JP Lewin

Foundy

Head to one of the links in my profile’s *Featured* section to learn more about how we have transformed M&A through Foundy's AI agents and expert advisory service. 

When millions can be gained (or lost) during and after an acquisition event, it is vital that business owners and buyers surround themselves with the right deal flow, community, tools, and expert advisors that specialise in their market niche for their long term acquisition planning and transaction processes. Yet, the process has historically been riddled with inefficiencies, eye watering fees and fragmented processes that leaves stakeholders at a disadvantage.

Foundy offers 2 sell side products and specialist advisory services:

The first is long term exit planning (6 to 36 months from selling): 
1a.) Detailed business valuation report
1b.) Exit readiness score and growth roadmap packed with helpful step by step support and tools
1c.) Tailored buyer list with contact details and insights into how you can position your business to make it as attractive as possible for an acquisition. This has helped businesses unlock millions in additional value. 

Our second product is Deal Execution for business owners ready to sell in the near term
2a.) Centralised deal management portal enabled by AI
b.) Expert advisors, including Foundy's seasoned team and hand selected specialist from you (our client)'s specific industry niche. We will ready your business for sale, find buyers, secure higher acquisition offers and then navigate the end to end DD and legal document process.

On the buy side:
Our popular Buyer Essentials package grants buyers access to an exclusive business buyer community where they access a high profile network and valuable resources. It is designed to set them on a path towards a successful acquisition, including improving their access to quality deal flow, funding and more.

Head to Foundy.com to learn more

Founder and CEO

Focal

Foundy was voted in the top 3 companies out of 1900 (0.16%) that applied to competitive demo day called Focal. This was based on the number of upvotes pre-demo day and the number of meeting requests post-demo day.

S23 Alumni - Voted In Top 3 out of 1900 companies

Pavilion

Pavilion is a community-powered learning platform for B2B SaaS go-to-market executives and their teams.

Executive Member

Revenue Syndicate

Revenue Syndicate is a platform for B2B Saas leaders and angels to access a high-quality deal flow of investment opportunities. It was founded by leading experts in the market and has since become a 500 + member community.

Member and Angel Investor

ZWINGS

Zwings is a SaaS enabled marketplace. At the time of acquisition, we had 80,000 customers and retained major contracts for 4 consecutive extension periods, including one of the UK's most lucrative contracts. We repeatedly outcompeted companies with over 100x more funding than us in head to head tenders. I had a team of 16 staff which increased to 30 during the high season. 

We ran an M&A process after we were contacted by various prospective acquirers. In Q3 of 2022, the company was acquired by Zeus. The acquirer added Zwings' locations to their network of 45+ cities across Europe and Asia. In the year that followed the parent company's valuation doubled. 

I originally founded Zwings as a B2B SaaS electric transport solution provider for hotels and corporate offices. After COVID enforced lengthy stay-at-home orders and the hotel and commercial property markets were some of the worst affected, we had to quickly adapt. We made a successful pivot. We were able to onboard investors and skilled employees which helped us win and retain lucrative contracts. Our business model involved SaaS subscriptions and pay-as-you-go services. We built a streamlined operational model that involved a rotating team working 7 days a week around the clock to swap batteries in scooters and relocate vehicles for different geolocations relative to expected usage. 

We began receiving interest from various rivals and companies in the wider sector looking to acquire ZWINGS which led to our team initiating an M&A process. After a complex exit journey involving multiple bidders, Zwings was acquired for a deal comprising a combination of cash and equity. The M&A process was complex, drawn out and expensive and I have since met a lot of people that also experienced this with their exits. I learned a great deal scaling and exiting Zwings, both personally and professionally. Now, I am on a passion driven mission to drag the antiquated exit process into the digital age.

Founder and CEO (exited via M&A)

Urban Futures Podcast

I produced several podcast videos where I interviewed incredible leaders who are pioneering disruptive change in the transport and sustainability sectors and wider industries.

Founder and Host

Lektron Networks Power Controls

Between my second and final year at business school, I spent 2 months shadowing the founder of a renewable energy systems supplier. They specialise in electrical refurbishments inside hundreds of homes and offices across the south of England. I primarily supported the accounts team to help manage the company's finances. I gained a key insight into the mechanics behind reneweable energy and the wider cost and environmental impact of transitioning to greener systems.

Renewable Energy - Summer Accountant

CEO Foundy: sell & acquire £100k to £15m revenue businesses via Foundy.com's first of its kind AI powered acquisition portal | You no longer need 5 separate tools and 4 advisors, Foundy has all in one portal.

Warm Welcome! 👋 Considering selling or buying a company in the near or long term? Or maybe you want to help your community of business owners or buyers by referring them to Foundy.com and earning by doing so? Explore the links in my profile’s featured section to learn more.

1.) Business Sellers - Experienced advisory team + AI agents trained in historical acquisitions in your market to provide you the most optimal route to a successful acquisition

2. Business Buyers - Off market Deal origination and due diligence reports to find more deal flow and vet them more effectively. 

