Stacks with everything you’ve already levelled.
1. Reach for the AI Before You Hire
Solopreneurs have started using AI as a replacement for hiring.
Not as a stopgap until they can afford someone, but as the actual replacement.
Why?
Think about the cost.
A Claude Max 20x plan is $200/month. A basic VA is $500/month, and that’s at the affordable end of the market.
Then think about the speed.
The AI needs maybe an hour of one-time setup per task, and after that it runs 40-50x faster than a new hire ever will.
This happened with my own work recently.
I had a VA helping me manage student support for my courses. She somewhat complained that it was becoming a lot of work.
So… I sat down for an hour and pushed Codex to work out an automated solution for me. It ended up being some automated scripting in Chrome that handles everything end-to-end.
And now my VA has nothing left to do 😬
So if you’re a solopreneur or small business owner thinking about offloading something to a new hire… reach for the AI first.
The best part is that you don’t need to know how to build any of this. Tell the AI what you want to do, then ask it how it would do it. Have a discussion. Within an hour, you’ll have a solution you can test.
I show you how to work with AI like this in The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity and The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide.
2. Where AI Actually Fits on the Force Multipliers List
Many years ago, I wrote about force multipliers — the implements in your life that will let you accomplish greater feats than you could without them.
The list included things like solid mindsets, good health, systems, money, self-discipline, location, culture, personal-level technology and skillsets.
Notice anything?
The list predates AI entirely.
So where does AI fit?
It slots under personal-level technology, right alongside your computer, your phone and your washing machine.
But here’s what I’ve noticed lately: the other multipliers on the list are determining how quickly people adopt AI.
Skillsets, like coding or technical fluency, determine how creative you can get with AI.
Mindset and culture determine how open you are to learning new tools and changing how you work.
Location determines whether you can even use frontier models. (Living in Hong Kong? No Claude for you.)
And good systems are the big one: a documented process you can hand to a staff member is a process you can hand to an AI, and then automate even further with it.
3. Courses
I have a range of online courses that teach business people what they need to know about productivity and AI:
1. The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity
A comprehensive course taking you from beginner AI concepts like prompt and context engineering, to cutting-edge AI productivity using terminal-based AI tools like Claude Code for non-coding office work. Usable with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other current LLMs.
2. The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide
This non-technical course shows business people and non-coders how they can build and use AI agents in ChatGPT and Zapier.
3. The AI Playbook
This is my longer premium course on how businesses can deploy AI tools and technology across their processes and teams.
4. Next Level Productivity
A practical, straightforward course that teaches you how to achieve elite-level personal productivity in today’s constantly interrupted world.
5. ChatGPT for Managers
See how AI can solve complex management challenges in less than 30 seconds. Full prompt library and examples included.
That’s it for this week!
— Aaron