Do you know where your website is hosted, who owns your domain, or how you would get back into your ad account if the person who set it up was gone? Paige Wiese has spent sixteen years building websites and running marketing for small businesses, and she has watched owners find out the answers on the worst possible day.

Paige is the founder of Tree Ring Digital, a full service digital marketing agency with a team of sixteen.

In this episode:

• A beautiful website nobody visits, and a busy website that doesn't convert, both end in no customer
• Why "more clicks" is the wrong objective, and what a conversion actually is
• SEO traffic versus intent: the custom home builder ranking for DIY tile
• Your website is a snapshot of how you run your company
• Outgrowing your marketing message the same way you outgrow your systems
• The cheap offshore build that ended with two versions of the site and no access to the domain
• Know enough to ask the right questions, not how to do every step
• A list of your digital assets and logins, and what happens when two factor is tied to a former employee's phone
• Providers who keep ownership of your domain, your ad account or your QuickBooks file
• The $5,000 quote for a copy of a site the client had already paid for
• The fake Meta verification message, and TA's hacked ad account
• Why fixing it in a panic always costs more, and why clean digital assets add value when you sell

Free for listeners: Paige's digital asset checklist at treeringdigital.com/SBBS.

Find Paige at treeringdigital.com or Paige Wiese on LinkedIn.

The business that gets you to one million is not the one that gets you to five. Michael Walsh has spent thirty years helping owners of service based businesses grow through the points where things quietly break, and in this conversation he names them.

Michael is the founder of the Walsh Business Growth Institute in Vancouver and the author of Freedom by Design: The Established Business Owner's Guide to Grow, Make an Impact, and Find the Joy Again.

In this episode:

• Why he left tax planning: it is very hard to save people more tax than they pay
• Why the structures of a $1M company and a $10M company have almost nothing in common
• The client who was told to let go of her million pound goal, and why
• The relationship math: 25 people is 300 one on one relationships, 50 people is 1,225, 100 people is almost 5,000
• Why middle management is the hardest job in any company
• What happens when you promote your best producer (you lose twice)
• The Gallup finding that 71% of managers rank themselves in the top 20%
• Business as a well oiled machine versus an intelligent ecosystem
• The danger zones at $2M, $5M, $8 to 10M and $12 to 20M
• Why 80% of problems past 20 people are people problems, and why people are also the fix

Michael's offer for listeners: email info@walshbusinessgrowth.com, mention the podcast, and include your name, mailing address and phone number for a copy of the book.

Find Michael at walshbusinessgrowth.com or search Michael Walsh Vancouver on LinkedIn. Freedom by Design is on Amazon in print, Kindle and Audible.

A lot of what is being automated right now is a broken process made faster. Ten months off the mic, two Get Connected stages, and the three words I am building everything around now: integrate, automate, delegate.

Season six starts here. I spent the summer speaking to accounting and bookkeeping pros in Calgary and Toronto, six weeks apart, and the conversations were not the same conversations. AI went from curiosity to everywhere in a month and a half. So this episode is about what that actually means for a service business, and it is not the answer the software companies are selling.

Can some bookkeeping be done by AI? Yes. Can the process be done start to finish by AI? Not today. And the bigger problem is that most of the processes being handed to AI were never good processes. Making a broken process faster is not the upgrade everyone will tell you it is. First we must know what the task actually is.

Chapters

• 00:42 Where I've been
• 02:37 Six weeks, two cities
• 04:57 AI in everything
• 07:34 Integrate, automate, delegate
• 10:01 They're only your deadlines
• 11:36 September, the mid-new-year
• 13:25 Will AI replace bookkeeping?
• 15:23 Broken processes, made faster
• 19:06 A hundred little fixes
• 22:12 Be willing to look
• 22:52 I wonder if it's possible
• 25:02 The invoices have to go out
• 26:51 The business lives in the owner's head
• 28:17 Your very own forest fire
• 32:05 Not anti-hustle
• 34:23 What's possible

What you'll learn

• Why the order matters: integrate, then automate, then delegate, and what goes wrong when you run it in reverse
• The Calgary to Toronto shift: how fast adoption moved in six weeks, first hand
• Why September is a sales month for most of the businesses whose books I review
• The client near retirement I expected to resist AI, and how wrong I was
• Is that bookkeeping? The question to ask before you automate anything
• Why there is no job more important than getting the invoices out
• Who is Beth? What it costs when the business only exists in the owner's head
• Running a business is a forest fire: how to know something is smoldering and keep going
• Why I am not anti-hustle, and why I am an acquired taste

Key takeaways

• Automation is a magnifier, not a fixer. It makes a broken process produce wrong answers faster
• Integrate first. Disconnected tools automated together are still disconnected
• Delegate is last on purpose. Handing someone an undocumented process is abandonment, not delegation
• If the business operates in your head, nobody else can run it, and no tool can either
• Not every fire needs you. Evaluate all of them and decide which one requires your personal firefighting attention
• Some things can smolder while you build the bigger, better solution that fixes them for good
• Data plus intuition is where the real work happens. AI has the data half
• Do not put your I wonder ifs on the back shelf. Now is the time

Try this today

1. Pick one process you are about to automate. Write it down start to finish. If you cannot, it is not ready to automate yet
2. Run the Beth test. List three things about your business that only exist in your head. Get one of them out this week
3. Name one fire you will let smolder. Then use that time to build the solution that ends it for good

Creators & Extras

• Tiffany-Ann Bottcher - Host

Resources

• Path 2 Profit Bookkeeping and Tax
• Goal Getter Media
• Service Based Business Society Podcast

If this episode resonates, subscribe and share it with a service business owner who is about to automate something they have never written down.

#integrateautomatedelegate #servicebusiness #aiforbusiness #bookkeeping #businesssystems #automation #delegation #entrepreneurship #smallbusinessoperations #tiffanyannbottcher #businessowner #processimprovement

Click here to view the episode transcript.