A client of mine spoke for one hour and walked away with $13,326.89, and her contract said she wasn’t allowed to sell anything from the stage (more on how she got around this, ethically, later). She sent me this message, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

The no-selling part was written into the agreement, so she never once pitched anything the way you’re picturing.

So, her speaking fee was $1,500 of it; the other $11,826.89 came from things she set up before she ever stepped on that stage.

Here’s the thing about her question at the end there, the “can I do this every month haha.” That laugh is doing a lot of work; she’s asking because she genuinely cannot believe an hour of her time produced that, and she’s been in business long enough to know that most hours don’t. She sold a private practice, built a personal brand in the emotional health industry, and she’s good at this, and she still didn’t see it coming.

Fast forward, she does this regularly now and has similar results every time.

I call this “getting paid to get paid”, meaning one paid hour set up so it produces four or five revenue streams instead of one, and I teach it to every 1:1 client I have.

I want to tell you why it worked, because the number is the least interesting part.

Going wide is not the same as going deep:

Every entrepreneur has heard that they should diversify their income. Almost everybody executes that advice the same way, which is going wide. You add a course, then a membership, then a group program, then some affiliate stuff, then maybe a low ticket thing, and now you have six income streams sitting side by side like separate little businesses.

Here’s the problem nobody says when they give you that advice: every single one of those streams needs its own sales system in order to have consistent sales from it;; otherwise, it sits there with little to no sales. It needs its own lead warming, its own launch, its own emails, its own content, its own funnel. Six income streams means six sales systems, and you are the person running all six.

So you end up spending all your time marketing and selling instead of doing the work you’re actually good at and love, and that’s the pattern I’ve watched play out across more than a thousand entrepreneurs at this point.

I do income audits with people all the time, and this is the part that really, really gets them. So many of them end up cutting 50% or more of their income streams once we actually look deep enough. And it’s not because those streams make nothing, because some of them make a little, but they cut them because once you account for what it costs in marketing and selling and your own hours, a bunch of them are losing money.

I had a client who was making really good money, like super good numbers on paper, and when we added the soft costs into every income stream, it turned out half of them were losing her money; she was legit shocked for at least a day.

They were never really income streams; they were just expensive hobbies with a checkout page, and most entrepreneurs fall into that.

Stacking goes the other direction; it goes deep (that’s what she said)! Instead of building five things that each need their own sales system, you take one thing you’re already doing, and you set it up so it fires multiple times.

One hour on a stage produced four revenue streams for her plus one that compounds later, and she didn’t build a single new sales system to do it.

There are rare occasions I would recommend an entrepreneur go wide and not deep with their income streams, but that’s for another article!

What going wide is actually costing you:

Let’s be super real about the math on your life here.

If you have five income streams and each one needs its own sales system, at that point you’re running five marketing departments by yourself and calling it a business. That’s why you’re working six days a week, and the revenue isn’t moving the way it should. More marketing into that setup just makes you busier, not more profitable and working less.

If this is you, what you have is a model problem, and adding a sixth stream will not fix it.

So, promise me you’ll start stacking income deep and not wide? Okay great! Now onto the client’s numbers and how she stacked it all!

What one hour on stage actually produced:

Not one piece of her $13,326.89 was luck. Every single income stream was decided strategically and set up before she walked into that building. The stack was built in advance, on purpose, using a handful of moves that most speakers never make because it does not occur to them to ask. The talk itself was the delivery mechanism; it was literally her getting paid to market her business.

Below this, I’m giving you the whole build. The exact dollar split across all four streams, the five-part soft sell she ran when she was contractually banned from selling, the two asks she made of the event that almost nobody thinks to make, and the one rule that decides whether a speaking engagement is actually profitable or just impressive on Instagram. Plus how to run this same stack if you never step on a stage in your life.

Here’s how the $13,326 split:

Read more

I didn’t know that yet, obviously lol. What I knew was that I was running a six-figure business, so by every marker anybody uses, I was successful. Six figures of money was coming in, and it felt good. I was also working harder than I had ever worked in my life, but I thought that was what you had to do when you ran a six-figure business; everyone else I knew was super burnt out and working a lot too.

Then I saw a woman post on social media about how much she made per hour that she worked in her business, and it was north of $500. My first thought was that it was amazing, and my second thought was some version of, okay, well I charge $250 an hour for consulting, so I’m not that far off. I remember doing that math in my head and feeling pretty good about myself, which is honestly the most embarrassing part of this whole story.

So I started poking at it… If I charge $250 an hour for the call, what about the one hour of prep before the call and the 30 minutes after uploading the call recording and emailing the client notes? What about the marketing I did all week to get the person on the call? What about the emails and the Voxers and the follow-up in between sessions that nobody pays for directly? Once I started counting the hours that were real instead of the hours that were billable, the $250 fell apart pretty fast.

So I did the actual math of what I paid myself per hour that I actually worked in my business. This is called your ‘Effective Rate,’ and it’s your owner pay divided by the hours you actually work, including all the ones nobody bills you for.

I actually built you the calculator, and it will give you personalized feedback about your rate and what to do next based on your business model:

Get The Free Effective Rate Calculator

For me, this meant what I paid myself after everything, divided by the hours I really worked, which was right around 60 a week.

Twenty-two dollars an hour………….

I sat there and thought, I could go get a job making $30 an hour, work 40 hours a week, and not carry any of this stress. No payroll stress, no launch stress, no waking up at 4 am thinking about a client. Just a normal job that pays more per hour than the business I built with my brain and my own two hands.

That number is the thing that changed everything for me, and it’s why I built The Effective Rate Calculator, a free tool for you that runs the whole thing for you in about four minutes. You put in your real owner pay and your real hours, and it shows you the number with the math right there and personalized next steps based on your rate.

What I did next was the wrong thing:

The number itself is only half the story. When I first found out I was making $22 an hour, I didn’t fix my business model; I just decided I had a marketing problem.

I really did lol. My whole brain went, okay so I just need more…. more clients, more revenue, more everything, and then this number goes up, because if my revenue goes up then what I make per hour of work goes up, I thought. So I posted more on social, I said yes to more free speaking gigs, I chased more guest podcast spots… I was doing all the things you’re supposed to do, going HAM on visibility, because the logic felt airtight.

When your model isn’t built right, every new client you bring in costs you more hours. You have to fulfill them, and you have to keep marketing to replace them, and you have to manage all of it, so the work grows right alongside the revenue. Your revenue chart goes up, and to the right, your effective rate goes down, and from the outside it looks like a great year via your revenue, which is exactly the trap that keeps entrepreneurs overworked and underpaid.

I’m just gonna say it: the “post more and you’ll get more clients” advice being sold to entrepreneurs is terrible. It burns you out mentally, it eats time you’re never getting back, and posting does not make you rich; it never has.