3.) Exited Founders -  Join our fast growing WhatsApp group for exited founders 

Deeper insights into our product:

1. **Industry-Leading AI**: This scans the entire internet to look for signals that indicate possible buyer interest for your business. We also centralise and streamline client’s growth and exit process, positioning you for the best exit deal.

2. **Specialist Advisors & Account Managers**: Our team collaborates with experts from each client’s market niche, providing tailored guidance and ensuring a seamless experience. 

We don’t compete with traditional advisors. Instead, we collaborate through a partner programme, sharing fees to tap into even the most niche buyer segments. Whether you're planning an exit soon or are already in the process, our tools, network, and advice can help you secure the best deal. Book a confidential call via our website or direct message me to give you free insights. 

**For Buyers:**  
Foundy.com offers buyers access to deal flow, networking events, due diligence tools, 1000 + lenders and educational resources to streamline sourcing and transactions. Meet M&A teams at publicly traded companies, exited founders, fund managers and acquisition entrepreneurs. 

**About Foundy.com** 
With over 14,000 self registered users, Foundy.com had modernised the M&A process. We used to operate a marketplace as our primary business model but we have learned that the best businesses don’t want to list on a marketplace, they want a specialist advisor that can empower them with the tools, knowledge, buyer network and support they need to successfully navigate the process. Our team includes M&A experts and seasoned entrepreneurs, all driven to modernise the M&A landscape on behalf of business owners across the UK, USA and beyond.

Let’s discuss your goals.  
[Book a Call: https://calendly.com/joe-7yw/30min?back=1&month=2024-03 

*(No recruiters, please)*

Foundy has overhauled the acquisition process for tech business sellers and acquirers. We are specialists in helping founders ready their business for an exit, including preparing their data room and finding relevant acquirers. Alternatively, founders and buyers can use our platform for free on a self-serve basis if they prefer. 

Buyer accounts include representatives of large tech companies, private equity and software aggregators as well as acquisition entrepreneurs and family offices. Sellers include founders of mostly profitable online businesses in verticals such as SaaS, fintech, mobile apps, marketplaces, eCommerce, Amazon FBA, Web3 and AI but we are very much open to hearing from companies in other sectors and industries, as well as distressed businesses. 

Alongside a range of digital tools and M&A advisory services, I am helping my team to produce podcasts, tutorials and blogs with the intention of delivering helpful insights and tips to company leaders, buyers and aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey to exit 💵

Join today by creating a free and anonymous account or sign up to our newsletter on https://app.foundy.com/sign-up

Joe Lewin

If you care about AI, this is today’s headline.

Disney just signed a 3-year licensing deal with OpenAI and is investing $1bn equity investment into the company.

Here’s what’s actually in the deal:

1. Users on Sora can generate short AI videos with 200+ characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars
2. The best fan-inspired clips will appear on Disney+
3. OpenAI gets exclusive generative rights for year one
4. OpenAI cannot train its models on Disney IP
5. No real actor faces or voices, with heavy guardrails around that

The context is what makes this so big. A few months ago, Disney and other studios were blocking Sora and calling it a “significant legal risk.”

So, yesterday they were firing off copyright letters to other AI giants.
Now today they’re OpenAI’s first major content-licensing partner and a $1bn investor.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is already saying this is about licensed use and respecting creative work, not replacing it.

Sam Altman gets capital and a flagship Hollywood partner at a time when model-training costs are exploding.

So you end up with this:

Disney is hedging the future of its IP.

 OpenAI is clearing a legal and commercial path for Sora.

Together they’ve just drawn a blueprint for how AI and big IP might work together.

What do you see this as most: a smart copyright strategy, a lifeline for OpenAI, or the start of a new AI/ entertainment playbook?

Joe Lewin 

AI Native Route To Sell & Buy Companies | DealFlowAgent.com | Helping business owners & Acquirers find one another through conversational AI and navigate through to completion 3x faster

Big news for UK business owners today! 🚨

The proposed exit tax has been pulled from Friday’s Budget plans!

Credit to the 150 plus Startup Coalition signatories. A clear example of what aligned voices can achieve.

The U turn helps, but the initial message still lingers... The proposal for a 20 percent charge on unrealised gains unsettled founders, investors and acquirers across the UK.

Removing it was the right call. The UK cannot afford policies that discourage innovation or investment.

Recent signals people in the market have been talking about:

- founders exploring relocation conversations
- investors slowing deals due to uncertainty
- advisers flagging valuation volatility
- sentiment becoming as big a risk as the policy itself

These are signals, not predictions. But they show why policy clarity matters.

the UK is still a strong ecosystem! Global interest has not disappeared. It's still Europe's hub for innovation, for now, and the 3rd largest market for small cap M&A globally. 
 
YCombinator just release the first company for their winter cohort and it is a UK startup! Plus, we've just raised capital from US based investors. 

