Not one line. From something they had finished writing minutes earlier.

I am, as anyone who reads this publication knows, not anti-AI. I run businesses that wouldn’t exist without it. I write about it most weeks. I think it’s the most powerful tool ever handed to a small business owner and the people who learn to use it properly are going to build things that would have taken teams of fifty to build five years ago. None of that has changed.

But there is a problem sitting underneath all of that productivity, and the research coming out of the last eighteen months is making it very hard to ignore. The same shortcut that lets you compress a six-hour task into ten minutes is also compressing the thinking that used to happen during those six hours. And your brain, as it turns out, is paying attention to that.

What the research is actually saying

The MIT Media Lab study didn’t just measure recall. Across four sessions, the researchers watched the ChatGPT group get progressively lazier, initially using the tool to ask structural questions about their essays, eventually resorting to copy-and-paste by the end. The EEG data showed the AI users had the weakest brain connectivity of the three groups, consistently underperforming at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels. One independent analysis of the data put the drop in brain activity in the ChatGPT group at 47% compared to the unaided group. Half.

The most uncomfortable finding came last. When the AI users were taken off the tool in a final session and asked to write unaided, their brains stayed sluggish. The cognitive engagement didn’t bounce back when the AI was removed. The effect lingered.

The researchers called this “cognitive debt”, and the phrase has stuck because it describes something most of us have started to recognise in ourselves. The lead author, Nataliya Kosmyna, has gone to some lengths since to push back against the more alarmist headlines and remind people that this was an essay-writing task and not a generalised IQ test. Fair enough. But the underlying signal, that the brain treats outsourced cognition as a reason to switch itself off, is hard to argue with.

A separate study published earlier last year by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University reached a complementary conclusion through a different route. They surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real-world examples of using generative AI in their jobs, looking at how confident they were in the tool, how confident they were in their own ability, and how much critical thinking they actually deployed. The pattern was clear. Higher confidence in the AI was associated with less critical thinking. Higher self-confidence was associated with more.

In other words, the more you trust the tool to do the thinking, the less of it you do yourself. Which would be fine if the tool were infallible. But it isn’t. The same study found that users with access to generative AI tended to produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task than those without. Everyone’s work starts to look the same. We’ll come back to that, because for a business owner trying to stand out in a market, it might be the most important finding in the whole pile.

Why your brain works this way

The thing about the brain is, structurally, it is a use-it-or-lose-it organ. The principle has a formal name in neuroscience, synaptic pruning, and it works exactly the way it sounds. Neural circuits not actively engaged in task performance for an extended period of time begin to degrade. The connections you don’t use get reabsorbed. The energy your brain was spending to maintain them gets redirected to circuits that are doing more work. This isn’t a bug. It’s the most efficient way to run a metabolically expensive piece of biology.

The “use it or lose it” theory of aging is one of the two foundational principles behind how neuroplasticity works in adults: systems in the body that are underutilised eventually atrophy, and the energy needed to maintain them is stored or diverted to areas where there is need. It’s why concert pianists who stop playing lose technique. It’s why bilingual people who don’t use their second language for a decade can’t summon it under pressure. And it’s why, when researchers looked at people who relied heavily on GPS to get around, they found something striking.

A 2020 study of fifty regular drivers found that those with greater lifetime GPS use had worse spatial memory when navigating without it. A three-year follow-up showed that the more GPS people used during that period, the steeper the decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory. The hippocampus, in case you’d forgotten, is the part of the brain most associated with memory and navigation. It’s also one of the first regions to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The McGill neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot, who has spent years studying this, has been clear that reduced use of spatial memory strategies may have implications for cognitive decline in later life.

The flip side of this principle is just as well documented, and it tells you something about how the brain rewards effort. In a 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology fitted 36 university students with high-density EEG caps and had them either handwrite words with a digital pen or type them on a keyboard. The brain connectivity patterns during handwriting were far more elaborate, lighting up regions associated with sensory, motor and memory processing in ways that typing simply did not. The lead researcher, Audrey van der Meer, put it bluntly: handwriting activates almost the whole brain compared to typewriting, which hardly activates it at all. The harder the task is on your brain, the more your brain shows up for it. The easier you make it, the less of you is in the room.

Now apply the same principle to general-purpose thinking. To writing. To memory. To the ability to sit with a difficult idea and turn it over for an hour without reaching for AI. Each step we take towards frictionless cognition is a step away from the engagement that built those capacities in the first place. Handwriting to typing to dictating to prompting. The slope is continuous and AI is just the steepest section of it.

The reason this is so insidious is that humans are, fundamentally, optimised for the path of least resistance. Your brain burns roughly 20% of your body’s energy at rest and a great deal more under cognitive load. Anything that lets you produce an acceptable output for less effort feels, neurochemically, like a reward. AI is the most efficient cognitive shortcut ever invented. Of course your brain wants to take it. That’s exactly the problem.