Real talk, I’ve worked with over 1,500 entrepreneurs, and this is the pattern I see most in the ones who are already winning because you’re not lazy and you’re not under-marketing…. You’re just pouring all your effort into the top of a business that leaks it out the bottom, so the harder you push, the more it costs you, and the effort you’re most proud of is usually the effort doing the least for you. If you’re in a season right now where you’re posting more and launching more to fix how tight things feel, run your number before you run another launch. It only takes four minutes, and it’ll tell you whether you have a marketing problem or something else entirely.

For me it was something else entirely.

What actually moved the number:

Fixing it took about two years, and I want to be super honest that it was not one clever tweak. The single change that moved the number the most, though, and immediately, was getting rid of the marketing strategies that weren’t actually bringing in sales. I looked at where the money genuinely came from, cut everything else, and that alone gave me back about 20 hours a week on average. Nothing about my revenue changed in that moment, and my effective rate went up anyway, because that’s just what happens when you stop pouring hours into things that were never paying you. From there I changed my pricing, I changed my offers, I changed how I sold, and I built systems so the business didn’t need me sitting inside it every hour to function. I rebuilt the model itself, and that’s a totally different animal than tweaking the branding.

Two years later I was paying myself $400 an hour and working about 5 hours a week.

In this article, I actually go super deep into the 4 big actions that got me there:

The reason I know that rebuild mattered has nothing to do with the number. During part of that stretch, I was healing from mold illness, and I physically could not work much. Five hours was not just a flex; it was all I had to give. My old business, the $22 an hour version, would have gone to zero the second I stepped back, because it only paid me when I was fully inside of it running every single piece. The strategically rebuilt one kept going for me.

What your number is actually telling you:

So here’s the takeaway, and I want to be really clear about it.

Your effective rate is a diagnostic of how your business is built, not a grade for how you’re doing as a business owner. I am not telling you to go charge hourly; I don’t recommend hourly billing to anyone, ever. The number just tells you what your model currently pays you for your life. When that number is low, and your revenue is healthy, you don’t have a pricing problem or a marketing problem; you have a business model problem, and model problems are fixable without burning the whole thing down. For most people, it’s five to seven small structural tweaks, and you get to keep the business you already built.

The answer was never more; it’s better-built.

If you’ve never actually done this math, and most people never have because some part of them already suspects the number will sting, go find out. The Effective Rate Calculator is free, it takes about four minutes, and it walks you through counting the hidden hours too, the Sunday emails and the DMs and the evening admin that never makes it onto anybody’s spreadsheet. You’ll get your number plus a few specific things you can do to move it.

Then come back and tell me in the comments: what did you think your effective rate was before you ran it, and what was it actually? I’ll go first; I thought I was at $250, and I was at $22.

Get on the AI Leverage Lab Waitlist ↓

The AI Leverage Lab is a live, 8-week cohort where we build your custom AI system together, one level at a time, so you walk out with AI that sounds like you and runs the busywork. This is the first live round, and I won’t always run them live. Get on the waitlist, and you’re first in line when doors open August 3rd.

Join The AI Leverage Lab Waitlist

You open a fresh window, you paste in some context, you ask for an article, and you get back something that’s fine. It’s fine, and fine is the problem. Then you spend an hour fixing it, which is roughly the amount of time it would have taken to write the thing yourself, so you conclude AI isn’t there yet and go back to doing it by hand.

The problem is that you asked one tool to do five different jobs at once: research the strategy, pull the ideas out of your head and get them drafted, sharpen the angle, handle the SEO, and repurpose it to other content. No single prompt does all of that well, because those jobs have nothing to do with each other and they need completely different instructions.

What I built instead is five separate AI processes, each doing one job, running in a fixed order. Each one only has to be good at its own job, and each one hands off to the next.

That’s what took my Substack article process from 6 hours to 2 or 3 per article. I broke the full math down in this article, so I won’t redo it here:

But the short version is I’m not getting back 430-770 hours a year back depending on how many Substack articles I’m posting between my two publications.

This post goes into the build of the systems: all five processes and what’s inside each one, the research step I did before any of it, my real minute-by-minute workflow with actual timings, where I still do things by hand, what I’d build first if I were starting over, and the mistakes I had to go back and fix.

If you publish anything regularly, this saves you more than 10 hours a month, easy! That’s the bar I hold every paid post to.

Start here, before you build anything:

Here’s the step almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why most people’s AI content comes out super generic and leads them astray in their business.

Before I built a single skill, I had AI go research what’s actually working on Substack right now, not what worked in 2022, and not the general newsletter advice that’s been recycled through a hundred blog posts. I wanted current patterns from publications that are performing really well in my category, and on the topics I write about.

Then I embedded that report inside the Claude Skills, so it’s the reference every skill checks its work against.

That’s the difference between AI that gives you the internet’s average take and AI that gives you what’s working this month and how it applies to your unique business!

I also ensure the research covers monetization and not just writing. Time savings are the easy part of this system, but the harder question is whether the platform is actually making you money, and most people publishing on Substack are leaving so much revenue on the table because they’re guessing at what free versus paid should look like, where the paywall goes, how the subscribe ask gets placed, and what paid subscribers in their category actually get. The research answers those with patterns from the bestsellers instead of random tips from here and there. This is the difference between a publication that costs you time and one that pays you back, and it’s why this section comes before anything else.

Here’s the first prompt:

I’ve left the brackets in so you can run it for your own category and topics, and I’d rerun it about every six months because the last section is the part that goes stale fastest and you want to make sure you’re keeping up with what’s working over time.

And bonus tip: you can schedule Claude Cowork to run this prompt for you every so often, then your new report is delivered straight to you without you needing to remember or even prompt it.

Read more

Here is what I am building instead:

• I will be available to cook a real dinner at home most nights of the week.

• I will homeschool my kids and still run my business.

• I will have the money for a beautiful, regular-sized house on a good chunk of land.

• I will drive a nice car.

• I will keep my consistent daily good mood.

• I will be available to help my grandparents move (check).

• I will be available to take my best friend to her first appointment with her newborn on a Wednesday morning (check).

• I will not leave my husband’s side when he had an emergency appendectomy on vacation and spent eight days in the hospital (check).

• I will say yes to the travel and the random adventure when it shows up.

• I will be a present mom and wife.

That is my actual business goal, and every offer, every price, every hire, and every hour gets measured against it.

And this is not to say that you can’t have these things while running an 8-figure company and doing major things that you’re on the cover of Forbes, but there’s no doubt it’s very hard ot do both, and most people have to sacrifice a lot to make it work.

Here’s the thing though:

A woman came to my business retreat wanting an $8 million business:

She was doing $1 million a year, and she told me straight out that the goal was $8 million.

So I asked her why, as I do all my clients when we talk goals, and I ask because of this next thing that happened. She said she and her husband wanted to own a second home in San Diego where they’re both from. Great, that’s specific; that’s something we can price. So, we ran the math right there, and the life she described, including the second home, needed about a $2 million business. Only 2x, not 8x.

