Businessing with Pat Miller

Your client expects answers after 10 PM because you've given them answers after 10 PM. Sorry, but it's true. In today's Idea Slam, Pat tackles the after-hours client texting trap and gives the most permission-giving advice you'll hear all week: take your email off your phone. He also reveals his favorite part of the SBOC '26 conference (it's back, it involves steak and champagne), demos Gemini's n...

"You may nail the numbers at work, but if you don't nail the numbers at home, your home will leech off the business and both will be compromised." That's Mike Michalowicz on what cracked open his new book. Mike, author of Profit First and The Money Habit, joins Pat to preview his keynote for the SBOC 2026 Conference. The conversation goes deep on the difference between financial freedom and financ...

Solving small business problems so you can be more profitable, with less stress, and run a modern small business. It’s the last day of April, and Pat opens with the show’s new daily ritual: positivity, gratitude, the distraction of the day, and the one task you have to finish before you stand up from your desk. Today’s distraction is performative busyness. Pat calls it a suit of armor. When somebo...

A 110-person company just lost access to Claude. Cold cut off. And it got Pat thinking...what would happen to your business if your AI got taken away tomorrow? This episode goes deep on the AI dependency trap most small business owners are sleepwalking into. Pat shares why building your business on someone else's software is starting to look like the late-2010s Facebook follower mistake, and what...

Pat had a moment in the car driving home from a chamber event yesterday. He'd just spent the afternoon with a room full of business owners in Fond du Lac, and they all said the same thing he's heard for 750+ Idea Slams: I'm behind. I'm overwhelmed. I feel like I'm failing. So today, the show changes. From now on, Businessing is the daily meeting for small business owners. Every show opens with thr...

A British marathoner just broke the 2-hour barrier. The four-minute mile of long-distance running. And every runner in the world is suddenly asking the same question: "Maybe I can too?" Pat takes that energy and aims it at every small business owner watching. Five questions you don't want to answer honestly: → How many hours of an eight-hour day are you actually working? → Could you make an extra...

Thursday's Businessing opened with Pat walking into the studio fresh off an hour outside. 70 degrees in Milwaukee. An AI Installation Group meeting behind him. A mountain of work ahead. The conversation that followed was the best kind of course correction. Consultant Michael Rampolla of Fortum Advisors joined Pat (on hotel lobby wifi, then literally outside) to unpack why small business owners wor...

Three AI wins you can install this week. That's the show. Jason Kolins of Kolins Intelligence spent years running AI at Fortune 500 companies. Then he brought the playbook home to Cedarburg, Wisconsin and started helping solo shops and small teams without the Fortune 500 price tag. He came on the air with three wins any business owner can deploy right now: 1. Stop writing everything from scratch....

Do you care that the number one song in the country was written and performed by AI? Today on Businessing, Pat Miller unpacks the synthetic content tsunami... including new data showing less than half of new podcasts released yesterday were likely made by humans... and makes the case that real-life gatherings are about to become the most valuable asset a business owner can own. Then: the lead stor...

Claude Design just launched, and Pat demos it live, rebuilding the ugly AI Installation Group landing page in real time. The insight: if your website looks homemade, your prices look homemade. The tools for small business owners to look professional just got a lot better and a lot cheaper. Also on today's show: the SBOC 26 keynote reveal. Mike Michalowicz, author of Profit First and The Money Habi...

You never have to wonder what to post on social media again. The problem isn't that you don't have ideas...it's that you have too many. Creative constraint is the fix, and Pat breaks down exactly how to use it. Plus: Jeff Bezos said something about AI that broke Pat's brain. AI isn't a product like the iPhone. It's a horizontal market like electricity. It doesn't compete with what exists...it repl...

Your business doesn't need to be better. It needs to be weirder. Not goofy weird. Strategically different. The kind of different that makes people stop scrolling, stop comparing, and start paying attention. Today we break down four ways to get weird with your business: quality, speed, entertainment, and scale. The Grateful Dead just launched a $10/month streaming service for live recordings...60 y...