The taste problem

Here is the thing I keep coming back to — if everyone has access to the same tools, and those tools tend to produce, as the Microsoft study found, a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task, then the entire ground of differentiation in business shifts. It stops being about who can make the thing, anyone can make the thing, and starts being about who can tell good from bad. Whose taste is sharpest. Whose editorial sensibility is the most refined.

Taste is the thing that survives when execution gets cheap. Taste is what’s left.

And here is the cruelty of it: taste is built through exactly the practices we’re now outsourcing. It comes from reading thousands of pages. From writing badly and noticing it. From sitting with your own work long enough to see what’s wrong with it. From boredom, from friction, from doing things the hard way for long enough that you develop instincts about what good looks like.

There is a generation of people coming up now who have never known professional life without an AI co-pilot. They will be faster than us. They will get more done. They will also, if they’re not careful, have no idea whether what they’re producing is any good, because the only way to develop that knowledge is to have done it the hard way for long enough that you internalise the standard.

The compounding problem of cognitive debt isn’t really about us. We can already see, in a four-month study, the muscle starting to fade in adults who used to have it. It’s about the people who will never get the chance to build it in the first place.

How to stay smart

I am not suggesting you stop using AI. But I do want to raise the question of how do you stay smart? And really I think it is about continuing to choose to do certain things yourself. Not because AI can’t do them. But because you are better at them and it will keep you sharp.

I’ve come up with a working set of rules, refined through paying attention to what’s happened to my own thinking when I’ve gone too far one way or the other:

Form your own view. Use AI, if you must, as a sparring partner, not a substitute. Don’t outsource your critical thinking to AI.

Read long things, slowly, on paper. Actual books, actual articles. Not summaries and certainly not the AI-generated executive overview. The deep-reading circuits are some of the first to atrophy under digital habits, and they’re the ones that build judgement. This is the single most important habit on the list and it’s the one most people drop first.

Protect boredom. Walks without podcasts. Baths without your phone. Driving without an audiobook. When the mind wanders, it engages the brain’s default mode network, which is where the disparate-ideas-connecting happens. It’s the bit responsible for the shower thoughts, the walks where the strategy clicks into place, the long drives where a problem you’d been chewing on for weeks finally unknots itself. You cannot schedule that back in once you’ve trained yourself out of tolerating it.

Do hard cognitive things on purpose. Mental arithmetic. Memorising a phone number you’d normally save. Navigating somewhere unfamiliar without Google Maps. Reading something difficult and not looking up the words you don’t know until you’ve finished. These feel pointless. They are not pointless. They are how you keep the muscles intact.

Keep one domain entirely yours. Choose one part of your business where AI does not touch it. For me it’s the writing of this publication. For you it might be sales calls, or strategy, or the design eye, or the way you talk to your most important clients. One thing that stays unambiguously human, that you keep practising at, that becomes the thing you’re known for in a market where everyone else’s work is converging.

The thing about all of this is that none of it is about resisting the future. The future where AI does most of the production work is coming whether you participate in it or not, and pretending otherwise is a worse strategy than engaging with it carefully. The question is what you become inside that future. The people who will do well are the ones whose taste is sharpest, whose judgement is most reliable, whose minds are still capable of holding a complicated idea for long enough to do something interesting with it. That isn’t an accident of personality. It’s a consequence of what you’ve chosen to keep doing yourself.

Your brain will let you stop using it. It will reabsorb the connections and redirect the energy and feel, for a while, like nothing has been lost. The studies are now clear that something has. The good news is that the same neuroplasticity that allows your brain to deteriorate through disuse is what allows it to be rebuilt through use. The cost is friction, and friction has never been cheaper to avoid. Which is exactly why choosing it is about to become the most valuable thing you do.

Sources:

MIT Media Lab — "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt" (Kosmyna et al., June 2025)

Microsoft Research / Carnegie Mellon — "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking" (Lee et al., CHI 2025)

McGill University — GPS and spatial memory (Dahmani & Bohbot, Scientific Reports, 2020)

Norwegian University of Science and Technology — Handwriting vs typing (Van der Weel & Van der Meer, Frontiers in Psychology, 2024)

Additional Sources:

Neuroplasticity — Kleim and Jones, “Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity” (Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2008)

• This is the foundational paper behind the use-it-or-lose-it framing. Original citation: Kleim JA, Jones TA. J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2008;51(1):S225-39. A good accessible summary is here: https://www.neuroskills.com/neuroplasticity/

Maryanne Wolf — Deep reading

• Her book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) is the primary source. Her Guardian piece is also widely cited: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf

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Seven years. The number on the invoice she sent her first client is the same number she charged in February. She knew it was a problem before she said it out loud, of course she did, but she’d never quite been able to bring herself to do anything about it. Every time she sat down to work out a new rate she’d talk herself out of it before she’d opened a spreadsheet. The clients had become friends and the thought of that conversation made her feel sick. So another year would pass and the rate would stay where it was, and the gap between what she was charging and what she should have been charging would grow wider.

