In this practical episode, Tim Harrison, Founder and CEO of Coaching Innovation Lab, shares how AI can be your most powerful leverage tool as a stage 2 solopreneur. If you're overwhelmed wearing every hat, struggling with time constraints, and doing too much low-value work yourself, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why AI is now the essential third option beyond just eliminate or delegate

- How to focus on your zone of genius while letting AI handle everything else

- What it takes to build simple systems that multiply your impact and productivity

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Tim Harrison is a pioneer at the intersection of Coaching and AI. As the founder of the Coaching Innovation Lab, he specializes in advising, training, and consulting solopreneurs and organizations on the practical application of AI. Tim’s leadership in the field is globally recognized. He was one of eight experts selected for the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) Global Taskforce on AI, helping to shape industry standards around the use of AI. His innovative work includes founding the nonprofit EPOG Academy, which developed PowerPath, an AI-powered coaching system designed to bridge guidance gaps in education, and leading Project BEACON, an NIH study measuring the impact of coaching for underrepresented biomedical PhD students.

Want to learn more about Tim Harrison's work at Coaching Innovation Lab? Check out his website at https://coachinginnovationlab.com/

Connect with Tim through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachtimharrison/

Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again

to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Retheimer, and today we're

talking to the founders who want to win in what I think is aptly,

should aptly be known as the automation age, especially those

of you who are in level two and are doing absolutely everything

yourself, because historically, if you're in level two and it's

just you and maybe one or two people helping you, kind of had

two choices, you could either, if you were, if your schedule is

full, you could either stop doing something, we would call

that eliminate, or you could hire somebody else and delegate

to them, and both of those opportunities can be helpful,

but they have their flaws, and more than ever, there is a third

option that's available to us, and that is the ability to

automate and to unpack that, what it would look like, and how

you can start implementing it today. I am thrilled to welcome

Tim Harrison, who is a pioneer at the intersection of both

coaching and AI. As the founder of Coaching Innovation Lab, he

specializes in advising, training, and consulting

solopreneurs and organizations on the practical application of

AI. Tim's leadership in the field is globally recognized.

He's one of the eight experts selected for the International

Coaching Federation's Global Task Force on AI, helping to

shape industry standards around the use of AI. His innovative

work includes founding the nonprofit EPO G Academy, which

developed Power Path, an AI-powered coaching system

designed to bridge guidance gaps in education, and leading

Project Beacon, an NIH study measuring the impact of coaching

for underrepresented biomedical PhD students. He's here with us

today. Tim, I'm really excited about this conversation. One of

the things I said is a lot of times these conversations on AI

can just go 1000 different ways all at once, but I love your

specialty in this, or your focus in this on how we can use it for

for solopreneurs, and to an extent the organizations that

they start, and so I'm wondering if just right out of the gate

you can start with the mindset shift that you're seeing

solopreneurs have to make in this age, where so many AR tools

are available.

Yeah, there, Scott, it's great to be here. Thanks

for having me. There is so much information out there about AI.

There's so much hype. Is it going to destroy the planet and

destroy us, or is it going to be our savior, and I think you have

to have a balanced perspective. When I say AI, I like to say

applied innovation, because it's never about the technology, it's

about our ability to do things better. And for solopreneurs,

many of them, like you said, are the only person in their

business, they're doing everything, they're wearing a

lot of hats, and so there's never been a more powerful

technology and opportunity to expand what's what an individual

is capable of than now.

That's awesome. One of the reasons I've

seen folks be somewhat reluctant is they just don't know how to

start, so I would imagine that most people have kind of started

now, but let's say we had the opportunity to kind of push

reset and start the best way possible. What's the best way to

start thinking about and using some of these AI technologies?

Do what you do best, let AI do the rest. Right, there

is now an opportunity to rethink what is it that's worth doing,

and where should I be spending my time? Everyone has the same

challenge. There's only 24 hours in a day, and everyone has the

same challenge, that most of what we do doesn't matter at

all. There's something called the Pareto principle, or the

8020 rule, where 20% of our input is responsible for 80% of

our output, and the opposite is also true, 80% of what we spend

our time on is only responsible for 20% of our output, and so if

you want to maximize your impact and your influence and your

productivity, you have to figure out how to maximize the time

spent in that 20% that has outsized returns, and AI is now

that third option, like you mentioned, you can eliminate

things, take things off your plate, you can simplify them, do

the minimum viable version of it. Now you can automate. Now

you can automate, right. And so what you want to do is, you want

to look at, well, what are the things that AI is just as good

as I am, or better at, or better, and trade off, hand it

off to AI, hand it off to those systems, right. Everyone has

four zones of ability: you have your zone of incompetence, your

zone of competence, your zone of excellence, and your zone of

genius. Zone of incompetence are things that maybe you're not

great at, or things that anyone can do just as well as you,

right, like the. Data entry, you know, basic analysis, basic

summary, that kind of thing. Your zone of competence are

things that you do average. Most people can do them, you're not

bad at it, but you know it's pretty average. And the zone of

excellence are things that you do above average, right? And

then zone of genius are the things that you do that are

unique to you that you tend to get the most fulfillment and

reward from, and they have the greatest impact on your

business. So, you want to do is, you want to minimize your time

spent doing the things that are average or below, and you want

to maximize time spent on the things that you're above average

or great at, right? And that makes sense. And so, now AI is

an opportunity to hand off those things that are average or

below, so you maximize time spent on the things that have

the greatest impact.