The proposal is off the table for this Budget. Now the question is whether confidence rebounds.

What is your take? Does this move restore confidence, or has the damage already been done?

Picture shows an image of the budget announcement with the red briefcase. 

Most founders waste months on buyers who were never serious.

You get an inbound from a potential acquirer. Spirits are high. 
First call booked.
They’re “keen.”

You share numbers. Share plans. Share hope.

Then it drags for weeks or months, unnecessarily.
More calls. More emails. Hidden intent. Then
Silence.
Or “new concerns.”
Or... they never had funding.

This is what happens when signals get lost.

The hard truth: buyer calls are broken.
Too polite (especially in the UK). Too vague.
Too easy for time-wasters.

So we changed it.

We’re building one of the largest, fastest-growing living relationship graphs of active acquirers through our conversational AI, Sterling. He optimises for the 'signal to noise' ratio

Users know his voice is AI but they seem to be building genuine rapport with human (business buyers, some are even hosting long and regular calls with him. 

Sterling surfaces what buyers truly want, what they’ll never touch, and how serious they really are.

No one can fake that.
Time-wasters show in minutes, not months.

I’ve watched founders burn out chasing tyre-kickers.
Now deals move faster because buyers put their cards on the table early.

You can’t scale trust with hope.
You can scale insight with the right questions, asked early.

Want to see how Sterling separates real buyers from the rest?
Comment INSIGHT and I’ll share a high-level framework

thank you Timothy Armoo! Our buy side conversational AI is seeing a serious surge in interest in local service niches, including property services and healthcare. 

Our friendly AI agent, Sterling, is hosting human like conversations with buyers to hear about their nuance search criteria so that we can make warm intro's, where they can, to qualified deal flow. 

(think Boardy.ai or Jack & Jill but specifically for connecting buyers and sellers for small cap M&A.)

Dental, HVAC, Plumbing, Electricians, Emergency Services... and other future proof niches - all moving.

buyers are actively looking for profitable, healthy businesses in the 1-10 million revenue range with recurring revenue models and local defensibility.

if you're a business owner considering a move, whether retiring or moving to your next project, or a business buyer, let's chat.

Join The UK’s Biggest Live Event On January 10th In My Featured Section ⬇️

These businesses will never trend on Twitter.

But they make more than 99% of start-ups.

Everyone's chasing the next AI startup while plumbers are quietly banking £2M a year.
These businesses are insane, and often overlooked.

The pattern is obvious:

- Local service roll-ups
- Boring B2B software
- Unsexy recurring revenue
- Infrastructure nobody thinks about

Steal these business ideas before everyone else catches on. 👇


P.S. If you have a business and you’re thinking of selling in the next 6-24 months, I’ve got something for you. At DealFlowAgent, we help you strategise the path to your exit to get you the best price possible. Send me a message if you want to know more.

These 7 Boring Businesses Make Stupid Money

Tag a trusted operator or thought leader in either property services or healthcare – dinner on us.

Who are the well-respected people across these two verticals and sub-niches?

🏘 Property services: pest control, HVAC, roofing, landscaping, fire safety, solar, electricians, plumbing and data centres etc.

🏥 Healthcare: dental clinics, care homes, outpatient centres, vets etc.

Tag any of the following in the comments below:

 ✓ Service provider or operator
 ✓ Journalist or blogger in these sectors
 ✓ Thought leader on LinkedIn or Meta
 ✓ Anyone else with a strong network of business owners in these niches

If someone you tag ends up partnering with us, we’ll send both of you a dinner gift card for two, as a thank-you. 

Know someone who fits this? Tag them in the comments below.

If they might be in your network, a like or repost helps this reach the right people and might unlock a life-changing opportunity for them.

If that’s you, let’s talk.

The biggest discount on your exit rarely happens on paper. It happens in the first few conversations.

If you do not control the story early, you lose leverage in price and terms.

Preparation is clarity. Contracts, margins, team, and tidy process.

We help owners tighten that story and meet only serious, funded buyers.

I put together a private Home Services Exit Pack

Story Sheet, Buyer Question Set, Contract Visibility template, and the UK and US proof stacks on one page.

Using this pack helps owners tighten the story, reduce buyer pushback, and improve leverage in real negotiations.

Direct message me 'HS-Exit' and I will send it privately.


#HVAC #firesafety #pestcontrol #drainage #electrician #HomeServices #BusinessSale #MergersAndAcquisitions #ExitPlanning #DealFlowAgent

How to sell your home services business

Corner Alliance

Founder

Working with government and non-profit leaders to innovate, communicate, and build better programs, including the Department of Homeland Security, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Department of Commerce.

OwnerRx.com

Building the always on AI-enabled strategic copilot for SMB owners.

Owner

Entrepreneurly

Board Member

OwnerInstitute

Owner Institute helps owners grow their businesses while achieving independence.

