The transition from a corporate career into a solo owner practice can be an overwhelming experience given the varied disciplines involved that fall outside your experience zone. You likely didn’t realize how dependent you were on your IT, marketing, operations, branding, sales, accounting, legal, HR, web, and other team members who allowed you to focus on doing more of what you do best.
The result is you feel off-purpose. What seemed on the outset to be such an exciting and freeing venture had turned into an inescapable consuming monster. Take heart, it does get better because you can work smarter.
Your start-up intention was to earn money leveraging your subject matter expertise. Instead, your hours and days are spent researching, learning, and making first-time decisions on detail after detail on infrastructure you didn’t recognize. The hidden overhead cost of downtime getting ready to get ready to do business was an unexpected ravenous vulture of your resources. While the learning is fun, the lack of earning isn’t.
Artificial intelligence to the rescue? No, really. Recently, I’m inundated with amazing offers for tools and technologies promising AI will write my book, create images, develop my marketing plan, and design my course in seconds. Except they don’t deliver the goods.
My solution is to view AI not as Artificial Intelligence but as my Artificial Intern. By assigning research and idea generation to my AI tools as I might with an intern, my expectations are where they need to be. An intern is a valuable member of the team, but typically lacks the experience and creativity to produce the finished product. My job is to be thankful for the stimulation, be discerning, and enrich the results.
Here’s my additional lessons on the state of the Artificial Intern use for the solo owner:
- Embrace AI as your Artificial Intern.
- Learn to use prompts and how to refine results as these are key to getting useful output.
- Be aware that AI-generated images still have a long way to go to be useful. Therefore, I still use stock photography services and Canva for designing graphics and images.
- Realize most AI writing is bland and safe. We humans add spice and nuance.
- Try different AI specialty tools for different needs.
For the record, I asked AI what’s the best use of itself for a solo owner. Here you go. “Overall, leveraging AI can help solopreneurs streamline their daily workload, improve decision-making, personalize marketing efforts, enhance customer service, and gain insights into industry trends. By incorporating AI into their business operations, solopreneurs can save time, increase efficiency, and drive business growth.”
The bottom line is this: A solo owner investing in AI as an intern is an extremely low-cost/high-reward method to reclaim time otherwise spent poking around the web for a variety of matters related to operating your practice. Remember the goal is to free yourself to “Do More of What You Do Best More Profitably,” as shown in The On-Purpose Business Person.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
