A year and a half ago my body was pretty much giving up on me.

I was working 16 hour days. I didn’t focus on tailoring to the needs of my body and listening to it.

I could have kept going mentally. My body literally collapsed on me. My body was saying, we can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep working 16 hours a day. You can’t keep ordering Uber Eats and eating this junk. You can’t ignore the feelings within.

As a business owner, you grow up with this hustle culture. It’s a little toxic, if I’m being honest. Everyone’s like, yeah, just shove your emotions aside. Just keep going.

The changes were very simple. It wasn’t like I needed to give up entrepreneurship. One of them was breath.

To be honest, at first I thought this was just woo-woo. What is this going to do for me?

Then you look at the math.

• We exercise once a day.

• We eat maximum three times a day.

• We breathe 25,000 times per day.

Imagine if we ate 25,000 times a day. That’s all we would be talking about.

Take back 1,000 hours a year. Subscribe to Taking My Time Back.

But people don’t understand, if you do something dysfunctionally 25,000 times every single day, the massive impact that has on your body.

It used to be that this was more of a spiritual practice. Now you have executives, you have CEOs, you have the world’s leading athletes and performers who are all using breathwork.

It’s not magic. It’s just biology. It’s physiology. You’re just using your body in ways that it was designed for.

What that actually looks like in a workday.

• Breathe low. When you take a breath in, your belly should be going out, not your chest.

• Breathe slow. Four seconds in, four seconds out while you’re working. You don’t even have to stop and close your eyes.

• Breathe through your nose. Every time you breathe through your mouth you’re activating your sympathetic, that fight or flight response. People are doing this all day long, sitting at their desk.

• Start every meeting with two minutes of it. It calms you down. It calms your team down. It gets you on the same level.

Time is the number one thing that comes up. I just don’t have time to do this.

But everyone has time. You have the capacity to make time to do anything.

Getting in touch with my breath has helped slow me down. It has made me a more calm Cory, and that’s hard to do.

I thought it was woo for the longest time. Then you realize how important it is.

We have to drink water. We have to breathe.

Leave a comment

Written with , founder of Reconnect Breath. We’re both in the comments

Take back 1,000 hours a year. Subscribe to Taking My Time Back.

Nothing Saturday, Sunday or Tuesday. I was flying back from Portugal.

I believe the reason people get into business is to take back their time. Choosing where your time’s spent. You don’t have to be a founder to do it.

01 AI is how people find you now

It only surfaces the people who keep talking publicly about their craft.

A marketing consultant told me how a client found her. A woman in Europe running an accounting network ran a deep research query on ChatGPT, looking for someone who fit a set of criteria including native English speaker. Ten people came back. She was at the top of the list, and it turned into paid work.

This week a client found me the same way.

They found me because I created human experiences. More podcasts, speaking on other people’s podcasts, all the backlinks from that. These platforms are trained on publicly available data. So if you’re talking about your craft, you’re more likely to be surfaced. They need something to reference.

Nobody wants to be sold to. It’s figuring out how to be seen without shoving things down people’s throats.

There are founders with average products who understand this and sell on authentic content. And there are people with really good products who haven't caught on, because they're sticking to the traditional approach.

02 Share the whole method

Almost nobody executes it.

I ran a tech business before this and my partners always asked why I was sharing all this with everyone.

Because we can share all the information of how we do things. It’s how we execute that matters. You can give people the answer and they’re still hiring you to do it. Go and do this yourself. Then they realize how hard it is.

The founder I spoke with Wednesday does the same on podcasts, telling people the exact way he does it. That’s how he builds enough trust for someone to buy a suit they’ve never touched.

His read: they're gonna do it their own way, they're gonna put their own spin on it. No one thinks the same.

03 / The job description will never be the job

My team pushed back on me this week and they were right.

We placed someone as a project manager and the client wasn’t happy. Their read: he doesn’t actually know what he needs. He explained it, we thought project manager was the answer. It’s us who made the wrong call. We hired an expert, just not an expert at what the client actually needs.

There’s no title. You’re hiring a person that can take on stuff.

I don’t think we’ll ever win with clients on roles, because they’re always going to change stuff. We’ve got to get used to that and make it clear to the person coming in. Your job isn’t going to be clearly defined. You will earn more trust. They will give you more to do.

What did you start out doing for me? Commenting. Then graphics. Then you started with one of my clients.

So you screen for other things:

• Whether they’ve shown they’ve done this before, wherever they did it

• Creativity, demonstrated, because we don’t want robotic stuff

• Communication style and work style, which is where most offshore hires fall down, not skill

• Whether they’ll come to you with things, because they’re going to spend more time on the platform than you

04 A new person is supposed to be slow

Almost nobody says that out loud.

Management is coaching and mentoring. Setting expectations and giving people the confidence to believe in their abilities.

When someone starts a task it’s going to be slower than when you do it, because you do it every single day. So you go to them and say it plainly.

The reassurance. It may take you a little longer today. Don’t look at the amount of time you have. As you master it, you’ll get it done faster. It’s not an issue with time. You’re just new to this.

The expectation. I expect you to get there within the next 30 days. I know you can do this. I want to see progress over time.

The permission. It’s okay to make mistakes in the beginning. We don’t want the mistakes to continue. I’m willing to let you learn on the job.

For someone more senior, there’s less leeway. Take a stab at it. Give me it when you think it’s done. I don’t want to feel like you just ran one pass through it.

05 You don’t need to know what your team is doing

You need to know that it’s getting done.

I joined a startup meditation session this week and thought, I don’t know what my team is working on right now.

We did all hands in the morning with the executive team, so I understand what they’re working on. I just don’t know how they’re doing. And I was like, I need to know.

But do I really? No. Stuff is getting done. I just need to make sure it’s getting done.

I can micromanage everything, but then nothing gets done. Versus, you’ll make mistakes, you’ll learn, I’ll get angry at you, but I still love you.

The fractional operator I spoke to Wednesday had the other half of it. As the founder you still have to be the visionary, the one who says this is the route. But you have to find a way to make them feel like they helped you get there. The more ownership they feel, the harder they work for you.

06 If I expect my team to go all in, I have to make myself available

I said this to someone on my team while we were planning live events.

Don’t worry about me. You have my calendar, so don’t ever worry about me. It’s about you. If I want to pay you guys more, I have to do more. I have to get more clients for us. Say you’ve got me as a resource. I need to do more to make you more money.

My job as a founder is to succeed for my team. If I expect them to do a lot for me, I need to make myself available. Yes, I still need to guard my calendar. But I want them to know I’m investing my time in them.

It all starts with trust. It always comes back to trust. They’re taking a risk.

I told them getting their pay up is my biggest priority. My job is to keep them happy, get them paid more, and give back to them.

07 Automation doesn’t remove the person

It moves them up.

He used to have a human manually entering every custom order into the factory. Fabric, lining, button, every measurement, all typed in by a person. Building an API to the factory would have taken a year back in the day. Now they can build it in a few weeks.

Removing the manual entry saves 90% of that person’s job. So that person is no longer an order entry person. That person is a tailor doing the fitting work. A higher level person, because the automation is more easily implemented.

Same at the front. The website introduces you to the brand and explains how the process works, and an email flow gets you prepped for the appointment. By the time a human is needed, the guy is already there.

08 Find your easy

I recorded my founder story this week.

I actually just got this tattooed on my arm. It says find your easy. What are you natural at? What is it that brings you fulfillment? I never heard that in school.

It was like, this is what society needs, this is what you need to do. But what are you natural at? What is just so much easier?

Some people are naturally school smart. They’re going to be the doctors and the lawyers. It comes easy to them. Then there’s a huge percentage of the population we force into a glass box, and it’s like, this is where you have to perform. And you start to doubt yourself, because you don’t fit into it.

Door to door sales might not be easy. It takes a special person to do sales. So sales isn’t for you. What is easy for you?

The nine to five actually sounds harder to me, because I have to take instructions from someone. We define what a harder path is.

09 · You can’t keep doing what isn’t working

You also can’t change everything every week.

I change my mind all the time because it’s not working. What am I supposed to say? Keep doing this?

That’s true, and it’s also the problem. From the outside, killing something that isn’t working and flip-flopping look exactly the same.

It’s all I do all day. I just talk and have to deal with people and their expectations. Very frustrating. I’m very frustrated at this point.

Where I’ve landed is that it’s not changing everything and blowing everything up. It’s making it better. If you’re continuously changing and trying to chase something, then sure, that can be unfocused. So where are you seeing the patterns?

A fractional operator I spoke to had the other half of it. You go into a team meeting, share your ideas, want a conversation, and people think they need to execute on it. A lot of times the founder is a little bit of the problem there. You have to make sure you’re shutting yourself up sometimes.

Her version of the fix is a timer. We’ve discussed this long enough. Give me your argument why. Great, that’s the choice, let’s go forward. And if we have to switch it up in a couple weeks, we’re going to.

I need people to take ownership. And when you own something, you have to figure out the path to go.

10 · You don’t have to quit your job to go all in

Or drop out of school, or give up the thing that’s paying you.

I had a call with my business partner this morning about the fear of going all in. He just left his nine to five. There’s a lot unknown. His business is going very well, but he knows it’s not a long-term play.

Same with me. I recently had to cannibalize part of my business because it was a short-term solution and I needed to think about the long term.

What I said to him is there’s no need to go all in at the start.

Too many people jump in thinking they have to give up their stability. Focus on the stability instead, because that’s what lets you create small experiments. Small objectives you can track, that start to validate the business. Don’t cannibalize an entire arm of the business when it’s supporting you. Use it to invest into what you want to do.

There isn’t this all-or-none mindset. Sure, maybe in some situations it applies. I actually don’t think it’s valid in all cases.

You don’t have to go all in, but you have to give it 100% focus.

It has to be methodical. There needs to be some hunger. There needs to be the mindset that you’re not gonna fail. You have to manifest.

What you don’t do is give up everything and jump in without validating certain aspects. That’s how you get your hopes up. That’s how you make mistakes. That’s how you get the blinders on.

The validation is small. Figure out what you need to validate, in small increments. Set the metrics, the things you need to see for it to be successful.

19 conversations went into this issue.

Business never comes easy to anyone. And it’s always good to talk to other founders when we’re going through something. That’s most of what this newsletter is.

Thank you for reading this far. You’ve got a business to run and you gave me part of your day. If one of these lands, try it this week and hit reply to tell me what happened.

Cory 🤜🤛

A mentor of mine once told me he was retired.

The problem was, he was working harder than anyone I knew at the time.

He was still starting new things, still in meetings all day, still partnering with people and still in it every single day.

So I said it.

“Yeah, but you work so, so hard. What are you talking about? You’re not retired.”

He didn’t argue with me.

He said, “I work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. I’m in meetings all day. I’m starting new things, but I’m retired.”

What he meant was that he got to choose what he worked on.

He got to choose where his time was spent.

That was it. That was the whole thing.

I had been thinking about retirement the same way everyone does.

It was a date on a calendar, a number in an account, the day the work stops and the reward starts.

He was telling me it was none of that.

He wasn’t waiting for some point in the future when he could finally enjoy his life.

He had already taken the decision back.

The picture I had in my head is the same one we all see on social media.

You see the four-hour workweek.

You see founders saying, “I only work an hour a day.”

You look at Instagram and TikTok and it’s people going, look at what I got, it’s not a lot of work, blah blah blah blah blah.

A lot of it is fake, but the picture sticks anyway: do the hard part now, stop later.

His version had no later in it.

I heard it and ignored it

There was a stretch where I was working sixteen-hour days.

Nobody made me do that.

I did it because I believed only I could.

That’s the part I want you to catch.

I wasn’t choosing where my time went. The work was choosing for me, and I was calling it ambition.

Mentally, I felt fine.

Physically, my body was deteriorating.

I had high blood sugar.

I was pre-diabetic.

My cholesterol was dangerously high.

I was sitting at my desk all day, getting almost no exercise and eating junk food because I was working constantly.

There were days when I had chest pain and thought, this doesn’t feel normal, but I must be stressed.

It wasn’t stress.

I used to think it wasn’t okay to nap during the day or take a little time off.

If my body told me I was tired, I ignored it.

I seemed healthy and I wasn’t.

That mindset burned me out physically, and I was lucky that I was able to make improvements.

There are people who aren’t so lucky.

They burn out physically and mentally and don’t get to come back from it.

That was when I started to understand what my mentor had been telling me.

He wasn’t describing a reward you get at the end for working hard enough.

He was describing the only version of this that doesn’t eventually take something out of you.

I started buying pieces of my time back.

• I have a dog walker.

• I have someone who comes and helps me clean around the house and helps me meal prep.

Walking my dog, doing my laundry and cooking are all things I like doing.

I hand them off anyway because the hour matters more than the chore.

The more time I get back to focus on myself, my business and my team, the more value I can create.

The question I kept asking

That was still only my answer, so when I started my podcast, I began asking the same question at the end of every conversation:

What does it look like when you have your time back?

I’ve asked fourteen people over the last couple of months.

They have different businesses, live in different countries and are at different stages of their lives.

I went back and read all the answers together.

At first, I thought everyone had answered differently.

Then I realized they hadn’t.

One answer stopped me.

I asked what life would look like when he had his time back, and he said, “Pretty similar to right now.”

I went back through the other conversations after that.

• Someone had made her weekends absolutely sacred. Nobody could get to them. All she wanted to do was cook and garden, and she shut down early enough to have dinner with her husband without talking about work.

• Someone who hadn’t played golf in fifteen years had started playing with his wife.

• One person told me, “I don’t want to retire. I’m too young. I have too much energy. I have too much still that I want to do.”

• Another said, “I work with who I want, when I want, how I want, doing what I want.”

They weren’t describing the day the work stopped.

They were describing lives that already looked a lot like the lives they wanted.

The difference was that they got to choose.

That made me look at my own week differently.

The meetings weren’t necessarily the problem.