This was one of the core reasons she came to me in the first place, because not only had her prices stayed the same, as the business grew she had hired a team. In other words, her costs had grown significantly and her profit had nose-dived but she just couldn’t work her way out of it.

In case you are new here, I have a handful of 1:1 advisory clients I work with as a quasi-board and strategy advisor. We meet a few times a month and speak most weeks or every few days and my role is to hold up the mirror, advise, make recommendations and give founders the gentle shove you sometimes need in the right direction. (If you are in need of this then you can find out more here).

Back to pricing… you see, the cost is never the underpricing itself. It’s everything the underpricing prevents — the systems you didn’t build, the help you didn’t hire, the holiday you didn’t take, the buffer you didn’t put aside, the profit you sacrificed. Seven years of charging properly would have completely changed the shape of her business. Seven years of charging not-quite-properly just kept everything ticking over while quietly eating into what she could have built. Every year of underpricing didn’t just cost her the difference, it cost her everything that money would have built on top of itself.

If you’re reading this and any of that sounds familiar, you already know your rates are too low. You’ve known for at least a year. You’ve done the maths in your head a hundred times and changed nothing, because every time you get close to actually doing it, the calculation comes out the same way. What if they say no?! If I lose three clients, that’s most of my income, and I can’t afford to lose three clients, so I can’t raise my prices, so I’ll think about it next quarter. Next quarter arrives. Same maths. Same outcome.

What I want to do in this piece is give you the actual mechanics of how to raise your rates without your business falling apart in the process. Because the reason most reprices go badly isn’t the new number. It’s that founders treat pricing as a single decision rather than a structured transition — they pick a rate, send the same email to everyone in the same week, and then try to manage the consequences as they all land at once.

Pricing isn’t a number. It’s a system with three moving parts: what existing clients pay, what new clients pay, and what you do during the months when both rates exist at the same time. Most of this guide is about the third part, because the first two are easy by comparison.

We’ll cover the three diagnostics that tell you whether you actually have a pricing problem or whether something else is going on, the three-tier framework I use for handling existing clients during a reprice, the actual scripts for the difficult conversations (including the ones where the client tries to negotiate, goes quiet, or walks), the repositioning work for new enquiries, and how to manage the awkward middle period where some clients are on the old rate and others are on the new one.

The composite running through this piece — the email marketer currently charging £3,000 a month — is loosely based on the client I just mentioned, with the numbers changed and details simplified. The same logic applies whether you’re a copywriter, a fractional finance director, a designer, a virtual assistant, or anyone else who charges a recurring fee for ongoing work. The numbers shift but the structure doesn’t. And I’m happy to report that my client, after some gentle coaxing and harsh truths, has now actioned everything and her revenue increased by a whopping 50% in ONE MONTH.

If this is your first time landing on one of my articles, welcome to my Substack! I’m Helena, I’m a serial entrepreneur, tech founder, AI Queen and content creator. I write three times a week about business, AI and building leverage so you can actually live a truly rich life in every sense of the word. This is how you get really rich - I’d love it if you decide to stay for a while!

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As one does when you contemplate your life after a big life shift (ICYMI my marriage ended six months ago).

We all know know we are going to die. The outcome is the same for everyone, we know the final destination — a coffin.

So why given the end is fixed and the timing isn’t, are we not spending more time thinking about, and doing more about, what happens before the end? What happens in the middle? And where I’ve landed is that most people don’t know. We think of bucket-lists, of vision boards, of destinations, achievements, goals, to-do lists, but if you are really honest with yourself, when was the last time you seriously thought about what you want? What you want life to feel like on the way?

I want to say at the top of this piece that I do not have a neat answer. I don’t have a five-step plan or a tidy framework for you where you tick the boxes and emerge knowing your true calling, because I don’t believe such a framework exists.

Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) working out what you want is not a strategic exercise. It is an observational one and you don’t think your way to the answer. You walk around in your life with your eyes a bit more open until the answer becomes visible, which it does eventually, but on its own timing rather than yours.

So as I have been pondering this question myself — what do I want?… What I can now offer are the things I have been doing that have helped the picture become clearer, and the picture becoming clearer is, I think, the most you can hope for. More practices rather than steps. At least that’s what has worked for me. And honestly, as I have been going through this process, I’ve realised that what I really want as an outcome of these practices, doesn’t look a bit like what I pinned on a vision board five years ago.

Walking, alone, a lot

The first one, and the foundational one, is walking. By myself. Without a podcast. Without somebody on the phone keeping me company. Just walking, with my own thoughts, for as long as I can manage on any given day, which is usually somewhere between thirty minutes and two hours.

I cannot overstate how much of the rest of this piece would not have happened without the walking. Walking is the single most under-appreciated thinking technology available to us, and the fact that it is free, requires no equipment, and works for almost everyone is a bit of an embarrassment to the wellness industry. The thing about walking is that the body is occupied with the relatively un-demanding job of moving, which leaves the mind free to do something it almost never gets to do anymore, which is wander without an agenda. Thoughts surface that have been waiting for weeks. Connections you didn’t know you were making suddenly arrive. Old questions answer themselves. Things you have been pretending not to know about your own life become impossible to ignore.