Gas prices just crossed $4 a gallon and your clients are about to start acting different. Pat breaks down what rising fuel costs really mean for your business and gives you three moves to protect the bottom line right now. Then we're rewriting the rules on to-do lists. If your list makes you remember everything, that's why you're stressed. Pat shares the system he used with Abby over the weekend t...

The two most dangerous words in your business are "what if." You know the spiral. What if my biggest client cancels? What if AI takes part of my product? What if there's a new competitor? We what-if ourselves into paralysis trying to control a future that probably won't happen anyway. But here's what we never do...we never what-if the good stuff. What if that big client says yes? What if you doubl...

Your survival instinct built your business. But is it also holding you back? New research shows animals that adapt just to survive actually evolve slower. On today's show, Pat connects that science to what he's seeing in the small business owner community...businesses growing so fast that quality suffers, owners doing tasks their team should handle, and all of us ignoring the small fixes because w...

Solo diners spend 48% more than group diners. The whole restaurant industry got it wrong about their best customers. What are YOU getting wrong about yours? On today's show, Pat walks through an interactive customer quadrant exercise that maps your products by value and time horizon. Grab a pen and paper and figure out where your money actually comes from...and where your attention should be going...

Mark Zuckerberg said something that should stop you in your tracks. Social media used to be your friends and family. Now half the content is creators. We went from a group chat to cable TV in our pocket, and we didn't even notice. On today's Businessing, Pat connects this shift with a restaurant remodeling boom...warm interiors, communal spaces, staff that talks to you...because the human connecti...

Pat brings Friday Energy to Open Line Thursday. An unexpectedly emotional Artemis II launch story taps into Gen X Challenger memories. Stephanie Kern from Vander Bloom Creative joins live to announce the sticker club Pat bullied her into, featuring the "WTF Claude" sticker. Pat shares his own WTF Claude moment building the live check-in map. Plus the AI story of the day: Perplexity sued for sharin...

Pat kicks off April Fools with an AI-translated Mandarin video intro, then demonstrates just how easy video generation has become with a live Grok Imagine demo. He generates Steve Jobs walking on stage as the SBOC keynote speaker and animates last year's conference photos into moving video...all while broadcasting live. The lead story compares owning a Culver's franchise to building your own busin...

In today's episode: Pat launches the Businessing Daily Check-In — an interactive map where you can see who's watching, connect on LinkedIn, and keep your streak alive. We dig into disposable vs. necessary income and why it matters right now. The Trump administration makes a tone-deaf King Charles move during "No Kings" protests (business lesson: get a second opinion). Tyler Perry gets blocked from...

OpenAI killed Sora last week. A million dollars a day in computing costs, fewer than 500,000 users, and they walked away from a billion-dollar Disney deal... all to refocus on the core business. Today we're talking about focus. The thing we all need more of and most of us hate doing. I walk you through a quick exercise to find your one thing and de-emphasize the stuff that's competing with it. You...

Solving small business problems so you can be more profitable, with less stress, and run a modern small business. In this episode, Pat celebrates the wins that actually matter—and they're real. Four entrepreneurs share breakthrough moments: Talmar Anderson discusses a client breakthrough that changed everything at Boss HQ. Lynn Razzi reveals how she hit #1 bestseller status while running fractiona...

Learn the three-part framework that makes your products genuinely irresistible—and discover why Google Gemini is now changing how small business owners manage their days. SEGMENT BREAKDOWN The Flea Filter: Value + Timeliness + Fun (inspired by Red Hot Chili Peppers) Google Gemini Personal Intelligence demo and free access Idea Slam: Friends getting weird when you start making money Idea Slam: Know...

Businessing with Pat Miller is a podcast for small business owners who want to get smarter about running their company without the corporate jargon. We cover real strategies, live demos, and honest conversations about what it actually takes to build something that works. In this episode: How to take vacation as a small business owner (time IS compensation), a live demo of Claude's Computer Use tha...

The Strait of Hormuz deadline just got pushed to Friday and the markets went absolutely vertical. Dow up over 1,000, crude oil crashed 8.62%, and business owners are watching gas prices hit $3.91 wondering what happens next. Pat breaks it all down. Then the main story: a viewer compliment sparks a conversation about the hardest part of owning your differentiator... actually believing it. Pat walks...