projects.” “Finance Stuff.” “Business Stuff.” “Kid’s Ideas.”

The idea was simple: let the AI build a knowledge base around the topics I actually cared about, using the history of our conversations to give better and better answers over time.

At the same time, I started building my own custom GPTs. I fed one more than 10,000 workouts I had written over my career as a gym owner and fitness coach. I wanted to see blind spots, test whether it could create a viable week of programming for an individual or a full gym. At the time, I failed. I know now it was because I did not have the right tools or the right approach to training it. But the seed was planted.

The Road Trip That Changed Everything

Fast forward to a family trip from Columbus, Ohio to Hilton Head, South Carolina. Three kids under four, a Boston Terrier, my wife Maria, and me. Here is what I asked Grok before we left:

“I’m taking a road trip from Columbus, Ohio to Charlotte, NC and staying the night, then finishing the drive to Hilton Head the next morning. I’m bringing three small kids under 4, my dog, my wife and myself. I need to stop every 2.5 hours, preferably at a nice playground in a safe neighborhood with gas stations nearby. We’re packing our food. I also need the best dog-friendly, family-friendly hotel with a good breakfast along our route in or near Charlotte.”

It gave me the perfect itinerary. Precise timing and distance. Best gas prices. Three park options for our family to choose from.

We used it to stop along the river in Charleston, West Virginia for an hour. Beautiful playground, walking path, workout stations, dog park. Right next to it was a BP with the cheapest gas we had seen all trip. Back on the road.

The hotel was clean, affordable, and right on the fastest route. We reversed the exact same trip on the way home because it worked so well.

When the Car Broke Down

In Hilton Head, we had car trouble. My old move would have been to Google “auto repair near me” and scroll through a dozen results hoping for the best. Instead, I took pictures of the car and uploaded them to Grok. It told me the likely cause, what to do about it, a ballpark cost so I would know if a shop was overcharging, and three local shops ranked by reviews, distance, and affordability.

We called the first one. They got us in same day and took care of it for free.

That shop never would have gotten our business in any other world. We did not know the area. We had no recommendations. But the AI matched us to the right business based on real data, not ad spend.

I Stopped Googling. Then I Started Thinking.

Somewhere on the drive home, I realized I had not actually typed something into Google in months. Shopping, travel, car trouble, financial questions. I was reaching for AI every time.

I told Maria that I did not think I had Googled something in months. She looked at me like I was exaggerating. I was not.

Then I started thinking about the implications. All the time I have spent building an online presence and platform for an internet structure that likely will not exist within a few years. I thought about the random BP in Charleston, West Virginia. The small auto repair shop in Hilton Head. Both got our money because an AI recommended them. Not because they had the best Google ranking or the biggest ad budget.

What does the future of finding a local business look like? How will people interact with small businesses when AI is making the recommendations?

I had been building a Claude Code AI Agent system at home and joined several educational programs to learn more about what was possible. When I got home from that trip, I started building with a more purposeful direction.

“I Keep Hearing This Term ‘Agent.’ What Is That?”

An AI agent is not the same thing as AI search.

When you ask Grok or Claude a question, that is search. You get an answer and you move on.

An AI agent is a system that lives on your computer. At its core is a file called agent.md. A markdown file. Plaintext, lightweight, easy for AI to read and write. This file sits on your machine or an external hard drive. It does not live on someone else’s server.

What that file does is where things get interesting.

You use it to build a structure that creates a permanent set of rules for your business. Your colors. Your fonts. Your logos. Your brand voice. Your pricing. Your locations. Your projects. What you sell. How you sell it. The more you talk with the agent, the more rules and information you give it, the more it becomes the heartbeat of your operation.

Once you have built the agent file out, your prompts stop being generic questions and start being direct commands. Here is a real example.

I am working with a commercial general contractor in Columbus. His goal is to be more aggressive with lead generation. He has access to a database with thousands of potential projects he could bid on, complete with contact information for companies looking for contractors. The problem is that the database is massive and nobody has time to comb through it every day. Leads sit there. Opportunities pass. His competitors grab them first.

Here is what I told the agent to do:

“My client is a commercial general contractor. Using his company profile, preferred customers, and ideal project value, complete the following:

Comb the database for all new projects listed in the last 30 days. Capture the contact and project information and put it directly into his CRM. Create a task list of the five most important leads to call and email every morning. Draft follow-up email templates for leads he connects with and a separate template for leads he cannot reach. Make sure he connects with every contact on LinkedIn after outreach. Build a dashboard showing total leads found, contacts established, prospective bids submitted, jobs won, and jobs completed. Organize all of this into a strategy document for his sales team.”

One prompt. The agent builds the lead pipeline, populates the CRM, writes the emails, creates the daily call list, sets up the tracking dashboard, and delivers a strategy document. His team shows up in the morning to a prioritized list of five calls instead of an overwhelming database they never open.

That is not search. That is a system. And it runs every single day without anyone asking it to.

Why This Matters for Small Businesses in Columbus

This is the difference between AI as a novelty and AI as infrastructure.

Search gives you one answer to one question. An agent gives you a machine that knows your business, watches for opportunities while you sleep, and does the work that used to take a full-time employee an entire week. For less than $100 a month.

The businesses that build this now will be the ones AI recommends to the next customer searching for a contractor, a coffee shop, or a fitness studio. The ones that wait will wonder why the phone stopped ringing.