Quietening the borrowed wants

The second practice is the one I had been resisting for a while, because I work in tech and a lot of what I do depends on being visible in places like Instagram and TikTok. But personally — meaning, when I am not working — I have stopped scrolling. The phone goes face down. Instagram doesn’t come out at the end of the day. The dopamine drip is closed.

I want to be careful about how I frame this because I am not interested in writing another sermon about the evils of social media, of which the internet has more than enough already. The reason I cut it off is more specific. I had begun to notice, when I sat with myself for long enough on those walks, that a lot of what I thought I wanted from my life was not actually mine. It was absorbed. I had been quietly accumulating other people’s wants — wants that came from creators I admired, friends I hadn’t seen in years, women on holiday in places I’d never been, accounts I followed because their aesthetic was nice. None of these people had done anything wrong. They were just living their own lives in public, and I had been mistaking proximity to those lives for information about my own.

You cannot hear yourself over the volume of everybody else. That is the simple version. The fuller version is that the more time you spend looking at other people’s lives, the harder it becomes to know what you would want if no one else had ever shown you anything, and that is the version of yourself you need to get back to if any of the rest of this is going to work.

The home movie

This is the bit that has done the most work for me, and it is the practice I would most encourage you to try if you only try one of them.

We’ve all heard the adage that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes — a highlights reel of everything you’ve done, and if you’re unlucky, possibly some of the things you didn’t. I don’t know if that is true, but I find it a useful image. For me, the reel plays as a sort of 90s home movie, slightly grainy, the colour a bit off, an absent narrator. And the question I have been pondering with is: what is in mine? What scenes are playing? Where am I? Who am I with? What am I doing?

Aside from my children, my parents, and my ride-or-die trauma-bonded sisters and their kids, I know I have not yet met everyone who will feature in this film, which is itself a thrilling thought when you think about it for long enough. Most of the people who will end up being significant in your life are still strangers to you. You haven’t met them yet. The conversations that will define the decades to come haven’t happened. The places that will become beloved, you have not been to. There is a lot still to come, and the home movie isn’t yet finished filming.

But the bits I can already see playing — those are extremely informative. In nearly every scene I’m outside. At the beach, in the water, up a mountain, eating outside, sitting in a garden somewhere. As my son recently put it, Mum, you’re just an outside girl and I’m an outside boy. Apparently he was right and apparently I needed a six-year-old to point it out.

What is also informative, possibly more so, is what is not in the home movie. There are no luxury hotels in mine, despite having had the good fortune to stay in some lovely ones. There are no designer handbags. There are no nice cars, no second homes, no big imposing houses with the right address. Not because any of those things are bad — please understand I am not making a moral point about consumption — but because when I look at the reel that plays, none of it is there. It does not feature. It does not stick. The hotels blur into one. The stuff don’t make the cut. Whereas a particularly memorable run around Lake Como and a cold morning swim with three of my closest friends in 2024, where we cackled until we couldn’t breathe, plays in HD.

If your home movie has the luxury hotels and the cars front and centre, I want to be clear that this is also fine and possibly even good — you are allowed to want what you want, in fact, I actively encourage it. Go for it. Get what you want.

The point of this process is not to consider what is in mine, the point is that asking the questions is more useful than almost any goal-setting exercise I have ever done, because it bypasses the part of your brain that knows what it should want and goes straight to the part that knows what actually moves you.

Sitting in the silence without trying to fix it

The fourth practice is the one I find hardest, and I think most people will too, which is just sitting. Not meditating exactly, not journalling, not making a list. Sitting somewhere quiet, alone, without an objective, without trying to extract anything useful from the time, and not filling the silence with planning or scrolling or admin or the small comforting buzz of constant low-grade input.

I am quite happy in my own company in the ordinary sense — I always have been — but this is a different thing from that. Being content alone with a book, or alone on a walk, or alone in a café with a coffee, or even walking, is one kind of solitude. Sitting with no input at all, no book, no walk, no coffee, no list, just a person and a chair — that is a different kind, and it is one that almost none of us are practiced in anymore. Most of us have not had ten consecutive minutes of unstructured time in a chair without a phone for years. We do not know what our minds do when we stop feeding them, because we have not stopped feeding them since some point around 2010.

I won’t sugarcoat it, this is very uncomfortable, especially at first. You reach for the phone reflexively, which is almost embarrassing in itself. You catch yourself making a list of what you will do when you stop sitting. After a while, if you can ride past the discomfort and not turn it into a project, things start to surface. Not always profound things. Sometimes very small things — that you’ve been ignoring how tired you are, or that you haven’t seen the sea in a while. The small things are what you are looking for.

Looking for themes, not building a list

The last practice, and the one that pulls the others together, is what I have come to think of as looking for themes rather than building a list.

