Don’t start with AI.
We built our businesses for a world that no longer exists
Most established businesses weren’t designed. They evolved.
A customer needed something, so we created a process. We hired someone. Added software. Then more software because the first lot didn’t quite do the job.
Someone built a spreadsheet.
Someone else found a workaround.
Eventually nobody could quite remember why half the machinery worked the way it did — except that Mary had always done it that way.
That was fine. We built our businesses using the people, technology and economics available at the time.
But those ingredients have changed.
So ask:
If I was building this business today, knowing what is now possible, would I build it the way it operates now?
Would you still pay experienced people to enter data, make customers wait for answers the business already knows, or keep yourself as the piece of string holding the whole thing together?
Probably not.
What business do you actually want?
Forget AI for a moment.
Imagine the business two, three or five years from now.
- More revenue without a matching increase in staff and overhead.
- Better margins.
- Less dependence on you.
- Fewer admin headaches.
- More time for your people to deal with customers rather than computers.
Perhaps you want to expand, prepare the business for sale — or simply get to Friday afternoon without discovering that Saturday and Sunday have joined the working week.
Whatever the destination, ask:
What is stopping us from being that business now?
That gap is where the real work starts.
Find the constraint before you buy the cure
Maybe enquiries are coming in but not being followed up quickly enough.
Maybe margins are poor.
Maybe experienced people are buried in routine work.
Maybe systems don’t talk to each other.
Maybe customers wait for things that could happen immediately.
Or maybe you’ve quietly become the operating system yourself.
These are business problems.
Some may need AI.
Some automation.
Some a better process.
And some may need nothing more exotic than fixing something daft.
Ask “Where can we use AI?” and we’ll find somewhere to put it.
That doesn’t mean we should.
It’s like buying an expensive electric drill before checking whether the problem actually requires a hole.
The better question is:
What is preventing us from building the business we want?
Now we have something worth solving.
Use AI where it removes the constraint
AI is not a strategy.
It is an amplifier.
Give it a good process and a clear objective and it can be extremely useful.
Give it confusion and it can help you create confusion faster.
You can automate a bad process, respond instantly to the wrong leads and become very efficient at doing something you shouldn’t be doing at all.
Putting a bigger motor in the car doesn’t help if you’re driving down the wrong road. It just gets you lost faster.
So work backwards from the business you want.
Where is money leaking, time being wasted, customers waiting or growth getting stuck?
Which one of those problems is worth fixing first?
That is a much better place to start than “AI transformation.”
Let the first improvement help pay for the second
Suppose enquiries aren’t being followed up quickly enough.
Fix that.
More enquiries become customers.
Then you find an admin process wasting 20 hours a week.
Fix that.
Now you have capacity back.
Then perhaps quoting is slow.
Fix that.
Customers get answers sooner. Staff get time back. More quotes may turn into orders.
Each improvement leaves the business stronger.
And the gain from one improvement can help fund the next.
I call this a Systematic Self-Funding Transition.
- Fix something worthwhile.
- Measure the gain.
- Use part of that gain to fix the next thing.
The business can and should be funding its own evolution.
That strikes me as rather more sensible than spending a fortune “AI-enabling” everything and discovering six months later that you’ve automated several things nobody particularly needed.
Make people more valuable, not less necessary
The AI conversation has become strangely obsessed with replacing people.
I think that misses the point.
Good people are valuable because they build relationships, solve unusual problems, negotiate, reassure, exercise judgement and recognise exceptions.
Yet a surprising amount of their week disappears into admin, follow-ups, scheduling, moving information between systems and answering the same question for the 47th time.
There’s the opportunity.
Not:
Which people can AI replace?
But:
What work can our systems take away so our people can spend more time being valuable humans?
The technology should disappear into the machinery.
The customer should experience the improvement.
I genuinely believe this is one of the most exciting times to be in business.
Capabilities that were impossibly expensive — or simply impossible — for ordinary businesses only a few years ago are becoming accessible very quickly.
That gives us a chance to build businesses where information flows, routine work happens quietly in the background, customers get faster help, valuable knowledge is captured, and growth doesn’t automatically require another desk, another salary and another layer of administration.
That is the prize.
A streamlined, easy-to-run business with a highly profitable, healthy future.
AI will most likely be part of it.
Automation will play a part as well.
But neither is the destination.
Your business is the destination.
Want to go further?
We’ve put together a free 17-page Business Owner’s Operating Brief: A Profitable, Stress-Free Path to AI.
It looks at how to map your business, find the right first improvements, choose the right technology and use the gains from early wins to help fund what comes next.
If you’re asking “Where do I start?”, it was designed to help you answer that question before somebody sells you another piece of software.