Then I asked if she still wanted the $8 million one. She said sure, why not. So we mapped it out on the spot, the clients, the team, the layers of management, the whole machine she’d be sitting on top of, and what came back was a team of over 300 people and an expansion into six other states. About ten minutes into that map she said it was giving her a headache just thinking about running all of it.

She decided to build to $2 million instead.

That’s what I mean about ego wearing a business plan. Her actual want was a house in the city she’s from, and she had attached it to a number four times bigger than the one that would buy it, and nobody had ever asked her to check.

This is what most entrepreneurs do, and it’s what runs them into the ground.

I wanted the other thing first:

For real, I wanted all of it, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and the $75k speaking fee and the top 10 podcast and the 8-figure company with 30 people working for me. The heels and the blazers and the big office where I got to be the one everybody was waiting on.

My goals were full on Girl Boss mode!

You probably have your own version of that list, and I’d bet you can picture it right now without even trying.

I wanted it because it looked good, and because it looked like it felt good, and for some people I genuinely think it does. But what stopped me is that I know too many people who climbed that whole ladder and got to the top with no life to show for it, and the things they traded away were their health, their nervous system, and any ability to ever work less again.

I know because I traded some of it too. Chasing that version cost me my health and my peace, and it cost me years I could have spent building a super chill, simple business that compounds, with real assets underneath it. Instead, I chased shiny objects that meant nothing, so when I finally changed my vision for my life, I had to change my entire business model to match it and start from scratch.

Then somebody asked me a question that wrecked the whole thing: If you achieved it and nobody ever knew, would you still want it?

Plot twist: every single one of my biggest business goals failed that test; not one of them survived it. What was underneath, once I got honest, was that I want to make really good money doing what I love and very little of what I hate, with enough room left over to spend more hours on my life than on my business.

Money is renewable and your time is not:

Let’s be real about something before you run anything else in this post, because I don’t think most of us actually believe it even when we say it out loud.

So the question sitting underneath everything below is whether hustling this hard and carrying a business that big is worth what it costs you in the only currency you can never make more of. For me, the answer is no, and I got there by running the math on both sides, not by deciding I wasn’t capable of the other one.

The four questions to build a More Life Business:

I run these with clients now, and I’m giving you all four because you can run them on yourself this week without me.

1. Do you actually want the goal?

Stop trying to win a game you don’t want to play, and stop grinding toward a trophy you don’t want to hold.

Here’s how I spot it on a call before the person admits it. They talk about what everybody else is doing, who launched what and who hit what number, and they use hustle language: how hard entrepreneurship is and how you just have to grind through this season. When somebody’s chasing a goal they actually chose, they talk about their own thing, and they sound calm about it. When they’re chasing somebody else’s, they talk about the industry, and they sound tired. That ain’t it, and it’s the most common thing I see in rooms full of successful people.

2. Why do you want your goal?

This is the ego test, and it’s brutal, so take your time with it lol. When you answer honestly, you’ll usually find one of two things underneath that you’re wanting that goal to give you: either a life you want to live or a way you want to be seen.

If it’s a life you want, then great, go run the numbers on that life, like how much does the life cost and how many hours does that life leave for work, because the numbers are almost always smaller than the ones you’ve been chasing. I have a ‘More Life Money Calculator’ I run with clients that prices out the exact life they described and hands back the revenue it actually takes to fund it, and the reaction is the same nearly every time, which is a long pause and then “wait, that’s it?” and then they lessen their business goal and it lowers their hours and stress!

And look, here’s where it gets really real with the time piece. You have 112 waking hours in a week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks it down like this, and yes, this is for people who commute to a job and work 40 hours a week, but it’s still accurate for entrepreneurs within a handful of hours.

Work eats 40-45 of those hours, then chores and errands and eating and self-care eat another 28, and what you have left is 39. That sounds like plenty until you remember the 39 includes every conversation with your spouse, every bedtime, every friendship, every hobby, and every ounce of rest you’re going to get.

3. Do you want the lifestyle that comes with achieving the goal?

Every achievement has a good side and a bad side, and I really want you to look at both before you sign up.

An 8-figure company, structured well with real profit, means you are getting paid BANK. That part is genuinely amazing and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It also means an 8-figure company is riding on your shoulders. It’s the late call that the site is down, and firing someone you actually like, and your team’s mortgages living in your inbox, and the vacation where you’re technically in Mexico and functionally in a Zoom room.

Some people build that whole thing, see their kids a few hours a day, and are genuinely happy with the trade, and honestly, good for them. I’m not here to yuck anybody’s yum. I’m here to make sure the version you’re building is one you actually picked and genuinely want.

There’s one ambition-time trap I want to mention:

Schedule flexibility from being an entrepreneur means you can leave, but the work follows you, and time freedom means that when you leave, the work doesn’t follow you out the door, and most successful people I meet have the first one while believing they have the second.

When my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I flew across the country at the drop of a hat, and I stayed with them on and off for 3 months, and I ran my business on about ten hours a week the whole time. That wasn’t ten hours of frantic triage between appointments; it was ten actual hours, because the model was built to survive my absence. He’s okay now, by the way! He was cancer-free in under 90 days, and he’s six years clear, and we got there with an integrative root cause approach that supported his body, and that’s a story for another Substack article lol. I tell you that because the cleanest test of whether your business is built right is whether it holds when you walk away from it.

4. Is achieving the goal worth it?

Because you get one life. And that can either talk you into big goals or out of them! Sometimes the answer really is yes, go get it, and I will be the loudest person in your corner.

I have a client right now for whom it is absolutely worth it. She’s building multiple companies, one at multiple six figures and another at seven, and she works around the clock and handles the headaches and the fires that come with running all of it. She has schedule flexibility, but she does not have time freedom, and she knows the difference, and she picked it anyway. That’s an easy yes for her, and I’m all the way behind her, because she actually sat with the hard questions in this article.

Most people never answer the hard questions; they just keep hustling, because stopping to ask feels like quitting. The ones I watch avoid it hardest are already at seven figures, because at that point the answer gets expensive. They tell themselves this is just what entrepreneurship is, and that one sentence has cost more people more years than any bad hire ever did.

The woman who downsized and made more money:

She had a big salon with her name on the space, multiple chairs rented out, nail techs, good profit, and a one-year-old at home with another on the way.

After she read my #1 Bestselling Book More Life, she looked hard at what that business was giving her versus what it was costing her, and it didn’t come close to penciling out. So she downsized and now rents a single chair in somebody else’s salon, and she works at least two full days less every week and makes more money than she did owning the whole thing. Even if the money had stayed the same and she got two days a week back, that is a win, but she got both.

The retreat client and the salon owner didn’t get less ambitious, and it’s not that they couldn’t have handled the bigger business, but when weighing out if it was worth it in the grand scheme of life or not, it just wasn’t. So they aimed for less, hit it, and were way happier!

This is not permission to want less:

I want to be crystal clear, because this is where people take the wrong thing and run with it.

