Is it possible to transform a business without increasing payroll? Or improve reliability, consistency, and profit while reducing employee turnover? Artificial intelligence (AI) makes all that possible and more. It’s the fastest, easiest way to scale a business.
Successful entrepreneurs learn early on that growth isn’t linear. Scaling up means hitting one ceiling after another. All too often, breaking through requires drastic changes in payroll or infrastructure that the company isn’t prepared to float.
Evan Ryan’s new book AI as Your Teammate is the manual entrepreneurs for transforming ceilings into opportunities and outpacing the competition through the power of technology. I recently caught up with Evan to learn more about his book and the ideas in it.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
I Google searched “AI for small businesses” and the things that popped up were cybersecurity and chatbots for websites. There’s so much more than cybersecurity and chatbots that encompass AI, but it’s difficult to break through the noise. Even if you do (which is difficult and requires a lot of work), it’s hard to visualize AI in your life.
It’s easy to see how the big tech companies use AI, but it’s difficult to see how a dental office or a general contractor might use it to make their business grow faster. I wanted to not only help people break through the noise on how small and medium-sized businesses use AI now, but also give people a manual that can help them implement AI in their world.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
The Activity Log. The first step in automating any process is knowing what goes into it. It’s a very simple concept – have everyone you work with write down every task they do for a week, along with the amount of time it takes them. Then, score each task on a 1-5 scale, where 1 means you hate it and 5 means you love it. Chances are, everyone on your team does tons of tasks scored at 1 or 2 that take a surprising amount of time.
Chances are also good that everyone does way more stuff than they realize. You can then group tasks together that all make up one big process, and you’ll see ways that you can make your processes faster and easier without even needing AI. Then, you can automate using tools like Zapier if you want to save yourself tons of time.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this idea in your own life? What’s it done for you?
I thought I spent only 15-25 minutes per day on email. Just a few weeks ago I did an activity log and discovered I was spending over an hour per day just on email, and most of my time was being spent scheduling meetings. For that, I would type the intro to the email, check the times I was available, type in those times, and then send it. Then, people would get back to me and I would create the invite, add the Zoom link, and send it off.
I know I could use a scheduling service like Calendly, but I find that to be a bit impersonal. After Google searching “AI for scheduling meetings” I found a free Microsoft AI (https://calendar.help) that will be more human-like and schedule a meeting on your behalf.
I save over an hour per week now on that!