Entrepreneurs'​ Organization

James Lee Witt Associates

Director

SRA Touchstone Consulting Group

Principal

The Touchstone Consulting Group, SRA International, Inc.

extreme blue intern

US Senator Max Baucus

Speechwriter

CEO @ Corner Alliance | Author @ The Small Business Mentor

I spent 17 years and $200K+ hunting through every business course, mastermind, and guru to find the nuggets that actually work.

EOS? Implemented it. Scaling Up? Read it. EO/YPO? Joined both.

The result? 10,000+ hours distilled into OwnerRx - the AI coach that knows every framework, every playbook, every shortcut.

What it took me years and big dollars to learn, OwnerRx delivers in seconds for a fraction of the cost.

Alan Pentz

A consulting firm came to me at 15% margins.

Target: 20%.

Five years ago, I had a playbook for this:

Old playbook:

- Better hiring → get 1-2% back (maybe)
- Global talent → squeeze out 3-5% (with cultural pain)
- Cut overhead → another 1-2% (one-time gain)

We'd grind our way to 20% over 18-24 months.

Today? That playbook is obsolete.

Here's what I'm seeing with AI agents:

Get 10% margin expansion by holding back office costs constant and growing topline.

Not cutting. Not offshoring. Not grinding.

Growing revenue without scaling headcount.

The new math:

Professional services firm:

- Revenue: $5M
- Back office: 8 people
- Margin: 15%

Deploy AI agents for:

-Financial Analysis
-Client Reporting
-Marketing
-Proposals and Quoting
-Quality Control
-Meeting analysis and follow ups
-Employee onboarding and HR 
-Client research (80% faster)
-Hiring

Result:

- Same 8 back office people
- Revenue grows to $7M (+40%)
- Margin: 25%

Owner @ OwnerRx.com | OwnerRx uses battle-tested playbooks from decades of building and coaching SMBs to create AI agents that run your business for you. | Read my newsletter: newsletter.ownerrx.com

One of biggest PE firms just allocated $1.5B to buy businesses like yours at traditional multiples, deploy AI, and watch margins expand.

Their thesis? You won't adapt fast enough.

I keep having the same conversation. Four owners last month asked me: "Should I sell before AI disrupts my business?"

Meanwhile, I invested in a metal fabrication company. The owner was spending 20-30 hours per week processing purchase orders. Not sustainable when you're trying to grow.

We built an AI system in two weeks. PO processing now takes 5 minutes. He got 25 hours of his week back.

We're closing on our second acquisition next month. Same playbook: build the AI capability once, plug each new company into the same operating system.

That's exactly what the PE firms are doing. At scale.

Here's the data that matters:

95% of AI pilots fail. But the 5% who break through? 91% see revenue boost. 86% improve margins.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a commitment problem. Pilots are experiments nobody owns. The winners pick one process, assign ownership, and measure results until it works.

The rinse and repeat.

The gap between "wanting to use AI" and "actually transforming your business" is where most owners get stuck.

That's exactly the gap PE firms are exploiting.

I'm not going to pretend I'm not doing the same thing PE firms are. The difference: I'm showing you exactly how it works so you can do it yourself.

Build the capability yourself, or become someone else's margin expansion play.

What's the one process eating 20+ hours of your week that you keep saying you'll fix "next quarter"?

I spent 10 hours a day for 4 days in a row re-building all my AI workflows last week.

3 months ago, I was building OwnerRx, the newsletter, and my Linkedin. I had 4 vendors helping with each aspect. Spend was out of control at $30k a month.

Now I've replaced them all with AI agents. That saves $360k a year.

First came the client tracker agent - every interaction, deadline, and renewal date monitored automatically. 

Then the meeting analyzer that turns Zoom recordings into 5 different artifacts to track and follow up on the meeting content.

The content pipeline was the game-changer. What took 2 hours to write now takes 3 minutes to generate and 15 minutes to polish.

Total investment: 100+ hours of my nights and weekends. 
ROI: 20 hours a week saved and $360k

But there's a downside: the exhaustion is real.

Every improvement reveals 10 more possibilities. Fix the client tracker? Now you see how broken your invoicing is. Automate content? Your distribution system looks ancient.

Last week's 4-day marathon started as "quick workflow optimization." 

The shift from doing work to building tools that do work isn't optional anymore. Teams still manually tracking clients in spreadsheets are losing 15-20 hours weekly that automated teams invest in growth.

My clients now run smoother with zero employees than they would with 5. 

But the pace is picking up. Some people spend all day building tools to make their tools work more effectively.

I'm not sure how many of us can handle it but the productivity increases are real and some people are achieving breakout.

I built a fully agentic CRM for my company in 2 days.

It wasn'ta proof of concept. It was production system running 24/7 in Azure.

Here's what happened:

My business development team was drowning in manual work—monitoring government opportunities, researching competitors, qualifying leads, syncing everything to our CRM.

15+ hours a week on work that should be automated.

