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Before you add another piece of software, another AI model, or another agent to your business — watch this. The problem: New business owners get told they need this tool and that tool and this agent. Next thing they know, software is 60% of monthly revenue. Scott has seen it firsthand. That’s not sustainable, especially when you should be protecting runway. Where Scott learned the principle — and it wasn’t from technology. About 20 years ago, Scott’s dad — a photographer in his second career — invited him to a weekend workshop in Cincinnati with David Ziser, an internationally in-demand wedding photographer. Ziser’s images are iconic. Twenty years later they still hold up. Scott watched him work: setting the scene, posing the subject, finding the light. Then the secret — Ziser would put a flash behind the subject, firing back toward the camera, so it lit up the veil, the train, and the white of the dress. All light. Nothing to do with the gear. Then Scott saw the gear. Cases of lenses. Multiple $5,000 camera bodies. Tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. Scott had a cheap camera and started to discount the whole thing — I can’t replicate this. Ziser stopped him: “You shouldn’t go out and buy all this equipment. You don’t need it. I would not invest in any equipment, any lenses, any camera bodies, until you know with confidence that you are missing shots that you could get.” And then the part Scott never forgot: “Everything I’ve ever bought has not come from this desire to buy this tool. It’s come from frustration from not being able to do what I wanted to do.” When Ziser hit a wall, he bought the cheapest thing that solved the problem. His equipment grew with his capability — not ahead of it. Applied to software: Earn it. The tool has to be justified by the business, not by what someone else in your industry uses. Keep it in budget. Don’t let software outpace what’s reasonable, especially early. Don’t grow into it. Grow, then earn it. No business ever grew because of the software. People on task are often cheaper. Transactional contractors cost less than a stack of subscriptions, and they don’t become a fixed expense. On the agentic-company videos: If your intent is to build an agentic business and you have the capital, go do it. But if you’re early and you’re not there yet, the tech becomes a boat anchor on your expenses at exactly the wrong moment. The mindset shift: The question isn’t “should I add this tool?” It’s “what constraint am I hitting consistently that this tool would solve?” That’s thinking first. Not tool-first. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Mall developer Alfred Taubman figured out that you can build the best mall in the world, but if people won’t walk into the stores, it flops. He called the problem threshold resistance — if getting in the door takes too much work, people just don’t go. The same thing happens with your call to action. The diagnosis: Most CTAs ask for too much. We all want the sale today, because sales pay the bills. But if the ask is bigger than what the buyer is ready to commit to, they walk. Match the ask to the commitment level. A book might be an impulse buy. A property isn’t — even when the monthly payment is low, the commitment is high. “Buy now” on a high-commitment purchase puts the brakes on. Make the next step a micro step. What’s the smallest thing they won’t say no to? Request information. Download a property report. Tell me about your situation. The attorney example: “Book a 30-minute consultation” sounds inviting, but with legal or medical the result might be something you don’t want to hear. That makes it scary. “Tell me a little about your case” or “download this” is a smaller door. Honor the micro-commitment. Once they take the small step, don’t immediately jump to the ask. They’re not ready yet. How to test it with AI: Take two CTAs you’re considering — A and B. Give your AI model the full context: whether the buyer is cold or already in your world, what the offer is, the pricing, everything. Let it ask you questions. Then have it simulate a thousand prospective buyers and compare response rates between the two. The warning: The numbers will be wrong. The model is wildly optimistic — it’ll tell you cold traffic converts at 10-15%. It doesn’t. Scott has had to walk it back every single time, and it agrees every single time. Use it for comparison, not prediction. You’re not looking for a forecast. You’re checking whether you’ve lowered the resistance enough, or whether you’ve picked the highest-resistance option without realizing it. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

My AI agent just found me $4,200 a year in payroll fees that I didn't know I could negotiate. Now, mind you, that $4,200 is from one vendor. And honestly, I wasn't even looking for that. I was looking at something completely different. So if I'm here to tell you that I'm surprised about something, I'm happy that I just found $4,200. Let me explain what's going on. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you fix your business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP job. And today I want to walk you through two of the experiments that I've been running on this channel. And I'll kind of give you some updates because I can't stand when people run experiments or they tell you something they never get back to you. So here we go. Experiment number one. I talked about it in last week's episode, and it was using AI to do my bookkeeping. And I told you at the time that I was running parallel systems, my CPA versus AI. Which one was gonna battle it out? And essentially I'm happy to report to you that the September run, if you will, was smooth for well, both of them. I mean, the CPA did what the CPA does. And the AI does did what the AI did. Now, here's the difference. My C EPA has years and years of experience with knowing how to code my transactions. And so the rules are built in. Whereas AI needed help more frequently with coding the transactions. But here's the thing. Every day, Monday through Friday at 8 a.m. or thereabout, I would get an a message from my AI bookkeeper who would say, Hey, here's yesterday's transactions. How should I code them? And in the beginning, I needed to give a little bit more, but by the end of the month, it was really doing a great job of suggesting what the coding should be. So it became less and less of like, hey, code it over here versus just scanning it and saying you're good to go. And then it started to pick up on some. Scott Todd (02:29.698) well-established rules like, hey, when we get revenue into the bank account, well, then that's just revenue. when we have certain expenses like payroll, boom, it just hit the payroll. When we paid our VAs, it knew their names and it hit them as well. And it just started even not even recommending anything to me. It just did it. And so at the end of the month, when I compared the revenue and expenses from the CPA and the AI, what happened was The revenue and the expenses aligned. It matched as you would expect that it would. Okay. Now, there were some transactions that were coded differently. The CPH coded them one way, the AI coded the other. And I don't really believe that that is a deal breaker. And the reason it's not a deal breaker is because it's not necessarily that the coding has to be exact and precise. So when I say coding, what I mean is. That if I spent the money on software, that it's coded software, or if I spent the money on travel, that it's coded travel. It helps a great deal, especially if you're comparing year over year, or you're comparing different transactions, or you're looking at different categories. That's important. But at the end of the day, the most important part is that the revenue and the expenses total the exact amount, right, of profit, right? That's what we're looking for. Now, here are some of the differences though. First of all, the AI agent got me my financial statements much faster than the CPA did. In fact, I had the financial statements on the first day of the month from the AI. And it was well after that that I got them from the CPA. So the human involvement of looking at it faster to me was through the AI. Clearly, the lower cost option is the AI. The AI, I don't really know what it cost me. Because I'm just on a subscription and it's using like my grok bot subscription for 200 bucks a month. And clearly that was just some fraction of it, but way less than what I spend with my CPA. But the one clear difference that I found was the thing that kind of surprised me the most. And that was the fact that my AI agent began suggesting to me cost savings. Scott Todd (04:54.796) Now, some of them I just dismissed. Like, yeah, no, it's good. I'm I'm okay with this subscription, but it began to look at my subscriptions. And then it brought to my attention something that I was really surprised about. And here's what it was. I pay my payroll company. I have multiple businesses, so they each have their, they each have a payroll account with this company. And I pay them a fee every time we run payroll. So I think on one company it was like $140 a month. And the other was a hundred, I'm sorry, $140 per pay period times 26 pay periods. And on the other company, it's like 106 times 26. That was what we were paying. And the AI looked at that and said, Hey, I think you have a cost savings here. And I was like, What do you mean? And they said, it said, Hey, there is a lower tier plan. that you're avail that you qualify for if you're not using these other services. And quite frankly, I didn't even know I had access to those other services. So in almost three years, I had never used those services once. They were like background checks and other things that just really aren't relevant to my business. And in fact, I called up the payroll company and I said, is this true? Like, is Is this true? Because like I'm paying over $100 per pay period when in fact I think I qualify for a lower plan that's like less than $40 per pay period. And they looked at my account and they said, yeah, that's true. So with that one suggestion, my AI agent literally found for me $4,200 in annual savings. And it wasn't, again, it wasn't even something that I was looking for. I didn't hire it to go out there and do it, do that. I hired it to record transactions. And, you know, I think that the thing that surprises me the most is that at the end of the day, as a business owner, I cannot examine every single transaction and know that I'm on the very best plan. But and I'm not saying this to dog on a CPA at all, but the CPAs in the world. Scott Todd (07:23.982) They're not necessarily looking at those transactions either, saying, I think you have the opportunity to save money. And I just was really taken aback by the fact that my AI agent just delivered to me this gift that will continue to keep on giving. So that was $4,200 for the next 12 months. It's $4,200 a month, a year, sorry, $4,200 a year for multiple