I wanted to meet with the right people and build the right relationships.

What I didn’t want was to spend my time fixing every little thing, being in the weeds or doing work someone else could own.

I wanted to spend it on the things I’m actually good at: high-level strategy, relationships, talking to partners, talking to leads and building.

That is why I don’t think the number of hours is the definition.

I work hard today.

I can choose where my time is being spent.

I’m choosing to work on this.

When people say, “Wow, you work crazy hours,” it’s like, well, I chose to do that.

I have power in doing that.

So if you’re working hard, what aspect are you making decisions and choosing where your time is being spent?

One of the conversations changed the way I thought about that question.

She said, “You have to be so intentional with what you’re taking your time back for because otherwise we could just fill that time in with more and more and more work.”

That is exactly what most of us do.

1. You save time posting three times a week, so now you post six times a week.

2. You hand off five hours of work, so you find five new hours of work.

3. You make the business more efficient, but your life doesn’t change.

What time have you actually saved?

Taking back your time is not about collecting empty hours. It is knowing where you want those hours to go.

In one conversation, that meant more time for spiritual growth and family.

She wanted to tap into more of her “inner essence” instead of only relying on the “inner grit” that got her through the earlier years of building.

In another, it meant having enough space to reach out to someone and ask, “Are you okay?”

They knew where they wanted the time to go.

It isn’t a light switch

I have to say this part out loud: it’s a privilege.

It is a privilege to be able to decide how you work, what you do and where you put your time.

It also costs something.

Early on, buying back my time was expensive.

We spent so much time trying to get around because we were always looking for the cheaper option.

One time we drove to Boston in a single day because we couldn’t afford the plane tickets.

A lot of folks will say, well, I’m working, I can’t afford to give up my job.

That’s okay.

I couldn’t afford to give it up either.

When you don’t have financial resources, time is your currency.

That’s what you’re spending, and that’s what you’re investing.

Sometimes taking back your time means choosing to put more of it into something now because you believe it will give you more choice later.

I don’t have this all the way.

Right now, time is not always mine to control.

I’m working towards it, and I’m in control of it a lot of the time, but not all of it.

Someone described it as slowly turning down a dimmer switch.

You take pieces back over time: an evening, a weekend, a decision, a client you can finally say no to, work someone else can own, or forty-five minutes to rest because your body is telling you it needs it.

You don’t wake up one morning with nothing left to do.

You slowly get more choice over what you keep doing.

What it means to me now

I said it as plainly as I could in one of those conversations: “Taking back your time, to me, means you choose where your time is being spent.”

Then I said the rest of it: “It’s when you get to actually choose where your time is being spent versus the world telling you, this is where you have to spend your time. You have no choice.”

That’s it. Choice, or no choice.

My mentor wasn’t describing a finish line.

He had just stopped letting anyone else pick.

That one answer holds up.

What would actually change about your week if you got your time back tomorrow?

👊

Ask someone at a big company why they do not write publicly and the answer comes back the same almost every time. Their employer would not like it.

One of us hears this constantly, usually from people sitting on years of real expertise.

It is almost never true.

We came at this from opposite ends. One of us builds outsourced teams and works with founders on getting their time back. The other does product and strategy inside a large enterprise, runs the AI implementation work there, and writes a newsletter translating what he sees for other knowledge workers.

Neither of us can find the policy everyone assumes exists.

It is a perception thing

One of us writes publicly while working a full time job at a large company, and nobody there has ever said a word about it. What holds him back is smaller and much harder to fix.

You do not want to give off the impression that you are spending all your time on this. So he posts less than he easily could. The AI systems are already built and publishing at scale would take almost no effort, but people who do not understand those tools will look at the output and wonder how he has the time. Is he even working?

Nobody stopped him. He stopped himself.

You cannot fix that with a memo, and it never gets reported, which is exactly what makes it stick.

Meanwhile the audience was inside the building the whole time. A lot of that newsletter’s subscribers are his own colleagues. They are trying to figure out this AI thing too, and somebody they trust to explain it is worth a lot to them.

His coworkers are learning to do their jobs better from a newsletter his employer had no hand in.

What companies keep getting wrong

Businesses should be promoting this instead of tolerating it. The best billboard you have is a happy employee talking about their day to day, their experiences, the projects they are proud of.

Most have not caught on. They still read it as a bad sign.

Some of that fear is earned. One of us knew a coach at a big consulting firm whose public writing was all about burnout, which is the nightmare version for any leadership team.

But shutting the writing down fixes nothing there. Fix the burnout, and you get people writing about the systems they are building instead.

The writing was never the problem. It was the readout.

Two companies made opposite calls on this recently. A print specialist at Staples started making videos about her job, store traffic rose enough for the company to measure it, and Staples backed her and made her an official partner. Years earlier a Sherwin-Williams employee posting videos of himself mixing paint got fired, and went to work for a competitor.

Why their stuff beats yours

Marketing teams keep asking how to make content feel human. They are solving the wrong problem, because the person doing the work already has what nobody can manufacture.

Working inside a large company and watching how these tools get used gives the writing credibility on its own. A workflow or a guide lands differently when it is something you ran last Tuesday on a real problem with real limits.

Most of what is out there goes the other direction. There is an enormous amount of AI content about using AI to make content. The useful version takes your day to day expertise and scales that instead.

Which is why the people with the deepest expertise have the most to offer here, and why so many of them are sitting it out.

Pair real expertise with these tools and you become hard to compete with. Without that base, the tool recommends something and you have no way to judge it. An expert reads the same output and says, this is not how I do it, do it this way. Then they are steering.

One of us has an accountant friend who insists AI gets everything wrong. It does get accounting wrong for a guy who cannot have the conversation with it. But he is the expert. Give it the exact parameters and he gets most of what he needs, and he can finish the last stretch himself, because he knows what right looks like.

So the resistance is not really about the technology.

It is an ego problem. Most people pushing back do not have the humility to sit there and admit they do not know how to use this.

Spend any time online and high agency is the thing everyone says to chase. That part is fair. But high agency usually travels with a big ego, because the ego is what produces the agency in the first place. What works is agency plus enough humility to unlearn, to question why you do things your way, to pull your own workflows apart and look at the pieces.

Teach anyone these tools and the first instruction is the same. Approach it like a kid. You have to be okay feeling dumb for a while.

Everyone is starting from zero here. Expertise still counts for a lot, and learning has never been easier if you know which questions to ask.

What this comes down to

The fear underneath all of it is replacement, and it is pointed at the wrong thing.

If these tools replaced everyone, that would wreck the economy, so people will build the guardrails the way we always have. Remember Y2K, when every computer was going to shut down. What is happening instead is more output, which creates more work, which needs more people to handle it. We might lose some jobs. Net, we think this makes more of them.

Nobody is getting replaced by AI. They are getting replaced by someone with expertise who learned to use it, because that person can suddenly do ten times as much at the same quality.

Which is the real argument for letting your people write. It is not a perk you are granting them. People buy from people they see as experts, and your payroll is full of experts who are currently silent.

So say out loud that writing is welcome. Draw one clear line around confidential information and leave the rest alone. Then tell your team nobody is judged on how often they post, because that single sentence removes the fear keeping your best people quiet.

Which one is your company right now, the one that backed the employee or the one that fired him?

Both of us will be in the comments.

Somebody said that to me on Monday, about four minutes into a call I’d never planned to have. She runs a venture studio with a core team of 11. She’s been a CEO of a $100 million business before. And the hardest problem she has right now is that every client still comes through her.

11 conversations this week. Fewer than usual. I flew to Portugal on Monday night for my girlfriend’s best friend’s wedding, and the calendar went quiet after that.

Here’s what came up.

01 / You’re at the center of your business because it happened that way, not because it’s right

You shouldn’t be doing a lot of the things you’re doing. You’ve only gotten to that point because it was just natural in you building your business.

Here’s the reframe I got this week, and it isn’t about being tired. Whatever you’re building, assume that at some point you’re going to want to sell it. And if you’re stuck as a founder in the middle of it, a buyer really doesn’t like that.

So it’s not a workload problem. It’s a price problem.

We are our own worst enemy. We never get out of the way.

02 / Every channel you build is a way of buying trust

Why do we get a referral partner? Why do we do advertising? Why do we create content? Because we’re trying to build trust. And trust isn’t just given away.

Which means the channel is never really the decision. The decision is how fast you’re trying to buy something that mostly can’t be bought fast.

Same goes for your team. Your first couple weeks are to build trust. That’s not where you slack off.

03 / You can’t hand off something you haven’t decided on yet

A lot of people hire someone to solve a problem for them. You can do that. The reality is then you become reliant.

Figure out what you want first. Because if you don’t figure this out for yourself, you can’t guide them. They might get you vanity metrics, but they’ll never get you the funnel that you want.

The cleanest method I heard all week runs on price rather than job titles. Delegate all the $30 tasks. Then the $50, then the $100, then the $1,000. Then set a dollar figure for decisions, and above that number they call you. Raise that number over time.

His line for what happens next: business starts businessing.

04 / Everyone can buy the channel. Almost nobody will do the relationship work.

We can do ads. They’re channels. But everyone else can do them too.

Not everyone’s going to roll up their sleeves and say, hey, I’m going to go network. They’re just like, I don’t want to do the hard work.

That’s the whole moat, and it’s available to anyone willing to be slightly uncomfortable.

What’s actually been working for me: when a client is happy, ask them if they know one person, a CEO or a founder, who could use help with delegation. We just want to chat with them.

05 / Two kinds of client means two kinds of hire

Some clients come in with all the strategy figured out and they just need an executor. But they also need to have some courage, and the ability to speak up. They’re not just yes people.

The other one has the skill and expertise and guides the strategy. That’s for people who don’t know what they want but they know they need something.

Get this backwards and everyone’s frustrated. And when it goes wrong, the usual explanation is the talent. It’s almost never the talent.

06 / Stop fixing systems you don’t have enough data to fix yet

We’re going to build the airplane in the sky.

If we fix something, then we have to change it, and it was a waste of time. We’ll fix it as we go.

The only reason we know all this stuff is broken is because we had clients go through it and it was broken. Which means the fixing was never going to come first. Focus on building the future, not correcting the past.

07 / I’ve been blocked for weeks, and it’s because I stopped doing the thing that unblocks me

This is the one I got wrong.

Founders never talk about this, because we’re told there’s no time for emotion. I believe emotion can’t be the blocker. But by not addressing it, it becomes a blocker.

And I’ve found that I’ve been blocked lately, as I’ve kind of moved away from it.

08 / Lock in on the work, and still get on the plane

I told three different people this week that I need to work and be very focused. That’s true. I also got on a plane Monday night to go to a wedding.

When I first met my girlfriend, I told her I was coming to this wedding. Her friends said, if you make it to June, then we’ll invite him. We made it to June. I’m cutting costs everywhere else right now to stay hungry, but that one wasn’t up for negotiation.

Focus is not the opposite of showing up for people. Focus is what buys you the room to show up at all. If the locking in never converts into a flight, a dinner, a wedding, then you’re not taking your time back. You’re just working somewhere nicer.

I’m still going to be heads down for the rest of this year. I just did it from Porto this week.

11 conversations went into this, and the line I keep coming back to is that trust isn’t just given away. Every channel you’re paying for is you trying to buy it faster, and the slow way is still the one that holds.

Thanks for reading this far. You run a business and you gave me part of your day for this. If one of these lands, try it this week and hit reply to tell me what happened.

Cory 🤜🤛

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what actually grows a business.

For years I’ve spent a lot of time creating content and building an audience. And I still believe in that.

But I’m starting to realize the content isn’t the most valuable part.

It’s what you do with the attention.

The engine was never the content

For a long time I thought the content was doing the work. I don’t think that anymore.

Content absolutely matters. It gave me credibility. It made it easier to get conversations and for people to know who I was before I ever spoke to them.

But when I really look at what has worked across the businesses I’ve built, it comes back to relationships. Someone knows you, trusts you, introduces you, or tells someone else, “You should talk to Cory.”

The content gets you in front of people. The relationship is what actually creates the opportunity.

The platform is the introduction

You got the follower, the subscriber, maybe someone replied to the DM. Great. Now what?

Because someone reading your stuff doesn’t mean they know you. Someone knowing your name doesn’t mean they trust you.

How do I take the relationship off the platform?

Focus on the relationship first

That sounds obvious, but most people don’t actually do it. We turn everything into a funnel. Get the follower, get the email, get the call, close the person.

And look, I’m running a business. Of course I want business. But people can feel it when the only reason you’re talking to them is because you want something.

I don’t like talking about my business much on networking calls. I’d rather understand what they’re doing, see where I can help, see if there’s a way to collaborate, or think about someone I could introduce them to.

And what’s funny is those are the calls where people sometimes say at the end, “I definitely have some clients I could send you.”

I didn’t ask for that. I just had a conversation.

The question I should have been asking a year ago

For months I would have a great conversation with someone, hang up, and move on. Good chat. Nice meeting you. Talk soon.

I wasn’t asking who else they thought I should meet.

Then I started doing that. Just asking, “Who should I talk to?”

And people started making introductions.

I remember thinking, what’s wrong with me? Why wasn’t I doing this before?

Because even if the person on the other side of the call is never going to become a client, they might know five people who could.

Why I’m doing more live conversations

It’s becoming easier to create everything. The post. The email. The image. The video. You can make all of it look polished without putting that much thought into it.

My hypothesis is that the more of that we get, the more people are going to crave real experiences.

With live, you actually have to show up. You stumble. You go off topic. You say something you didn’t plan to say. People get to see how you actually think.

This isn’t going to work for everyone

I don’t want to make this sound like I’ve figured everything out. I haven’t.

Recently I spoke to someone who had done a bunch of podcast appearances. I asked him what had actually come from them.

Basically nothing.

For him, the strongest thing was still a happy client telling someone else about him.

Fair enough. I’m not trying to prove everyone should do this. I’m figuring out what works for me.

Business is trust

Anyone can write an email. Anyone can generate a post. Anyone can automate outreach. Anyone can make themselves look really polished.

But do I actually trust you? Do I know how you think? Do I know whether you’re someone I want to work with?

That still takes time.

That still takes a relationship.

And I’m already seeing a correlation. The more conversations I have, the faster my business seems to grow.

I don’t have the hard facts, but I see it.

Social media gets you the attention. Content gets people to know who you are. A DM might start the conversation.

But eventually you have to get off the platform.

That’s where the real relationship starts.

👊

Relationships matter more than follower counts.

We talked about how we’ve built our businesses, the friendships that came from creating online, why everything should be treated as an experiment, and why chasing a massive audience isn’t always the goal.

We also got into pricing, confidence, authentic content, AI, and why I think Substack is becoming such a powerful place to build real relationships.

If you’re building a personal brand or business online, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.

Cory 🤜🤛

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I keep the calendar full on purpose. Most owners I talk to are trying to get out of conversations, and I’m trying to get into more of them. It’s the only way I find out what’s going on inside a business instead of what gets posted about it.

Eight things came out of this week that are worth passing along. One of them I got pushed back on, and I think the person pushing was right.

01 / Tolerating an underperformer makes your client pay for it

You’ve got to be a little tougher. People try to take advantage of nice people, and if you’re too nice, they will.

That came up more than once this week, and it never looked like a performance problem going in. It looked like someone being generous.

If you feel like you’re being kind, but the client isn’t happy because of it, we’re making them pay for something they shouldn’t be.

Wait too long and it costs more, because most owners won’t decide until they’re already angry. So set the date you’ll decide by while you’re still calm about it.

I like that you want to do good for people. People don’t always want to do good for you.

02 / Task lists burn people out, and they’re the first thing AI takes

Task work is what burns people out. No purpose, no role to own, just you do A every day and A doesn’t change.

Task work also isn’t sticky. The people who leave soonest are almost always the ones doing repetitive work all day.

So a task list is both the thing most likely to get automated and the thing most likely to make a good person quit. That’s a strange foundation to build a role on.

Define the role, say what good looks like, then let them figure it out. You can course-correct.

03 / The résumé is the worst thing to hire on, because skills aren’t what fails

The résumé said they’d done this exact work at a company twice your size. Week three, you’re rewriting every message they send.

Skills aren’t what fails. Fit is.

So don’t hire off the paper. What I’m looking for instead:

• Whether they’ve learned another industry. If they’ve picked up one, they can pick up yours.

• How they communicate and how they work day to day, not just whether they can do the task.

• Whether they’re overqualified, because they’ll leave for what they’re qualified for.

And guide the question. Ask someone straight up if they’re good at this and everyone says yes. You have to ask it in a way they can’t just agree with.

04 / People won’t ask you anything until you tell them it’s okay to bug you

My assistant has full permission to bother me all day. She’s on me more than my mother was, and I handed her that permission, so it isn’t a problem.

People don’t ask because they think it’ll annoy you. What they’re not weighing is that the thing not happening is worse than the annoyance.

One message a week fixes most of it. Are we still doing XYZ? Yep. Done.

05 / Stop pitching your ideal customer and start inviting them onto things

I’m not always targeting my ideal customer. I’m targeting the people adjacent to them who can make the intro.

And when you do want the ideal customer on a call, don’t pitch. Invite them onto a podcast, onto a live, to collaborate, to tell their story. People will give you an hour for that who would never take the sales call.

After every podcast I ask who else in their network I need to meet. I tried it this week and it worked on the first one.

06 / Visibility beats having the better product

The people putting themselves out there can make up for where their product is weak.

People buy from people they trust. They don’t buy from a logo.

Which is why I don’t delegate everything. I sell delegation, so I’m careful about what I own. No one else can build the thing with my name on it, and we tried it with AI. It doesn’t work.

07 / Global outsourcing is going to change work more than AI does

The talent always existed. What’s new is that hiring across borders became normal, so it finally gets an opportunity.

AI is part of why. Someone can self-learn from zero now in a way they couldn’t a few years ago.

It works differently depending on where you’re starting from. If you’re already an expert, you know enough to catch the hallucinations and you move faster. If you’re junior and you take the output as-is, you’re assuming it’s correct and you have no way to check.

Use them to become an expert. Just don’t treat them like the Bible.

08 / I was wrong to call this escaping anything

I got pushed back on this one, usefully. Work for a company and your manager has demands. Work for yourself and the company has just as many.

That’s right, and it’s why I stopped calling this escaping.

You don’t have to be a founder either. You can make your money at the 9 to 5 and take the time back outside of it. That counts.

My mentor told me he was retired. I said you work harder than anyone I know. He said, “I’m retired. I choose what I work on.”

29 conversations went into this, and the line I keep coming back to is the retired one. Choosing what you work on is the whole thing.

Thanks for reading this far. You run a business and you gave me part of your day for this. If one of these lands, try it this week and hit reply to tell me what happened.

Cory 🤜🤛

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been wrong.

Ideas I was sure about. Businesses I was certain would work. Solutions I built because I could see exactly how they were going to land. A lot of them just weren’t the right thing.

That’s not me being hard on myself, and it isn’t a knock on you either. It’s the job. You’re making calls with half the information, all day, every day. Some of them are going to be wrong.

The problem was never being wrong. The problem is how sure we are on the way in.

Founders think we’re right. That’s most of the reason we started something in the first place. Nobody leaves a paycheck to go chase a thing they feel unsure about. So we go full swing. We don’t stop and say okay, this is my hypothesis, this is the thing I’m testing. We just build it.

Here are a few of mine.

I thought if you build something great, the money follows. I spent seven years on that first business finding out you start with who is going to pay for it, not with how good it is.

I thought I needed to be at the center of everything. It was my business and my ideas, so it had to be my client calls, my emails, my content. What actually happened is I couldn’t take a holiday, and when I got sick everything fell through the cracks.

I thought never taking a day off was a badge of honor. I bragged about it at a Christmas party in front of investors. It burned me out, and my body paid for it before the business did.

Not all of them were wrong.

I thought if I documented everything I did, the person I hired could actually run with it. That one was right. People kept asking me how, and that question turned into the business I run today.

I thought you had to start narrow to get anywhere wide. The bookstore before the everything store. Right again.

The difference between those two lists isn’t intelligence, and it isn’t experience either, because the wrong ones are spread right across twelve years.

The difference is that I found out.

Some of them I found out fast. Some took years and a lot of money.

Here is one I found out slowly.

I thought I had created the perfect model. A small entry point into the business, low commitment, easy to say yes to. A client could start without making a big decision, our person got work, we got a client. Things were taking off, and it all looked good on paper.

It was beneficial for nobody.

It was never enough time to get the client the result they actually came for, and never enough work to motivate the person doing it.

Nobody misbehaved. Everyone did exactly what the model paid them to do, and everyone came out worse.

It was a hypothesis. I just never called it one.

The good news? One question catches almost all of it.

Everything is a hypothesis until you have the data to back it up.

Do I know this works, or do I just believe it works?

Almost nothing survives that question.

But two fundamentals remain:

• Working is not proof. It’s a result you got under a set of conditions, and conditions move.

• If you can’t point to the data that made you commit, you didn’t commit. You just stopped asking.

Step 1: Write the test before you write the launch date.

1. What I think will happen. Clients who start small will see enough to want more.

2. How long it gets. Ninety days.

3. What tells me I’m wrong. Nobody expands, and the people doing the work keep asking to be moved.

I did none of it. I had a belief and a launch date.

Line three is the one that matters, because it’s the only one that protects you from yourself.

Without a number that ends it, there is always a story available. Give it another month. Things are slow right now. That last client was a bad fit.

Step 2: Hand out outcomes, not tasks.

You don’t have the hours to test everything yourself, so the real question is whether the people around you are set up to test anything at all.

“Send 50 DMs a day” is a task. You just locked that person in a box, and when DMs stop working they will keep sending DMs, because that is what you asked for.

“Generate leads” is a hypothesis. Now they try things, bring you what’s moving, and kill what isn’t.

That is how a lawyer works with you. That is how an accountant works with you. Neither of them tells you what to do.

Give me the options. I’ll make the decision.

I sat on that entry point for months, because pulling it felt like admitting the idea was bad. The idea was not bad. The test came back no.

Killing something on time is not failure. It’s the test doing its job.

Write down what you expect. Give it a deadline. Decide in advance what a no looks like.

The founders I watch struggle are not the ones who guess wrong. Everyone guesses wrong.

They’re the ones who guessed right once and turned it into an identity.

So what is the one thing in your business you have never actually tested, that you just assume works?

Talk soon,

Cory 🤜🤛

Every few weeks, a new model drops. You try it. For a moment it feels like magic, faster, sharper, finally the one. You think: this is it.

That feeling is the trap.

Because it happens again three weeks later. And again three weeks after that. A steady drip of “this is it” that never resolves into it. If each release were really the arrival, you would stop feeling the shock. A finished thing does not have to thrill you every three weeks. It just quietly holds still and lets you build on it.

The recurring magic is not proof the foundation is solved. It is the symptom that it is not.

We wrote this to explain what that means for your money this year, because the people selling you the miracle are selling you the magic feeling, and skipping the part that actually protects you.

We use AI every single day. It drafts our documents, summarizes our calls, answers in minutes what used to take an afternoon. One of us builds AI data systems for companies for a living. These tools are the best thing to happen to small business in a decade, and we are not being polite when we say that.

So this is not a piece that trashes AI. It is a piece about what stage it is really at. And our honest read is this: AI is powerful, and AI is early. Both at once.

We come at it from opposite ends. One of us spent more than a decade across the UN as a project analyst and data engineer, managing programs and the data and reporting behind them, and now builds secure AI data systems for companies. The other is not technical, built a couple of tech businesses anyway, and now builds outsourced teams for companies. Different worlds. Same conclusion.

We have not reached the iPhone of AI. We are holding the BlackBerry.

That is not an insult. Knowing which one you are holding changes how you spend every dollar this year.

Two epochs, and we are in the wrong one to relax

Look at how phones actually evolved, because the shape of that story is the whole point.

There were two epochs, and they were not the same kind of change.

Nokia to BlackBerry to iPhone was foundational. Firmware, hardware, the physical guts, the paradigm of what a phone even was. Hard problems, unsolved, being solved one at a time. Every step felt like arrival, and none of them were.

Then iPhone to now was evolutionary, software based. The foundation was settled. The touchscreen slab was the answer, and everything after was refinement on top of a solved, stable base, better camera, more memory, longer battery, new apps. Nobody was still asking what a phone was. They were building on top of a phone that held still.

Here is the mirror, and it is less comfortable than the usual “AI is early” line.

AI is in the first epoch. We are fixing the foundation. The evolution has not started.

Everything happening right now, the new model every few weeks, the demos, the experiments, your own trial and error, is foundation work. It is not refinement on a solved base. It is the messy, unstable business of solving the problems that have to be solved before a stable base can exist at all.

And you can prove we are still there with two facts you have already noticed yourself.

The first is instability. A new model every two or three weeks. A foundation you can build on does not change under you every three weeks. It holds still on purpose, so the things you build on top of it keep working.

The second is worse, and almost nobody selling you AI will say it out loud. The same prompt does not give the same answer twice. Run it again, you get something different. Run it a third time, different again. A foundation you can build on is reproducible. This one refuses to repeat itself.

Instability and non-reproducibility are not bugs on the way out. They are the signature of a foundation that is not poured yet. Which is why what you are holding is intelligent, capable, genuinely useful, and not yet stable enough to be the thing everyone builds on. It does the job. It is not the substrate.

What AI actually is to your business

Now the part almost everyone gets wrong, because it decides whether AI helps you or quietly drives you off the road.

They treat AI like an employee. A worker you hand a job to. Run my marketing. Manage my client. Build my app. Then they are surprised when it wobbles.

Wrong picture. Start one level up.

A business is not a stack of separate departments. It is a body. Sales, legal, security, operations, the promise you make to a customer, connected tissue, not boxes. And before any of it can move well, the body needs a direction. Not three directions. One.

Your vision, your mission, your goals, pulled into a single vector, one arrow the whole body is meant to point along. Call it the through-line of the business. Without it, the parts pull against each other and call the pulling “being busy.”

That vector is the thing that has to exist first. And here is the hard truth about it: no model generates it. No prompt hands it to you. Deciding what your business is for is the one job that stays human, all the way down.

So what is AI, then?

AI is the nerve. Its job is to carry that vector across every layer of the body, to keep sales, legal, ops, and the customer promise all pointed the same way, in real time, as conditions change. Wired into the right place, it is the fastest nerve your business has ever grown. The layers talk to each other, inside the company and out to your customers, better than they ever have. The body moves as one.

Wired into the wrong place, it is worse than useless. A misfiring nerve does not sit there quietly. It sends the wrong signal to every layer it touches. It tells one part to go left while the vector points right. And a nerve firing into a business with no clear vector at all does the most dangerous thing of all: it aligns everything perfectly, to nothing. Beautifully coordinated, pointed nowhere, moving fast.

So the question was never “should I use AI.” It is: does my business have a valid vector, and is the nerve maintaining it, or scrambling it?

The 95% did not fail. Their nerve had no vector to carry.

The research says you are not imagining any of this.

MIT’s NANDA initiative studied how companies were actually using AI and found that 95% of their pilots produced no measurable profit. A separate survey by S&P Global found 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI projects last year, up from 17% the year before.

Those numbers get quoted as proof AI does not work. They prove the opposite.

Look at the 5% that won. They did not have better AI, everyone rents the same models. They had a valid vector and a nerve wired to maintain it. Clear jobs. Skilled people reading the signals. Small, specific tools bought to fit the body, instead of one grand system grown from scratch and bolted onto a business that never defined its own direction.

