The Readiness Report: Foundation First. AI Second.

Description Business owners are excited about AI agents, and the demos make it easy to see why. Agents that browse, write, file, and work while you sleep look like the answer to a desk that never clears. What the demos never show is the mess behind the camera — the undocumented files, the naming system only one person understands, the process that lives in someone's head and nowhere else. This epi...

You found an AI tool. The price looked reasonable, so you signed up. Then the real costs showed up. Setup time. Staff training. A bill that did not match what you expected. None of that was on the pricing page, and you are not alone. This episode gives you the math most vendors will never walk you through. Dr. Mike breaks down why the monthly fee is just the entry point, what total cost of ownersh...

Description You have heard about AI. You have probably bought a tool or two. Somewhere along the way, things did not go as planned. Not because the tool was bad. Because nobody told you to figure out where you were starting from first. This episode gives you a concrete way to think about your starting point before you spend another dollar or sit through another demo. Dr. Mike walks through the thr...

You bought an AI subscription. You tried it. It never quite worked the way you expected or it felt like a whole other job on top of the one you already have. So it just sits there doing nothing. The problem is not the tool. It's that you skipped the foundation. Two ratios change how you think about this. The 70/30 rule shows you which part of your week to hand off and which part to protect. The 70...

Most small businesses don’t have a tools problem. They have a process problem. And adding AI on top of a broken process doesn’t fix it — it just makes the mess move faster. In this episode, Dr. Mike Donaldson breaks down Lean AI: a framework that starts with your operations, not the technology. You’ll learn where waste is hiding in your day, why you have to clean up the process before you touch an...

When the doors close at 5 PM on a small business, most owners are not heading home. They are staring at spreadsheets, chasing invoices, and trying to figure out what to post tomorrow. That is the resource gap. Big companies hire experts for everything. Small businesses have themselves. AI is closing that gap — not by replacing the person, but by handling the work that does not require one. In this...

The Readiness Report: Foundation First, AI Second Dr. Mike Donaldson introduces The Readiness Report, a bi-monthly show focused on helping small businesses get practical answers about AI and operations. Emphasizing “Foundation First, AI Second,” the series tackles common operational headaches by answering key questions using a mix of lean strategy and AI automation. The goal is to provide direct g...