When I started doing all of this — the walking, the offline-ing, the sitting, the home movie — I expected to come out of it with a tidy plan. Clear goals (I LOVE a goal). A neat list of trips, projects, skills, things to learn, things to do. What I got instead was much less tidy and much more useful: a handful of themes, repeating across everything I was noticing.

Time outside, in nearly every form. Time with the people I love, properly, not in passing. Cooking, music, picking up new skills and being a beginner at things. Putting myself in new places and unfamiliar situations, because new lore for the home movie does not generate itself, and the cackling-on-the-coastline reel only fills up if you keep going to coastlines you haven’t been to before with people you have not yet met.

These are not goals. They are themes. The specific things that fall under each theme will change over the years — the cooking might be a sourdough phase one year and a slow-cooked-everything phase the next, the new places might be a summer in South America one year and a week in the Outer Hebrides the next — but the underlying theme stays the same, and the theme is the bit that matters. Goals are brittle. Themes are robust. A goal can fail but a theme just keeps going.

The work, once you have your themes, is not to convert them into a five-year plan. It is to look at this week, and the next, and ask whether any of your themes are actually showing up in it. If the answer is no, you do something tiny that puts one of them in. That is genuinely the whole job.

A note on technology

I want to close on something that may sound contradictory given the rest of this piece, and given the rest of my work. I spend a large part of my professional life thinking about, building with, and writing about AI. Technology is the centre of how I make my living. And yet, when I look at the home movie playing in my head, almost none of it features. There are no laptops. There are no phones. There is no one staring at a screen. Technology is conspicuously absent.

I don’t think this is a contradiction. I think it is the point. The technology is the means, not the end. What it should be doing — what AI in particular should be doing — is buying me back the hours of my life that would otherwise be spent on the unimportant operational work, so that those hours can be given to the things that actually feature in the reel. Cooking, painting, walking, the people, the new places, the good stuff. The purpose of the tools is not to spend more time with the tools. The purpose is to spend less time on everything that isn’t in the home movie, so that there is more time for everything that is.

That, in the end, is what working out what you want is really for. Not as an exercise in self-knowledge for its own sake. Not as a personal-development project. As a way of getting clear enough about your own life that you stop spending it on things that, if you were honest, you wouldn’t put in the highlight reel.

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Why? Because most businesses fail, and that’s because most people start businesses backwards, and you can usually tell within the first six months which kind of backwards they’ve gone. They see something working for someone else, lift the model wholesale, change the colour palette, and wonder later why they’re exhausted, underpaid and trapped in something they don’t even like. Or they go the other way — researching everything endlessly, planning nothing properly, and never actually starting.

This guide is the corrective. It is a sequence of questions designed to be worked through in order, because the order matters more than any individual answer. By the end you will have the outline of a business plan, but more importantly you will have built something by design rather than by accident. The whole point is that the business serves you — your goals, your life, your actual constraints — rather than the other way around.

You’ll need a notebook, or a doc, or wherever you do your best thinking. Work through each step properly — don’t skip ahead! The questions in step one inform every decision after it, and skipping the foundational thinking is exactly how people end up running businesses they don’t want… so here it is — how to start a business.

The framework

There are ten steps. The first nine are where the real work is and the tenth is what most people start with, which is why most people get it wrong.

1. The intersection — what you like, what you’re good at, what will make you money

2. Your personal goal

3. How the money actually works

4. Product market fit — vitamin or painkiller

5. The real customer

6. How you reach them

7. How the operations work

8. How it scales

9. Where you fit in

10. Brand, sales, storytelling

Steps one through nine are about building something that works. Step ten is about communicating it. Get them in the wrong order and you end up with a beautifully branded business that doesn’t make money, or a business that makes money but is destroying you.

Let’s begin.

Step one: what you like, what you’re good at, and what will make you money

Three circles. The intersection is where your business lives.

What you like matters because you are going to do this every day, probably for years. The romance of building something dies quickly when the thing itself bores you. What you’re good at matters because skill creates leverage — you’ll move faster, charge more and burn out less doing something you have actual ability in. What will make you money matters because passion and skill without a market is a hobby.

Write each circle out properly. Under “what I like” don’t just list industries. List the actual texture of the work. Do you like talking to people, or working alone? Do you like solving problems, making things, organising things, teaching things, selling things? Under “what I’m good at” be honest, not modest and not inflated. Ask three people who know you well if you need a reality check. Under “what will make money” think about where money is already moving. What do people pay for now? What do they complain isn’t being done well? What’s happening in the market that creates new spending?

The intersection is your starting territory. If you can’t find one, the answer isn’t to compromise on the money circle. It’s to widen the other two until they meet it.

Step two: be clear on your personal goal

This is the step nearly everyone skips, and it’s the one that determines whether the business you build will actually serve you.

What do you want this business to do for your life? Not in vague terms. In specific ones. How much do you want to earn, by when? How many hours do you want to work, and which hours? Do you want employees, or do you want to stay solo? Do you want to sell this in five years or run it for thirty? Do you want to be the face of it, or invisible? Do you want it to fund a particular life — a house, school fees, freedom from a partner’s income, early retirement, a specific kind of lifestyle?