The gap between the 95% and the 5% was never the technology. It was whether there was a business vector for the technology to carry. That is not what failure looks like. That is what an unsolved foundation looks like, and it is an opportunity for the people who wire it right.

(For the record: the MIT figure is a preliminary study and has drawn methodological criticism. We lean on the 5-versus-95 split, which is the durable part, not the raw headline.)

The coffee-machine lie

Now the most dangerous way to wire it wrong. The one being sold hardest right now.

Vibecoding sells you a coffee machine. Add your idea, press a button, pick your outcome, an app, a store, a booking system, and out it comes, finished. The pitch is that the whole IT layer was just coding all along, and now the machine does the coding.

But that layer was never just coding.

It is the nervous system. It carries the vector between every part of the business. It is the immune response, the thing quietly deciding what is safe, what is legal, what is a threat, what keeps you alive in a market that is actively trying to breach you. The coding is the last inch of all of that: the execution, after the real work of keeping the body aligned and defended is done.

Vibecoding does not automate the nervous system. It deletes it and hands you the twitch, one visible output, with none of the vector-keeping or threat-sensing underneath. You get an app that looks alive and a business that cannot feel where it is being touched. The person who built it cannot read it. They do not know what customer data it can reach, where that data goes, or what breaks first when something goes wrong.

No prompt restores that. It is not a matter of a smarter prompt or a better structure. The model can write the coding layer. It cannot be the nervous system, because carrying your specific vector across legal, security, and strategy is exactly the human judgment that was never automatable. You cannot delete the nervous system and call the reflex a company.

Why copy-paste is not just lazy, it is impossible

This is where the demos fall apart, and it is worth understanding the mechanism, because it changes what you do.

You have seen the videos. Someone runs a prompt and something magic comes out. They sell you the prompt.

Here is what they do not tell you. That was their run. Remember the second fact from earlier: the same prompt does not give the same answer twice. Their model produced that output, once, for them. Yours will never reproduce it. Not because you did it wrong, because the thing is non-reproducible by nature.

So the prompt they are selling is not a recipe. It is a lottery ticket that already paid out for someone else. Copy-paste cannot work, because the thing being copied does not repeat.

That is not a reason to ignore the prompt. It is a reason to use it correctly: as inspiration, not instruction. Take it, then tweak it to your body, your context, your vector. And that tweaking, knowing which signal actually serves your direction, is not busywork. It is the whole skill. Hold that thought, because it is where this piece is going.

You rent the nerve, and the rent is going up

Most people assume AI keeps getting cheaper, because right now it is.

That is the introductory period. And you have lived through it before.

Streaming was cheap until it had your library. Rideshare was cheap until the drivers and the competitors were gone. The free tier narrows. The flat fee becomes a meter. The intro price quietly expires.

This is not an AI story. It is the pricing playbook of every layer that gets you dependent first and charges you properly second. Stakeholders require profit. They always, eventually, come to collect.

The scale just makes it louder. The five biggest US cloud companies are spending somewhere between $660 and $690 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and the newest guidance runs higher still. Sequoia’s David Cahn first pegged the revenue needed to justify that spending at $600 billion a year, and has revised the gap upward every year since as spending outruns income. The industry is nowhere close. Investors want their money back, and the meter is already turning, the big providers are moving customers from flat plans to usage-based billing.

Which is why our advice to clients is the same every time. Automate for efficiency, not for hype. Every place you wired AI in for the thrill of it, rather than a measured gain, becomes a line item that bleeds the moment the meter turns on. Choosing where and when to deploy is not caution. It is cost discipline against a price you can already see coming.

“AI replaced them” is usually a costume

Watch what actually happens when a company cuts staff and credits AI.

It announces AI efficiency and a hiring freeze in the same breath. The AI is real. So is the freeze. But notice which one was the goal.

AI rarely eliminates the role. It gives a name to a decision that was already being made. “We are leaner because of AI” tests better with a board than “we stopped hiring to protect margin”, even when they are the same sentence.

Because the nerve still needs a brain. Someone has to read the signals, catch the misfires, and decide what a result means for legal, for security, for the customer, for the vector. That judgment does not come from the model.

So here is the part the layoffs miss. When the model becomes standard, the model is the part everyone has. Your people are the part only you have. Train them like you train the model, deliberately, continuously, as an investment and not an expense. A business that upgrades its AI every quarter and its people never has automated the wrong thing.

The BlackBerry era is an assignment, not a wait

Here is the mistake hiding inside the phone analogy, and it is worth naming so you do not make it.

Real BlackBerry users did nothing to earn the iPhone. Apple shipped it; they bought it. If that is how you read our story, your move is to sit still and wait for the good AI to arrive.

That reading is wrong, and it will cost you.

The AI iPhone moment is not a product someone ships to you. It is a capability you build. It arrives for whoever spent the foundation years mastering applicability inside a real business, cost, plan, structure, efficiency, a valid vector, a well-wired nerve. It does not arrive for whoever waited.

Which is why “copy-paste a prompt” is not a small sin. The copy-paste crowd and the mastery crowd are both standing in the foundation era right now, and today they look identical. They will not look identical when the foundation finally stabilizes. One spent these years learning to wire the nerve to their vector. The other spent them pasting lottery tickets. The gap is invisible now and decisive later.

Nokia is the warning, and not for the reason everyone thinks. The comfortable myth is that Nokia laughed at the iPhone and called it a toy. The record says otherwise: its own 2007 internal analysis, made public in 2025, flagged the iPhone as a serious threat and predicted much of its impact, and when the chairman polled twelve top executives, ten said it was dangerous. The dismissive “no chance” line belongs to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, not to Nokia.

Seeing the era is not the same as adapting to it. Nokia had the foresight and lost anyway, the same lesson the 5% teach. The winners are not the ones who see best. They are the ones who execute. And the mistake runs both ways: in 2007 the fatal move was calling the new thing a toy; in 2026 it is calling it finished.

So the moat was never the nerve

Now the turn everything has been building toward.

One day the foundation stabilizes. The models stop lurching every three weeks, they start reproducing themselves, and the nerve becomes trustworthy enough to build on. That is the iPhone moment. And at that exact instant, something happens that most people betting on AI have not thought through.

The nerve stops being an advantage.

Because everyone has the identical one. The iPhone made a great camera universal, and the moment it did, nobody’s edge was “I own a camera” anymore. The edge became whoever could see the shot. The model is about to go universal the same way. When the technology becomes the substrate, it stops being what makes you different.

So if it was never the nerve, what is the moat?

It is the creativity in which signal you send. The judgment to know, out of a thousand things the nerve could carry, which one actually maintains your vector, the one your competitor renting the identical model never thought to send. That is not a possession you can buy later. It is a way of seeing, earned specifically now, in the messy foundation years everyone else is trying to skip.

And it ties straight back to the thing that felt like a nuisance a few sections ago. The same prompt never repeats. If it did, you could copy the winner and the moat would collapse. It does not, so you cannot, so the creative signal-judgment is the one asset that survives the substrate going universal. The non-reproducibility that makes copy-paste impossible is the same fact that makes your judgment un-copyable.

That is the answer to the question every business owner is actually asking and almost no one answers honestly. If everyone has the same AI, why would anyone need me? Because mastery was never the model. It is what you learned to signal through it while everyone else was pasting prompts.

The BlackBerry test

Three questions. Five minutes. Not to say no to AI, to say yes with confidence, to the right things, without waiting for the hype to settle.

Before you spend money on an AI product, or change your team because of one, ask:

1. Does this still work if the price doubles? The introductory period is ending and the meter is turning. If the math only works at today’s prices, the math does not work.

2. Who on my team can tell when the signal is wrong? Output that looks finished is not the same as output that is finished. If nobody can catch the misfire, you have not automated the work. You have automated the mistake.

3. Would my client pay more or less if they knew? If knowing you use AI would make them pay less, you are cutting costs, and your prices will follow the cut. If knowing would make them pay more, because a skilled person is driving the nerve toward a real vector, you have found your premium tier.

Pass all three, and go all in. Fail one, and you have not found a bad tool. You have found the wrong place to wire it. Move the nerve and test again.

The magic is the trap. The foundation is the work.

So the next time a model drops and it feels like magic, like this is finally the one, enjoy the feeling, and do not believe it. The magic is the tell that the foundation is still being poured. The evolution has not started. We are all still in the epoch where the hard problems get solved, which means we are all still early, which means you still have time to be one of the people who arrives at the iPhone moment already fluent.

Do the foundation work. Set a real vector, decide what your business is actually for. Wire the nerve to carry it, carefully, with a human reading every signal. Train your people like you train your model. And build the one thing the universal substrate can never hand out: the judgment to know which signal is the right signal.

That is the moat. That is the play. The nerve is real, the era is early, and the direction stays yours.

You are holding a BlackBerry. Use it every day, wire it in carefully, and build what makes you different out of the one thing it can never copy.

What is the one job in your business you would wire AI into tomorrow, and the one you never would? Tell us below. We will both be in the comments.

Written with . She spent 12 years with the UN, builds secure AI data systems for companies, and writes about what everyone misses between the lines in business and tech on her Substack. Subscribe to her..

It’s the currency that I have. And the more time I put in now, the more time I get out later.

25 conversations this week. Clients, prospects, two Substack lives, six podcast records of my own, a guest spot on someone else’s show, people who will never buy anything from me, and my team.

Here’s what came out of them.

01 / AI doesn’t reduce your workload. It raises your capacity, so there’s more work now, not less.

Now I can take way more phone calls a day and I don’t have to do summaries. But I still have to check in. I still have to be the face. My team has to support more clients.

Just because AI is automating a lot of things doesn’t mean it’s reducing the amount of work. It’s actually creating more, because we have the ability to do more.

02 / If a task needs emotion or judgment, it needs a human. If it’s the same every time, give it to AI.

1. Does it involve emotion? AI is not bringing the emotion.

2. Does it involve judgment? Humans are better at judgment, we can think of all the different scenarios.

3. Is it the same thing every single time? Then give it to AI.

The part people skip is what happens after. That system you build for the AI is a great thing to delegate to a human. Someone to own it, manage it, make sure it keeps doing what it needs to do.

03 / The detection has moved past obvious AI graphics. It’s catching custom designs now.

For the last month my posts were going viral. 70 to 100,000 views pretty much every day with a style I created. Then last week it died completely, and I had the lowest impressions I’ve ever had in my life.

Everyone already knows a quick AI image gets flagged. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that custom designs are getting caught too. Real design work, iterated on, built to look bespoke. Same with video.

Most people think they’re safe the moment the output stops looking obviously generated.

What stopped working, with data behind it:

• AI-generated graphics

• Custom designs built with AI, even good ones

• Strong hooks and tight formatting on their own

What I’m going to test next, with no data behind it yet:

• Real photos of me

• Video of me talking

• Stories only I could tell

I don’t know if these are going to work. This is an assumption. But I’d rather be testing authentic, real things than keep getting penalized by the detectors.

Everyone knows they can use AI, so I think these systems are actually trying to force us to be authentic. They don’t want quick, dirty content anymore.

04 / Your pricing model is an incentive system, and the wrong one rewards the wrong behavior from everyone.

I learned about the Cobra effect this week and then realized I’d built one. An incentive that produces the opposite of what you intended, named after a bounty on dead cobras that ended up creating a cobra farming industry.

Mine was a small entry point. I thought making it easy to start would be helpful for everyone, and it turned out to be beneficial for nobody.

Nobody misbehaved. Everyone did exactly what the model paid them to do, and everyone came out worse.

The question isn’t whether your model is profitable. It’s what behavior it’s paying people to produce.

05 / Delegate the decision, not just the task.

The decision doesn’t need to come from me. I don’t want it to come from me. You’ve got to learn how to make decisions and stick with your decisions.

Same thing on a different call about a tool we’re building. What people are great at is building the thing. What they suck at is implementing it. So one person’s job becomes the change manager, and their job is to annoy everyone until they implement these things.

A tool nobody adopts is worthless.

06 / A good client hands you the reins. A bad one hires you and then won’t let you solve it.

They know what they need done, they just don’t have the time, and they trust you with it. The ones who don’t have that, and it makes sense that some don’t, we usually just tell them we’re not the right fit.

When you’re starting out you take everyone, because you have to, and that’s how you learn what the difference feels like.

07 / Start with the problem, not the solution.

If you start working on the solution, you’re going to make mistakes, because you never diagnosed what you were solving.

1. Diagnose the problem first.

2. Lay out all the potential options.

3. Pick.

It’s like when I hire a lawyer. The lawyer gives me options, and I say, okay, here are my options, I’m willing to take this risk, let’s go test it. An accountant is the same. They never tell you what to do.

Give me my options and I’ll make the decision.

08 / Everything is a test. It only becomes the solution once the data says so.

Most people start at the wrong end. They have an idea, they build it, then they go try to sell it. Somewhere in there was an assumption nobody ever checked.

We don’t know what’s going to work until it works. And even if it works for a month, next month it changed.

• Build out your hypotheses before the month starts, then run them

• If something’s working, double down until it stops working

• Don’t decide off your gut when you can test instead, because the data doesn’t lie

25 conversations went into this issue.

Thank you for reading this far. You’ve got a business to run and you gave me part of your day.

If one of these lands, try it this week and hit reply to tell me what happened.

Cory 🤜🤛

Almost every piece of advice you get about time is about protecting it. Save it, claw it back, do less with it. That’s backwards, and it’s why so many owners have the same number of hours this year that they had last year.

You have to put the time in now to get the time back later. It’s an investment that pays a dividend, and it compounds. I’m overinvesting my hours in the first years of this thing’s life because I know the payoff is huge.

None of that is what gets sold to you.

Everyone sells the payout

Scroll for ten minutes and someone will tell you he works one hour a day. Fine as a goal. Then it gets sold as the method, and that’s where I have a problem.