years. Again, I've been paying this for three years. So right there alone. I just paid for a bowload of AI usage on that savings alone. And it was all proactive. And if your AI agent, if you're using them, if they're not suggesting ways that you can save money, well, then you should definitely be proactive and ask it: hey, look at these bank transactions that you now have access to. Where's my cost savings opportunities? Question everything. Now, earlier this year. I did that with another service. I used it with Cloudflare. And I think my Cloudflare bill was almost, I don't know, $350. And AI suggested that, hey, that seems like it's kind of high. Give me the bill. And I gave it the bill and it said you should cut off all of these other services. You don't need them. And it also took my Cloudflare bill in January down from $350 a month down to $30 a So again, AI is very, very good at that. And it's not something that I've seen a proactive effort from the CPAs and the bookkeepers of the world. And again, I'm not here to dog on them. I think that they do a fantastic job. It's just an opportunity with AI that we can do something that's different. And you see this across the board. Lots of people are talking about AI saving on money. Well, this is how it helped me. Now, word of caution. Do not fire your accountant off of my podcast. Do not do it. Don't do it. But see, here's the thing: that experiment that I just ran gave me an answer to a question that I didn't ask. And what I want it to do is I want the AI to bring to me ideas that we can test. Scott Todd (09:48.43) Constantly, because that's the most important part of growing the business, is constant testing. And I mentioned this in episode 79 of this podcast, which was a few months ago, where I think it was in July, where I talked about this experiment that we were going to run on churn. And when I talked about the testing, I said, Hey, whenever we run something, we want to create a hypothesis. Whenever we run a test, we want to create a hypothesis and we want it to have a verdict of either true or false. Okay. It has to be true or false. And at the time, at the time, I said that the test that we were running in one of my companies is that in a SaaS product that we have, we did not allow certain people to accept reviews. And we turned that on, thinking that sellers with Reviews actually churn less. And that is still remains true that they churn less. And in fact, we did see a decrease in our churn from where we were. It was, it was let's see, it was 2.84%. And since we talked, it went down to 1.97%. Now that's a that's an improvement of 30%. That's pretty good. Okay. And I could have just come back on here and said, Hey, we yeah, we wanted to test to see if churn got reduced and it did. What yeah, we won. But as we dug into the numbers, we realized that the thing that we did, the thing that we did to reduce churn while churn was down. The thing that we did didn't have an impact on it. So again, what we did was we turned on reviews for certain sellers that didn't previously have it. And we saw that churn rate of that membership go down. But here's how we know it didn't have an impact. Because when we looked at the numbers, we realized that ultimately the P score, which is the correlation between that thing. Scott Todd (12:00.756) And something...

For the month of September, Scott has been running an AI bookkeeping agent in parallel with his existing accounting system and team. Nothing has been cut over. At month end, he's comparing both sets of financials. The setup, in five steps: Bank feed. BankSync.io (~$7/month) pulls daily transactions from connected accounts via Plaid. Daily ingest. At 8am, Stu — Scott's bookkeeping agent — grabs the prior day's transactions, filters out anything already processed, and ingests what's new. The queue. New charges wait to be categorized. Nothing posts automatically. Human confirmation. Stu proposes a category and the rule it believes applies. Scott confirms or corrects. Only then does it post to the ledger. Portability backup. The ledger copies to Dropbox, so the books can move to whatever agent platform comes next. The rule: The agent doesn't spend money and doesn't post anything unconfirmed. A second test inside the test: Grok recently released a Grok Finance plugin with read-only bank access — also via Plaid. Scott is comparing it against BankSync to see if both produce the same result, since Grok Finance is free. On the CPA question: The accounting team isn't going away. The CPA still oversees the work. The question is whether the low-level coding work can move, freeing people for higher-value work. Currently running three companies through the system. More advanced land-investing accounting is being tested separately — Accounting for Land Investors students should watch their class LMS. Before you try this: Vet any repo you connect to your financial data. Check the maintainer, the update history, and what the code does with your information. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Meta released a new AI agent framework called Muse. There will probably be another one next week, and another the week after. If you try to rebuild your business around every new agent, you'll get whiplash and never get traction. Scott's approach: Don't chase them. Learn what each one is good at, and use it for that. What Muse does well: It's tightly integrated with Facebook and Instagram. Scott gave it a link to a Chipley, Florida property on Landmodo (0.66 acres, owner financed, $200 down, $229/month). Muse pulled the photos and details, drafted a Facebook Marketplace listing, and asked for approval before posting. What Muse doesn't do: It's a single "God mode" agent. You can't build multi-agent workflows the way you can with Grokbot or Hermes. The bigger opportunity: Connect Facebook Messenger, then have Muse check for new messages every 30 minutes during business hours and auto-reply with your next step, like a link to your website. Coming up: Scott plans to have his Grokbot agents hand new listings to Muse automatically, and he'll map that workflow out on a future episode. The takeaway: Check out Muse if you sell on Facebook Marketplace. But don't build your whole business on it. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Dan Sullivan told Scott that in fifty years of working with entrepreneurs, he'd never seen someone with the wrong business. What he saw over and over was someone in the wrong seat, doing the wrong job. What if being stuck isn't a business problem? Scott took two assessments — Kolbe and Working Genius. Neither is a sponsor. He's just a customer. Kolbe (Scott is 7-3-7-3): High Fact Finder. Low Follow Thru. High Quick Start. Low Implementor. Translation: wired to research and start things, then hand them off. Not wired to finish them. The reframe: When you don't know this about yourself, you beat yourself up for being who you are. When you do know it, you stop trying to rewire yourself and start filling the gaps — with people, or with AI. Working Genius (Scott is Invention + Discernment): Shows where you fit in a workflow. Six geniuses. Two are your strong suit. Scott's missing piece: Tenacity. Which is exactly what Kolbe said too. The team application: Scott ran assessments across his team. Suddenly he could see who was in the right spot and who was underutilized. (Callback to Episode 75 — talented people in the wrong positions.) The Training Council: Scott's IT training department is run by two people. Their assessments showed they were missing Wonder and Discernment. So Scott built a five-person training council to cover every genius area — pulling in his head of IT for Wonder and himself for Discernment. The swap: Scott found someone in marketing with the same profile as him. Now when Scott travels or speaks, that person covers Discernment. The business doesn't stop. The warning: Assessments aren't a personality horoscope and they aren't an excuse. "I don't do paperwork because it's my weakness" doesn't cut it. These are diagnostics for workflow design. The cost: About $80 per person for both. Start with Working Genius (~$25) — it gives you a visual map of where people fit. Coming soon: Scott's team is building their own assessment. Still in R&D. Listeners get a gift when it's ready. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Last week: 9 use cases for AI agents. This week: the actual Grokbot agents Scott runs, by name and role. The principle: Each agent does one thing. One specialized task. Over and over. The agents: Simon (chief of staff), Lois Lane (daily brief), Lloyd (email manager), Sue (paralegal), Reed (researcher), Avi (video summarizer), Curtis (bridge to Hermes data), Pat (payroll), Walter (scheduling), Cindy (speaking/PR packages), Bob (developer), Tess (UI review), Stu (shadow bookkeeping), Chuck (IT), Vanessa (graphic designer), Ada (address changes), Pip (Python scripts), Drew (month-end close). Highlights: Lloyd filters junk email 5-6x/day, archives "got it" replies, surfaces urgent items Sue fills PDFs, reviews contracts, prepared entity conversion documents Curtis has the "secret handshake" with Hermes for internal data access Vanessa is A/B testing thumbnails against a human designer—and winning Stu is running shadow books alongside the CPA Workflow design: Scott is mapping his businesses from scratch—"If I were to design this today with AI built in, how would it look?" The book: Think First, Then Automate. September 2027. With the publisher now. The closer: "The winners won't be companies with the most AI agents. They'll be the ones who build the team to be most effective with AI and humans." Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Scott and his team are using AI agents across multiple businesses. Here are the nine use cases: 1. Data Analysis: AI agents pull data from multiple sources, calculate metrics, identify trends. Most small businesses don't have data analysts. Now they can. 2. Revenue/Financial Analyst: Daily revenue calculations, transaction reconciliation, refund trend analysis, investment return evaluation. Paired with a human who reviews daily. 3. Business Operations Assistant: Reduces operational load. Example: finishing a studio recording kicks off file downloads, editor notifications, and workflow—all triggered by telling the agent "this is done." 4. Billing Investigations: AI reviews billing records and catches human errors. Found thousands of dollars in improper billing. Revenue recovery. 5. Automation Builder: Builds internal tools and scripts. Example: studio background auto-switches based on what Scott is recording. 6. Automation Supervisor: Daily 6 PM review of all automations. If something broke and didn't self-correct, the supervisor investigates, fixes it, and reruns it. Prompt: "You work for a self-improving organization. When something fails, it is your job to fix it." 7. Research/Due Diligence: Market research, property due diligence, historical records. "You'd be amazed at how much due diligence can be done by AI." 8. Customer Support (Tier 1): Drafts responses within defined rules. 90% confidence threshold—below that, escalate to a human. Never sends without review. 9. Customer Analysis: Before any call or email, the agent examines the full customer picture—email history, billing, meeting notes, last human touchpoint. Enables deeper conversations. The $80K story: An employee left. Management said: "Give us $20K for AI tools and we can augment her work." It's happening. The principle: Every use case pairs AI with a human. "It's never the AI running rampant. It's a true partnership." Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

2026 is the year of AI agents. Scott started with OpenClaw in January. Moved to Hermes months later. Then Buzz. Now Grokbot. Four platforms in eight months. The problem: Every new framework creates friction. If you're building business processes around one agent and a new one appears tomorrow, you feel like you have to start over. The book: Scott's upcoming book, Think First, Then Automate, is about exactly this. Slow down. Think about the thinking. Document before you automate. The solution: Documentation portability. Scott keeps all company systems, processes, and decision history in markdown files in Dropbox. When a new agent framework appears, he gives it access to the folder. It's not starting from zero. The Lewis story: Scott's first boss, Lewis, drilled documentation into his head. "Mr. Todd, where's the documentation?" Scott hated it then. He understands now—documentation is what makes everything portable. The Grokbot caveat: Grokbot is easy to start with, but it's more contained within its own environment. Other frameworks let you bring your own models and your own files. The feeling: "Over the weekend I was feeling overwhelmed. Which one do I choose?" You're not being left behind if you're experimenting. But if your head is in the sand, you might have a problem. The principle: Build processes first that are automatable. Document them. Store them portably. Then when the next framework comes, you're ready. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Last week, Scott had two back-to-back calls. Two sellers. Same market. Same product. Same economy. Completely different results. Seller A: "It's slow. The economy. Infrastructure costs doubled. People are scared." Views were flat. Leads weren't converting. Copy was thin—same thing repeated over and over. Seller B: Same county. Same headwinds. Scott introduced them to the DREAMS framework in March. They applied it. Views exploded. Leads exploded. 4x growth in three months. The diagnosis: Seller A blamed the economy. Seller B changed the ads. The economy was the same for both. The real problem: If you've never experienced the highs, you don't know when you're in the lows. You accept bad as normal. Then you blame things you can't control. The market is always talking to you. Views without leads means you're not connecting. The market isn't the problem—your message is. Clickable and convertible: Two steps. Are people clicking? (Views.) Are they converting? (Leads.) If you're getting views but no leads, change the message. The controllable reframe: You can't control the economy. But you can control your ads, your copy, your delivery, your close. The challenge: Where in your business are you giving things a pass? Where are you blaming something you can't control? Pull it back in. What can you do differently this week? Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

How do you write your ads? Not physically—mentally. Do you have a framework? The research: In 2023, Scott's Land Moto team analyzed over 10,000 ads to answer one question: What makes an ad clickable and convertible? You have to win twice. First, they click. Then, they convert. Two separate wins. The finding: The highest performing ads consistently answered key questions already in the reader's mind. The DREAMS Framework — a six-point diagnostic: D — Destination Vision: Paint what life looks like after they buy. They have to see themselves getting what they want. R — Reasons to Act: Connect features to benefits. "Two and a half acres" → "You can spread out without being on top of your neighbor." E — Eliminate Objections: Quiet the logical brain. "I can't afford this" → "We can make it affordable." "I don't have credit" → "We don't worry about that." A — Accessibility Signals: Make the offer understandable. Clear price. Simple terms. Get them from "no" to "maybe." M — Motivational Trigger: Give them a reason to stop scrolling. But don't create fake urgency. Make the next step small—capture an email, not a credit card. S — Scannable: No walls of text. Make it easy to consume. The Instagram story: Scott clicked an ad, landed on a $27 Thrivecart page with a $67 upsell. He wasn't ready to buy. He left. She has no way to contact him without spending more on marketing. The Main Street store analogy: You walk in, browse, walk out. "Thanks, have a good day." They never captured that you were there. The key: DREAMS isn't a rigid template. It's a diagnostic checklist. The more elements you include, the stronger the copy. Learn more: scotttodd.net/dreams Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

