I love the first week of a new client. The audit, the strategy, the big plan. As an ENTP and an ADHD enthusiast, that part is intoxicating. So when Mitchell Wilson of Coachbirds opened our Unscripted Small Business interview with the advice he’d just given a client, it landed as a call-out:
“Doing the boring stuff consistently.”
Mitchell coaches tradies, professionals and local service owners across Australia and New Zealand on three things: sales, systems and strategy. Most of what he told me was about the part of business that comes after the fun part. If you’re like me, that’s the part you need to hear about.
You can watch the full episode or listen on Castos.
SEO is Tai Chi, and so is running a business
The way I described it to Mitchell, SEO is like Tai Chi: “it’s small repetitious movements that kinda look like nonsense on their own, but if you do them enough for long enough, then you can get fantastic results.” I believe that about search. I’m less disciplined about applying it to my own business.
Mitchell sees the same pattern in new owners. The fit-out, the tools and the setup are the exciting part: “it’s kind of like building that Lego set.” Then the doors open and the owner asks, “now what do I do? I’ve done all the fun part.” He says it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it, either. Five or ten years in, you still have to go back to the basics and check they’re being done right and consistently.
His order for getting there is mindset, then habits, then systems. The habits part is the one I’d underline. “We need to get these processes like it is brushing our teeth.” You can miss a day. You just don’t miss the next one.
I learned the systems lesson from a hallucinated recap
Here’s my confession from the episode. When I took this show over from Mark Preston, the editing, clipping and transcription were multiple hours an episode, so I went looking for prompts to clean up transcripts without hallucinations. In my words on the show: “I thought it was a good prompt until I reread one article and it had hallucinated part of the conversation that never occurred.” It went out. I had to correct it.
That’s why I now check every quote against the raw transcript before anything publishes. It’s also why the idea of a shared AI playbook made sense to me when Daniel Hebert of Oleno explained it. Oleno keeps a company’s marketing context for Claude and ChatGPT, the positioning, product facts and brand guidance, in one place, so the people and the AI tools on a team start from the same brief instead of each person improvising their own.
Mitchell sees an earlier problem in the businesses he coaches: the owner has AI, and the team doesn’t. “The rest of the team hasn’t actually been given that access and that authority to actually use it.” He also thinks the work of coordinating it will become a job, “an AI manager,” the way the social media manager became one. When I interviewed Ross Hudgens, I learned Siege Media already has a director of automations. And Dr. Gleb Tsipursky taught me that the owner’s excitement is usually the thing standing between the team and adoption.
AI turned his biggest weakness into a strength
This was the part of the conversation I related to most. Mitchell has ADHD and a little dyslexia. Writing was always his weak spot: “While I just passed English, I only passed it with fifty percent.” Maths, no problem.
“Now when AI came along, my biggest weakness now just turned into a strength.”
He described AI as “this buddy that’s sitting with me on my phone on my computer,” and says the content he can create has gone tenfold. As a fellow ADHD brain, I’d add one caveat from the section above: the buddy needs a system around it. If you have ADHD and you’ve just discovered how much faster you can ship, build the checking step before you build the volume. It’s artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom.
Speed to lead isn’t a robot’s job
I asked Mitchell about speed to lead. Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital had made the point to me about replying to clients quickly once they hit the form.
On tape I quoted Jake Melendy’s speed-to-lead study from memory, and I got the number wrong. Here’s what his mystery shopping actually found: over half of the service businesses he contacted never responded at all, and only 2% of the ones that did followed up more than once.
I expected Mitchell to say AI fixes that. He didn’t:
“I don’t actually think that’s an AI job. I think that’s sort of more of a systems job.”
He wants “some form of human interaction there somewhere.” AI is a tool to help you do the business, not a button that does it for you. Brett Schklar gave me a line I keep repeating, and here’s how I put it on the show: “AI is not out there to take your job, it’s there to take your tasks. But if your job is entirely composed only of completing specific tasks, then you probably need to watch out.”
Freelancing can be a busy job with overheads
Mitchell’s line for the owners he coaches is that “They’ve ended up building a busy job with overheads.” The team is running around, the owner works harder every year, “So maybe they’re making more money, but they just don’t have any time.”
I pushed back with my own world. A lot of solopreneurs end up doing more work and making less, not because the hourly rate is low but because every hour holds three jobs. Mitchell’s painter example nails it. Ask what they earn and they quote an hourly rate, but “they’re not including all that time behind the scenes where they are invoicing, looking for new work, ordering what they need to.” Louis Swart’s version of the same math is the post-it note that tells you to stop working.
The fix in his framework is the systems step, and the reason is the line that became the episode title:
“As they start growing, we need to make sure that we’ve got the systems in place. Because honestly, you can’t scale chaos.”
Mitchell writes about the same trap on his blog as the accidental CEO trap.
What I’m taking from Mitchell, as someone who loves shiny objects
I asked Mitchell whether entrepreneurs over-use whatever seems to be working. In SEO, Jeremy Moser of uSERP, which offers GEO services, flagged listicles as the tactic everybody is chasing right now. My worry was the herd: “monkey see monkey do,” “And then we all just drive off the cliff together.”
Mitchell split that into two different things, and it changed how I think about my own habits:
- Chasing what others do is shiny object syndrome. “Watch out for just doing something because everyone else is doing it.”
- Repeating what works for you is the boring stuff. “If something is working in business, do it more.” Most of us don’t do it enough.
- Your numbers tell you when to stop. When results start to dwindle, “if something’s changing, we need to pivot.”
- Check the ego. “A lot of them think no one can do it as good as me.” His answer is to be a leader, not just the best person in the room. I’ve written about the same lesson from Alan Lazaros on not being the bottleneck.
And if you’d rather not do any of that, Mitchell gave you permission: “you don’t have to own a business. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur.”
Mitchell is opening The Business Nest, a paid group, and offered listeners a free pass: reach him on LinkedIn or at coachbirds.com, or go straight to The Business Nest. For the full episode recap, read Mitchell Wilson on why you can’t scale chaos on Unscripted Small Business, and for the marketing angle, why more leads won’t fix a leaky sales process on SEO Arcade.
Sponsor disclosure: Oleno, uSERP and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.