Be specific because every subsequent decision will be made against this goal. A business designed to do £150k a year in 15 hours a week looks completely different to a business designed to scale to £100m and exit. Both are valid but they are not the same business.

If you can’t answer this clearly, you’ll end up building whatever the people around you are building, or whatever the loudest voices on the internet are telling you to build. Neither of those is your goal.

Step three: understand how the money actually works

Before you go any further, you need to understand the financial mechanics of the business you’re considering.

What does someone pay for one unit of what you sell — one product, one service, one subscription? What does it cost you to deliver it — materials, labour, software, time? What is the gross margin? How many units do you need to sell to hit the income goal you wrote down in step two? Is that number realistic given your time and reach?

Then go further: what’s the cost of acquiring a customer? How long does it take from someone hearing about you to paying you? Do they buy once, or repeatedly? What’s the lifetime value?

You don’t need a finance degree for this. You need a spreadsheet and some honest arithmetic. The reason this step matters here, before product market fit, is that some business models simply cannot get you to your goal. A handmade product business with 40% margins and a 12-month lead time will not produce £250k a year for one person working 20 hours a week. The maths doesn’t work, no matter how brilliant the execution. Better to know that now than after two years of trying to force it.

Step four: find product market fit — vitamin or painkiller

Every product or service is one of two things. A painkiller solves an acute problem the customer is already actively trying to solve and will pay quickly to fix. A vitamin makes their life better in some general way and competes for discretionary spend. Painkillers sell themselves. Vitamins require sustained marketing and brand building to convert.

Both can be excellent businesses, but you need to know which one you’re building, because they require completely different operations, marketing, pricing and patience.

Ask yourself: what is the problem I solve? Not what I make or sell — what problem disappears for the customer when they buy from me? Be specific. “I help women feel better” is not a problem. “I help perimenopausal women in their 40s stop waking up at 3am” is a problem. The first is a marketing tagline. The second tells you who to talk to, what to say, and what they’ll pay.

If you cannot articulate the problem in one sentence, in language the customer themselves would use, you don’t have product market fit yet. You have an idea and there’s a difference.

Step five: who is the customer

This is the step where most people go wrong, because they confuse demographic data with the actual customer.

The customer is not “women aged 35 to 55 in the UK with disposable income.” That is a market segment. The customer is the specific person with the problem you solve. Two women of the same age, income and postcode might have completely different problems and completely different willingness to pay you to solve them.

Define your customer by the problem they have, not by who they are on paper. Then you can layer in the demographic detail to find them, but the problem comes first. What does their day look like? What have they already tried? What are they Googling at 11pm? Who do they trust? What do they read? What would they say to a friend about this problem?

If you can describe one specific real person — even a composite of three real people you know — who has this problem urgently enough to pay you to solve it, you have a customer. If you can only describe a category of people who might theoretically be interested, you don’t.

Step six: how will you reach them — marketing

Now that you know who the customer is, you can work out where they are and how you reach them. Notice this is step six, not step one. Most people pick a channel first — TikTok, Substack, Instagram — and then try to find customers there. That’s backwards. The customer determines the channel.

Where does this person already spend time online and offline? Whose recommendations do they act on? What kind of content do they engage with — long-form, short-form, written, video, audio? Are they searching for solutions actively, or do they need to be educated that the solution exists?

Then choose one or two channels to start. Not five. The reason most marketing fails is that people split their effort across too many places and build presence in none of them. Pick the one or two where your customer actually is, and commit to those for at least six months before evaluating.

This is also where you separate the marketing channel from the sales mechanism. How someone hears about you and how they buy from you are not the same thing. You can be discovered on TikTok and bought on Instagram. You can be found through SEO and bought through email. Map both.

Step seven: how will the operations work

Operations is the unglamorous part of a business that determines whether it actually functions. This is where you think through how the thing gets made and delivered.

If you’re selling a product, what’s the supply chain? Where does it come from, how long does it take, what’s the minimum order quantity, where does it get stored, how does it get to the customer, and what happens when something goes wrong? If you’re selling a service, what’s the delivery process? What does the client experience look like from enquiry to delivery to follow-up? What systems do you need — booking, invoicing, contracts, communication, file delivery? If you’re selling content or digital products, what’s the creation cadence, the hosting, the payment system, the customer service?

Map the whole flow before you launch. Identify every step where you are personally required, and ask whether that’s necessary or just a default. Operations is where solo founders accidentally build themselves into a job rather than a business — by being the only person who can do every step, they cap the whole thing at their own capacity. You don’t need to solve all of this on day one, but you need to see it clearly so you can design around it.

Step eight: how does it scale

Scale is not the same thing as growth. Growth is doing more of what you already do. Scale is doing more without a proportional increase in your time or cost.

Some business models scale beautifully — software, content, products. Some scale with difficulty — high-touch services, anything bespoke, anything where you personally are the product. Some don’t scale at all, and that’s fine if you’re clear about it from the start.