So I built an agentic system using Claude Code:

• 6 specialized AI agents (qualification, research, competition/teaming, pipeline analysis, capture coaching)
• An "antagonist agent" that challenges every recommendation
• Full integration with Microsoft Dataverse, Teams, and Azure Bot Service

Total build time: 2 days.

The revolution isn't the technology.

It's that you don't need to build from scratch anymore.

Microsoft's Agent Services. Google's Vertex AI Agents. Anthropic's Claude.

These platforms give you the primitives. The authentication. The hosting. The integrations.

Your job is now architecture and orchestration, not infrastructure.

The barrier to building intelligent automation just dropped from "hire a team for 6 months" to "focused weekend with AI coding assistants."

The companies that win in 2025 won't be the ones with the biggest IT budgets.

They'll be the ones whose leaders can translate business problems into agentic solutions.

What manual process in your business would you automate first if you could build a custom agent in days instead of months?

Every owner I coach learns ChatGPT in 2-3 weeks.

That's not where they get stuck.

They get stuck at: Which workflows do I transform first? How do I get my team to actually use this? What does a "proprietary AI advantage" look like for MY specific business?

The real question isn't "which AI tool should I use?"

It's "how do I turn my company into an AI learning machine?"

That's a completely different problem. And most owners have no idea how to solve it.

62% of SMB owners say their top barrier isn't the technology—it's understanding how AI actually helps their business (Salesforce, 2025). Same survey: 62% cite no in-house expertise.

The tools are easy. The strategy is hard.

That's why 95% of AI pilots fail. Owners solve tactical problems without a strategic plan. They buy solutions to problems they haven't defined.

The questions that actually matter:

1. What's the ONE workflow costing you the most time or money right now?
2. What would it look like if AI handled 80% of that?
3. Who on your team has authority to change how that work gets done?
4. What would you measure to know it's working?

If you can't answer these four questions, you're not ready for tools.

You're ready for a plan.

75% of SMBs are experimenting with AI. I'd estimate that less than 1% have achieved anything resembling scale deployment.

The gap isn't technology. It's strategy.

What's the AI tool you bought that's still sitting unused?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what a $5M business looks like in three years.

Here's what I see coming:

Significantly fewer employees doing the same revenue.

Not because AI replaced people. Because AI handles the stuff that eats most of everyone's day—first drafts, research, scheduling, follow-up, pattern recognition.

Humans do what humans are actually good at: relationships, judgment calls, strategy, creative problem-solving, managing the exceptions.

The real moat? Proprietary systems trained on years of YOUR client data.

Your competitor using generic ChatGPT can't touch the quality of insights you're pulling from your own history. They're guessing. You're predicting.

I'm already seeing early versions of this.

At the metal fab company I invested in, the owner was spending 20-30 hours a week on PO processing. Now it takes 5 minutes. That's not incremental improvement. That's a different business.

The firms that wait? They become acquisition targets for the ones that didn't.

The 2028 firm isn't about replacing humans.

It's about humans finally doing what only humans can do—while everything else runs without them touching it.

The question isn't whether this future is coming.

It's whether you're building toward it or drifting toward being acquired by someone who did.

Last month I had the same conversation with four different owners. All professional services - consulting, marketing, accounting. All asking the same question: "Should I sell before AI disrupts my business?"

Not one of them is failing. They're all profitable. But they see what's coming.

I asked each of them the same questions: 

-Are you willing to learn this yourself - not delegate it? 
-Can you force organizational change even when your team resists? 
-Will you commit 2-3 years to rebuilding how work gets done?

One went quiet. Then honest: "I'm 5 years from retirement. I don't want to spend them becoming a technologist."

That's not weakness. That's clarity.

Here's what's interesting: these are all knowledge work businesses. The consulting firm owner is more worried than the metal fabrication company I invested in. 

Professional services feels the threat more acutely because their product IS knowledge work - exactly what AI does well.

Here's what I'm seeing: Owners who built great businesses over 20 years are struggling because they can't make themselves learn new systems. 

PE-backed competitors are acquiring AI capability through rollups. Multiples that look reasonable today won't in 18 months.

So I've started having a different conversation. Three paths:

BUILD: Learn deeply, force change, create proprietary AI workflows that competitors can't copy. 2-3 year commitment minimum.

PARTNER: Bring in PE or an operator who already has AI capability. Trade some equity for transformation capacity.

EXIT: Sell while you can get 5-8x EBITDA instead of waiting until AI-enabled competitors compress your margins to 2-3x.

No wrong answer. The only wrong choice is "wait and see."

This isn't pessimism. It's strategic honesty.

Do you have an AI strategy yet ?

$300K.

That's what each failed sales hire costs when you add: salary + lost deals + operational chaos + owner time back in the weeds.

The owner I talked with last week had just gone through his third failed sales hire. 

The pattern?

"We hired for product knowledge... failed to look at character."

But here's the deeper mistake:

They were trying to hire ONE person who could do everything the founder does.

Product expertise + all the relationships + sales nuance + operations + strategy.

