If you're a service based business owner like me, your goal is increase the amount of revenue you make every month without needing to work more hours to generate that revenue. Now the problem with service based business owner is that we have a client capacity that we could serve based on the amount of time we have on our calendar.
And traditionally the only way to get more clients is to either work more hours or hire more people to help with clients delivery. Now what if I told you you can increase the amount of clients you serve without needing to increase the amount of hours or hire anyone but with implementing AI into your business. More specifically, you'd implement a skill system that would extract all of your expertise,
your intellectual property, and your workflows on how you deliver value to your clients. AI can do that for you. Now this is completely different from using AI like a chatbot where you need to guide it and do everything from scratch while a skill system actually does 80% of the work. All you have to do is review the work, sign it off, and send it to your client. Now if you don't know what a skill system is, in my previous video, I explained exactly how you can build a skill system and how it's different from just having normal skills that you would build on Claude. And in this video, I wanna walk through a case study of my client, Kieran, a fractional CFO, who was spending forty hours a month on monthly reporting
for his clients and got that down all the way down to ten minutes using a skill system. And I'll break down exactly how Kieran used that skill system in order to scale his business without needing to work more hours. Alright. So the dream of running a business is, is ideally
over time,
we want our revenue to go up like so,
but we want the hours that we work to remain the same or best yet go down. And that's the goal of AI. Right? Everyone talks about AI automation.
They sell this dream that, hey. We're gonna implement this AI automation,
and your revenue is gonna go up and the amount of hours you're gonna work is gonna go down. Now very few business owners actually experience
this dream because in order to get AI automation, like I always talk about in all the videos on this channel, it's gonna require a lot of complexity to eat because
AI automation doesn't happen in one weekend, and you get to live this dream of, oh, you start stacking unlimited amount of revenue. You don't need to work at all. That is something that is not true. In order to get AI automation to work, you need to spend time building a skill system, which we're gonna go over in a moment. And if you don't know what a skill system is, in my previous video, I went over that, so I highly recommend you to watch that. So what actually happens for a lot of business owners is because they don't know how to implement AI the right way,
which is implementing skill systems,
is the the amount increase amount of revenue they make,
like so, but the amount of hours they need to work also increases with them because every client requires their input or they're just using AI like a tool. So if you use AI like a tool, you're just gonna work faster. Yes. You might be able to serve more clients, but because you're working more faster, you're gonna work more hours,
more hours.
Now the perspective shift we wanna make here is we want to have work have AI work as an employee,
AI employee.
And when we work as an AI employee, that means AI is able to be smart enough or we treat AI like an employee. We're gonna be meeting it like a human employee. You'd share it with more context. You'd share with your intellectual property. You'd treat it like someone that learns over time and improves their skills.
So as AI gets better and learns more about your business, ideally, the amount of hours
required for you goes down. Right? Now in order to get AI to work as an employee,
we need to build skill systems.
Skill systems. I'm a do a quick recap over here. Skill systems is a series of skills that chain together that allow AI to run workflows.
And as you improve the skills in the chain,
that is kinda like treating or improving the training of a human employee in your team. Let's say you you help them improve their
their you improve an SOP. They can do an SOP better. They improve their skill. They actually know the difference between a good quality output and a bad quality output, and that takes time. No one gets that right at the first shot. So AI needs to learn that over time. So once we have skill system,
that allows us to then have AI employees, and then that allows us to eventually generate more revenue in our business while working less hours. Now the big problem is a lot of business owners don't do this. They treat AI like a tool or like a product. They think about, hey. I'm just gonna work on AI this weekend. I'm gonna build this fancy thing or this elaborate sophisticated
system, and it's gonna make me tons of money.
Very rarely does that happen. So meet Kieran.
Kieran works with SaaS companies as a fractional CFO, and he basically sends them monthly reporting and consulting to help them make smart decisions with their financing in order to grow the revenue or to potentially exit their companies. Now as you can imagine, as a fractional CFO, there's a lot of number crunching, a lot of documentation,
reporting,
putting things together. It does take a lot of time and effort. And what was stuck at before was he was spending a lot of hours
trying to do all this documentation and stuff. He'd even have an analyst working for him on his team. So
was a good case study because when Kieran came to me, he was working with around seven clients,
and he was capped because each of his clients would take around six to eight hours a month to deliver. Now he was making a good amount of money. He was making around 24 k per month all the way up to 30 k or in some cases 50 k per month with his clients.
So here is a point where he hit his client capacity.