Those people are real. They’re also outliers, and you’re being handed an outlier as a set of instructions. You never see the thousands who ran the same playbook and got nothing. They didn’t make a video about it. The evidence for the fantasy is loud and the evidence against it is silent.

The Influencer Marketing Factory, 2026 US Creator Economy Report. The accounts teaching you how easy it is are the thin slice at the top, and they got there through years you didn't watch.

Time is a currency

Most owners never invest their time. They conserve it. They keep it in the mattress for a rainy day, then wonder why there’s never more of it than last year. A dollar in the mattress loses value, and an hour you refuse to put anywhere doesn’t sit still either.

Every hour goes to one of two places.

Nobody argues about this when the currency is money. I put money back into the business instead of pulling it out, and not one person has ever called that an expense. They call it an investment, because the word already carries the idea that the payoff shows up later.

Owners ask what an hour costs them and never what it returns

An hour on a call with someone who will never buy from you gets filed as a waste. An hour clearing your inbox gets filed as productive. Same hour, and only one of them pays you back.

Where I put mine

My calendar is full on purpose. The business is delegated and I could empty it, but the hours I bought back went straight into the thing that pays me back the most: conversations.

Business is all relationships and people are forgetting that. I take the calls off the platform, talk to as many people as I can, and make sure I’m adding something for them. Most of those aren’t sales calls. A conversation with someone who will never buy from you looks like a wasted hour on a Tuesday. It isn’t. It’s the deposit.

That’s how I ended up teaching delegation in the first place. I couldn’t keep up with building all those relationships. Now I have conversations all day and it turned into the work.

Do the unscalable thing first

I’m on LinkedIn and Substack talking to people one at a time, supporting them, asking them to recommend the newsletter. None of it scales. That’s on purpose. I need to prove it works before I can put the process in someone else’s hands.

Everybody wants to run that backwards. Skip it and you’re handing someone a process you never validated, which is how delegation fails.

The conversation is the deposit. The documented process is the interest. The hour you get back next year is the payout.

Nobody posts the timeline

I tell people the truth on the first call. You will not see much difference for three months. It took me eight months of posting every single day before I saw anything.

Being selective is the other half

If you read this as “take every call,” you got it wrong. Guarding your calendar doesn’t mean emptying it. It means deciding what gets in. Full of the right conversations, closed to the rest.

From scarcity you say yes to everything. From abundance you can say no, and saying no to the wrong thing is how you protect the right thing. Not every conversation is a deposit. Some are just spending with extra steps.

What the payout looks like

A couple of months ago I got a horrible flu. There was nothing I could do except be sick. The team ran itself, because the systems are in place and because I trust the people inside them. Having a team is one thing. Being able to trust that team is another.

Nobody would film that. And the time it freed up didn’t turn into an empty calendar. It turned into more conversations, which is the same deposit going back in.

The people posting the empty calendar are showing you the end of a story and calling it the beginning. I’d rather tell you the boring part. Talk to people, add something real, be selective about who, and keep doing it for longer than feels reasonable. It takes a lot of time to make a diamond.

We spend our days on opposite sides of the same idea.

One of us spent his career in the corporate world, in program, project, and change management inside big companies, including a major bank, and now writes about getting AI to work. The other is not technical, built a couple of tech businesses anyway, and now builds outsourced virtual teams for businesses.

We both love AI. It makes our lives so much easier. It makes things so much more efficient. A lot of the systems we run every day are built on it.

And we keep landing on the same conclusion from different directions.

These tools are only as powerful as the individuals managing them.

That one sentence runs through every argument this space keeps having. Let’s take them one at a time.

The right human is the superpower

Business owners come to one of us every single day and say: can’t I just get AI to do this?

And it’s partially true. AI does play a role. AI can do the tasks.

But underneath the question is a bigger one. Can I just replace the entire team? Can I remove the judgment? Can I remove the thought process that goes into something?

That part is not true, and here’s what we’ve noticed about why.

With all of these tools, there is so much more we can do now. There are so many more things to manage. They’re not creating less work. They’re creating more work, because we can do more.

And when you find the right person, someone you can delegate that system to, that’s when you create a superpower. The AI is great. It does its job. It deals with a lot of tasks. But when you find the right human to tie around the AI you’ve built, the systems you’ve built, that’s when you’re unstoppable.

Finding that right human mostly means someone with a bit of experience. They know when things have gone wrong before. They know what to look for in the quality of the outputs. They know where the judgment calls work and where they don’t.

A CTO one of us knows put it plainly. He uses AI every single day in his work. But take an expert, someone who’s been developing for 20 years, and give them the power of AI, and that’s the right person given the right tools. There’s a difference with someone who knows how to orchestrate and take control of these tools. That’s when you see the benefits.

Remove the experts from the picture and it can be detrimental for an organization.

Some very big companies just proved that in public.

The layoffs are walking back

Klarna laid off 700 people. The founder was all gung-ho on AI: we’re going to implement all these systems, we’re going to get rid of all these people.

And guess what? He walked it back.

When he did it, he realized the human experience was really affected by it. There’s a ton of case studies now showing big companies that tried to go all in on AI, and what they found is that if you do that, you lose the experts who knew the ins and outs of the system.

When companies make these big layoffs, they’re losing a lot of institutional knowledge. They’re losing the people who know what broke last time and why. And when you’re trying to roll out complex workflows, it’s the edge cases, the ones that only pop up every few months or every few years, that break the attempts to just automate everything.

The businesses that were loudest about replacing people are walking those statements back. They still see the value. They also understand now how much the human experience matters.

Gartner expects that by 2027, half of the companies that cut staff because of AI will be hiring those people back, often under new job titles.

And the people are only part of the bill. The rest of it is hiding in the costs.

THE COSTS NOBODY BUDGETS FOR

A lot of people think AI lets you skip steps. You can get a lot of output faster, yes. That doesn’t mean you don’t need judgment. You still need to know exactly what the acceptance criteria are. What does good look like? What does great look like?

And just because you push something to a system doesn’t mean you stop paying for the maintenance, the tuning, the testing, the upgrades, the compliance, the regulatory side.

You can’t lock, load, and forget. It’s constant, continual improvement, and the technology is moving so fast that something that made sense 12 months ago is now completely out of date.

Scale makes it sharper. If you’re running a workflow hundreds of thousands of times a day and the cost of the models changes, how does that work for your business?

Because the prices will change. Right now AI is really cheap, but the costs are subsidized. There are costs we don’t even know exist yet. The whole theory says AI makes everything cheaper, and it can make things more efficient, but there are a lot of hidden costs, and the prices these tools are at right now are not going to stay at this level forever.

Sometimes the hidden costs arrive overnight. A friend of one of us was building everything with AI coding tools at his company. Then the company started going through SOC 2 compliance, and it changed everything. He had to adopt a new system. Everything had to attach to a protection layer. The cost went up by $25,000 overnight, and now he’s scrambling to train the entire team.

Go in anyway. Just do it with your eyes open.

And if it’s complicated for a small business, step inside a big company and the weeds get thick.

INSIDE BIG COMPANIES, THE WEEDS GET THICK

Some big companies can’t use AI for hiring. They can’t use it for anything credit related. They can’t use it for anything risk or compliance related.

If you’ve never worked in those industries, you might be thinking: what on earth is going on there? Aren’t those the most logical places to use it?

It comes down to the human in the loop.

If you’re the regulator of a bank, and someone is the head of anti-money-laundering compliance, the regulator does not care that an AI wrote the report that had a mistake in it. It’s that person’s problem. They have the regulatory obligation. They’re a named officer. In some cases the fine goes to them personally, the bank can’t reimburse them, and the penalties are actual criminal penalties.

When the fine has your name on it, you check the work yourself.

Security stacks on top. A lot of businesses are terrified of rolling out AI because you don’t just need a cybersecurity team that’s good at cybersecurity anymore. You need a cybersecurity team that’s top notch at AI as well. That’s a double skill stack just to keep the business safe, and it barely exists in the market.

The rules are still being written too. In Australia there’s already a push toward regulation of AI in the workplace, possibly even required consultation with workers before AI changes how their jobs run. Every country is going to be different.

Hold all that together and the strange scenes make sense. There are people in financial services who can only use AI on their personal devices at home. At work they’ve got one basic assistant and nothing else, so their experimentation happens after hours. Which is wild, and it’s where parts of the corporate world are right now.

The leaders getting through it fastest give their people the honest version. If we roll these tools out, we’ll be competitive for longer, our cost economics get better, and we won’t be doing panicked layoffs later. As soon as people have that click, that it helps them do things better, faster, and cheaper, they stop fearing it.

Big companies will adapt. But their speed limit is real, and it shapes the jobs question everyone is asking.

THE JOBS QUESTION, WHERE WE DON’T FULLY AGREE

This is the topic with the most fear in it, and the fear is real. One of us makes short videos about AI at work, and the amount of anti-AI hate he has to block in the comments is shocking. The gap between how business people talk about these tools and how much of the workforce feels about them is wide.

The two of us read the question differently, and we’d rather show you the honest split.

One of us is more cautious.

A lot of workflows can replace teams doing work that’s well documented in standard operating procedures with clear acceptance criteria. The most technical, most experienced people in those functions will be fine, because they can bring that experience and judgment to bear. The more junior to mid-level roles are in for a real struggle unless they rapidly fold in AI skills. If you’re a younger person with a specific domain expertise, the most important thing you can do is push AI as fast and hard as you can, so you can chase that skill bar and not get left behind.

He’s also watched companies offshore work for years, and the lesson transfers. What’s the difference between offshoring something and pushing it to a workflow? You still need skilled people onshore. You don’t just send the work away. Someone still has to be responsible, be accountable, understand what’s going on, and deal with crises. That’s a skill set, and it operates at a much higher level. Managing teams of agents and AI workflows is that same emerging skill. And there’s a span of control: beyond a certain number of functions, balls get dropped, and AI still can’t magically clean that up.

The other one of us is bullish, especially on young people.

Now is the time to go out and learn. Back in the day, a developer had to get really good at finding information on Stack Overflow. That was the skill. Now the tools research it and hand it to you in seconds, so someone starting their career needs to learn how to ask the right questions instead. That information is all there, and a curious person can build the skill for the price of a subscription.

Experience can even cut the other way. A friend of his works at a development firm where everyone is an experienced developer, and their biggest challenge is adopting the new systems, because their architecture principles rely on outdated practices. All those previous systems in place make it very difficult to change. A junior carrying nothing can move faster than a veteran carrying everything.

Where we land together is one word.

Race.

Whatever your seat, whatever your level: be racing to learn these systems, to catch up, to close that skill gap, while the tools are cheap and almost nobody is far ahead of you.

And the people racing fastest are not who you’d expect.

THE SMALLEST BUSINESSES WIN THE MOST

One of us has friends who sped up their legal research by an order of magnitude with things they put together themselves. They didn’t pay a vendor an enormous sum for an AI legal research tool.

And no, these aren’t tech people playing lawyer. These are lawyers doing it.

For smaller firms and independent operators, that’s where the opening is. The tools have the power. They have the domain expertise. The gap was only ever the technical skill and the quality control, and that gap is closing. Why pay tens of thousands a year for software that does half of what you can put together with a subscription?

Smaller firms might grow from two or three people to ten, because they can run a bigger book of business profitably, at high quality. And the bigger companies that are too slow, whose policy says we can’t use AI, are going to feel that competitive pressure.

One of us was talking to a client about exactly this. The client had hired a firm to build software for his company, and he didn’t really understand what he’d bought. He didn’t have the power to build it himself eight months ago. Now he’s doing it himself, and he moves a lot faster, because he understands the problem so well.

You’ll start seeing businesses everywhere building their own software. That will be what makes them competitive. They’ll have their own tools nobody else has, because they understand the problem way better than everyone else.

Eighteen months ago, one of us couldn’t build his own website. Now he’s built the website and he’s building his own applications.

The prize is bigger than revenue, though. The work itself gets better.

THE BORING PARTS WERE NEVER THE JOB

Think about fulfillment in your work. The joy in your work.

Doing repetitive tasks day in, day out is the mindless stuff people don’t want to be doing. We know teams where people spend their days just checking off the box, and it’s not enjoyable for them. They’d rather be solving problems and thinking about the role as a whole.

Those tasks can go away, and it’s better for everyone.

Think of a lawyer. Do they want to draft the same repetitive contracts every single day? Does the doctor want to run the same intake questions? No. They want the complex problems. They want time with the patients.

One of us used to build technology in healthcare, and the running joke was the doctor pulling up WebMD on their phone mid-visit. Before that, they left the room to check the big encyclopedias. The value was never the walk to the encyclopedia. The value was the judgment about what the information meant for the patient in the room.

Push away the less interesting, repetitive stuff and people get to focus on the interesting problems, the ones that give you some self-actualization at work.

Honestly, if the two of us never had to look at an email or a spreadsheet again, we’d be happy.

Which leaves the last topic. The one about you.

BE THE MASTER OF YOUR OWN DESTINY

There is so much opportunity for folks right now.

It’s like when the iPhone came out and everyone started building mobile apps. We’re there. Everyone has an opportunity to build something really awesome, to get better at their craft, to learn more, because the information is so readily available.

And right now is the cheapest it’s going to be. There’s so much investment capital in these tools, and every company is trying to lure people onto theirs. It’s cheaper than it’s ever been to build a business and to grow a business.

Even if you’re skeptical, lean in. If you don’t lean in and learn, you can’t make informed decisions about where you take your business.

So whether you work for a company, you’re building something, you’re a solo practitioner, or you’re a professional: take the power into your hands.

Get started. Start using these tools. Start adopting them. You don’t need to understand the complexities. Figure out how to use it in your world.

We’re all masters of our own destiny in this era.

The person who runs the system is the most valuable part of the system. It might as well be you.

What’s one task in your world you’d hand to AI this week?

Tell us below.

We’ll both be in the comments.

I keep watching the same thing happen, and it’s starting to worry me.

Someone builds a tool in a weekend. AI did most of it. Clean interface, works on the first try, and they post the screenshot like they crossed a finish line. Founder now. Company started. And I understand the feeling, because for years the build was the wall. It was the part that took money you didn’t have and a team you couldn’t hire and six months you couldn’t spare. So if the wall is gone, you must be most of the way there.

You’re not. You’re at the start. The wall was never the business. It was just standing in front of it, big enough to hide everything behind it. AI knocked it down, and now you can see the whole field, and the field is exactly as hard as it always was. Probably harder, because everyone else is standing in it too.

Here’s what I actually believe after building five companies. AI made building a product almost free, and it made building a business harder, because it flooded every market with products and changed nothing about how you get a stranger to care. The thing it can’t do, the part where you reach people and earn their trust and give them a reason to choose you, that part didn’t get easier. It became the entire game.

The cheap part and the expensive part

There’s a product and there’s a business, and people keep using the words like they mean the same thing.

The product is the thing. The app, the offer, the service. AI is incredible at helping you make the thing. A person with no technical background can now go from an idea to something real and working in a few days. Not a mockup. A functional product someone could actually use.

The business is everything around the thing. Who needs it. How they find out it exists. Why they pick you over the ten people who shipped the same idea last Tuesday. How it gets paid for. Who answers when it breaks. What keeps it running on a day you’re not there.

You got the first one handed to you. You got nothing on the second. And the second one was always the actual work. You just couldn’t see that before, because the building was hard enough to keep the truth politely hidden. Now the building is easy, so the truth is sitting out in the open. You can have a brilliant idea. You can build it perfectly. And if you can’t get it in front of anyone, you don’t have a business. You have a really good product with no path to anyone’s wallet.

That’s not a motivational point. It’s a math point. And the math has been sitting in plain sight for years, long before anyone was building anything in a weekend.

This was killing companies long before AI

Here’s the part that should stop you. The thing that kills most companies has nothing to do with how good the product is. We have the receipts on this, and they go back years.

CB Insights pulled apart 431 companies that died and looked for the real cause. The number one answer wasn’t bad code or a weak product. It was that they built something the market didn’t want, or couldn’t be reached with. Poor product-market fit, in 43 percent of them.

“Ran out of money” shows up on 70 percent of the post-mortems, but that’s the body finally stopping, not the disease. The money runs out because nobody’s buying. Nobody’s buying because the thing got built before anyone confirmed they wanted it, or it got built fine and never got in front of the right people.

Read that again with AI in mind. The number one killer of companies, for years, before any of this, was building something nobody needed or nobody could find. That was the wound. So what did AI actually change about it? It made that exact mistake faster, cheaper, and easier to make in bulk. It didn’t cure the disease. It handed the disease a printing press.

You can see it already. Of the giant wave of AI startups that launched in 2024, a huge share were dead inside two years. Most of those founders weren't fools. They built working products. Some had paying customers. They died anyway, because a thin layer on top of a model, with no audience and no relationships and no reason to be chosen, is not a company. It's a feature in a company costume. The report I trust most on this said it without flinching: capital isn't the bottleneck anymore, distribution is, and the founders still saying "we'll figure out how to reach people later" are this year's casualties.

Building was never your bottleneck. It was just the loudest problem in the room.

AI walked in and quieted the loud one. Now you can finally hear the quiet one that was doing the actual killing.

The success story everyone points to proves the opposite

Now, someone always pushes back here, and they push back with the same example every time. So let me take it head on, because it actually makes my case better than I could.

I’m not going to pretend AI changed nothing. It changed who gets to compete, and that’s real and it matters. People love to bring up Base44. One guy. He didn’t train a model, he wired existing ones into a product, grew it past 250,000 users with almost no marketing, and sold it to Wix in about six months for roughly 80 million dollars, as the only shareholder. One person. That’s the dream everyone’s chasing, and it actually happened, so doesn’t that blow up everything I just said?

Look at what he owned. The niche. The distribution. The customer. The data. The build, the part AI helped with, was the cheap part of the whole story. He won on every single thing AI didn’t give him. The one-person miracle everybody cites didn’t win because he could build fast. He won because he understood a specific group of people, got the thing in front of them, and held the relationship with them directly.

That’s not the exception to the rule. That’s the rule, standing in the middle of the best-case scenario. The tool got commoditized. The relationship didn’t. So no, you don’t need to outspend anyone or hire an army to build anymore, and that’s a genuine gift. But the gift is time and capability. It is not a business. What you do with the time you got back is still the whole thing, and almost everyone is spending it building more product instead of building the one thing that carries a product to revenue.

The work just moved to the part AI can’t touch

So if AI didn’t take the hard part away, where did the hard part go? It moved. It moved to the exact place a model can’t follow you, and once you see the line, you can’t unsee it.

AI can’t make someone trust you. It’ll write the email. It can’t be the reason the person opens it. It can’t hand you an audience either. It can help you make things for one, but it can’t be the years of showing up that make a stranger care what you say. It can’t build your network. It’ll draft the message, but the reason that person takes your call is yours to earn the slow way or not at all. It can’t sit with a customer through a hard moment. It’ll close the easy ticket and go quiet the second real money or real reputation is on the line. And it can’t be accountable. When something breaks, a person has to answer for it, and that person is the business. The model is just a tool the business happens to use.

This is the part that flips the whole thing. When building was hard, building was an edge. You could win just by being the one who managed to ship. That edge is gone. Everyone ships now. So the only ground left to win on is the ground AI can’t stand on, and all of it is slow, all of it is human, and none of it can be generated over a weekend. The trust. The audience. The systems. The people.

The shiny part went free. Which is exactly why the unshiny part just became the most valuable thing you own.

So go build the business

That’s a nice thing to say and a harder thing to do. If I’m going to tell you the building was the easy part, I owe you the hard part in plain terms. So here’s how I’d actually go after it, and the order matters more than any single move.

Build the audience before you build the product. This feels backward and it’s the most important thing I’ll say. Most people build the thing and then go hunting for someone to sell it to, which is the exact path into that 43 percent. Flip it. Start talking publicly about the problem long before you have the solution. Get in front of the people who have the pain while it costs you nothing. Then you’re not launching into silence, you’re launching to people who already know you and already have the problem, and the product becomes the easy part. Which, thanks to AI, it now is.

Once you have people listening, make them prove they actually want it. Get a wallet out before you write a line of code. Liking your idea and buying your idea are two completely different things, and the gap between them has buried more companies than any competitor. Pre-sell. Ask for money on the thing that doesn’t exist yet. It’s uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the whole point, because it’s the only honest test of whether you have a business or just a circle of people being nice to you. If not one person will pay before you build, building it won’t fix that. It’ll just cost you three months to learn the same lesson the slow way.

And you don’t have to find those first people from scratch, because you already know more of them than you think. You believe you’re starting from zero. You’re not. Every past client, old coworker, and person in your world who still takes your call is distribution you already own. That list is the one thing the person who shipped your exact product last week doesn’t have. They have your tools. They don’t have your relationships. Distribution isn’t a channel you go rent later, it starts as the people who already pick up the phone.

Get all that right and you’ll have demand. Then you need something to hold it, which means building the boring spine. The people and the systems behind the product. Who handles the confused customer. What happens when an order goes sideways. How it runs on a Tuesday when you’re sick. None of that is fun and none of it gets done by a clever prompt, and it’s the exact difference between a business and a demo that breaks the first time real life touches it.

Notice what AI did and didn’t do across all four of those. It didn’t do any of them. What it did was buy back the time so you could. That’s where it actually belongs in the story. Not as the business, as the tool that frees you up to go do the human work the business is actually made of. Every hour it saves you is real. Just don’t spend that hour making more product nobody asked for, which is the trap almost everyone falls into. Spend it on the customer, the audience, the relationships, the systems. Use the speed to go exactly where the machine can’t follow you.

What doesn’t change

Strip all of it back and you land on something simple. AI made building a product nearly free, and that’s not small. It’s one of the biggest shifts any of us will see in our working lives. But it didn’t touch the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are the business.

You still need people who want the thing. You still need a way to reach them. You still need their trust, and the systems, and the people to hold it all up. Not one piece of that got automated. All of it got more important, because it’s the only part left that’s actually hard.

I build with AI every day, so this isn’t me being precious about the old way. It’s the opposite. The more I lean on these tools, the more certain I am of the thing underneath them: the relationships it takes to build a business matter more now than they ever have. Not in spite of AI. Because of it.

Everyone can build now. Almost nobody can get the thing into the right hands. Pick the second one. That was always the business.

You've got the build handled.
So what are you actually doing this week to find the people you built it for?

I spend my life online now. I know you can be in a specific area and find driven people, but I find I’m able to do it by just being online and having conversations every day.

I’ve been building businesses for the last 12 years, and over that time the main purpose has always been to get back freedom. To be able to make decisions, to be able to spend my time where I want to spend it. So no, I don’t want an empty calendar. Most folks are their own worst enemies. They’re still doing everything themselves. They’re not delegating, they’re not building systems, and they’re getting in their own way of success.

Here’s what this week taught me.

01 / Everyone sent me a task list. Nobody sent me an outcome.

Every single person came with a list. Inbox, calendar, posting, follow ups, research.

I get it. That’s how you think about the work when you’re the one drowning in it. You’re not thinking in roles. You’re thinking about the eleven things you didn’t get to yesterday.

But here’s what happens. You give someone a list, and what you get back is the list. Nothing more. The second something shows up that isn’t one of the five things you wrote down, guess where it goes. Straight back to you.

I’ve lived this from the other side too. I could do commenting. We used to do that back in the day, but it was just a task. And what happens? You’re just checking the box.

You don't just need someone to do the work for you. That's what AI does. It checks off tasks. You need someone to own an outcome for you. Happy clients. More meetings booked. If you focus on an outcome, the task can change over time. If you focus on the task, they get hooked on the task.

The clearest example is content. Why are you creating content as a business owner? To generate leads. To book calls. So your goal isn’t actually the creation of the content. The tasks are creating content, but the outcome is get me more booked calls.

And that changes everything about what the person does. Now they need to be looking at what’s trending. They need to be able to build lead magnets, make design, engage, and move to a different platform if the one you’re on goes cold.

The missed question that a lot of folks creating content never answer is: what is it that you actually want? What’s the end goal?

Most people can’t answer it. And if you can’t answer it, the person you hire can’t either.

The move: Write the outcome in one sentence before you write a single task. Then list everything this person could work on, not what they'll start on.

02 / The skill was never the problem

This one took me two years to figure out, and I’m still a little annoyed about how long it took.

We used to connect people to someone and then manage them. That’s the whole process. And a lot of folks go through a bunch of duds. A marketplace focuses on having people with different skills. That’s not the problem you’re solving.

It always comes down to the right fit. It took me two years to realize this. The right fit doesn't just mean they have the skill set. It's making sure they have those skills and the right personality type, the right communication style, and the right work style.

It doesn’t matter if a person has the skill. That person might not be successful with a certain founder.

Someone told me this week about interviewing three people from an agency for the same role. She asked each of them a version of the same question. You have direct messages to send, comments to leave, and then someone messages you directly. What goes first?

All three either gave the wrong answer or talked around it. She came out of every interview thinking, what is going on right now.

That question is the whole test. It doesn’t measure a skill. It measures whether the person can think when nobody is watching.

The other thing I look for is whether they’ll push back. A lot of times what happens is they say yes because they’re not confident, or because they think that’s the answer you want. You need someone who can push back and just tell you the truth. Someone who isn’t scared to do it.

And there’s a version of this that catches people off guard. No person wants to do repetitive tasks, even though they might say they do. It bores them, it burns them out. So a lot of times the folks who are willing to do it are the duds, because it’s super boring. The person happily volunteering for the mindless work is usually telling you something.

So what’s the scenario question you’d ask before your next hire?

03 / When everything gets cheap, the human gets expensive

This came up in four separate conversations this week with people who don’t know each other, which is usually how I know something is real.

Technology used to be the expensive component. Now everyone has the same technology. It’s meant to increase capacity and efficiency. But people start to realize, oh, you’re doing this because you’re trying to save money. So why am I paying you more for this?

The more expensive thing is the human. The systems the human is managing. The teams.

Look at Klarna. In 2024 they told everyone their AI assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. By May 2025 the CEO was on Bloomberg admitting they went too far. Cheaper, but worse. Now they’re hiring humans back.

Content is where you can watch the same thing happening right now. Everyone at first was like, well, I can just get AI to write it. That’s great, you do that. But then everyone starts using AI and everything starts sounding generic. And then the specialist becomes the premium tier.

A ghostwriter I spoke with has a perfect answer for this. When a client asks why they shouldn’t just use AI, she says, okay, you use AI, and I’ll use AI, and we’ll see who performed better. Their response is always the same. Well, you’ve been doing this longer.

That’s it. That’s what you’re paying for.

A person with experience and skill is deadly with AI. Just because you're using AI doesn't mean you're trained to spot the deficiencies. AI gives you something, you publish it, and when the facts are wrong, who do you blame? It's not AI's fault. It's your fault for not recognizing it.

If I'm paying a premium for your service, I don't want to talk to a chatbot. I don't want to yell at a computer. I want to yell at a human.

The move: Name the one thing in your offer that only works because a person does it. Stop apologizing for its cost and start leading with it.

04 / Twenty years of experience just met a reset start line

Here’s the flip side, and it came from two different calls in the same day.

Everyone’s focused on the fear. Oh, we’re all going to lose our jobs. No, there are going to be new jobs created that we might not see right now. The jobs that are task based, just repeatable, mindless work, people don’t find enjoyment in that anyway. So it’s giving them an opportunity.

We're all starting at zero with AI. You can have 20 years of experience, but when it comes to using these tools and learning how to learn on them, the gap has shrunk. The person who just graduated and the person with 20 years of experience, they're all starting from zero with these tools.