Look at what you’ve designed in steps one through seven and ask honestly: what happens when I want to double this? Do I work twice as hard, or does the system absorb it? What’s the constraint that would stop it scaling — my time, the supply chain, the channel, the margin? If you want a business that scales, you need to design that in from the beginning, not retrofit it once you’re already overwhelmed.

If you don’t want it to scale — if you want a beautifully crafted business that does exactly what you want at the size you want — that’s a legitimate choice. Just know you’re making it.

Step nine: where do you fit in

You’ve designed the business. Now ask where you actually sit inside it.

Are you the founder who runs everything? Are you the face of the brand? Are you the operator behind the scenes? Are you the strategist who sets direction and lets others execute? Are you the practitioner who does the core work? There’s no right answer, but there is a right answer for you, and it has to match what you wrote in step two.

Most founders default to being everywhere in the business because they don’t know they have a choice. They become the bottleneck without realising it. Decide now what role you want to play, and design the business so that role is sustainable for years.

This also means being honest about what you don’t want to do, and planning how those things get done by someone or something else — software, contractors, eventually employees, AI. The parts of the business you don’t want to do don’t disappear because you ignore them. They just get done badly until you address them.

Step ten: now you can think about brand, sales, storytelling

Notice this is step ten. Most people start here, and that’s why most businesses look the same and feel hollow. Brand without substance is just decoration.

Now that you know what the business is, who it serves, how it makes money and where you fit, you can build the layer that communicates all of that. The name, the visual identity, the voice, the website, the sales pages, the story you tell about why this exists.

This step is where you make the business legible to the customer. It’s also the step that’s the most fun, which is why people are drawn to it first. Resist that. The brand built on top of clear thinking is incomparably stronger than the brand built on a hunch.

What you should have at the end

Worked through properly, these ten steps give you the outline of a real business plan. Not a 40-page document for a bank — a working document for you. It should answer: what I’m building, who it’s for, how it makes money, how it reaches customers, how it operates, how it scales, what role I play in it, and how it presents itself to the world.

Keep this document and revisit it every quarter. The questions don’t stop being relevant once you’ve started. They become the lens through which you make every subsequent decision — whether to take on a new client, launch a new product, hire someone, change direction. If a decision moves you closer to the business you designed in these ten steps, do it. If it moves you away from it, don’t.

The point of building by design is that you stop reacting and start choosing. That’s what makes a business actually serve you, rather than the other way round.

What to read next:

That has been the subject of my three-part Claude Co-Work series, and this is the final piece of it. What we’ve done so far is foundational and don’t get me wrong, it’s useful. If you followed parts one and two, Co-Work should now be saving you a bit of time in admin and it feels satisfying the first few times you watch it happen. But it is not a system. It is a shortcut. And shortcuts, however good, are still things you have to remember to use.

The shift from Co-Work being a tool you reach for to Co-Work being something that runs parts of your business in the background is not about having more skills or more connectors or more plugins. It is about getting those individual pieces to work together as a chain. A scheduled task that pulls information from a connector, runs it through a skill you have built, produces an output in the format you actually use, and drops it into the place you are going to look for it. Each piece doing the thing it is good at, in sequence, without you sitting there stitching them together.

This is the difference between having the parts and having the machine. Most people, once they have set up a few skills and connected a few tools, assume they are done. They are not. They are where the real work starts, because everything you have set up to this point is potential. Chaining it together is what turns potential into leverage. And ICYMI, leverage is what we are after.

This is what it feels like in practice: You wake up on a Monday morning. You make a coffee. You sit down at your desk. And the thing you would normally spend the first hour of your week putting together is already sitting there waiting for you. Not because you remembered to ask for it on Friday. Not because you stayed up on Sunday night to get it done and prepping for the week ahead. Because the system remembered for you, ran the task while you were living your life, and had the work finished and ready before you even began your day.

That is a workflow. And that is what we are going to set up next.

If this is your first time landing on one of my articles, welcome to my Substack! I’m Helena, I’m a serial entrepreneur, tech founder, AI Queen and content creator. I write three times a week about business, AI and building leverage so you can actually live a truly rich life in every sense of the word. This is how you get really rich - I’d love it if you decide to stay for a while!

This deep dive is one of the many perks of being a paid subscriber to Really Rich, if you aren’t yet subscribed you can join hundreds of other readers upgrade below for less than a large coffee and a tiny cake.

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Here’s what I see playing out in almost every category and on every platform — waiting. People waiting everywhere, sitting on ideas, a business, a conversation you need to have, something you want to go after, a new project. And whilst they are waiting for perfect conditions, a bit more experience or a magical sign from the universe that they are on the right path, someone with far less talent and experience than them fills the gap.

The people with more audacity launch the business you thought of years ago, they get the client you have been meaning to pitch, they make the video you wanted to make, they learn the skill you wanted to learn or they charge the price you talked yourself out of.