That's not a job description. That's a unicorn.

And unicorns don't exist.

Here's what happens when you track your sales process with AI and ask: "What am I actually doing?"

AI breaks it down:

- Marketing: 9 hours/week (lead gen and qualification)
- Admin: 5 hours/week (Writing and sending followups, updating the CRM and dashboards)
- Selling: 7 hours/week (actual conversations with buyers)
- Meetings and Reporting: 5 hours/week (in internal meetings and preparing for those meetings)
-Customer Service: 10 hours/week (Talking recent sales through onboarding issues)

You're not hiring for one role. You're trying to get one person to do a bunch of different stuff.

The AI insight:

Don't hire 1 "unicorn" at $150K who'll fail in 18 months.

Engineer it into 3 achievable roles:

- Sales Rep ($75K) - hire for relationship skills and ability to close
- Operations Coordinator ($55K) - hire for ability to track actions, update the CRM, and do follow ups.
- Customer Service Rep ($60K) - hire for deep product knowledge and ability to answer customer questions 

Then AI generates hiring scorecards for each:

- 5 character traits (integrity, ownership, learning ability, culture fit, resilience)
- 5 technical competencies (specific to THAT role, not "do everything")
- Interview questions revealing both dimensions
- Red flags from your past failed hires

The real problem:

You're not bad at hiring.

You're trying to hire another version of yourself.

The solution:

Stop looking for unicorns.

Start engineering roles AI can help you fill.

Drop your calendar export in ChatGPT and ask:

"What am I actually doing, and should this be 1 role or 3?"

Every SMB owner faces a choice in the next 18 months.

Here's the framework I walk through with every owner I work with:

BUILD: if you have 3+ years before exit, genuine interest in learning the tech, a team capable of change, and appetite for hard work. You'll create moats your competitors can't copy.

PARTNER: if your value is in your client base or team, you want to stay involved but not lead transformation, and you're open to being part of something larger. Trade some equity for transformation capability.

EXIT: if you're 5 years or less from wanting to stop, have no interest in learning AI deeply, or your team can't change. Sell while multiples hold.

There's no wrong choice among these three.

But there IS a wrong move: no choice.

Waiting is a choice. It's choosing to let the market decide for you.

I had four conversations last month with professional services owners asking whether they should sell. All profitable. All seeing what's coming. The honest ones are asking themselves hard questions about which path fits them.

The owners I worry about aren't the ones who choose to exit. They're the ones who won't build AND won't sell. Who hope disruption passes them by.

Which path are you on? And if you're honest with yourself—are you actually on a path, or are you just waiting?

OpenAI just launched ChatGPT Shopping 3 days before Black Friday. It's built for products.

But if you run a professional services firm, the behavior change matters more than the feature.

People are getting trained to ask AI for recommendations instead of searching Google. "What do I need?" "Who can help me?" "Who's best for my situation?"

Right now, that's mostly products. But the habit is forming.

So I ran an experiment.

I asked ChatGPT: "Who are the best fractional CFOs in Austin for manufacturing companies doing $5-10M?" (Congrats to vcfo Austin, you won)

What showed up varied each time I asked with a slightly different query (AI results aren't consistent like Google). But patterns emerged in what seemed to influence recommendations:

- Firms with clear website positioning about who they serve
- Those with substantial Google reviews
- People mentioned in industry publications
- Content that directly answered the type of question I asked

The firms with vague "we serve everyone" messaging? Didn't appear.

Here's my hypothesis for professional services:

Your next client might never Google you. They might ask AI. And AI appears to synthesize everything it finds about you into a recommendation. Or not.

This isn't proven science yet. But it's worth investigating.

Three things worth trying this week:

1. Ask ChatGPT who the best [your profession] in [your city] are for [your ideal client type]. Run it 3-4 times. See patterns in who shows up and what signals seem to matter.

2. Look at your Google reviews. Not just the star rating. The actual words clients use. AI reads those.

3. Check if your website clearly states who you serve and what problems you solve. Specificity seems to beat vagueness.

The shopping feature is for products. The behavior shift affects all of us.

What patterns did you notice when you ran the search for your profession?

One of my coaching clients delegated AI to an entry-level ops person.

She had no training. She had no authority. She had no idea what problem she was supposed to solve.

Three months later: nothing. Not because she failed. Because she was set up to fail.

Here's the hard truth: You can't delegate something you don't know how to define.

Most owners want to hand off "figure out AI" to whoever has bandwidth. It never works. Because AI transformation isn't a task. It's a fundamental shift in how work gets done.

Your employees need to go from "doing the work" to "building systems that do the work."

That's not a training problem. That's an identity problem.

The people who built their careers on being great at execution? They often struggle the most. Their value has always been doing the work well. Now you're asking them to make themselves obsolete.

Meanwhile, owners who lead it themselves—who learn the technology, pick the workflow, define the success metrics—see results in weeks, not months.

The gap isn't capability. It's ownership.