Small was never the goal here; the goal is aligned, and aligned is usually still a big number; it just isn’t a number that costs you late nights and weekends. Broke and burnt out is not a lifestyle either, and I don’t want it for you.

I’m as ambitious as I’ve ever been; the target just moved but the intensity never did. I’ve already proven the model to myself, because I went from charging $22 an hour to $400 an hour, and I broke down exactly how I did it:

And once you have watched that happen, you stop believing that bigger and harder is the only road to more money. I want a million-dollar year, and I want it as a solopreneur with maybe one VA, running lean, working under 20 hours a week. Running a million-dollar year on 20 hours is harder than running 8 figures on 60, because there’s nowhere to hide and there’s no team to absorb your bad decisions.

Almost everybody needs a smaller number than they think to live the life they’re picturing. I urge you to find yours before you spend another five years earning somebody else’s.

If that’s the kind of business you’re trying to build, subscribe, and I’ll keep showing you how the model actually works.

Tell me in the comments: which of these four questions was the most helpful for you? ↓

That was the moment the whole ‘marketing’ thing flipped for me. I had been marketing my business the way everybody said to market it, which is to say I was doing it for free, constantly, and calling that a ‘sales strategy’.

Okay, so let’s be real about what free marketing actually costs:

It doesn’t take money out of your account, which is why it feels free, and that’s exactly the trick. It takes hours instead, and hours are the one input you cannot buy more of. When you spend a full workday every week making content that pays you nothing on the back end for your hours spent, you haven’t saved money; you’ve paid for that channel in the only currency you can’t replace.

In fifteen years of working with over 1,500 entrepreneurs, I’ve watched at a minimum 20% of the free marketing they do never return a single dollar. For most of them, it’s closer to half. So half the hours, gone, every week, forever.

And I know why you keep doing it anyway, because I did it too. Free marketing feels productive. And everyone says “content is king” and “you just gotta get more visible”. It’s the one lever you can pull entirely by yourself with nobody’s permission, and nobody can reject you from posting.

Here’s my own hard pass on this, and it just might surprise you. For the last 3 or so years, I didn’t use social media for my sales strategy because I was getting paid to market from stages and I could not justify the hours social was going to take from me. I’m on it now, on purpose, because I’m speaking less this season and I want to build this Substack via Instagram, and I actually really miss talking to people in my DMs (btw here’s a nudge to send me a DM and say hi!). That’s a choice with an intention behind it, which is different from just posting because everyone told you to.

So a few years ago I started building my business around a different question. The question stopped being how do I market this, and became how do I get paid while I market this. Once you start looking for it, the options are everywhere, and most entrepreneurs are sitting on two or three of them without realizing it.

There’s a second reason this matters more now than it did years ago. Every one of these channels puts a real human in front of other humans, and as AI gets better at generating content, emails, and video, the human part is the part that gets scarce and expensive. I’ll come back to that at the end, because that’s where it hits hardest.

Real talk though, these are not created equal, so I ranked them for you!

The test something has to pass:

Before the list, here’s the filter I ran everything through, because otherwise this turns into a generic “ways to make money” post and that ain’t it, friend.

It only counts if the act of getting paid is itself the marketing.

That means the thing that puts money in your account has to be the same thing that puts your business in front of the right people. If those are two separate activities, then your entire marketing strategy may just be built on hope.

This is why affiliate income is not on the list, and I know that’s going to bug some of you. I run affiliate partnerships, and I like them; they pay well, and they’re low effort. They just fail the test because I don’t get paid to actually market them; I market them for free, and then I get paid from them. That’s still good scalable income, and I’ll take it; it’s just doing a different job than marketing.

Same reason most straight sponsorship deals don’t make the cut. If the money is coming to you for pointing attention somewhere else, it’s revenue, and revenue is great; it’s just doing a different job, and this post is how you can get paid to market and sell more on the backend. So you make money upfront and on the backend, yay!

Everything below passes my filters!

How the ranking works:

I ranked these by effort against speed of return, because you typically don’t have a shortage of ideas, but you most likely have a shortage of hours, right?! So, every single one of these is a good thing to do, but the ones at the top of the list (ranked at the bottom) take longer to pay you back, and the ones at the bottom of this list (ranked at the top) can move money in the same month you start.

We’re counting down from eleven to one, so the fastest payback is at the end.

11. YouTube AdSense

You build a channel, the channel markets your business, and YouTube pays you a slice of the ad revenue on top of it.

The upside on this one is amazing, but let me be fair to it before I tell you why it’s last. I have clients pulling $2,000 and more a month from AdSense right now, and that money arrives whether or not anyone clicked through to hire them. With this strategy, your best videos keep earning years after you upload them, which is the closest thing to genuinely passive marketing income that exists. If video is already your channel, turning on monetization is free money, so what are you waiting for?!

The cost with this one is time, and a lot of it. Early AdSense revenue is super low, like single digits a month for a long stretch before the numbers get good at all, and the production load per video is heavier than almost anything else on this list.

Pays: a few dollars a month early, $2,000 or more a month once the library compounds

Costs you: the highest ongoing production hours of anything here, plus a long runway before it’s worth anything

Do it if: you’re already committed to YouTube as a marketing channel, and you’re playing a multi-year game

10. Facebook creator payouts

Facebook is now paying creators to post on their pages, which means the content you were already making to market your business can carry a payment attached to it.

Here’s my read on it: it’s still social media, rented ground, so you don’t set the terms, you don’t set the rates, and platform payout programs have a long history of getting generous and then getting quiet right when people start depending on them. If you’re already posting to a Facebook page, absolutely turn it on, because free money layered onto work you’re already doing is a rare and good thing. Just don’t change a single thing about your business to chase it and throw all your eggs into one basket.

9. Sponsored podcasting

You host a show, your audience gets nurtured by hearing you think out loud every week, and brands pay you to be there.

When this works, it goes hard! Podcast sponsorship money runs anywhere from $500 to $15,000 a month depending on your downloads and your niche, and a podcast is one of the highest-trust nurture channels that exists. People let you into their ears for forty minutes at a time, and that intimacy converts crazy high. And once the sponsor income covers your production costs and your time, you are being paid to run your own nurture sequence.

The catch is sequencing, though. Sponsors show up after you have the audience, not before, so this is a reward for work you already did. Podcasting is also genuinely heavy to produce, and a lot of people start one, run out of gas a few months in, and end up with a graveyard sitting in their feed.

Pays: $500 to $15,000 a month with an established show, zero before that

Costs you: significant weekly production time, plus a long runway before sponsors appear

Do it if: you already have a show with real download numbers, or you’re committed to eighteen months of one

The rest of this list is where the math actually flips. Numbers eight through one pay back faster, and number one is the one I’ve personally stacked into five figures from a single hour of work. Here’s all of it.

Read more

I had a business that looked completely successful from the outside. Revenue was coming in, I had a bunch of income streams running, and I was marketing harder than I ever had in my life. I was posting, launching, emailing, pitching, doing all the things everyone tells you to do when you want to grow.

Fast forward to a few years later I was making around $400/hr working five hours a week!

Here’s the part that matters more than the numbers though. That $400/hr was nowhere close to the most money I’ve ever made in this business, but it’s still the best business model I’ve ever run, and I’d rebuild it again tomorrow, in fact, after my year long paid sabbatical I’m build this model back up again.

During that year of my better business model I was healing from mold exposure, I was helping my husband recover from complications after an emergency appendectomy that happened while we were on vacation, and we bought a house and moved. Any one of those would have flattened the 2020 version of me, because the 2020 version of me had built a business that needed 60 hours a week to produce $22 an hour take home. There was no room in that model for a ‘life to life’, and life happens whether your business has room for it or not.

Real talk, this is the thing I want you to sit with before we get into the process.

The belief that keeps you stuck at $22 an hour:

Most people in this spot think they have a marketing problem.

That’s the diagnosis I hear more than any other, from people who are already successful, already making good money, already known in their space. They tell me they just need to figure out the marketing, or fix the funnel, or get more consistent with content, and then they will have finally “made it” and be able to breathe more.

Listen listen listen… I’ve worked with more than 1,500 entrepreneurs at this point, and my clients average a 67% profit increase and 28% fewer hours from working together, and almost none of that comes from more marketing. A capacity-capped business has a model problem, and knowing that is uber important because more marketing poured into a broken model doesn’t fix the model, it just scales the part that’s breaking you. It literally just scales chaos and stress.

That’s exactly what I was doing in 2020... I had a pile of income streams and most of them were just sitting there, and my answer to that was just to market them harder.

What it looks like when someone runs this correctly:

I had a client who pulled her client roster for the previous 12 months and traced how every single person had actually found her and converted.

Not a single client had ever come from social media in those twelve months. She was paying a VA $1,000 a month to run her social, plus roughly five hours a week of her own time managing the whole operation, reviewing content, approving things, answering DMs that went nowhere.

Meanwhile about 80% of her sales were coming from networking.

So she cut the social media entirely, ended the VA contract, and moved those five hours a week into networking, which was already the thing producing almost all of her revenue. Over the next year her revenue went up 42%!

She didn’t add a single new marketing channel and she didn’t launch anything. She just took the money and hours out of the thing producing nothing and put them into the thing already working, and the business responded immediately.

That’s one move out of four, and it isn’t even the first one.

The four moves, and why the order is the whole thing:

When I rebuilt my model in 2020 I did four things, and I did them in a specific order.

Running these out of sequence is how people end up cutting the wrong income stream, or systematizing a model that should have been killed, or raising prices on an offer they’re about to resent. I’ve watched all three happen, and every time it traces back to someone doing move three before move one.

So, below I’m walking you through all four with the actual decision rules, tools, and exercises you can complete to do have this business glow up for yourself!

I’ll go into why I killed five digital products that were genuinely making money, what I actually rebuilt the model into, and the secret about how I marketed during that year that nobody else is going to tell you (hint: it’s without social media).

Move 1: Run your effective rate and set a target.

Most successful business owners have never run their Effective Rate even once, which is exactly how someone ends up at $22 an hour without noticing, like me, lol.

This is owner pay, not revenue, and the actual hours you do work, not scheduled hours, which means the Sunday night email triage counts and the mental load of thinking about the business in the shower doesn’t, so be honest without being dramatic about it. You can run yours with my Effective Rate Calculator in about four minutes.

Most people who have run some version of this ran it on revenue instead of owner pay, which produces a number that feels amazing and means absolutely nothing. When I ran mine in 2020 it came out around $22 an hour and I sat with that for a while, because I was a business owner in my late 20s with clients and “good” revenue, and I was paying myself less than the going rate for a lot of jobs I could have applied for that afternoon.

Here’s the thing though, this is the move my clients resist hardest, every single time… the pushback is always some version of “it doesn’t really matter, I’m already making good money.” That’s exactly the sentence I would have said in 2020 while making $22 an hour. Good money and a good model are two completely separate questions, and the only way to find out which one you have is to run the number. So run it friend!

Get The Free Effective Rate Calculator

Then you set a target rate, and you write it down somewhere you’ll see it.

This is the step people skip and it’s the reason everything downstream turns into a gut or intuition call. Once you have a target rate on paper, every income stream in your business gets measured against the same line, and the decisions stop being emotional. Without it you’re just staring at a spreadsheet feeling vaguely uneasy about an income stream you already know isn’t working.

So, pick a number that’s a stretch from where you are without being fantasy, get there, then reset it higher. Ok?!

Now onto Move 2 that will have you working less within the next few hours.

Read more

So here’s the thing nobody’s talking about. While everyone races to use more AI, it’s costing them five things, and I’ve paid a couple of these bills myself: your reputation, your integrity, your brain, your time, and the one that actually hits your bank account. In my experience, a reckoning is coming over the next 12 months for entrepreneurs using AI the wrong way, and the ones who keep their voice and their thinking are the ones who win.

By the way, I teach this whole thing inside my AI Leverage Lab, the live cohort program where I show you how to leverage the 4 levels of AI without losing yourself.

First though, the part of the AI conversation almost nobody’s having. Let’s get into it.

The 5 Ways AI Use Is Harming Entrepreneurs

1. Your Reputation

AI can make your copy sound impressive while saying absolutely nothing clear, and it can fake an intimacy your audience feels is hollow… the copy-paste captions that sound like no one… the emails that could’ve come from any entrepreneur in your niche. Confused people leave, and people who feel disconnected from you leave forever, and you usually don’t find out why.

And I've felt this in real life… a friend texted me during my endometriosis surgery last fall, and I clocked the bot in about two seconds because it didn't sound anything like her. She never uses words like this. And while my initial reaction was hurt… that a close friend of mine couldn’t just be themselves and tell me they love me and support me in their own words. It didn’t sit well with me. But honestly, knowing this person, I do think they just wanted to have good words for me, so I don’t hold anything against them. I know it was done with good intentions, but still… it makes you question it. And I would always rather someone message me raw and real with no beautiful words than something that did not truly come from them.

Another friend posted a full vacation recap on Facebook that was clearly straight out of AI with zero edits, and I felt the connection to her drop right there. Not because AI touched it, but because none of it was actually her, and I could tell. Like, what? No one talks in staccato sentences like that. No one. Like, come on everyone, just write from the heart, real, raw, human, and tell people how you really felt about your vacation. That’s what we want. And posts like these I immediately scroll past.

And as a consumer, I’d never want to hire someone whose captions look like this for their business. I want to know THEM, THEIR VOICE, THEIR IDEAS… not AI.

If this has been you, it’s okay; everyone’s done it, and they do it with the best intentions really… no one is using AI and trying to be fake and inauthentic, but that’s the way it turns out. So now’s your wake-up call, friend!

