At the end of last month’s post I mentioned I’d been quietly putting time into automating the repetitive bits of my work. Dashboards, scheduled reports, things that just run. I said more on that soon. This is the soon bit.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about what’s actually changed about how I work, and the honest answer is that I’m doing things that would have needed a small team two years ago. Not because I’m suddenly more capable, but because the tooling has quietly caught up to the ambition.
A lot of that is AI. Specifically, Claude, which has become the closest thing I have to a second pair of hands. At a fraction of the cost of an actual second pair of hands, I might add.
I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this post that reads like every other “AI changed my life” piece doing the rounds. That’s not what I mean. I’m not turning my business over to a chatbot. What’s actually happened is more boring and more useful than that. A lot of the jobs that used to sit in the “I’ll do it when I have a quiet afternoon” pile, things like rebuilding a reporting dashboard, pulling together a competitor audit, drafting a proposal for a new market, are now jobs I can knock out in an afternoon I didn’t previously think I had.
A brand expansion across several international markets is a good example. A couple of years ago, running something like that as a one man band just wouldn’t have been realistic. What makes it work now is that the boring bits, the things every market needs you to do again, the media plans, the keyword research, the first draft of the proposal, the structure of the reporting, don’t have to be done from scratch each time. I can get 80 percent of the way there in a fraction of the hours, and spend the time that’s left on the actual thinking.
That’s the bit people miss, I think. The interesting work, knowing which markets are worth entering, how to structure a joint business plan, where a brand’s real competitive advantage sits, none of that gets automated. It can’t be. But it used to get squeezed out because you were too busy doing the structural work around it. Now it isn’t.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that scaling revenue and scaling hours have finally become separate conversations. For the longest time in agency work, more revenue meant more hours, which meant more people, which meant more overhead, which meant more revenue needed, and so on. That loop is quietly breaking. I’ve added meaningful client work this year without adding meaningful admin load, because the admin load is the thing the tools are best at.
None of this is a sales pitch for AI. If anything, I’d say most of the “use AI to 10x your business” stuff I see is hollow. The real benefit is much less exciting than that. It’s mostly small stuff that adds up. Things that used to eat half a day now get done before lunch. Reports that used to need carving out time for just sort of happen in the background. Work I’d have quietly dreaded, like pulling a first draft media plan together for a new market, doesn’t really feel like a big job anymore. On its own, none of that sounds particularly dramatic. Put it all together across a month, and it’s the difference between running a business and the business running you.
I don’t know where this ends. My honest view is that most solo founders and small businesses are years behind where they could be on this, not because the tools are hard, but because “I should look into that” keeps sitting in the same pending pile I wrote about last month. I think there’s also an element of “I don’t know what I don’t know”, and maybe some less than ideal experiences with AI a year or two ago colouring the view in a negative light. A lot has changed since then. If you’ve been meaning to give it a proper go and haven’t, well, as I said last month, it’s usually just a random Tuesday. April’s full of them.
David Bradley 