If you don't understand AI well enough to define what success looks like, you can't delegate it. Period.

You either learn it yourself or you hire someone who already knows. There's no third option where you hand it to whoever's available and hope it works out.

Who on your team could actually lead this? Not "who's available"—who has authority AND understands the work?

If you can't name them in 5 seconds, that's your answer.

Talked with an owner last week who runs a $10M compliance consulting firm for large construction projects.

$3M EBITDA. Niche expertise. Regulatory moat.

But AI is coming for the core deliverable. The environmental studies his team spends weeks researching and writing? AI can now draft those in hours. Not perfectly—but good enough to commoditize the work.

His question: When do I sell?

He's the sixth owner in two months who's asked me some version of this.

The trap: Actual disruption might be 3-5 years out. But buyers see the writing on the wall earlier. By the time your industry is visibly changing, your multiple has already dropped.

You're not racing disruption. You're racing the perception of disruption.

His business trades at 5-6x EBITDA today. If buyers start pricing in AI risk, that becomes 3-4x. That's a $6M swing on the same business.

My advice to most owners: Go BE the AI change. Use AI to produce studies faster and cheaper. Become the consolidator, not the consolidated.

But that's not everyone's game. Some owners are 5 years from retirement. Some don't want to bet a 20-year business on a tech transition.

Both paths are valid. What's not valid is deciding without understanding what AI can actually do today.

I've watched owners dismiss AI while competitors train it on exactly their workflows.

I've also watched owners panic-sell businesses with 10+ years of runway.

The only way to know which camp you're in? Get your hands dirty. Not reading headlines. Actually testing AI against your deliverables.

Then you can decide instead of guess.

Are you building toward disruption or planning your exit?

I had two AI agents argue about why their businesses would fail.

 Mike owns a $5M accounting firm. Sarah runs a $3M marketing agency.

 I told them the hard truth: 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear in 1-5 years.

 Then I asked about their most valuable asset.

 Mike: "Janet. Senior CPA, 20 years experience. Even if I document stuff, it's impossible to capture everything she knows."

 Me: "How many client calls has Janet been on in 12 years? 200 a year? That's 2,400 conversations of expertise that vanished the moment they ended."

 Mike got quiet.

 Sarah jumped in: "It's worse. Every time my strategist Jess explains why a headline doesn't work. Every Slack message with feedback. That's our IP. And we're just... letting it evaporate."

 Here's what landed:

 Janet sees 40 restaurant clients. She notices patterns—tip reporting differences between Texas and California, depreciation flags across the board, underused deductions.

 That pattern recognition? Locked in her head. Maybe mentioned at a staff meeting. Mostly just sits there.

 Now imagine Janet with AI surfacing: "17 of your restaurant clients haven't claimed the energy efficiency credit. 12 likely qualify."

 Janet goes from processing work to generating work. From reactive to proactive.

 The gap isn't "who has AI."

 It's who's been feeding it.

 A competitor who started capturing 6 months ago has 6 months of compounding knowledge you can't catch up to.

 What expertise walked out your door last night that you'll never get back?

How to win as a business onwer:

Just focus on the most important thing.

I know owners who spend 10 hours getting the best pricing on a service or product that makes up 5% of their cost.

You know what they’re not doing during that 10 hours? 

Selling a service or product that’s worth 100x that cost savings to them.

I see owners who read a book or hear a podcast about some new marketing technique then try to pivot their whole company to it.

What aren’t they doing? Doubling down on a tactic that is already bringing in leads.

Stop what you are doing and think about this one question: what single thing will guarantee that I won’t reach my goal? 

Then go solve that thing. Rinse and repeat and ignore everything else.

24,000 hours.

That's how much client interaction one consulting company records per year.

Most would say: "That's expensive storage."

They're thinking: "This is our competitive moat."

Here's what they discovered:

AI analyzed those recordings and found something competitors can never replicate:

Their methods deliver outcomes 1.5 standard deviations better than industry average.

Not "we think we're better."

Data-proven superiority from analyzing thousands of real sessions.

Now they can:

- Prove results to justify premium pricing
- Train new staff 3x faster using what actually works
- Continuously improve by spotting patterns in top performer sessions
- Show clients exactly why their approach works

*his is happening across industries:

A coaching business recording sales calls:

- AI identified: Top closer uses these 3 questions, bottom performers don't
- Automated quality coaching for entire sales team
- Conversion rate: 30% → 40% in 90 days

The dark data problem:

Right now, every meeting in your company contains:

- What actually works (buried in someone's memory and an unprocessed transcript)
- What clients really care about (mentioned once, forgotten)
- Patterns that predict success/failure (invisible without AI)
- Your team's best moves (can't scale what you can't see)

It evaporates the moment the meeting ends.