Yeah, it's really helpful. One of the

things I've seen, and I'd love your insight on this, is there

are some things that AI isn't good at, or as good as it needs

to be, and sometimes it can make mistakes and errors, and one of

the challenges I've seen is folks who have jumped straight

to the bottom of that tank, like these are the things that I

don't do well, let me have AI do them, and one of the challenges

with starting there is you don't know if the output is good or

not to some extent, right, like if I was, if I was going back to

school to be a rocket scientist or something, I don't know if

that's a thing, but I wouldn't know if the answers that it was

giving to me were right or wrong. That's not very helpful,

whereas in that zone of competence, things that I can do

but I don't really care to do, it's much easier to see, hey, am

I getting a good result back or not? And I have found that that

tends to be some of the lower hanging fruit. Would you agree?

I would agree in the fact that you're not able to

evaluate the response as well if you don't, if you're not skilled

in that area. However, if you're not skilled in that area, the

odds are that the basic that you're going to get from AI

might actually exceed what you're doing. So it's a trade

off, and the areas that I'm great at, I'm able to

distinguish and have judgment and taste around what's good and

what's not, but if I'm not able to do that, the odds are that

the AI might actually boost my baseline for that. Right, there

was a research study that they did called the Cybernetic

Teammate. You can look it up, but what they did is they had

individuals use AI and compare them on performance to teams who

didn't use AI right, so imagine you had someone who was a

marketer and someone who was, you know, had a financial

background, and they had them run a campaign together, and

then you had an individual who was either a marketer or a

financial advisor, or had a finance, you know, was a finance

professional, and they used AI for the opposite, so the

marketing person use AI for finance, the finance person use

AI for marketing. The individuals who use AI

outperform the team of the marketer and the financial

person. Wow, right? And this is good news if you're a

solopreneur, because you're wearing a lot of hats: you're

wearing the marketing hat, you're wearing the financial

hat, you're wearing whatever service you provide hat, you're

wearing the backend hat, all of that at once, and so it's

actually good news, but when you double click and look into why

it worked, well, it bridged the skill gap, so the financial

person must have been well below average on the marketing side,

and vice versa, and the AI bridged that gap, it actually

raised their level, so they could be average or above

average, however, it didn't improve their existing skill, so

AI didn't make them a better marketer, or AI didn't make them

better at finance. So, there's a saying I like to say: is it

raises the floor, but the ceiling is still up to you,

right? So, it can bridge the gaps of things that you're not

good at, but you still have to work on your judgment and your

taste, so using AI is an excuse not to develop skill, but it

allows you to choose which skills have are worth

developing, because you can augment the rest of them.

That's awesome. That is great news from

a study standpoint, and really, really helpful insight. So, you

work a lot with coaches, and I would say coaches are kind of a

helpful example of what a lot of long-term solopreneurs are,

right, professional service providers, folks that are good

at what they do, and, and for those folks, one of the biggest

things, and you touched on this in the very beginning of the

show, is to get as much of the other stuff off of your plate as

you can, and that allows us to maximize our dollars per hour

worked. It allows us to do things that we enjoy doing, and

can fill in some really, really big gaps, because most of us

aren't great at everything, right. And so, for a coach

looking at how to start automating AI, maybe they've

separated some of these different zones. What are some

of the best ways you see coaches or other professional service

providers using AI to save time?

Yeah, for one, you have to just use it. You are the

expert at your business, and you're the expert at your

domain, and these companies, OpenAI. Google Anthropic, you

know, X AI, they're going to come out with these incredible

models, and they're going to get smarter and smarter and smarter,

but they're not going to tell you what that actually looks

like in your business, right? And so you have to get your

hands dirty and start using it, because that's where first value

is going to going to come. After that, it's not just about using

the tools, right? You don't rise to the level of your goals, you

fall to the level of your systems, and the people who have

the greatest results with this are the ones who built a system

around it. When you look back at the past, sometimes you can

predict the future, and in the last great technological

revolution, we had the combustion engine, right, that

was invented, and everyone knew, just like they know now, that

this new powerful technology was going to transform the way that

people do transportation and transform the way that they do

work. But if you go back, you can look this up. What were some

of the early mock-ups, some of the early inventions with the

new engine? And you would see a horse carriage with an engine in

the back, because they thought, oh, wow, this is going to make

the horses faster, they're going to be able to carry heavily,

heavier weight, they're going to last a lot longer, because

there's less wear and tear, and it's very logical to think that,

because they spent their whole life traveling via horse, so

that was their only mental model, and we look back at that,

and we laugh, because we think obviously it was the automobile,

it was the Model T that ended up being the real breakthrough that

the combustion engine allowed for, and if you look at a lot of

current AI use today, it's like that engine-powered horse and

buggy, we have this new AI-powered engine, but we're

just slapping it on and bolting it on to the existing way that

we do things. The greatest opportunity with AI is not just

doing things a little bit better, a little bit faster, a

little bit cheaper, it's in the new things that are now

possible. What's the Model T in your area? And so, for people

who are looking to get the most out of it, don't just ask, "Hey,

can AI do this? Ask, what is now possible, and that's the

difference between being able to go from zero to 60. To give a

very practical example, let's say you're a coach or you're an

advisor, you're a consultant. What you do is you hop on calls

with people and you're paid for your expertise, right? If you

have your system currently set up from an AI native

perspective. You may have an AI note taker that is on the call,

and here's all the relevant context. And then you have your

basic AI operating system, like your cloud or your ChatGPT or

your Gemini in the middle. And then you've set up your back

end, so where AI can access your context, what your business is

about, your name, your brand, your packages, your contracts,

and all that stuff. And then what that allows you to do, once

you've set up that system, where it connects, you can do a simple

prompt like this that might take you 10 seconds. Hey, I just got

off a call with a leader, and they're interested in me sending

them a proposal. I want you to look at that called transcript

and identify their core pain points. Then I want you to

reference my existing services and packages and help me build a

pitch deck for this engagement. Make sure you reference my brand

colors, my logo, and all that. And then hit enter. And once you

set up that system, the AI will go in, read the transcript,

analyze it, reach back into your back end, like your Notion, your

Google Drive, your Outlook, find your pre-existing services,

blend those two together, and then I'll write the code for an

entire presentation. It'll go ahead and build that out.

That might be six to 10 hours of work before that can now be

initiated in the first, you know, 1015 minutes, once you

have that system in place, now it's not final, because you know

the AI is going to do its best attempt. You still need your

judgment, you still need skill to review it, but sheesh, like

you're saving six hours, gets in, it gets compressed down

about 15 seconds, and that sounds like hype, but so does

seeing a car go from zero to 60 in less than 10 seconds if you

spent your whole life riding a horse, it's the equivalent

today.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Fascinating. Well,

Tim, there's a question that I'm eager to hear your answer to.

This question I ask all my guests, and it is this: What is

the biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all? What's

that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening

today knew.

I'll say you're already on that mountain. A lot of

people look forward there, they have things they want to achieve

and things that they want to accomplish, and it's like it's

this mountain over there that they need to then start

climbing. I think, when you actually get more granular, you

realize there's a lot of things that you've already done that

are moving you in that direction, and you're actually

probably standing at the foothills or standing somewhere

on that mountain, and it's not somewhere that you're that

you're not already, and I think the difference. Is when you're

on that mountain, it's easier to continue when just looking at a

big challenge. It's easy to feel like you have to get started,

and there's all this inertia to overcome, but when you realize,

oh, I'm already making progress in this direction, or I'm

already there, then I think, I think it's a lot easier. You

have to see yourself as already doing it, as already it, you

know, when I got trained to become a coach, after you

graduate from the certification process, so many people are

like, when I get my first client, then I'll be a coach,

but then they don't act in alignment because they don't

believe that's who they are already, so they act as if

they're not a coach, so they don't do the things that a coach

would do, but as soon as you say, okay, I am this or I am

that. It's suddenly appropriate to do the things that that

person would do, and I think a lot of people just get stuck

because they, they choose to put it outside of them instead of

seeing that they're already there.

Yeah, so good, so good. Well, Tim, there's some

folks listening to this, and they'd love help, you know,

taking the next step, whether it be the first one or the 500th

into really putting AI to work in the and allowing it to shape

their practice. Where can they reach out to you? Where can they

find more out about the work that you all do?

Yep, find me on LinkedIn, Tim Harrison, and you

can also find more at Coaching Innovation lab.com We put

together a special package that special link for people who find

out about me on this podcast, which will be included in the

show notes, so make sure you check those out.

Fantastic, fantastic, we'll get that in the

notes for everybody. And Tim, just really a fascinating

conversation. Pleasure having you here. Thanks so much for

being on the show, and for those of you watching and listening

today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us.

I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I

did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care. Hey

everyone, Scott Wedheimer here. Thank you so much for listening

to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode

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and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next

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honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible

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