Fix My Business

For the month of September, Scott has been running an AI bookkeeping agent in parallel with his existing accounting system and team. Nothing has been cut over. At month end, he's comparing both sets of financials. The setup, in five steps: Bank feed. BankSync.io (~$7/month) pulls daily transactions from connected accounts via Plaid. Daily ingest. At 8am, Stu — Scott's bookkeeping agent — grabs the...

Meta released a new AI agent framework called Muse. There will probably be another one next week, and another the week after. If you try to rebuild your business around every new agent, you'll get whiplash and never get traction. Scott's approach: Don't chase them. Learn what each one is good at, and use it for that. What Muse does well: It's tightly integrated with Facebook and Instagram. Scott g...

Dan Sullivan told Scott that in fifty years of working with entrepreneurs, he'd never seen someone with the wrong business. What he saw over and over was someone in the wrong seat, doing the wrong job. What if being stuck isn't a business problem? Scott took two assessments — Kolbe and Working Genius. Neither is a sponsor. He's just a customer. Kolbe (Scott is 7-3-7-3): High Fact Finder. Low Follo...

Last week: 9 use cases for AI agents. This week: the actual Grokbot agents Scott runs, by name and role. The principle: Each agent does one thing. One specialized task. Over and over. The agents: Simon (chief of staff), Lois Lane (daily brief), Lloyd (email manager), Sue (paralegal), Reed (researcher), Avi (video summarizer), Curtis (bridge to Hermes data), Pat (payroll), Walter (scheduling), Cind...

Scott and his team are using AI agents across multiple businesses. Here are the nine use cases: 1. Data Analysis: AI agents pull data from multiple sources, calculate metrics, identify trends. Most small businesses don't have data analysts. Now they can. 2. Revenue/Financial Analyst: Daily revenue calculations, transaction reconciliation, refund trend analysis, investment return evaluation. Paired...

2026 is the year of AI agents. Scott started with OpenClaw in January. Moved to Hermes months later. Then Buzz. Now Grokbot. Four platforms in eight months. The problem: Every new framework creates friction. If you're building business processes around one agent and a new one appears tomorrow, you feel like you have to start over. The book: Scott's upcoming book, Think First, Then Automate, is abo...

Last week, Scott had two back-to-back calls. Two sellers. Same market. Same product. Same economy. Completely different results. Seller A: "It's slow. The economy. Infrastructure costs doubled. People are scared." Views were flat. Leads weren't converting. Copy was thin—same thing repeated over and over. Seller B: Same county. Same headwinds. Scott introduced them to the DREAMS framework in March....

How do you write your ads? Not physically—mentally. Do you have a framework? The research: In 2023, Scott's Land Moto team analyzed over 10,000 ads to answer one question: What makes an ad clickable and convertible? You have to win twice. First, they click. Then, they convert. Two separate wins. The finding: The highest performing ads consistently answered key questions already in the reader's min...

How many things in your business are broken—little things you see every day but haven't fixed? Frictions: Scott captures every broken or inefficient process he sees. He calls them frictions. They go on the automation loop worksheet. Then he prioritizes by closeness to revenue and team efficiency, and fixes one or two at a time. The hot mess: In Scott's loan servicing business, the collections proc...

How much of your time is spent obsessing over your customers' problems? Or how much is spent on the stuff you want to build? **The conference room story:** A business owner spent 45 minutes showing Scott everything he'd built. Impressive. Then Scott asked: "What does your customer need next?" Pause. "I don't know." **The problem:** We build things that meet our goals. But the thing that makes a bu...

Successful businesses run experiments. Constantly. Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke found that companies like Amazon, Google, and Booking.com run thousands of experiments per year. They don't guess—they test. And they grow faster because of it. Scott's not Amazon. But yesterday, his team ran an experiment—and he's sharing it. The problem: Churn. One of Scott's SaaS businesses tracks...

Cheryl writes: "I'm afraid to hire people because I don't want them to learn my business and then start their own. I know this is holding me back. Help me overcome this." The reality: 6% of the U.S. population owns a business. 94% don't—and don't want to. Scott's story: When he hired his first sales rep, she had a history of owning businesses. He was nervous. But he asked himself three questions:...

Mario hired a marketing company. They promised: "We'll put your ads out. You won't even have to think about it." And they did. The ads looked great. But they weren't converting into leads. The problem: They measured the wrong thing. The company delivered on their promise—ads. But Mario wanted leads. They never actually promised leads. Mario assumed it was implied. The lesson: If it's not specific,...

Last week at an event, someone walked up to Scott after his presentation. Full-time job. Side hustle. New business. All kinds of doubts. Ready to throw in the towel. Here's what Scott told them. 12 years ago, Scott was in the same boat. VP at a Fortune 300 company. Saw the writing on the wall. Started a side hustle in real estate investing. The emotions—doubt, self-doubt, resistance—are all part o...

Christopher writes: "My team is frustrating. I hire people and end up jumping in and doing better than them. What am I even paying for?" The two lies: "It's faster if I do it myself." "I can do it better than anybody else." The truth: When you jump in, your team learns they can just come to you. You become the bottleneck. The business can only move as fast as you can move. The Goal (Eli Goldratt):...

Joe writes: "I'm seven months in. I thought I'd have this figured out by now. I'm working harder than ever, and the results aren't there. Is this normal?" Yes. Welcome to the muddy mile. The hardest part isn't starting—it's sustaining. The newness is gone. The initial excitement is gone. You're in the grind. The lag: The results from today's effort might take months to appear. But if you stop and...

Tony writes: "I found a deal, but I don't have the cash. Should I bring on a partner or borrow the money? How do you decide?" The reframe: This isn't a finance question. It's a control question. Borrowing (debt): You keep 100% ownership You owe payments regardless of performance Lender doesn't care if the deal works—they want their money back Risk: Deal fails, you still owe When to borrow: When th...

Erin writes: "My husband supports me, but he really doesn't get it. He doesn't understand why I'm working nights and weekends on something that isn't paying off yet. I feel like I'm losing him." This is one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship that most people don't talk about. Scott's story: Built a business for 17 months while suspecting his corporate job was ending. When it did, his wife as...

Derek writes: "I'm bootstrapping. I can't afford paid ads. How do I get leads without a marketing budget?" The belief shift: Marketing isn't about money. It's about attention. You can buy it or earn it. The trade-off: Time or money. When you're bootstrapping, you trade time. Scott's Craigslist story: Free platform, but not free—it cost time. Wrote the ads. Posted the ads. Played whack-a-mole with...

Lena writes: "I know I need to sell, but I hate it. I feel pushy. How do I get better at this?" Scott's confession: For years, he hated selling too. He did it to pay the bills, but he didn't love it. The belief shift: Sales isn't convincing. It's solving problems. Where the sleaze comes from: Pitching before diagnosing. If you start selling before you understand the problem, it feels pushy—because...

John writes: "I keep getting leads, but nobody buys. They ask questions, say they'll think about it, and I never hear back. How do I tell who's serious?" The belief shift: Tire kickers aren't born. They're made—by your marketing, your process, and your sales approach. Check your marketing first. A cleaning company kept getting calls for floor polishing. They didn't do that. Turns out their stock p...

John writes: "I'm six months in, building AI agents for follow-ups, email, lead management. I've spent weekends on it. Nothing's working. I feel like I'm getting further behind." The belief shift: AI agents work best when the process is already proven. If you're six months in and still figuring out what success looks like in sales, lead management, and pitching—you can't hand that to AI. That's li...

Andrea started her business 10 months ago as a side hustle. She thought she'd be further along. More revenue. More profit. Less time. She's considering quitting. The wall is real. Around 9-10 months, the initial excitement burns off. The wins don't come fast enough. The inner voice says: call it a day. Scott almost tapped out at nine months. If he had, he'd be in a corporate job today. It's physic...

Josh writes: "I keep writing ads but I'm not getting leads. I've hired people. Tried different headlines, different platforms. My team says the ads are good. But no leads." The diagnosis: You're writing to everybody. Which means you're writing to nobody. The market is always talking to you. View counts show people are seeing your ads. If they're not converting, the audience is telling you somethin...

Business owners are wasting massive amounts of time building AI agents when they should be figuring out what their business actually needs. Scott isn't anti-agent—he has them in his business. But there's an untold tax: onboarding, maintenance, troubleshooting. In small businesses, guess who does it? You. The Easter Weekend story: Anthropic changed their terms. 3pm Saturday, Scott's OpenClaw stoppe...