Your business may have capable people, a solid product, and plenty of demand. But do you get the feeling that too much work still waits for you? You are the person who sees the missing detail. ..who knows what “good” looks like. The person everyone needs to ask before the next step can happen. For a seven figure business and beyond, that means you're friggin' expensive. You are a glorified traffic cop. Quit that mess. I am applying a simple rule to AI work: 10/80/10. The first 10% is human. Define the outcome. Set the constraints. Decide the standard. Make it clear who owns what. Then persistent AI agents carry the middle 80%. For me, ClickUp is the task manager and shared operating record. Agents receive assigned work, retain the context they need, add findings and notes into each ticket's chat thread, move work through development stages, and make progress visible. The work keeps moving. I can see the whole system. I can step in when a decision needs my judgment. The final 10% is human too. That is validation, verification, and leadership. Did we get the result we wanted? Is it accurate? Does it meet the standard? Does this decision require courage, creativity, or a real conversation? Sometimes the first 10% needs more care. Sometimes the final 10% does too. This ain't a slop job. It is a better operating layer: people lead the work, agents carry defined work forward, and the owner spends more time on strategy, creative work, and the decisions only they can make. 🚀 - James

A warning: grossness ahead. This is what actually happened. This morning.. I was upstairs reading the Bible while my wife was making breakfast.. and I heard what sounded like.. something falling in the kitchen. A little later, I heard my daughter going down the stairs way earlier than usual. One of her new birthday earrings had gotten infected. There was blood. It was painful. We moved a dining room chair into the kitchen, sat her down, gritted through it, got the earring out, and carried on. Then my wife quietly told me there was a roach in the kitchen drawer. That sound I heard earlier was her slamming it shut. She hates roaches. Our daughter hates roaches. Yet after handling the earring situation like a mama warrior, she stayed calm enough to make sure nobody else got worked up. I did what I do: grabbed my phone and collected evidence. I recorded the drawer, got a couple close-ups, got rid of it, dropped our daughter off, went to the gym, and called what I thought was our pest-control company. I had Googled the company name and clicked the first "Call Now" button. It was actually a competitor's ad. I didn't know that.. The rep immediately asked whether it was a German cockroach. Since it was in the kitchen, I guessed yes. My guess turned into a whole plan: empty every kitchen cabinet and bathroom, leave the house with the pets for three hours, prepare for a major treatment. Then she went to book it and realized I had called the wrong company. I called my actual guy. He heard, "I found one roach," and said, "One roach? You don't have a roach problem." I texted him the video. His answer: wood roach. They wander in, get attracted to light, and can come through a garage. They don't infest homes and can't survive indoors. So the first rep built a three-hour treatment plan on top of a customer's guess. My guy took a minute, looked at the evidence, and saved me time, stress, and money. That's how I try to operate too. I've been on calls with people who seemed ready to buy. After digging in, it was clear they weren't ready, the project wasn't the right fit, or they wouldn't see a return on the investment.

How many times has this person actually gotten value from you? Not how many emails they opened.. Or how many posts they've viewed.. Or how many times they saw your retargeting ad. I was on a call recently with a founder who looked back at the people who joined his highest-level program. Every one of them had experienced four to five real value-add moments first. They had heard him teach something useful. They had gotten help with a problem. They had attended something. They had learned a framework and applied it in their own world. By the time they were invited into the higher-level offer, they had evidence that his stuff worked. They had already seen how he thinks. They had already received help. They had already started connecting his work to better outcomes in their own business. That is a very different kind of sales process. Most businesses leave those moments to chance. A person might find a podcast episode. Maybe they check out a virtual event.. Or buy a lower-level product. Or maybe they never find the next useful thing at the moment they need it. He's not taking any chances.. We're crafting a well-designed software system changes the game. We're building activation into the experience and measuring the time it takes for them to get their first win with the system. We're guiding people toward the next useful action after that. We're giving them tools, frameworks, feedback, and progress markers that help them apply what they are learning. And we'll track the whole customer journey with Funnel Pulse to see who is actually receiving value and who needs a reach out. The software becomes another value delivery vehicle. That is the kind of system I am building for established founders right now.. one that turns real expertise into a better customer experience, stronger outcomes, and a more natural path into high-ticket offers. If you have a proven method and want to turn it into something your customers can actually use, apply, and return to.. you gotta get on this.

I'm working with a business and leadership expert right now to turn his principles, frameworks and years of real-world experience into software. At first the idea was simple. Take the material that lives in his books, courses, calls, stories and head.. and make it more useful for the people he serves. As we've worked through what that could become, something more interesting started showing up. What if his students, clients and team members could ask about a specific situation they're facing.. and get guidance shaped by his actual leadership philosophy? His principles. His examples. His standards. His way of thinking through a problem. I've been calling it a Business Oracle. Before I got too attached to that, I went looking for prior art. Turns out there's been a whole category of software for decades called expert systems and decision-support systems. Capture the knowledge of an experienced person, combine it with relevant data, help someone else make a better decision. Same thing.. just different tools. Books, courses, SOPs and dashboards all have real value. But when someone's in the middle of an actual situation, the hard part is rarely finding more information. It's figuring out which information matters, what principle applies here, what the current facts are, and whether they've got the authority to act. Here's where it got interesting for me. This doesn't have to be an AI clone answering questions from a pile of documents. It can be wired into the tools the organization already runs on. Customer history. Projects. Tasks. Reporting. Training. CRM data. Whatever's relevant. So instead of digging through five systems and trying to remember what the leader said six months ago, someone can ask "what should I do here?" The system assembles the relevant context, points them at the applicable principles, guides the next step.. and recognizes when the decision needs to go to the leader instead. I'm still learning what this becomes. But I'm increasingly interested in software making a leader's experience available to the people doing the work, without pretending it can replace the leader.

If you're an expert, you're probably in the business of transformation. You help people go from stuck to unstuck in a specific area.. using a method you developed through your own experience, or by helping a lot of other people get the result. There are three ways to deliver that transformation. You can do it for them. You can do it with them. Or you can teach them to do it themselves. For years, "do it yourself" meant a book, a course, a workbook, or a membership. Those can be valuable.. but information alone rarely creates the result. The customer still has to figure out which lesson applies today, what to do next, how to stay consistent, and what to do when they get stuck. That's a lot to ask from someone who came to you because they wanted help. There's another option now. You can turn your framework into a guided program that helps people take the right action at the right time. Instead of handing them 40 videos and wishing them luck, the software can: Ask the questions you'd ask Identify where they are in the process Give them the next best action Keep them focused on the part that matters now Track progress and celebrate wins Bring your expertise into the moment they need it Start with the material you already have. Give your book, course, transcripts, worksheets, and framework to AI. Ask it to pull out the step-by-step process, the decision points, the common obstacles, and the actions that actually create the result. Then turn that into a product design. From there you can hand it to a developer.. or use AI to build a first version yourself. Give alpha access to a handful of existing customers. Watch where they get value. Improve it. Collect the stories. Now you've got a product that can stand on its own. It can be a lower-cost way to work with you. It makes your done-with-you and done-for-you clients more successful. And it might be the most valuable "bonus" you give the people already paying you. Your expertise doesn't have to stay trapped in your head, your calendar, or a course library nobody finishes.