I talk to small business owners every week. They describe the same problem in different words, but it’s one problem.
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.