What Comes Next

That construction example is not hypothetical. That is a system I built for a real client here in Columbus. And it is one of dozens of workflows an AI agent can run for a small business.

If you are a business owner in Central Ohio and you want to see what this looks like running live, reach out. I will show you exactly what it does and what it could do for your operation.

Jeff Binek
Founder, Cbus AI Agents
Dublin, Ohio
cbusaiagents.com

I developed a passion for health and fitness when I was 19 in the Army. My first sergeant took me under his wing once I got to my unit and started teaching me how to lift. From there, I went to conferences all over the world. Got training and certifications from the world’s leading experts. Signed up for more programs than I can remember. Bought every book on the topic and listened to every podcast I could find. Full immersion.

Then I tried to build the biggest networks I could to get that information out. Blogs, podcasts, newsletters, emails, in-person conferences, seminars, YouTube videos, all of it. Tens of thousands of hours dedicated to learning and teaching on one topic.

Most of the people in my life have a singular identity attached to me: gym owner. Fitness coach. That is an identity I’m incredibly proud of. But it only ever showed a fraction of the picture.

When Singular Focus Runs Its Course

Over the years of podcasts and blogs, I tried to drift into other topics of interest. If only for some variety and intellectual stimulation. I enjoy philosophy, financial and monetary theory, economics, political history, military history, computer science and gaming, to name a few.

I’ve kept a life of “alternate realities” since I was a teenager. Three very different friend groups: a gaming group (I was a semi-professional gamer back then), an athletic group I’d play sports with, and a social group that was mainly focused on parties and girls. I loved each of them equally and enjoyed the time I’d get to spend with each, even though I mostly found them incompatible with one another.

The same pattern showed up in my adult life. I found more and more that my identity as a gym owner wasn’t allowing me the intellectual freedom to work on and discuss some of these other topics. My life of singular focus, obsession really, had met a natural conclusion. I felt like I’d read, listened to and experienced everything I could from an input perspective, and then uploaded and talked about everything I possibly could from an output perspective. The only other option was to go back and repeat myself in new ways in perpetuity. That just isn’t something that motivated me.

Reinventing Yourself Is Simple, But Not Easy

As this realization hit me, I started to let my mind wander into other interests. I started reading on different topics. Subscribed to a whole new group of podcasts. Signed up for some new Skool platforms. Started taking Udemy courses. Completely fixed and broke the algorithm the world was feeding me.

All of the sudden, everything being sent to me or suggested to me across the internet flipped overnight.

To me, this hammers home two points:

1. Reinventing yourself is very simple, but not easy. You have to actively choose to consume differently, think differently, and show up differently. Nobody does it for you.

2. The world is incredibly flexible. If you point in a new direction, it will listen and help get you there.

I found within me something I hadn’t felt in a long time. An excitement about a new path. I found myself lost in hours and hours of work that felt like minutes. Forgetting to eat again. Sleep being pushed to the back burner. I used to have this kind of youthful energy and spirit toward the gym every single day of my life, but it had been years since I’d felt its welcome familiarity.

What Actually Drives Me

Throughout all of these years, the gym, the Army, the businesses, I’ve taken the most pleasure in helping my friends, my family, and the people in our local community who are truly good people get ahead. Build businesses. Get promotions. Get better jobs. Look better, feel better, be healthier and more present for their families. Get off prescription drugs. Earn more time to give that goodness out to others.

The conversations I’ve had recently, the things I’ve built, the value I’ve been able to bring to people around me with big dreams, lofty goals and a vision for their future. That is what has me up past midnight again.

The Barrier of Entry Is Gone

One more thing.

The people I’ve been working with over the past few months aren’t tech people. They’re the same people I’ve always worked with. Small business owners, side hustlers, friends with an idea they’ve been sitting on for years.

The difference now is that the things that used to stop them don’t exist anymore.

“I can’t afford to hire someone to build that.” You don’t need to. An AI agent can do it.

“I don’t have time to learn a new skill.” You don’t need to learn it. You need to describe what you want and let the system build it.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” That’s the part I handle.

I’ve watched people go from a notebook sketch to a live website in an afternoon. From a vague idea about a business to a branded proposal they can send to their first client, in a single sitting. Not because they suddenly became developers or designers, but because the barrier that used to separate “I want to” from “I did” is gone.

If you’ve been carrying around an idea for a business, a project, a creative pursuit, something you told yourself you’d get to “someday,” that someday is closer than you think. The tools exist. The cost is almost nothing. The only thing missing is someone to sit next to you and help you set it up.

I’ve already started helping people in Columbus build the businesses they’ve always dreamed of. And I can’t wait to do more.

What’s Coming Next

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing about these new technologies, the philosophy behind them, and what they can mean for all of us trying to earn back the most important thing: time doing what we love, with who we love.

Subscribe. One post a week. No fluff. No jargon. Just real talk about AI from someone who spent 16 years in a completely different world and found his way here.

Bottom Line

After 16 years of building a career in fitness, I found the same obsessive energy in AI. Specifically in helping small business owners and entrepreneurs use AI agents to build the things they’ve been putting off. The barriers that used to stop people from starting a business or chasing an idea are gone. The tools exist, they cost almost nothing, and they work right now.

Jeff Binek is the founder of Cbus AI Agents in Dublin, Ohio. He builds AI agent systems and hardware setups for Columbus-area small businesses and entrepreneurs. If you’re a business owner in Central Ohio who’s curious about AI but doesn’t know where to start, book a free call.