Here’s what to do this week to protect your reputation: Never let AI write in your voice from a cold start. Feed it your real writing first, and then read every single line out loud before it goes anywhere. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d actually say, don’t post it. I’ve built advisors trained on my voice and my frameworks and my whole business, and everything I put out comes from me at the inception, and then the final still gets approved by me, because even a well-trained AI wanders and slips up (even with training, it happens daily!). It is never 100% you on its own.

2. Your Integrity

I’ve watched a handful of clients, who will stay nameless, have AI build their entire digital products and courses and lead magnets and client materials from scratch. None of it came from their brain, like zero. As a personal brand, people are buying you, your brain, your experience, the expertise you actually earned.

It’s like being the airline captain who gets paid to fly the plane, and you let the copilot fly the whole thing while everyone thanks you for the smooth landing. Nobody would keep booking that flight if they knew. Your integrity is really the only thing you can’t buy back, and maybe your reputation in there too.

Here’s what to do this week to protect your integrity: Only package what’s actually yours. Use AI to structure and speed up the expertise you’ve genuinely built, never to manufacture expertise you don’t have.

3. Your Brain

When AI first showed up, it was the wild wild west, and I was running to it for things that were simple enough for my own brain to solve. Over time, I could feel my problem-solving getting lazier and my creativity getting worse, and I know I’m not the only one this happened to. Your brain is your most valuable business asset, and the more you outsource your thinking, the weaker that muscle gets, so your judgment and your creativity and your discernment all start to atrophy.

Here’s what to do this week to protect your brain: Make the decision yourself first, then hand AI the execution. Keep the thinking, give away the typing. And if you want advice from AI, be sure to build AI Advisors trained on how you want them to think and where they pull their knowledge from. This will help advise you, but again, never think for you. It would be like talking things through with a team member. This is Level 2 of my ‘4 Levels of AI Leverage’. I talk more about advisors in this article:

4. Your Time

I don’t know about you, but I have lost entire days to AI. The 10 pm rabbit holes where you’re prompting and re-prompting and re-prompting again, and your tokens are maxing out, and you feel productive the whole time, and yet you produce basically nothing. Prompting AI is the new doom scrolling, I’m convinced! 45 minutes gone and the work on your task list is still not done. Half the time, the sales page you were trying to get AI to write would’ve taken you less time to just write yourself from scratch.

Here’s what to do this week to protect your time: Two moves here. Train AI on your business so you’re not stuck re-explaining yourself in that endless loop, and set up real systems so it saves you time instead of eating it. Then before any AI task, ask whether it needs your brain, your voice, your judgment, or your relationships. If yes, you stay on the wheel. If no, that’s exactly the work you hand off. The full system for sorting your work this way is one of the first things we build inside the AI Leverage Lab, so I won’t unpack the whole thing here.

5. Your Money

This is the one that actually hurts, and it’s the sneakiest. AI is innately positive (yay! but…), and it’s designed a lot like a social media algorithm, where people are paid six and seven figures to keep you on the platform for as long as possible (because that’s how it makes money, and same with AI… you run out of tokens and you’re not finished with your work so you spend more money beyond your monthly plan). So it will tell you every idea you have is a great idea, and it’ll throw ten more at you for free. It’s a major people-pleaser, and the second you push back, it caves.

I’ve had a handful of clients not renew their consulting contracts with me because they wanted to try to use AI as their only business coach (I don’t blame them, its a fraction of the cost and you have 24/7 access to it), and every single one of them came back to me, more broke and more scattered and more burnt out than when they left, because they’d followed whatever their AI told them. One had AI convince her to launch an Amazon journal, and girlfriend didn’t even have consistent sales yet… an Amazon journal that won’t sell well and at best will bring her $150 is the last thing she needs. Another ran a whole free challenge AI talked her into, and it flopped, because I have the discernment and expertise to know that his ICA does not participate in challenges. Another built an entire launch on AI’s plan, and that flopped too, because it was so generic none of it connected with her real leads.

Here’s what to do this week to protect your money: AI has no real discernment, and you have all of it. Run every idea it hands you through your own filter and your own research before you build a single thing around it. And please, please, please, keep your business coach! And if you need one, hit me up; I’m taking on 1:1 clients right now!

Let’s wrap this up:

Okay, take a breath, because this is not me telling you to be scared of AI. I use it every single day, and I’ve personally made some of these mistakes too, and so have my entrepreneur friends and clients. The fix isn’t using less AI; the fix is leverage done right, and it’s completely learnable. You use AI for the robot work so you can amplify the human parts, being more present, more clear, more you. You're the first 20%, the AI’s 60%, and you’re the final 20%.

If you’re just finding me, the last couple of posts build right into this one:

Now tell me in the comments, which of the five have you already caught yourself doing? Be real with me! ↓

Get on the AI Leverage Lab Waitlist ↓

The AI Leverage Lab is a live, 8-week cohort where we build your custom AI system together, one level at a time, so you walk out with AI that sounds like you and runs the busywork. This is the first live round, and I won’t always run them live. Get on the waitlist, and you’re first in line when doors open August 3rd.

Join The Waitlist

I know how that sounds, so let me put the real math right up front before you decide I’m doing the inflated-number thing that everybody in this space does lol. One Substack article (like the one you’re reading right now, so meta am I right?!) used to take me about 6 hours start to finish. I run two Substack publications, this one and my lifestyle one, More Life, and I will be publishing somewhere between 12 and 16 articles a month across them both, so at 6 hours a pop that’s basically a part-time job just to get the words down. And that was the problem I sat down to solve, and the math at the bottom is going to walk you all the way to 500+ per year. Stay with me.

The Things Almost No One Does:

Here’s the thing almost nobody actually does: they will not spend time to save time. They’re so buried in the doing that they never stop long enough to build the thing that ends the doing. That’s the whole busy trap right there. That’s exactly why they stay busy and burned out forever and never scale, because scaling requires you to step out of the work for a minute and build the machine, and stepping out feels impossible when you’re drowning… so they keep swimming, and they never build the boat.

I almost didn’t build any of this, actually. It was a whole weekend, give or take: six hours Friday, six Saturday, six Sunday, and that is not how I wanted to spend those three days. I did it anyway, and every week after has been (and will be) better for it, so I’m not going to pretend the up-front time feels good, because it doesn’t; it’s just the thing that’s worth doing. And side note… I made it fun… I went to Whole Foods, grabbed a few fun snacks, treats, and some kombucha, turned on my Brain Food playlist and just rocked it out!

Why you think AI can’t do this (and why you’re wrong):

Okay, so here’s where I want to push on you a little, because I think most entrepreneurs have already decided what AI can do for them, and they decided it after about 16 minutes of trying.

Here’s what usually happens… You open ChatGPT, you type “write me a post about X,” you get back something that sounds like a LinkedIn robot wrote it during a corporate training, and you close the tab. You conclude that AI writing sounds like nobody, that it can’t capture your voice, and that using it would make your brand generic, so you go back to doing everything by hand.

