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There is still a block sitting on my calendar from the second week of July that says “Record new podcast episodes.”

I never moved it. I sat down in front of it most mornings, pushed it to the next day, then to the next week, and eventually I stopped pretending and just let it sit there being wrong.

My granny died while my family was in Italy – just 6 months after my mom passed away. 

So instead of returning home and jumping right into my Q3 90 Day Plan that I’d created before traveling, I went to another funeral and pressed pause on everything else.

When your plan falls apart, the useful question is not how to get back on track → it’s what do I actually have the capacity for, right now?

In this episode, we’re catching up a bit on what’s been happening behind the scenes, including what I let go during this summer, what continued to run without me, and (a little teaser of what’s coming up this fall) how I spent a lot of that extra time researching and forming my own opinions around AI for small business.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• What it actually looks like to run a business when navigating a tidal wave of grief (again)
• The triage questions I ran my Q3 90 Day Plan through when I only had a fraction of my usual capacity
• How I followed my curiosity (and yes – the dopamine hit) learning about AI for small business
• The single prompt that took me from AI-curious to AI-serious in about half an hour
• What that research told me about my own positioning that I did not want to hear
• Why every plug-and-play AI promise I tested came back generic, and what has to happen first
• What is inside Human First, the AI series for high-trust businesses, starting September 3

Key Concepts from the Episode

Your business should not fall apart when you fall apart. My ads kept running, the private podcast series went out, my team kept the operations moving, and I limited myself to the work only I could do. None of that was luck. It was infrastructure built before I needed it.

You are allowed to fall apart. Your business is not.

Must-Do versus Nice-To-Do. When my capacity dropped, I went back to the 90-Day Plan and asked one question about every line on it. Client-facing work got fiercely protected. Everything else became optional, including the newsletter and this podcast.

A plan that only works at full capacity is a plan built for your best days.

The murky middle. I watched people I respect go hard pro-AI and I watched the comments section go hard against it. What if you could see both sides? The position I landed on came from Randi Buckley’s language: context, nuance, and discernment.

All or nothing is often a way to avoid making a decision.

50 Hours of market research in under 30 Minutes. I have given clients a 100 Conversations Challenge for years, and the honest math on that is around 50 hours of work most people never do for their business. Then I found and tweaked a research prompt that truly impressed me with research that was fully cited with linked results and references, including industry research that would have taken even more hours to go through. It quickly assessed where my business was stuck in the ‘sea of sameness’ plus messaging that I could uniquely own.

When your differentiator starts showing up in everybody else’s copy, it stopped being a differentiator.

The Unicorn Assistant Problem. For years, I’ve watched people struggle to build a team because they are hoping for a magical unicorn assistant who can not only do everything – organize their calendar, respond to emails, create social media content, handle the bookkeeping – but can do it all on Day 1 of working together. Now I’m watching people treat AI the exact same way. That’s not how this works! You’ve got to create the foundational infrustructure first!

AI can’t support your business well if everything is still trapped in your head! You still have to take the time to build the foundational systems.

Resources Mentioned

Marketing for High-Trust Businesses. The private podcast series built for the businesses where you know your clients’ names, plus the assessment that names the gap in your marketing. Free. theceocollective.com/high-trust-marketing

Randi Buckley, Healthy Boundaries for Kind People. The source of the context, nuance, and discernment language I use throughout this episode. https://www.randibuckley.com/

Michael Hyatt’s AI program. One of the first paid programs I tested. https://aibusinesslab.ai/

Maria-Ines Fuenmayor, Codified in the City. The day we spent in Florence building my dashboard and mapping which internal tools were worth building. https://codifiedinthecity.com/

Callan Faulkner, A2A. Automate to Accelerate. Her early stance that AI is here to amplify human work is most of why I joined. https://theuncommonbusiness.co/

Gabi Day, Hype-Ma’am. Runs the ads for The CEO Collective®, 90 Day CEO Certified Professional®, and my guest for the final episode of the series. https://hypemaam.com/home

Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @racheal.cook
• TikTok: @rachealcookmba
• LinkedIn: @rachealcook
• YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
• Website: The CEO Collective

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