Broken Processes, Made Faster.
Download MP3A lot of what is being automated right now is a broken process made faster. Ten months off the mic, two Get Connected stages, and the three words I am building everything around now: integrate, automate, delegate.
Season six starts here. I spent the summer speaking to accounting and bookkeeping pros in Calgary and Toronto, six weeks apart, and the conversations were not the same conversations. AI went from curiosity to everywhere in a month and a half. So this episode is about what that actually means for a service business, and it is not the answer the software companies are selling.
Can some bookkeeping be done by AI? Yes. Can the process be done start to finish by AI? Not today. And the bigger problem is that most of the processes being handed to AI were never good processes. Making a broken process faster is not the upgrade everyone will tell you it is. First we must know what the task actually is.
Chapters
- 00:42 Where I've been
- 02:37 Six weeks, two cities
- 04:57 AI in everything
- 07:34 Integrate, automate, delegate
- 10:01 They're only your deadlines
- 11:36 September, the mid-new-year
- 13:25 Will AI replace bookkeeping?
- 15:23 Broken processes, made faster
- 19:06 A hundred little fixes
- 22:12 Be willing to look
- 22:52 I wonder if it's possible
- 25:02 The invoices have to go out
- 26:51 The business lives in the owner's head
- 28:17 Your very own forest fire
- 32:05 Not anti-hustle
- 34:23 What's possible
What you'll learn
- Why the order matters: integrate, then automate, then delegate, and what goes wrong when you run it in reverse
- The Calgary to Toronto shift: how fast adoption moved in six weeks, first hand
- Why September is a sales month for most of the businesses whose books I review
- The client near retirement I expected to resist AI, and how wrong I was
- Is that bookkeeping? The question to ask before you automate anything
- Why there is no job more important than getting the invoices out
- Who is Beth? What it costs when the business only exists in the owner's head
- Running a business is a forest fire: how to know something is smoldering and keep going
- Why I am not anti-hustle, and why I am an acquired taste
Key takeaways
- Automation is a magnifier, not a fixer. It makes a broken process produce wrong answers faster
- Integrate first. Disconnected tools automated together are still disconnected
- Delegate is last on purpose. Handing someone an undocumented process is abandonment, not delegation
- If the business operates in your head, nobody else can run it, and no tool can either
- Not every fire needs you. Evaluate all of them and decide which one requires your personal firefighting attention
- Some things can smolder while you build the bigger, better solution that fixes them for good
- Data plus intuition is where the real work happens. AI has the data half
- Do not put your I wonder ifs on the back shelf. Now is the time
Try this today
- Pick one process you are about to automate. Write it down start to finish. If you cannot, it is not ready to automate yet
- Run the Beth test. List three things about your business that only exist in your head. Get one of them out this week
- Name one fire you will let smolder. Then use that time to build the solution that ends it for good
Resources
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Creators and Guests
Host
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher
Entrepreneur | Founder, Bottcher Group | Host, Service Based Business Society Podcast | Author, Data Driven Method | Helping you scale your success!