I get it, and honestly you’re right about that output; it is crazy generic.

But that’s just the front door of what AI is.

And listen, I wasn’t ahead of you on this. I didn’t think AI could run repeatable processes like this at all. I definitely didn’t know it could go out onto the web or into my actual computer and do things for me. For a long while, I just treated it like a chat box you asked questions to, same as you probably do right now.

What you did in that 16 minutes is Level 1 of my 4 Levels of AI Leverage framework:

Level 1: Prompting

You typed a request into a blank box and hoped. Level 1 is the rung almost everyone lives on, and it’s also the rung that produces the exact bad output that convinces people to quit or to use it endlessly until you finally get a good output. You asked a tool that knows nothing about you to sound like you, so of course it didn’t lol.

Level 2: Advisory

This is where AI knows your business well enough that you stop re-explaining yourself every single time you open it.

Level 3: Acceleration

This is where you’ve built repeatable processes, and the work moves at a completely different speed.

Level 4: Automation

And this is where the thing runs without you touching it.

What I built that weekend is Level 3. And the gap between the Level 1 experience that made you give up and the Level 3 system that gives me back 500+ hours a year is not talent, and it’s not some technical background I have that you don’t.

It’s setup time, and that’s a gap that keeps most entrepreneurs stuck in prompting and re-prompting.

I walk through all four levels and how to build in each one inside the AI Leverage Lab, because once you see the ladder you can’t unsee how much room there is above where you’re standing. It’s seriously so exciting!

First things first, why I stay the brain:

Real talk though, here’s what this was never about. It was never about cranking out more content (aka harnessing systems to do more instead of less). I built this to protect my integrity, my creativity, my brain, and my voice. Because here’s what freaks people out about AI, and they’re super right to be careful: they think leverage means handing over the thinking. I never hand over the thinking. I stay the brain at every single decision point in my personal brand, and the AI only does the grunt work in the gaps between my decisions. I hand over the labor, and I keep the judgment. Those are two completely different things, and the whole system lives on that line.

I stay the brain for two reasons that actually matter to me.

1. The first is that everything you put out there represents you, so the second I publish something I don’t fully stand behind, that’s my whole reputation on the line, and I want people following me for my brain, not for the AI’s.

2. The second is that I just started this Substack, so these articles are literally the first time I’m running this system live, and without it I’d have been stuck with two options I hated, either post way fewer articles right when I’m trying to warm up a brand new audience with real value, or work a whole lot more, and I wasn’t about to do either one.

Okay, so let me tell you what I actually built, because I want you to see the machine.

The AI x Substack System I Built:

Before I built any of it, I had AI go study the top Substack creators and hand me back a report on what’s actually working right now. Not what worked in 2022, but what’s working this month, and all other systems got built on top of that report.

I have these run in a very specific order, and they are all designed to keep my brain, voice, and integrity.

1. It starts with a Substack Advisor, loaded with Substack strategy that’s specialized to my business, so when I ask it something, the strategy I get back is mine, not the internet’s average take that already lives in every other creator’s head.

2. An article builder that interviews me instead of writing for me. I talk my ideas out loud using Wispr Flow (you can get a free month of Wispr Flow Pro right here), and it pulls the article out of my head.

3. A refiner that sharpens the draft, hunts for the spots where a smart reader would get confused, and checks every line against my actual voice.

4. A pre-publish audit that handles SEO, AEO, and GEO, so the piece gets found by search engines and by the AI search tools people use instead of Google now. This one replaced a $50/month SEO subscription that I cancelled.

5. A promoter that turns the one article into a stack of content pointing back to it.

Here’s the principle underneath all of it, and this is the part I want you to really understand even if you forget everything else. If you do something more than twice, it should be a process. Build it once, run it the same way forever, and stay the brain at every decision point so it never stops sounding like you. Fun fact: this exact article ran through the system you just read about… I mean, of course!

The real time-saving numbers:

The time invested: 18 hours, 1 weekend, 5 processes.

Each article used to take 6 hours and now takes 2 to 3, so I’m saving 3 to 4 hours every single time. Run that against 12 to 16 articles a month and the savings land somewhere between 430 and 770 hours a year, depending on how heavy the month is. A normal month sits around 575. I say “over 500” because it’s the round number I can defend on my slowest month without stretching, and I’d rather hand you the real range than the biggest number I could get away with.

A Note: While I spent 18 hours building the initial systems, all systems need to change, evolve, and be updated over time. I’ve already spent about 45 minutes refining some of the processes as I’ve worked through them in real time. Still overall a major time saver, but I want to remind you that once systems are set up, they’re not set it and forget it. If you evolve, your business changes, your processes change, you find hiccups or leaks in the process, it needs to be updated, period.

Where the hours saved actually go:

Here’s the deeper meaning behind this though, and it’s the reason I did any of this.

The hours don’t go back into more work; that was never the goal. They go into more life. The numbers were never the “prize” of productivity… the life the time buys back is the prize. That’s the More Life throughline in everything I teach: you leverage the tool so you can work less and live more, not so you can grind harder with the time you just freed up. If you save 500 hours and pour all 500 straight back into the business, you didn’t build leverage; you built a bigger jail cell.

So build the boat, spend the weekend, and be the person who stops swimming long enough to make everything after it easier. Ok?!

If you built one process this month, just one, what would it be? Tell me in the comments, and I’ll tell you where to start. ↓

Get on the AI Leverage Lab Waitlist ↓

The AI Leverage Lab is a live, 8-week cohort where we build your custom AI system together, one level at a time, so you walk out with AI that sounds like you and runs the busywork. This is the first live round, and I won’t always run them live. Get on the waitlist, and you’re first in line when doors open August 3rd.

Join The Waitlist

Let’s be real… You are not bad at AI; you’re just stuck on the lowest rung of it and calling that “using AI”.

Here’s where you probably live right now, whether you’d admit it or not: You type a prompt, you get something mediocre back, so you correct it and re-prompt, then you fix the tone and re-prompt one more time. The whole way through, it feels ‘productive’. Two hours gone, and all you’ve got to show for it is a slightly better email and a to-do list that somehow got longer.

I’m just gonna say it: prompting is the new doomscrolling. It’s a loop built to keep you in the conversation, and you were the bottleneck the entire time and never clocked it, because typing into a chat box really does feel like you’re getting somewhere.

What’s the difference between using AI and leveraging it?

Okay, so here’s the distinction that really matters. Using AI means you’re still doing all the work and the AI just talks back to you. Leveraging AI means the AI actually speeds it up or does the work for you so much that you have freed up work hours from it. And most entrepreneurs have no idea they’re not leveraging it because the whole thing feels busy while it’s happening, and busy reads as progress and productivity, am I right?!

There are four ways you stay stuck here, and you’re probably doing at least two of them:

1. You stay stuck prompting, treating AI like a think-out-loud partner that just manufactures more work for you to go execute.

2. You get hit with shiny-object syndrome, because AI is a people-pleaser and it’ll hand you 15 new directions when what you needed was one sharper focus.

3. You let AI think for you, which means you’re outsourcing the one thing that was always yours… your actual judgment.

4. You let AI build your product without your brain in it, offloading the exact expertise your whole brand (and reputation) is built on.

Here’s the common thread though: not one of them makes you work less.

The 4 Levels of AI Leverage

So let me give you the actual map. There are four levels of AI leverage, and knowing which one you’re stuck on is the difference between AI buying your time back and AI just eating more of it.

Level 1 is Prompting, and it’s the floor.

This is perfect-prompting territory, and you do need to get good at it, because everything above it sits on top of it. It’s still 100% your time and effort every single time you open the box. A good prompt gets you a cleaner answer, but you’re still the one doing all the work every time, and this is where most people get stuck for years, mistaking a good prompt for a system.

Level 2 is Advisory, and this is where it starts getting good.

This is where you train AI on your actual business so it thinks like an advisor who knows you, instead of a generic chatbot pulling whatever’s floating around on the internet (seriously, it will just pull absolutely crap sometimes lol). In my business, I run a whole advisory board: a strategic advisor, a sales advisor, an operations one, a financial one, plus one for each of my income and sales platforms. Each one is trained on three things at once: the exact strategies I actually like to use, instructions for how I want it to perform and advise me, and everything inside my business- my values, my ideal client, how my monetization model really works, my goals, etc.

Without that training, AI just hands me any strategy off the web. With the training, I get advice built around my business from something that actually knows my business. Real quick though, a lot of people build one of these, and it comes out generic, and they figure the whole thing doesn’t work for them, when really they just need to refine it, because they haven’t given it enough about their business yet or told it clearly enough how they want it to respond.

Here’s an example of responses from general AI chat vs. my trusted advisor, and of course I asked it something absurd for funsies:

Much different answers!

(P.S. Inside AI Leverage Lab I teach you how to create this yourself, but also tons of plug-and-play templates and files to use)

Level 3 is Acceleration, and this is the one that saves me the most time by a mile.

This is where a task that used to eat hours gets done in a fraction of that, and you’re still in the driver’s seat the whole time. Marketing and content systems are one of my favorite places to start here.

My husband and I co-own Premer Health & Performance. He’s the Chiropractor & Functional Medicine Doctor, and I handle all the admin and marketing. So here’s a look at our Level 3 AI Content System:

1. He’ll record a 3-5 minute video on a topic, which we edit and use for Instagram.

2. I drop that transcript into the AI repurposing process I built, and it hands me back a full value-based email to our list plus 3-5 more supporting social posts, all in his voice and his words. This really matters because people aren’t buying me (the person doing the marketing); they’re buying him… the doctor, so information must come from him and his brain and knowledge and not me. The work is 90% there, and I’m just steering it home.

Same deal with my own Substack (this one you’re reading right now). One article would take me around 6 hours start to finish, and now it’s more like 2-3. I’m breaking that entire system down in its own post here ↓

The whole point of Level 3 is that I’m still making every real decision and every bit of it comes from my brain and my experience; the AI just cuts the drive time.

Level 4 is automation, and this is the one that still kind of blows my mind.

This is work that runs without you in the room at all. I have a tool that every single week researches the internet for places I should pitch for speaking gigs and podcast guest spots, and it pulls the contact info, who their audience is, the details on each one, then ranks the whole list by what’s most strategic for my business, and it keeps that list running and up to date on its own. I used to pay a VA $30 an hour for about 6 hours a month to do a worse version of that by hand, so around $180 a month. The tool runs on its own for about $100 a month, does roughly 80% of that work automatically, and outperforms a VA because it’s working the entire internet every week instead of a handful of hours. (Note that I pay that $100/month for my main AI tool and it does hundreds of things for me; this is just one of them) That’s just one of the things it does for me.

So here’s the throughline to hold onto:

• Levels 1 and 2 make your thinking sharper.

• Levels 3 and 4 are where you actually get your time back.

Which level are you actually on?

Here’s your quick gut-check, and be honest about where you actually spend your days, not where you dabbled successfully one time.

• If AI only ever talks back to you and then you go execute everything yourself, you’re on Level 1.

• If the advice you’re getting is actually shaped like your business, you’ve made it to Level 2.

• If a task that used to eat hours now takes a fraction of the time and your hands are still on the wheel, that’s Level 3.

• If something is producing real work for you while you’re asleep or out on a walk, that’s Level 4.

If you’re thinking you don’t have time to build out AI systems like this…

Okay, so right about now you’re probably thinking, cool, so now I have to go build all of this, and I don’t have time for that either. I hear you; that’s the most relatable objection there is, and it’s also exactly why you stay stuck. If you don’t have time to build systems to save you time, that’s exactly the reason you need to build systems. There are two more things worth saying here.

First, you don’t need it all, and you don’t need it all right now.

You’ll need to figure out what your specific business actually needs to run, not building a pile of tools because they’re cool to build. Some of my clients only ever build Level 2, and they’re thrilled, because that’s all their current season calls for, and they can always add Level 3 and 4 later. I did exactly that myself; I sat at Level 2 for a couple months before I built out 3 and 4, because I was shifting a bunch of stuff around in my business and Level 2 was honestly all my season called for at the time.

Second, yeah, you have to spend time to save time; and seriously, nobody wants to hear it.

Real talk, I could’ve started my Substack the normal way and spent 12 to 18 hours a week cranking out the articles I wanted to publish. I chose to spend around 18 hours up front building the systems instead, which is basically one week of work. I made it back inside two weeks, and it will pay me back every single week moving forward.

Here’s the part that actually stings:

Building this stuff is way less scary than it sounds. A Level 2 advisor takes me anywhere from 30 minutes to about 3 hours, a Level 3 process is 30 minutes to 2 hours, and a Level 4 automation is around an hour.

The reason people still don’t finish on their own is they start, get pulled into the next fire, and end up with a bunch of half-built things that never actually save them anything. That’s the whole reason the AI Leverage Lab is a live cohort, and why building your Level 2 advisor is the very first thing we set up together, because it keeps you on task and building only what you actually need. This is the first live cohort I’m running, and I won’t always run them live, so if being walked up these levels in real time, live with me is what would finally get you to do it, this is the window, friend.

Here’s what I know for sure:

So here’s your north star: AI should make you work less, not more. If it isn’t doing that, you’re using it, and you’re almost certainly stuck on a rung you outgrew a while ago.

Tell me in the comments: which level are you actually on right now, and which one are you most ready to build first? ↓

Get on the AI Leverage Lab Waitlist ↓

The AI Leverage Lab is a live, 8-week cohort where we build your custom AI system together, one level at a time, so you walk out with AI that sounds like you and runs the busywork. This is the first live round, and I won’t always run them live. Get on the waitlist, and you’re first in line when doors open August 3rd.

Join The Waitlist