And nobody is going to hand you the head start. There aren’t programs teaching this. There isn’t a university degree for it. You have to self-learn. You can put yourself in a position where it doesn’t matter where you live, because you can become an expert.

It’s also what people actually want to hire right now. Someone who knows how to use these tools, or is able to figure them out, because they’re so new. It’s not like seeing Microsoft Word on a resume. Most people just need to learn, and the ones who do become the person everyone else needs.

One hour this week, one tool. That’s the whole head start.

05 / People don’t buy from people. They buy from experts.

Every podcast I go on, they ask for the origin story. Tell your story, all of that. It’s scripted now, and I keep thinking, is this really what you need me to share? If someone really cared, they’d go search it, because it’s all out there.

People buy from people, but the truth is people buy from people they see as experts. If I know the topics I'm talking about well enough, people will reach out and ask me questions. And if people are asking you questions, you know you've done something right.

That’s also how I think about sales, and it’s why I don’t have a script. Sure, scripts work for some people. I’m trying to give them as much value on the call as I can. If I lead with enough value, they’ll want more. And I know they’re seeing value because they keep asking me questions, like I’m the expert. They’re trying to learn from me. People make their buying decisions based on one thing: can you help me solve this problem? Are you a big enough expert? Can you come in and be the doctor?

A leadership coach who has been doing this for decades said the most important thing in today’s world is to share your expertise as an expert. To be the knowledge expert. Not to retell the story you’ve told a hundred times.

And the conversation is the one thing AI can’t replace. It can’t sit on a call and be the person someone trusts. I’ve tried the avatars. It isn’t there.

Try this: next time someone asks for your story, answer in two sentences and spend the rest of the time teaching the thing you actually know.

Taking your time back doesn't mean having all the freedom in the world. It's actively choosing to work on something you enjoy. You've actively made a decision, therefore you've taken your time back. You could be doing this for someone else, but you've chosen to do it for yourself.

Everyone gets into business for freedom. That’s my thinking. You choose to be a business owner because you want a little more control over your life. You want to choose where your time’s going. You want to build something that’s meaningful for you.

I said this to a founder who left a stable corporate path this week. You could have kept doing the corporate stuff, making money. It was sustainable. Or you could jump into something that’s your own, and you chose to do that. Because if you don’t, and you’re just giving all your energy to everyone else, you’re building something for someone else. And I think it takes more energy to do that.

The mechanics come down to three questions I keep coming back to:

• How do you say no to clients?

• How do you guard your time?

• How do you value your time?

Nobody says the first one is easy. You’ve earned that freedom. You’ve earned the ability to choose. And a lot of people feel obligated to say yes to everything when they’re first starting out, which is understandable, and also the exact thing keeping them where they are.

So what’s on your plate right now that you never actually chose?

07 / I killed the profitable part of my business, and I’d do it again

Here’s the one that cost me something.

When I started this business, I had a different model in mind, and it was working. It was all task based, all hourly. But who wants task based, hourly work? The people who don’t want to spend much. So we were attracting the wrong clients, the team was unhappy, and it was very hard to scale.

A couple months ago I just said we've got to scrap everything. I was comfortable cannibalizing the business, because I knew we had to make the change. Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions for a long term future, and I think a lot of business owners forget that.

So we moved away from the task based, hourly model to a retainer. It’s fair, it’s more motivating for the team, and it lets us focus on a role and outcomes instead of hours. It’s a better model, more scalable and more manageable. Sometimes you cannibalize the short term to build the long term.

That’s the week.

31 conversations went into this issue. If there’s one thread through all of them, it’s this. The most important step is just being able to say no. It’s knowing what you want and then being able to do that.

Thanks for giving me your time. If one of these lands, try it this week, then hit reply and tell me what happened.

Cory 🤜🤛

Every time someone hands you work, you run it through a loop. Take it in. Do it. Look at it. Decide if it’s right. Ship it.

That loop is the whole job. Always has been.

So here’s the question I keep hearing from owners, and it’s the wrong one. “Why would I pay a person to do that? AI can do it.”

Sometimes that’s true. A lot of the time it’s true. But watch what happens when it becomes your answer for everything.

If AI can do all of it, every part of every task, then follow that thought one more step. AI can do your job too. You just argued yourself off the org chart and didn’t notice.

The people who say “AI can do it” about everything think they sound lean. They actually sound like they don’t know what their own people do. And I want to show you exactly where they’re wrong, because once you see the loop, you can’t unsee it.

The part AI is actually coming for

Let me be fair before I push back, because pretending AI is weak would make this whole argument dishonest.

AI is fast. It’s often good. It is coming for a huge pile of work, and most of that work should go. The tedious stuff. The repetitive stuff. The rule-based stuff nobody on your team ever wanted to touch in the first place.

The data backs this up. Harvard Business School looked at how AI is hitting the labor market and found job postings for the most automation-prone roles dropped 17%. That number is real. Those tasks are getting eaten.

But look at the other number in the same research. Roles built around human judgment working alongside AI grew 22%. The work didn’t vanish. It moved.

That’s the part the “AI can do it” crowd misses. AI came for the task. It did not come for the person. Those are two different things, and treating them as the same thing is how you make an expensive mistake.

What happens when you cut the human out of the loop

You don’t have to guess how this plays out. Companies already ran the experiment for you.

Klarna is the cleanest example. The CEO stood up and said AI could already do all the jobs humans do. He meant it. Headcount went from around 7,000 people toward a target under 2,000. He made the “AI can do it” bet with the whole company.

Then he walked it back. He told Bloomberg the company had focused too much on cost, that the quality had dropped, and that they were hiring people again. His own words about what they’d built: lower quality.

This isn’t one weird story. Forrester’s 2026 Future of Work report found 55% of employers regretted laying off workers for AI reasons. Gartner projects that half the companies who cut jobs for AI will rehire for those same roles. The pattern is so common analysts gave it a name.

Every one of those companies made the same move. They saw AI handle the fast part of the loop, the “do it” part, and assumed it could handle the whole loop. Take it in. Do it. Judge it. Decide. Ship it. They cut the human out of all five steps because the machine looked done.

But “looks done” and “is right” are not the same place in the loop. The machine closes the first gap. It does not close the second one. Cut the person who closes the second one, and the quality leaves with them. Klarna learned that in public.

The loop is the whole point

So stop asking “can AI do this?” It’s a yes or no question, and the honest answer to a whole job is almost always no. That question forces you to bet the entire role on one coin flip.

Ask a better one. “Which part of this can AI do?”

That question splits the work the way it actually splits. Run any task through the loop and the parts sort themselves.

Take it in. Do it. Those front steps are where AI is strong. The drafting, the sorting, the first pass, the tedious lift.

Judge it. Decide. Those back steps are where a human lives. You know the client well enough to catch what’s off. You feel when the tone is wrong. You catch the thing that’s technically correct and completely inappropriate, and you own the call.

The Fiverr CEO put this better than I can. He told his whole company AI was coming for their jobs, his own included. Then he said the part everyone skipped. It frees you to do the things humans are special at. The nonlinear thinking. The judgment calls. The taste. The strategy. Even if you automate every repetitive task you have, that doesn’t make you replaceable. It makes you more useful.

That’s the reframe. AI taking the front of the loop doesn’t shrink your person. It hands them more room to do the back of the loop, the part that was always the actual work.

How to point AI at the right thing

Here’s how you do this on a real task instead of nodding along.

Sort the task, not the job. Never decide “can AI replace this person.” Decide “which steps of this task is AI good at.” The first framing is a layoff. The second is a system. One of them blows up in your face like it did for Klarna.

Find where the loop closes. Every task has a point where someone has to look at the work and own it. That’s the close. A throwaway internal note closes on a glance. A proposal to a client you’ve had for three years does not, even if the draft generated in four seconds. Find that point before you decide anything.

Put your person on the judgment, not the typing. This is the move most owners get backwards. They keep their person doing the front of the loop, the slow manual lift, and never let AI touch it. Flip it. Let AI carry the front. Put your human on the judgment, the context, the call. That’s where their hours are worth the most.

Raise the bar instead of cutting the head. When AI takes the tedious work off someone’s plate, you have a choice. Cut the person, or give the person more of the work only they can do. The owners winning right now pick the second one. Same person, pointed at harder and better problems. That’s not charity. That’s how you get more out of the same headcount.

The reframe

Every task is a loop. AI is fast on the front. Humans own the back. The skill isn’t choosing between person and machine. It’s knowing where in the loop the human belongs, and putting them there on purpose.

Do that and AI doesn’t replace your team. It makes every person on it more powerful, because they spend their hours on judgment instead of busywork.

Refuse to do that, answer “AI can do it” to everything, and you end up exactly where Klarna did. Cheaper for a quarter. Worse for good. Rehiring the people you swore you didn’t need.

AI came for the task. It was never coming for the human in the loop. Don’t be the one who hands it the whole thing and calls that strategy.

What’s one task you tried to hand fully to AI, and where exactly did it break?

A successful tech founder reached out to me last week. Smart guy, real company, the kind of person you’d assume has this figured out.

He didn’t message me about strategy or hiring or any of the things you’d expect. He messaged me because he’d just realized he needs to become a content creator. Brand new to him. A little uncomfortable, honestly.

I wasn’t surprised. I just nodded along, thinking: this is exactly what I’ve been saying.

Back in January, I made a prediction. If you’re a founder, you’re already a content creator. You don’t get a vote. Because in 2026, people buy from people and content is how you build the company now.

That founder felt it before he could explain it. Most of them do. They just figure it out too late. I know, because I was one of them.

The back seat felt like discipline. It was a leak.

In my last two businesses, I took the back seat on purpose. I told myself it was the smart move. I was the operations guy I ran the systems, kept the machine humming, and let everyone else be the face.

Putting myself out there felt like a distraction from the real work. So I stayed quiet. It stunted my growth. I just couldn’t see it at the time.

The back seat does something you can’t see from inside it. You’re still trying to steer. You just can’t see the road. A founder steering a company they’re hiding inside of is a backseat driver grabbing the wheel.

I had two tech companies before this one. I exited the last one and sat there thinking, okay, what now? For the first time, I didn’t have an operation to disappear into.

So I made a call. I was going to put myself out there. I started writing online. Nothing fancy. I wasn’t trying to become an influencer I wanted to get better at saying what I actually meant. That was the whole goal.

And then something happened I didn’t plan for. People started reaching out. Asking me questions. Doors opened I didn’t know were there. Not because my work got better. Because people could finally see it.

The founder job description changed. Most founders just didn't get the memo.

People buy from people… who they see as experts

For a long time I figured content was a nice-to-have. Then I looked at how people actually buy now. It comes down to one thing: they buy from people they see as experts. And the data is a little wild once you pull on it.

Then there's the buying side. Edelman and LinkedIn survey nearly 2,000 decision-makers every year on how they actually choose vendors. Three numbers stuck with me.

That last one is for anyone who isn't the biggest name in the room. A founder with a sharp point of view can beat the market leader inside a buyer's head. That used to be impossible. Now it's just Tuesday.

And attention moved to video.

It’s not only the written stuff. In 2025, short-form video became the single highest-ROI content channel and the kind that wins isn’t polished, agency-produced. It’s lo-fi, founder-on-camera.

I felt all of this before I saw it in a study. When I started posting, old colleagues surfaced in my replies. Then people started asking me for advice not pitching, asking. And when I reached out, they answered faster, warmer, more often. Same message I’d have sent two years earlier, except now a following did the vouching before I said a word.

I didn’t buy that reach. I didn’t run ads. I just stopped being invisible, and the doors loosened on their own.

Three companies. Three worlds. One move.

So why doesn’t everyone do this?

For most of business history, being quiet was fine. Better than fine. You did good work, it traveled by referral, and staying out of the spotlight cost you nothing. That world is gone. A lot of founders just haven’t noticed it left.

Your buyer makes up their mind about you before you ever get to talk. They search you. They scroll. They watch how you think or they notice you’ve never said a single thing.

Silence isn’t neutral anymore.
It’s a vote. Against yourself.

Founders think not posting is the safe, disciplined choice. It used to be. Now it’s the riskiest thing you can do because while you stay quiet, someone with half your experience is showing up every week and becoming the obvious choice.

Nobody fears posting. They fear being seen.

When founders tell me they don’t have time for content, that’s almost never the real reason. I know, because it wasn’t mine either. The real reason is that putting yourself out there is exposing. You’re not avoiding a task you’re avoiding being seen. Judged. Screenshotted. Argued with by someone you’ll never meet.

You become a person with a public point of view. That’s a different version of you and plenty of founders would rather stay hidden and lose slowly than step out and risk looking dumb. I get it. I hid for two companies. Nobody screenshots a process doc.

The hard part was never learning to write. It was deciding I was allowed to be seen. That’s the actual work. It’s why so few people do it.

And yeah it costs something.

I’m not going to sell you the easy version where you post twice a week and customers come running. This costs something real.

The difficulty is the whole moat. If it were easy, everyone would be visible and none of it would mean anything.

The content didn’t open a door. It became the business.

That’s almost where I quit too. I’d started writing, it was working, and then it started eating all my time right as I took on my first full-time consulting gig. I physically could not do it all.

So I brought in a VA. And I knew the one thing that makes someone deliver: a clear plan, full context, no guesswork. I built the system, then handed it over. That VA crushed it.

Then people started asking how I did it. Same line every time: “I’ve had no luck with VAs. They never know what to do.” The missing piece was never the person. It was the management layer.

I didn’t set out to build BlueMoso from a LinkedIn post. I set out to stop being invisible. The company came downstream of that one decision.

You don’t actually get to opt out.

This isn’t a “post three times a week and win” piece. Three things are true at once:

But you can't get around the core of it. You're already a content creator. The moment you became a founder, this became part of the job same as hiring, same as selling. You don't get to vote on whether the role changed. You only get to decide how you show up inside it.

A founder with a voice or a backseat driver.