How many things in your business are broken—little things you see every day but haven't fixed? Frictions: Scott captures every broken or inefficient process he sees. He calls them frictions. They go on the automation loop worksheet. Then he prioritizes by closeness to revenue and team efficiency, and fixes one or two at a time. The hot mess: In Scott's loan servicing business, the collections process was tracked in a spreadsheet. It worked—but it wasn't scalable and wasn't something to be proud of. It became the next priority. The process: Opened the spreadsheet, brought Claude in, explained the process end to end Asked Claude for a product requirements document (PRD) Read the PRD over two days, pushed back, refined it Applied the SCALE framework SCALE applied: S (Scope): Collections process only. Not the whole internal tool. C (Clarify the Flow): Whiteboard. Drew the future state. A (Automate the Trigger): Notify humans when new cases arrive. Don't automate judgment—humans decide before anything fires. L (Leverage the Data): Know when it's working AND when it's broken. "Automated processes die silently." E (Elevate the Experience): Make sure people can always get back to a human. The build: Fed the refined PRD to Claude Code. Built an internal tool replacing the spreadsheet—better tracking, security, visibility into who changed what and when. The principle: Think first before you build anything. Don't jump to "how do I automate this?" Think through the entire process first. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

How much of your time is spent obsessing over your customers' problems? Or how much is spent on the stuff you want to build? **The conference room story:** A business owner spent 45 minutes showing Scott everything he'd built. Impressive. Then Scott asked: "What does your customer need next?" Pause. "I don't know." **The problem:** We build things that meet our goals. But the thing that makes a business operate is the customer opening their wallet. **Scott's quick fix:** When things feel stuck, ask: "How can I serve my customer better?" It flips the focus outward. **The Doc story:** Scott was selling rural land. A buyer named Doc asked, "How close is the nearest Walmart?" Scott assumed close was good. Doc said: "Please tell me it's more than 20 minutes away." He was an Afghanistan veteran. The city was too loud. He wanted to take his son somewhere quiet—to be one with nature. He bought the property on the spot. 30 months later, Doc called. "I'm ready to be back in the city. The property served its purpose." He gave it back. **The lesson:** If Scott had assumed remoteness was bad, he would have carried that wrong inference into every future sales call. By staying open and asking why, he discovered that what he thought was a weakness was actually the feature. **The principle:** We cannot serve everybody. Find the people who want the solution you can offer. Obsess over their problems, not your goals. **The result:** The guy in the conference room went back, talked to customers, found out what they needed next, and built that. His business took off. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: [scotttodd.net/ask](https://www.scotttodd.net/ask)

Successful businesses run experiments. Constantly. Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke found that companies like Amazon, Google, and Booking.com run thousands of experiments per year. They don't guess—they test. And they grow faster because of it. Scott's not Amazon. But yesterday, his team ran an experiment—and he's sharing it. The problem: Churn. One of Scott's SaaS businesses tracks churn monthly. The report shows the number, but not the why. Churn applies to everyone: Training companies, land investors, service businesses. Anytime you have to go get new customers, you have churn. The excuse: Someone on the team quoted Alex Hormozi—"small businesses go out of business." Scott's response: "You can't do that." The experiment: Scott gave AI access to the data. The insight: customers with reviews cancel 58% less. One package didn't allow reviews—and had the highest churn. They turned on reviews for that package yesterday. The hypothesis: Churn will drop. They're measuring over 30, 60, 90 days. Scott will report back. The Slack example: Slack found that the more colleagues you added early, the more likely you were to become a paying customer. That's why they push "bring your team." The lesson: What can you do early to help your customer succeed? When your customer succeeds, you succeed. The challenge: What experiment could you run this week? Change one thing. Measure before and after. True or false—did it work? Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Cheryl writes: "I'm afraid to hire people because I don't want them to learn my business and then start their own. I know this is holding me back. Help me overcome this." The reality: 6% of the U.S. population owns a business. 94% don't—and don't want to. Scott's story: When he hired his first sales rep, she had a history of owning businesses. He was nervous. But he asked himself three questions: Does she have the capital?Does she have the interest?Does she have the burning desire? Most employees don't. They want stability, not risk. The car detailing story: A professional detailer—20 years in, van, full setup, referrals—worried about a neighborhood kid undercutting him on Facebook. Two years later: kid is gone. Professional is still thriving. The lesson: Just because someone can start a business against you doesn't mean they'll succeed. The reframe: You're holding your business back because of something that probably won't happen. This fear isn't unique to hiring—business owners make decisions all the time solving for things that probably won't happen. The real risk: Not hiring. Not growing. Staying stuck. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask