Businessing with Pat Miller

In-person connection is king, and you just can't get the same connection online as you get in a real room. I spent this week with two mastermind groups in person, and the difference wasn't even close. This episode is for every work-from-home business owner who packs the calendar so tight that putting on real pants and driving across town feels inefficient. I'll walk you through why the before and...

Halfway through 2026, your mid-year business review comes down to one shift: the question goes from what do we wanna get done this year to what can we still get done this year. Hope is not a strategy, and the second half of the year doesn't care about the goals you set in January. Pat walks through seven questions (the five he planned, plus two bonus) that every small business owner should ask bef...

68% of small business owners are using AI, but only 15% have installed it into their regular workflow and are actually getting the benefits. Pat says the gap comes down to one reframe: stop treating AI like software you have to learn and start treating it like a junior employee. This one's for the owner who's been tinkering with ChatGPT and Claude, writing a few social posts, and wondering where a...

The AI tools making you faster can also become a business risk. When everything you run lives inside one model, you don't own that part of your business, you're renting it. Pat Miller breaks down why going all-in on a single AI tool can quietly turn into a liability, and how to use it hard while keeping a backup nobody can switch off. He's joined by Melissa Gregory of Automation Bird Dog on gettin...

Self-improvement is crushing your business. The fastest way to grow isn't getting a little less bad at the thing you hate, it's handing that thing to a person or a robot who's great at it and pouring your time into the work only you can do. Pat Miller makes the counterintuitive case that shoring up your weaknesses is quietly slowing your business down. He walks through a simple two-list exercise t...

You know that line in the old movies when somebody says it's quiet...it's too quiet? That's your business in the calm right before everything hits the fan, and today I make the case that having more problems is actually a sign things are working. I walk through three ways to go find better problems when your to-do list feels too comfortable, then Gjeret Stein joins me to talk about his new book, C...

Small business burnout is real, and when you're the business, you can't afford to run at 80%. If things feel heavy and slow and harder than they need to be, this one's for you. I've got three ways to relight the fire. I just got back from a week off, a twelve hundred mile golf trip with my dad, and it reminded me exactly how a solo owner gets the spark back. Put the phone down and get off the algo...

Taking time off isn't optional. You're going to take it whether you like it or not, because if you don't, you'll get sick or burn out or both. So you might as well lean into rest as part of a healthy business. This is Pat's last show before a full week off, so he walks through exactly how he gets ready to actually disconnect: the five steps to claim a week, clean it out, keep your business telling...

Chipotle just gamified its rewards program with visit streaks, monthly challenges, and local leaderboards. You're not Chipotle, but that doesn't mean you can't borrow the idea and gamify the way you keep customers coming back. This one's about giving your customer loyalty a little life and a little bounce. Pat walks through a pile of low-budget ways to gamify referrals, your newsletter, your socia...

The calculator moment hit knowledge work. If you sell training, education, or consulting, the way you make money just changed. When the calculator showed up, knowing long division stopped being the valuable part. Pat makes the case that AI is the calculator moment for knowledge work, and your clients won't be the ones pulling the levers anymore. They'll hand the how to their AI junior employee, so...

The best way to move your business forward is to change the inputs you take in every single day. That's the big story today. When you're the only boss you've got, nobody's there to redirect you when you drift off track. So the inputs you put into the Whopper supercomputer between your ears are the whole game. Pat digs into the energy-vampire coffee friend who only ever talks about themselves, the...

Sandra Yancey runs a multimillion dollar business on five AI tools, not eighty-two. When everybody else zigs toward the next shiny object, she says go left. This one is for the owner who feels buried by AI, by the to-do list, and by the pressure to keep up with everyone else. Pat sits down with Sandra Yancey of eWomen Network and Sarah Urban of She Carries It to talk about focusing on what actuall...

The Visa CMO just said it out loud: AI agents are your new customers. Pretty soon they'll land on your website and buy on their own, and if your sales page isn't built for them, they'll buy from somebody else. On this episode Pat breaks down what that actually means for a small business owner who sells online. Agents don't care about your clever marketing copy. They want product specs, real facts...

Every role in your business touches revenue. The CFO, the receptionist, even the person who forgot to clean the bathroom. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it changes how you sell and who you hire. This one is for the owner who's tired of networking conversations that go nowhere. Pat sits down with Lisa Raebel of Rebel Girl Revenue for a live Idea Slam on how to build trust fast, so the per...

Most business owners are asking oddly specific questions that are really just versions of the wrong question. The real one is simple. Does anybody actually want to buy what you're building? Today on Businessing, Michael Rampolla of Fortum Advisors joins Pat to talk about solving the right problem, why "go fund yourself" beats chasing VC money, and how to pick the one task that actually moves your...

Are you showing people the finish line and potentially scaring off the customers who could hire you? A new study on "fitspiration" content says showing the after photo can actually push people away, because it reminds them how far they are from where they want to be. Today on Businessing, Pat unpacks a counterintuitive social media insight every owner needs to hear, then welcomes Tayler Cusick Hol...

In an algorithmic, AI-powered, synthetic world, the people willing to share what made them who they are have the advantage. That's the operator-to-icon trade Matt Stone walked us through, and it's the kind of conversation that changes how you show up. Today's big show. Matt Stone from The Bigger Stage explains the journey from competent operator to industry authority to icon, and why vulnerability...

Look at your to-do list. Cross something off, name one piece of sales activity for the day, and underline the one thing that has to get finished. Free, fund, finish. That's the daily reset. Tuesday's show pulls a new opener out of the Fridays Off theory and runs it. Then we get into pay-what-you-want pricing (yes, the Radiohead model, this time at an Italian restaurant in Austin), an Idea Slam wit...

You may call it creative hours, but the headline isn't your process. It's quit spending so much time in Canva. People don't buy the work you're proud of. They buy the result they want. This episode is built around a live Idea Slam with brand designer Teresa Wilmot, who couldn't figure out why her $47-a-month membership wasn't selling. The answer turned into a coaching session anyone who sells a se...

Half of the people polled said they'd rather give their money to brands that avoid AI. Stop the freaking presses...that's a market opportunity hiding in plain sight, and if you make something by hand, it belongs on the front page of your website. Today's show is for business owners who want practical answers, not theory. Tanya Murphy from Cruise Planners drops five money tips for handling cash abr...

Six thousand CEOs were just surveyed, and 90% of them said AI has had zero impact on productivity. I'll tell you right now, Claude has changed my life and changed my business. Here's why owners are winning the AI race while corporations slow-walk it. Today on Businessing, I'm back from three days off feeling like I've been shot out of a cannon. I went to the Claude Small Business meetup in Chicago...

Claude just dropped Claude for Small Business...native connectors to QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and a stack of other tools you're already paying for. Translation: you can stop hunting and pecking through QuickBooks and just ask, "Hey, did that client pay?" Pat unpacks what the announcement actually means for owners before driving down to Chicago to meet the Cla...

No one's coming to save you. That's a bad thing. But no one's coming to stop you either, and that's a great thing. Wednesday's show is built around the most overlooked profit lever in your business: your P&L. Barbara Fausett from Money Masters Bookkeeping sits down with Pat to break down the five sections of a profit and loss statement, why most owners only read two of them, and what kind of d...

No money does not mean no value. If you've ever been asked to speak for free and wondered if it's worth your time, Pat lays out five concrete ways to make a "free" gig actually work for you...the kind of value that builds your speaking business faster than a one-time check ever could. This is your daily prep for being a small business owner who actually wins. Pat also unpacks why 38,000 layoffs in...

Other people's opinions are not instructions. Especially the ones from people who don't pay you green American dollars. Today on Businessing, Pat unpacks the AI story trifecta: ChatGPT's leaner GPT-5.5 Instant base model, Anthropic's SpaceX compute deal that doubles Claude's usage windows and removes peak-hour throttling, and a researcher's fake eye disease that fooled ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot...