Issue #24 · Ops & Om · Health of Business
Every few weeks there's a new headline. A big company cuts thousands of jobs and points at AI as the reason. I think most of those stories have it backwards. The waste was already there. AI just brought it all to light.
I just got back from ten days in Italy with my family. Rome, Pisa, Florence, and three days before that at an agriturismo, with trips out to small towns like Pienza and Montepulciano and some great vineyards. I carved out three or four pockets of work the whole trip. The rest of the time I was just there.
Every client deliverable kept running. At one point I opened ClickUp and watched the team handle podcast production without me: chasing the info for show notes, finishing final edits. And I noticed something about myself that I didn't love. Normally, when I see a task request come in and sit there like that, I jump in and take care of it before anyone else gets the chance.
Here's what we'll cover in this issue.
The layoffs are an inefficiency report
Picture a department with 10,000 people in it. Now say half of them, trained well on AI, could do the same work or better. The math on that is obvious, and a lot of companies are running it.
I get it. I'm a business owner. Cutting costs is a real lever and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But read the headline again. What it really says is that the company was carrying a huge amount of wasted motion, and AI made it visible. The work was always slower than it needed to be. Now there's a tool that shows exactly how much slower.
So you have two ways to respond to that information. You can cut down to the smaller number and pocket the savings. Or you can keep the 10,000, make every one of them good with these tools, and go take the market. This is a great time to expand, and most people are reading it as a time to shrink.
My little agency is choosing the second option. So are plenty of others. Yes, the one-person business is having its moment, and it's a real path. It just isn't the only lesson in the headlines.
The bottleneck was me
Here's the uncomfortable part of the Italy story.
Our team has been growing, mostly just lately. Some are contractors. Some are newer. On paper, that's a group that should still need a lot of hand-holding. Instead, from my phone in Italy, I watched them operate like a crew that had worked together for years. I still had approvals to give here and there. The production itself didn't need me.
They could obviously do it. The process was built for exactly this. The surprise was how often, on a normal week, I don't let them. I see a task waiting and I grab it, because it feels faster.
If you're a practitioner or a founder, you probably know this move. You built the business by being the person who handles it. That habit doesn't switch off just because you hired help. It quietly caps how much the team can grow, and it caps what they learn.
The team was ready before I was. Being out of reach for ten days is the only reason I found out.
Record once, train forever
So why could a newer team run like a veteran one? Most of it is how we train, and AI changed that completely.
When there's a task I do that someone else should own, I hit record and do it once. Claude captures every click and every step. Then it writes the SOP and sets up a recurring task in ClickUp for the person taking it over, with clear instructions attached. If it spots a step that could go faster, it tells me. And for some of those tasks, the AI can simply do the work itself, which frees the person for the parts that need judgment.
Hiring works the same way. The training is already written down, so a new person has a clear path from day one.
You can try a version of this today without any special setup. Pick one task you keep grabbing back, write out how you do it (or paste a transcript of yourself talking through it), and run this:
I'm handing off a recurring task to someone on my team. Below is how I do it today, written or transcribed as I talked it through.
Turn it into an SOP someone new could follow without asking me anything:
1. A one-line purpose: what this task is for and when it's done well
2. Numbered steps, one action per step, with where to click or what to open
3. The judgment calls: any point where I decide something, and how I decide
4. What "done" looks like, and who to notify
Then give me two short lists:
- Steps that could be faster, and how
- Steps an AI could do on its own, and what a person should still check
Ask me about anything that's unclear before you write the final version.
How I do it today:
[paste here]Run it on one task this week. The SOP is useful. The list of steps you do out of habit is even more useful.
That's the whole move this week. Find the one task you keep grabbing back, write it down, and let someone else have it. I'd love to hear which one you picked. Just hit reply.
Baldomero Garza — Find me on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or book a 1:1.
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