So he hit client capacity,
and some clients actually wanted to work with him, and he had to say no. So can you imagine saying no to clients, saying no to money? Well, that's really hard for a lot of business owners. You feel really bad about that. So in this position, Kieran was actually thinking about hiring another analyst because he already has an analyst on his team. He was thinking about hiring another analyst in order for him to serve more clients so he can scale his business. Now Kieran Kieran is not a type of guy who wants to manage a big team. He likes to keep things small, leveraged, and lean. So that's where I came in and helped Kieran with building a skill system. So after building the skill system, what happened was within two weeks of implementing the skill system, he was able to serve 15 clients.
What would take him around six, eight hours per client for monthly reporting would take him around ten minutes take him around ten minutes. Now he can make around 52 k per month, and he doesn't need to hire anyone because he was able to treat AI like an employee in his business that he would train over time on how he delivers work, uh, to his clients.
So how did Kiran's skill system actually look like? So it looked like so. So Kiran would then split up a whole workflow into separate skills or separate phases. So step number one, for example, would be load the configuration for that specific client. So he'd he'd have a YAML front matter that would show Claude where to find the brand colors and the basically, the configuration to create that monthly report. Then AI would pull in the data. It would use Python and Power Query Query to find the data. Then it would calculate the metrics, ARR, MRR, churn moves, everything.
Then it would validate the data before it moves on to anything. It would look for any anomaly detection or mistakes.
Then it would generate the charts. Then it would generate the commentary.
Then it would create an HTML or in a PDF after that, then it does a quality assurance review, and then Kieran comes into the picture. So all of this stuff is 80% of the work, and Kieran comes in and does 20%
of the work, or this could be even, like, 90%,
and he does, like, 10%. And then the output is a client's deck and then a briefing that, uh, Kieran can share with a client. And by the way, if this is your first time seeing,
uh, infrastructure or skill system look like this, I have another video in my channel. My previous video just posted. Check that out to explain to you how skill systems actually work. But this is actually what you wanna do. This is what you wanna do if you wanna get AI to actually generate revenue in your business. You wanna break down your workflow into smaller tasks, create skills, and then chain them together into a skill system so it can actually create an output that is
90%
quality or more. Now this is what AI automation looks like. AI automation
looks like so. It is this going through all these skills step by step and creating an output that is 90% quality. Now in order to get to this level, you have to treat this like an employee again. Right? Each of these skills can be improved over time. You're gonna add more edge cases. You're gonna add more guidance. You're gonna add more intellectual property,
more, uh, mental frameworks to get AI to think more like that you do. Now potentially,
Keyring can get to a point where it does a 100%,
but that again, that will take a lot more time because then AI will need to get the context
from these calls. So then Kieran can potentially feed the calls, uh, to AI to run the full thing, uh, a to z. But that's something that I wouldn't recommend to do right now. I think maintaining your judgment is really important, uh, with this stuff because you need to be on top of the strategy. So Kieran knew that the reporting was a bottleneck because he was spending sixty eight hours on reporting, sending monthly reports. As a CFO, you do have to send reports
on the finances and give some insights to his clients so they can make better decisions, um, in order to grow the business or to egg, uh, or to exit the business. He was specifically working with SaaS companies.
So he knew that for months, he said he would keep fixing it, but he just couldn't find the time. So so he was in a difficult position because he was already way too busy delivering the work, and he knew if he had to hire someone, has to do more handholding and wait for them to learn. And he didn't know how to break it apart. He actually need to figure out how to break up his workflow so that the skill system can execute the work for him. So the first thing we did was when we hopped in a call was we mapped out his business so we can understand how his business works, and we can find clarity on how we can get AI to do the work for him in his business and which skill system would be relevant for him. So we started by mapping out a business map where I like to call, and then we identified that what was his problem was delivery, not lead generation.
Kieran thought his problem was was lead generation, but it was actually delivery. So we then focused on that. And that was evident to us because I like to use something called the bowtie funnel, which kinda maps out your business from the lead gen side all the way up to client delivery side. And we saw that a client delivery side was where we could find good AI opportunities to help him scale his business. So what we started was we started with developing a scale system for one specific client at first. So we started by going over reporting scripts, creating some Python scripts, creating some deck templates, creating the brand files for that client, and then, uh, putting it all into a trigger called run monthly that, um, Kieran can run every month for that specific client. So Kieran worked on that and he got it to around 90% quality to get it get it to work. So it got it it got to a point where it was he was satisfied with the result to 90%.