What AI can do with recordings:

1. Pattern recognition: What do top performers do that others don't?
2. Outcome correlation: Which approaches actually drive results?
3. Training acceleration: New hires learn from 100s of real scenarios
4. Competitive proof: Data-backed claims vs. competitor marketing fluff
5. Continuous improvement: Spot quality drift before it costs you clients

The 10x value play:

Companies recording systematically are building:

- Proprietary methodology (competitors can't copy)
- Pricing power (proven better outcomes)
- Faster onboarding (new hires effective in weeks vs. months)
- Quality consistency (AI catches drift)
- Category leadership (your data becomes industry benchmark)

First-movers are building 2-3 year leads.

The objections I hear:

"Storage is expensive" → Storage is $50/month. Lost knowledge costs $50K+
"No one will review it" → AI reviews it. Humans get the insights.
"Compliance nightmare" → SOC 2 + consent frameworks exist. Not harder than current QA.
"Clients won't consent" → Position as "quality improvement" + show benefit. 95%+ consent.

Most SMB owners think:
"We're too small for this."

Reality:
You're the perfect size. Big enough to have volume. Small enough to move fast.

The companies doing this wrong:

Recording but not analyzing. Terabytes of dark data, zero insights.

The companies doing this right:

Every recording becomes training data. AI finds patterns. Insights improve delivery. Better results justify premium pricing. Category domination.

Do you really want to share good content during Thanksgiving week?

I've got some gems saved up but kind of feel like everyone's still talking to their family at this point.

Maybe by Friday they are back on linkedin trying to do anything but talk with their family?

OpenAI's pricing dropped 99% in 18 months. Your competitor can copy your prompts in 30 seconds.

  So where's your edge?

  There's no moat in "using AI." Everyone has access to the same tools.

  The moat is in learning loops. AI that gets smarter from YOUR customers.
  Systems that improve from YOUR data. Feedback loops competitors can't
  replicate.

  That's what focusing on for each of my clients and each of my businesses. You need to use AI to start learning from YOUR customers. No one else can learn from that but you. 

  A competitor starting fresh would need months of your data to catch up.

  The same principle works at any scale:

  Your proposal tool learns what wins for YOUR specific buyers.
  Your service AI improves from YOUR customer conversations.
  Your operations system optimizes for YOUR quirks.

  Most SMBs buy tools. Few build loops.

  The question isn't "are you using AI?"

  It's "is your AI getting smarter every day in ways competitors can't
  replicate?"

I'm seeing a new pattern emerge.

SMB owners (not PE firms) doing their own roll-ups. Building AI into their operations first, then using that capability to acquire competitors who didn't.

I'm doing this myself. The metal fab company I invested in is closing on its second acquisition. Same playbook both times:

- Build the AI operating system once (quoting and PO processing went from 20-30 hours/week to 5 minutes)
- Acquire a competitor at traditional multiples
- Plug them into the system that already works
- Use their data to make the AI smarter
- Rinse and repeat

The competitors who were "waiting to see how AI plays out" are becoming acquisition targets.

This isn't just us. I'm watching coaching clients think the same way. The ones who built AI capability aren't worried about PE roll-ups anymore.

They're thinking about doing roll-ups themselves.

The math is simple: AI doesn't just improve your margins. It makes every future acquisition more valuable. The capabilities compound.

Two years ago, owners in the $5-10M range were worried about being acquired.

Now some of them are the acquirers.

Same revenue bracket. Different strategy. Completely different trajectory.

Are you building the operating system that makes you the buyer—or waiting until someone else's system absorbs you?

$1.2M revenue. Paper invoices. No contracts longer than 90 days.

That's what "riding a macro wave" actually looks like up close.

I'm a small investor in a metal fabrication roll-up. The operators are driving it—I just saw the thesis and backed the right people.

Here's the thesis: deglobalization is real. The US needs onshore manufacturing for defense and infrastructure. Data centers, military rebuilding after Ukraine and Israel, reshoring—all of it needs domestic fab capacity.

But where does that actually show up for smaller operators?

In fragmented, blue-collar industries with antiquated systems. Metal fab shops doing $1-2M/year, run by craftsmen tracking jobs on index cards. No modern software. Books that make accountants cry.

These aren't bad businesses—they're undervalued businesses waiting for operators who can upgrade the systems.

What we learned 18 months in:

The first year was rough. It took almost a year to really learn how to run the business. Volatile revenue, no long-term contracts, steep learning curve.

But if you buy cheap enough—1-2x profits, not 3-4x—you can absorb that volatility while you stabilize operations.

Now we're acquiring a shop that serves defense contractors with significant contract backlog. The thesis is playing out.

Stack a few $1-2M shops together and you're in double-digit revenue with consistent work from defense and data center buildouts.

The real insight: you don't need to be in tech to profit from macro trends. Find the small, fragmented industries that support the big shifts. Get there before the investment wave.

My bet: we'll see larger players start rolling up metal fab over the next few years as they recognize the consistency of work coming from reshoring, defense, and infrastructure.

The opportunity is in boring industries that serve emerging priorities.

What's the fragmented industry in your world that's quietly riding a macro tailwind?

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