I've been thinking a lot recently about the way AI is being sold. Sold to the individual, to the enterprise, to society. In my consulting, what matters most is that what I'm seeing on the small business side is that AI is being marketed as another output tool to squeeze more money from the business, without considering the impact on the business owner themselves. I believe that's the wrong approach, and its short-sighted nature will harm the owner rather than helping them.
Essentially, every AI-related ad targeting small businesses pitches the 'AI employee' who 'works overnight so you don't have to.' More output, faster, use the AI to squeeze more juice out of the owner's time. In part, that works, IF it protects the owner's own resources - their time, their judgement, their energy. Unfortunately, that's not what I'm seeing. Instead, I see a lot of pitches for courses, for newsletters, for supposed tools that take up more of the owner's resources, not fewer. Maybe, for a larger operation, these approaches make sense. If you have staff you can dedicate to making these off the shelf tools work for your enterprise.
In a small business, however, this is counterproductive. The business IS the owner, so the systems you build, AI or otherwise, need to take that into account first, and build the supporting structures accordingly. Your attention, your time, your money, your decision-making capacity - all of that has to be considered when building a system that truly improves a small business. Otherwise, the system becomes another burden the owner has to carry, a treadmill they have to run on to chase elusive 'output' ever-faster. A truly effective system must respect your resources, your attention, feed you the decisions and keep the rest running smoothly. That's what makes a good, small-business-owner-oriented platform.
I know, because I built one myself. Not with courses or get-rich-quick schemes, but with time and consideration of my own needs. It takes into account my schedule, my night-owl preferences, my interests and objectives inside and outside of the business itself. Now, I transfer that approach to building tools for other owners so that they can help themselves.
For a business owner, this could look like many things. For a Shopify business, I built a steward system to clean their chaotic back catalog. It merges items that are clearly duplicates or color scheme variants, writes SEO-optimized content, and keeps an eye on stock levels so that out-of-stock items aren't accidentally sold on the store. For myself, I built a newsletter digester, nicknamed Cliff, to read my 20+ daily industry newsletters and hand me the 5 lines that actually matter for my practice. I have a 'secretary' whose tasks include chasing invoices and outstanding client information that I need to produce their deliverables. All of these are made to reduce the time I spend working on my business, so that I can work in it.
And I know that's counterintuitive. All business literature says that we should be focusing time working 'on' our business, not 'in' it. In theory, I actually agree with that - you want your business to function well, and that takes thought and investments of time, and sometimes money. I don't, however, agree that business owners, especially small business owners, should stop working in their business, because doing the work of the business is what brought them to the business in the first place. I'm not here to tell an artisan soap maker to spend less time making soap and more on answering emails. Instead, I'm going to help them set up the systems so that the business runs smoothly without all of their focus, using AI to let them get back to doing what they love.
The point of this article is that you can use AI to relieve the burden, take over the parts you were forcing yourself to do, and give you more time and attention back to do the work only you can do. That you can use AI to give you more time back for the fun part, the reason you started doing what you're doing in the first place. If we focus on building systems for the owner as much as for the business, we can give you back the resources the other tasks were eating, so that you can get more out of your life, in and out of the business.
This is not to say that a good system cuts you out entirely. A well-built system knows when its judgement isn't enough, and calls you in. My catalog AI will check with me occasionally that two items really are duplicates. My invoice and client monitor checks with me if I've heard from the client by a means it can't see - like a call or text. Well built systems automate the safe, repeatable work and know to stop and ask their human before doing anything irreversible, or anything needing a broader judgement.
Let's take a hypothetical example. You have 60 hours in a week to work in and on your business (yes, 60 not 40, I see you over there). You create handmade products, and currently you're breaking even, spending 30 hours of your week making widgets, and 30 hours of your week doing all the other things - marketing, bookkeeping, etc. If you and I work together, my goal would be to cut the other 30 hours down to say 10, for a 'standard' 40 hour work week, while reducing the cost of the functions you're currently burning your energy on. You do not, then, have to spend the freed hours to make more widgets, or use AI tools to keep expanding your back-end activities until they are 30 hours again. You could, but you could also take the time to breathe, or do something else you love. For me, it's drinking coffee on the deck with my cats, which I'm doing as I write this. The choice is yours, as is the system. No strings attached.
So, when you work with me, or see any other system that promises that it's here for small businesses, I want you to consider two things:
Is this helping me as the owner, or does it focus on the business' output without any consideration of the human cost?
Is this something that I own and control, or does it require a recurring fee or dependency?
For 1 - if the answer doesn't include you as the owner, skip it. For a small business owner, you have to consider your own needs as well as the business' for the business and you to be successful. For 2 - consider carefully. There are some subscriptions or fees that are worth it. I pay for Claude, for example, and it's worth it to me because of what I get out of it in return. Other things, like that paid Slack group or masterclass subscription, I don't really see the value in. Good businesses, good builders, create systems that run themselves without unnecessary costs. They are built to 'graduate'. A system that genuinely supports the owner is one the owner owns and can run without the builder. You shouldn't need me forever. That's my design and business philosophy, and it's the opposite of how most of this is sold.
Owner-centric AI is how I build, creating systems for the person running the business as much as for the business itself. If that's the kind of thing you've been wanting and couldn't find under all the hype, I'd love to talk about what it might look like for you.