I make my living helping women use AI in their businesses. So believe me, this is not a sales angle: some of the most valuable words I say in any session are “this doesn’t need AI”.
Sometimes what’s needed is a workflow. Sometimes it’s a decision you’ve been dodging for six months. Sometimes it’s “you need a bookkeeper, and I know a brilliant one”. My job was never to sell you the robot. It’s to look at the whole mess, lovingly, and tell you which pieces go where. Sometimes that involves AI. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll always tell you which is which, because that’s the entire point of me.
The question I actually start with
Every client conversation starts in the same place, and it is not “have you tried ChatGPT”. It’s this:
What do you do in your business that sucks up your time, sucks up your energy and makes you feel rubbish?
Sit with that for a second, because your answer decides everything. If it’s “chasing invoices” or “writing the same onboarding email forty times a year”, then yes, gorgeous, there’s an automated fix and I will build it for you with genuine glee.
But I’ve also sat with holistic therapists who are brilliant at their craft and allergic to their own website, and what they needed wasn’t another tool. They needed someone to look at the whole thing and go: here’s the order, here’s who does what, here’s the one thing to fix first. I’ve told women to stop buying things. More than once I’ve found the block wasn’t anywhere near the tech.
You can’t automate your way out of a problem you haven’t understood yet. Bolt AI onto a tangled business and you don’t get an untangled business. You get the same tangle, moving faster.
My biggest secret, and it isn’t AI
I do bang on about AI constantly, and fair enough, mine earns its keep. Morning briefing, calendar guarding, fishing school emails out of the pile before I lose them. All real.
But the things that actually keep my business standing? None of this is sexy, sorry.
Telling my husband what I need, instead of expecting him to read my mind.
My VAs, who catch the balls when I’m poorly and give me breathing space. Not loads of hours. Enough.
Rest. Actual rest. Filling my own cup before it’s empty rather than after, which is a lesson I keep having to relearn.
Simple, right? And as a millennial ADHD firstborn Scorpio daughter, I forget every single one of them on a rolling basis. But when my business wobbles, it’s basically never because the tech failed. It’s because I quietly stopped doing one of those three things and hoped nobody would notice.
None of that is a tool. All of it is infrastructure.
The check nobody selling software will offer you
So here it is, the uncomfortable one.
If your business isn’t working and you feel rubbish, check whether you’re neglecting yourself before you blame your funnel. Check whether you’re carrying everything alone before you buy another subscription. Ask what support would change before you ask what automation would change.
AI is brilliant at holding systems. It cannot hold you. That job belongs to sleep, and support, and the people around you actually being told what you need. Get that lot in place first, and then AI becomes what it was always supposed to be: the thing holding the admin so you’ve got hands free for an actual life.
Start with the unglamorous bit. My free workbook walks you through it, and there’s not a prompt in sight for the first half.