All he had to do was and the last 10% and ship it off to clients and clients were impressed
with that. So with this in place, Kieran was unable to then pretty much copy paste this process, tweak it a little bit for other clients because other clients were a little bit more custom. So he just needed to change maybe 20% to 30% of the process. So now he can extend this to all of his other clients. So he had seven clients. He was able to extend it to all of his seven clients like so. And that started by creating one full pipeline or skill system built.
And this took him around forty hours
of training AI where specifically he would do the report and have AI shadow him while doing it. This allowed him to not only deliver to his current clients without, uh, firefighting and letting things go while still getting AI to develop, uh, the skill system for him. And the best thing about a skill system is that for Kieran to onboard a new client to run through that monthly reporting process, it would take him around ten hours to onboard just to get the API key, set things up. So that in turn would save him ten hours every single month. So instead of needing to spend, like, eight to ten hours every month doing the monthly reporting himself like so, now he just spends ten hours one time to onboard them, and then AI
does all the work from here. So this is a skill system doing the work for him. So you can imagine how much more time is he gonna get get over time. So this compounds.
Right? He's avoiding spending ninety six hours a year on a specific client. So that's a lot of client capacity he can get back. Ninety six hours back per client is a lot. So it onboarding the client so spending around ten hours onboard the client pays itself over the months so on because he doesn't need to spend as much time. So next thing about the skill system is that
Kieran didn't let AI do all the work or 100% of the work he actually let AI do 80 to 90% of the work which is most of the repetitive and execution
but when it came to his judgment which is identifying
the
the diagnosis
and giving advice to his clients, he would take care of that because that's what the clients appreciate.
So AI would build out these reports like so, and then Kieran would come in and do the the small
adjustments or the small commentary
to guide the client because Kieran has all of the context. You know, AI doesn't have all the context. If you are the service delivery
business owner,
you you are you're the person on the calls. You're the one who understands the emotions. You're the one who understands what the client needs and everything. So AI can help you probably make some commentary, but at the end, you wanna put in the last 10% because it is an emotional
connection or relationship with your clients.
So the principle here is AI should do most of the work, but you should do most of the judgment. So you should not let AI do all the judgment. So previously,
Kieran would take three to four hours writing the commentary.
AI would do some of it, and he would just come in and do the last thirty to sixty minutes to shift things off, uh, to the
So with this in place, generally, most service business owners have, like, three paths in order to scale their business. Number one, they could just do nothing, keep keep the status quo. And for Kieran, in this case, he would just stick to serving some clients, he would just continue working, uh, normally. Number two, he could hire someone. So for Kieran would be like to add an analyst, but that would add training, review, payroll, and that would just add more stress and handholding that he will need to do. Or third path is you could build a skill system or an AI employee
AI
employee,
and you can increase the client capacity you have like Kieran did. He increased it from seven to 15 clients, and you don't need to hire anyone, and it takes and it works on a $200 a month AI subscription on Cloud Code as an example. I don't know about you, but I would definitely pick the skill system option because the gains here are really high and the cost isn't that much. You know, you're paying $200 a month and you might spend a little bit time upfront
to learn how to use Cloud Code and how to use how to create a skill system, but that skill will pay you really well over the long term because not only would you create one skill system for this, you can create skill system for other parts of your business. Lead generation, sales, delivery, everything, and skill systems stack up on each other. So that's a goal for me as a business owner, and that's what I do when I help with my clients. So if your goal is something similar to this where you wanna build skill systems in your business and you wanna have AI employees that do 80% of the work for you in your business, I am launching a community next week on May 18. It's called the chief leverage officer
community. It's called that because as chief leverage officers, our goal is to grow our business based on leverage. That means we look to implement digital asset systems,
skill systems, and AI employees so we can scale up this without working more hours. K? And if you want that, I'm gonna put more information in the description below. So next thing about Kieran is that his calls with his clients became more productive and became more valuable to the client. Before he would recap numbers, he would read from the deck and he would tell them, hey. This is what happened to numbers and so on. Now what Kieran does instead is because AI does most of the number work and everything, Kieran just records a Loom video a Loom video. He's he does what he would do before on the call. He sends a Loom video, and then on the call, he focuses on things that that is decision making stuff, things that require judgment. So the client watches a Loom. The call is more strategic conversation.
You know? Kieran's more energized. He's not doing a boring call to explain numbers, but he can actually talk about decision making strategy.
And clients appreciate that more because now they're spending their time on stuff that they actually value more. So they actually talk about more important discussions. And, again, if you wanna build skill systems in your business so you can get 80% of the work done done by AI, I do have a community. I'm launching on May 18. I'll see you there in the inside.