…wondering why the deals keep going to someone less qualified than you.

I rode in the back seat for two companies before I figured that out.

Don’t waste two companies learning it.

I think this is one of the best moments to be alive in business in a long time.

Not because of what AI can do. Because of where it put everyone.

For most of my career, the people ahead of you were way ahead. They had ten years of reps you didn’t have. They had the rolodex, the scar tissue, the muscle memory. You were starting the race a hundred meters back, and the gun had already gone off, and you spent the first part of your career trying to close a gap that kept moving.

That race got reset.

A new starting gun fired. And for the first time in a long time, almost nobody is more than a few steps down the track. The expert. The beginner. The person who’s been doing this for twenty years and the person who started last Tuesday. Most of them are standing on roughly the same line, blinking at the same new thing, with no idea how to use it yet.

We’re all starting at zero. And that is the opportunity.

I want to tell you why I believe that, show you the data that surprised me, walk you through what it looks like on the ground, and be honest about where it breaks. Then I want to give you the move, because there’s a window here and it’s already closing.

I started at zero once, and it took me a decade to climb out

Let me start with me, because I lived the slow version of this.

I struggled to create content for most of my life. Writing did not come naturally. For years my stuff was a mess. I’d sit down to write something simple and an hour later I’d have three bad paragraphs and a headache. The people I watched online made it look effortless, and the gap between them and me felt like it would take ten years to close. So I did what you do. I put in the years. I wrote badly, then less badly, then okay, then good. It worked, but it was slow, and the whole time the people ahead of me stayed ahead.

Here’s what gets me. Someone starting today, with the same gap I had and the right AI tool sitting next to them, can collapse a chunk of that ten-year climb into months. Not because they’re more talented than I was. Because the tool now hands them the thing I had to build by hand.

That’s not a sad story for me. It’s the whole point of this piece. The climb that used to take a decade got shorter for everyone. And the only people it doesn’t help are the ones who never start climbing.

The race got reset, and the math flipped

Here’s the part most people get backwards.

The popular story goes like this. AI shows up, the experts get even better, the gap widens, and everyone without experience falls further behind. It sounds right. It’s wrong.

The actual research says the opposite. Over and over.

A study of more than 5,000 customer support agents found AI lifted productivity 14% on average. Fine. But split it by skill and the picture changes. Novice and low-skilled workers improved 34%. The most experienced agents? Almost nothing. The tool didn’t widen the gap. It closed it. The newer people moved down the experience curve fast, because the AI was handing them the playbook of the top performers.

Then there’s the BCG study. 758 consultants, some of the sharpest knowledge workers on the planet, split into groups with and without GPT-4. On tasks the AI could handle, the consultants below the average performance line jumped 43%. The top performers only gained 17%. The people with the least experience got the biggest lift.

Translators told the same story. The lower-skilled ones gained roughly four times what the high-skilled ones did.

This keeps happening. Researchers have a name for it now. They call it skill compression. AI helps the person at the bottom more than the person at the top, so the distance between them shrinks.

The thing experience used to buy you was knowing how to do the task. That's exactly the thing AI now hands a beginner for free.

What this looks like on the ground

I run a company that places virtual assistants, so I get to watch this happen across a lot of people at once. And the pattern is the same one the studies describe, just up close.

Two years ago there was a clear ceiling on what someone newer could take off your plate. A VA could handle the defined, repeatable stuff. The work that needed judgment, a good first draft, a feel for tone, that stayed with you, because handing it over meant getting back something you’d have to redo. So you held onto it. Not because you wanted to. Because the gap between what they could produce and what you needed was too wide to bridge quickly.

That ceiling moved. With the right tool and a clear system around it, the same person now produces first drafts that are genuinely close to what you’d have done yourself. The research brief. The client update. The first pass at a proposal. Work that used to require years of reps now requires a good process and a willingness to learn the tool.

Notice what didn’t happen. The AI didn’t replace the person. It raised their floor. It took someone who was three steps back and moved them up to one step back, on the exact work you used to guard. That’s skill compression with a face on it.

And it points straight at the opportunity for anyone who leads a team, which I’ll come back to. But first, the honest part, because if I stop here I’m selling you something.

Zero isn’t actually zero. Here’s where it breaks.

I’d be lying if I said AI turns a beginner into an expert. It doesn’t. And you should know exactly where the line is, because it’s the difference between using this well and embarrassing yourself.

Harvard researchers had marketing people and developers try to do the job of specialist web analysts, with AI helping. The finding was sharp. AI helped everyone with the thinking part. Generating ideas, framing the problem, organizing the approach. Beginners did almost as well as the specialists there.

But on the execution. The deep, hands-on, you-need-to-actually-know-this part. The beginners couldn’t keep up. They didn’t know enough to spot where the AI was wrong. They couldn’t fill the gaps because they didn’t know the gaps existed.

There’s even a trap waiting for experts who get cocky. In one part of the BCG work, on a task that sat outside what the AI could actually handle, the people leaning hardest on the AI did worse than the people with no AI at all. They trusted a confident wrong answer. The AI didn’t say “I’m not sure.” It doubled down, apologized, and restated its wrong answer with more data behind it.

So what does experience still buy?

This is the question that matters, and it’s where I land differently than the “experience is dead” crowd.

Experience is not dead. It got repriced. The part that’s worth less is the doing, because AI does the doing now. The part that’s worth more than ever is the judging.

Think about what’s actually left when anyone can generate a decent draft of anything. What’s scarce is the person who can look at that draft and know, fast, whether it’s any good. Whether it’s true, or the right answer to the wrong question, or a confident paragraph that’s confidently wrong.

That’s taste and judgment, and knowing which question to ask in the first place. None of it comes free with the tool. It still comes from reps.

The new moat isn't doing the task. It's knowing whether the output is good.

The beginner who can generate but can’t judge will ship garbage with confidence. The experienced person who can judge but refuses to use the tool will get out-produced by someone half as seasoned. The winner is the one who uses the tool to do, and uses their judgment to check.

Zero isn’t truly zero. The gap went from a mile to a few steps. But a few steps you can close. A mile you couldn’t.

The opportunity nobody is actually taking

Now the part that should make you move.

The gun went off. Everyone’s roughly on the line. And almost nobody is running.

Sit with those numbers for a second. The single biggest leveler to come along in a generation is sitting right there, free or close to it, available to almost everyone. And three out of four people aren’t using it. The starting gun fired and most of the field is still tying their shoes.

This is what I keep telling business owners. The advantage right now has nothing to do with intelligence or experience or even talent. It’s being one of the few people who decided to run.

Who this hits hardest

Two groups are getting this exactly wrong, in opposite directions.

Both are wrong for the same reason. They're still measuring the race by the old starting line.

So run. Here’s how.

Knowing the field is wide open doesn’t help you if you stand still. Here’s the move, whether you’re an owner, on a team, or starting from scratch.

If you lead a team, find who’s one tool away

This is the one I care about most. That person on your team you wouldn’t have handed a stretch task to two years ago? With the right AI tool and a clear system, they can now produce first drafts that are close to yours. The work you’ve been hoarding because nobody else could do it well enough is exactly the work AI just made handoff-ready. Find the person who’s one tool away from leveling up, give them the tool and the system, and keep your own judgment in the loop to check the output. That’s a kind of output you couldn’t get out of your team last year.

The window is open. It won’t stay that way.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.

This moment is temporary.

Right now the field is wide open because almost nobody has put in their five hours. But five hours isn’t much. The day is coming when everyone has cleared it. When using AI well is the baseline, the way email and spreadsheets are the baseline now. Nobody brags about that. It’s expected.

When that day comes, the reset is over. The starting line firms back up. The people who ran early will have months or years of real reps with the tool, plus the judgment to use it well, and they’ll be the new far-ahead. The people who waited will be doing the old thing all over again, trying to close a gap that keeps moving.

The window where everyone is at zero is the window we’re in. It is the cheapest the head start will ever be. That’s not a reason to feel relaxed. It’s the reason to move now.

The only thing that separates people now

The old question was “how far ahead is everyone else?”
The new one is simpler: who’s actually running?

For most of history, you measured yourself against people who had a decade on you, and the math was depressing. I know, because I spent ten years closing one of those gaps the slow way.

That question is dead, at least for now. The experience that used to decide the race got repriced. The head starts got smaller. The tool that closes the gap is free and sitting on the line next to you. And most of the field hasn’t moved.

I don’t think the winners of the next few years will be the most experienced people. I think they’ll be the fastest learners who started running first, regardless of where they began.

You’re at zero. So is almost everyone else. The only thing that separates you now is whether you start moving, before the line firms back up.

👊

If you’re standing at this new starting line what’s the one task you’re going to point AI at this week? 💬👇

For years, I was the bottleneck in my own business. Every decision ran through me. Every follow-up. Every task nobody else knew how to do. I told myself that’s just how it works for a small business. We’d fix it later, once we grew.

That thinking kept me stuck.

Here’s why it doesn’t work anymore: customers don’t care how big a business is. They compare it to the best experience they’ve ever had anywhere, and that experience is fast, reliable, and nothing gets missed. A three-person team doesn’t get graded on a curve just because it’s small.

Doing more with less used to require a big payroll, but it doesn’t anymore. AI can handle the repeat work. The right person can handle the work that needs judgment. And a few simple systems hold it all together. A small team can act like a big one without turning into one.

Every decision, every follow-up, every task nobody else knows how to do runs through one person. That's not a small-team quirk. It's the actual bottleneck.

Start with the standard, not the size

Most business owners plan around what they think they can handle. “We’re small, so we can only do so much.” That’s the wrong starting point.

Instead, ask: what does great actually look like for this business? How fast should a customer hear back? How quickly should a project move? What should never fall through the cracks?

Write that down. The gap between that picture and what gets delivered today is the to-do list. Size decides how a business gets there. It shouldn’t decide how high it aims.

Size sets the method, not the standard. The gap between what's delivered today and what great looks like is what needs building.

Split the work into two piles

Before fixing anything, sort the work. Every task falls into one of two piles.

Pile one: repeat work. Scheduling, first drafts, data entry, the same customer questions again and again. This work follows a pattern. It doesn’t need judgment. It needs speed and consistency.

Pile two: judgment work. Decisions, relationships, hard conversations. This needs a real person to think it through and own the outcome.

Take an hour. List everything that happens in a normal week. Mark each item: repeat or judgment. This one hour shows exactly what to fix first.

Take an hour, list every task in a normal week, mark each one repeat or judgment. That one hour decides everything that follows.

System 1: Let AI handle the repeat work

Start here. It’s the fastest win, and it buys time for everything else.

Look at the repeat-work pile. Find the most repetitive task on it, something with clear steps and low risk if it’s slightly off. That’s the first task to hand to AI.

Three questions decide it: Does the task follow a clear pattern? Could the steps be written down well enough for someone else to follow? Is a small mistake easy to catch and fix? Yes to all three means it’s ready for AI.

Move one task at a time. Don’t try to automate everything in one weekend. Set up the first task, watch it for a week, adjust, then move to the next one.

The point isn’t to remove people from the picture. It’s to free them up for the work that actually needs them.

Three yes answers, and a task is ready for AI. If it’s repeatable but high-stakes, AI can still draft it. A person reviews before it ships.

System 2: Give the judgment work to the right person

Here’s the trap I fell into for years. Once AI frees up time, the instinct is to fill it right back up doing everything alone. I became the one handling every decision, every relationship, every problem, because I was the only one I trusted.

That’s not progress. That’s just being the bottleneck with more free hours.

Judgment work still needs a human. It just doesn’t need to be the owner. Finding someone with the right skill and temperament, and handing them real ownership instead of just tasks, is what makes the difference. There’s a gap between “do this thing I’m telling you” and “you own this outcome.” Give them the context and the authority to make the call themselves, and that gap closes.

The right person needs real ownership, not just tasks. Give them the context and the authority to make the call themselves.

System 3: Write down what “good” looks like

This is the piece most small teams skip, and it’s the one that makes the other two safe to rely on.

Three simple things matter here:

1. A short written standard. What does “done right” look like for each task? What are the rules? What should never happen? This lets AI or a person do the work without anyone watching over their shoulder.

2. A checkpoint for the risky stuff. Not everything needs review, but deciding which outputs do, and who checks them, is essential. Often AI drafts it, a person reviews and owns it, and only the biggest calls reach the owner.

3. A simple way to check if it’s working. Picking one or two signals, response time, quality, things slipping through, shows whether the system is holding up without hovering over every task.

   

Build the standard layer, and the other two stop depending on anyone. That's the difference between delegating tasks and building an operation.

Get out of the middle

Once these three systems are running, the owner’s job changes. They stop being the person who does the work, or the person every task runs through.

They become the person who runs the system: watching the signals, improving the standards, deciding what to build next. Everything else has a home that isn’t them.

That’s what “doing more with less” really looks like. Not more hours from the owner. A small team where AI handles the repeat work, the right people handle the judgment calls, and simple standards hold it all together.

The job changes. Watching signals, improving standards, deciding what’s next. Everything else has a home that isn’t the owner.

The whole thing, in five steps

If there’s only one thing to do after reading this, it’s this:

1. Write down what “great” looks like for the business, not what feels doable at its current size.

2. Sort the work into two piles: repeat work and judgment work.

3. Hand repeat work to AI, one task at a time.

4. Give judgment work to the right person, with real ownership.

5. Write down simple standards and checkpoints so quality holds without checking everything personally.

Being small was never the real problem. Trying to be the whole system alone was. Fix that, and "we're a small team" stops sounding like an excuse.

The next move is simple: name the one thing still running through the owner that shouldn't be, and decide which pile it belongs in.

I send this every week because the people reading it are the ones doing the climbing, not the ones waiting to see what happens.

So here’s your one move before next week: audit your tasks, find the automatable column, and buy back an hour. What you do with that hour is the whole game.

As always, just reply if something here landed, or didn’t. Your replies shape where this goes.

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