I put AI to work building a real business.

I started experimenting with AI while working in sales management, back in the GPT-3 days. I wasn’t technical. I had customers to find and problems to solve, so I started asking questions and building tools.

I went on to help build a home improvement company whose sales grew from $1.5 million to $4 million in 10 months. During that time, we changed how we sold, scheduled, and ran the business. AI was one part of that work. We got quotes out in minutes instead of hours.

Today, I build our own internal sales software, custom skills, and connected workflows. A skill is a set of reusable instructions for a job we do repeatedly. The workflows connect those jobs with our software and files so the agent can carry the work through.

For a customer quote, our agent prepares the pricing, creates the quote, makes and adds a rendering when we want one, puts the PDF together, and drafts the email. It also updates project files, organizes folders, and creates contacts in Google and our sales software.

Each week, it pulls our marketing data and brings me suggestions. I review them and approve what I want done, then the agent starts those tasks. These are some of the jobs I use it for; I keep building out what it can do.

I manage and run these tools, review their work, and improve the instructions and connections. That work is what makes them easy for us to use repeatedly.

That’s the experience I’m sharing through Agents for Real Builders: the instructions, examples, mistakes, and lessons that help an owner learn to build and direct useful AI work. All the information here is free. I’m not selling anything.

I believe a business owner should be able to do more with their ideas, knowledge and experience—without having to personally carry out every task.

Learning to direct AI can give you time back, help a small team handle more work, and make things possible that used to require skills or resources you didn’t have.

Start with your actual business. Identify useful work, give AI context, assign the job, check the result and improve it. Learn when a person is the right choice, too. My goal is for you to keep finding better ways to run and grow your business independently.