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.