It doesn’t seem fair, so you hold on to it. Confident that fair will play out eventually. That talent will out, that the right people will notice, that deserving something is the same as getting it. It isn’t. You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you have the audacity to ask for.

And audacity is a muscle. Which means it can be trained. But first you have to understand why most of us aren’t starting from the same place.

Where audacity comes from — and why most of us weren’t taught it

I grew up in inner-city Glasgow, the product of a state school where fires in the corridors and violence were a day-to-day occurrence that nobody batted an eye at. The day after my 18th birthday I started at the University of St Andrews and entered a very different world. The majority of my peers there came from wealthy backgrounds, privately educated, from families where a certain kind of confidence was simply the water they swam in.

The difference between us wasn’t intelligence. Nor was it talent. The difference was audacity — and specifically, the complete absence of self-consciousness with which they deployed it. They spoke up in seminars without rehearsing what they were going to say first. They emailed professors directly, asked for things, assumed their requests would be taken seriously. They walked into rooms as though they were expected. Not because they were arrogant (most of them weren’t) but because nobody had ever suggested to them that they shouldn’t.

Nobody had ever suggested it to me either, explicitly. But I had absorbed it anyway. From a culture where standing out invited trouble, where keeping your head down was survival, where the gap between where you were and where you wanted to be was so large that wanting too loudly felt like setting yourself up. So you learned to want quietly, to move carefully, to earn the right to take up space before you actually took it.

What my peers at St Andrews had been taught — implicitly, consistently, from birth — was that the space was already theirs. That is the real advantage of a certain kind of upbringing. Not just the contacts, the schools and the accent. The audacity. The unquestioned assumption that asking is allowed.

And whilst none of us can change the hand we are dealt and the privileges each of us have that are pure luck, one advantage we can learn is how to be more audacious. It’s teachable and a practice.

The audacity ladder

Audacity responds to progressive overload the same as any other muscle. You don’t start with the outright delusional and scariest thing you can think of — although, if you are anything like me, you definitely do. Let's start with baby steps. I won't assume you are as unhinged as I am.

You start one rung above where you currently are and you build from there.

The bottom rungs are the things that feel uncomfortable but survivable. Sending the pitch you’ve been sitting on for three weeks. Naming your price out loud without immediately softening it or following it with an apology. Posting the opinion you’ve been hedging into something so qualified it no longer means anything. These feel like small things. They are not small — they are the foundation, and most people never do them consistently enough to build on. They do them once, it doesn’t immediately pay off, and they conclude the exercise wasn’t worth it. The point is not the single act. The point is the repetition.

The middle rungs are where it starts to feel like you are getting somewhere. Reaching out to someone whose work you admire and doing it as a peer, not a supplicant. Positioning yourself as the authority in a room where you are not the most credentialed person, because credentials and authority are not the same thing and you know that. Saying no to work that doesn’t fit, not because you can easily afford to, but because you are holding space for work that does. Each of these requires you to act from the identity you are building rather than the one you have already proven. This is the gap to mind. Most people stall here because it is uncomfortable — you need to start doing things before you can fully evidence it. That is not fraud. That is how identity transitions work.

The top rungs are the big bold moves. I live at this part of the ladder. These are things that currently make you feel a little bit sick. By the time you have built the muscle through the lower rungs, it stops feeling impossible and this stage starts to feel like the next logical step — because it is.

At every rung, the question is the same: what would I do if I were operating at the scale of my actual ambition? Then do that. Not eventually — do it right now.

How to put this into practice

It wouldn’t be a how-to guide without a payoff so here is how you put this into action right now. Write down the three things you would do in your business or your life if you were certain they would work. Not hoping — certain. The things you have been waiting to feel ready for, or waiting for permission for, or waiting until the business is bigger and more established and more deserving of that level of action.

Those three things are your ladder. Start with the one that scares you least and do it this week. The other two will feel different once you have.

Life does not wait for you to feel ready. It does not reward the most talented or the most deserving. It rewards the person who had the audacity to go first — and kept going.

Bonus points if you let me know in the comments what the big, audacious, slightly delusional thing you’ve been sitting on is. The idea, the pitch, the launch, the ask… I’m with you all the way.

What to read next:

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If this is your first time landing on one of my articles, welcome to my Substack! I’m Helena, I’m a serial entrepreneur, tech founder, AI Queen and content creator. I write three times a week about business, AI and building leverage so you can actually live a truly rich life in every sense of the word. This is how you get really rich - I’d love it if you decide to stay for a while!

This deep dive is one of the many perks of being a paid subscriber to Really Rich, if you aren’t yet subscribed you can join hundreds of other readers upgrade below for less than a large coffee and a tiny cake.

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So as someone who has been using OpenAI since launch day, and working in early-stage venture capital who has been watching the coming wave of generative AI capability, I thought I would share a no-fluff, starting point for people who are looking to use AI in a way that is useful and impactful (aka not glorified Google).

Before we get into it, this is not a technical manual and most certainly not a hype piece. Instead it’s a practical guide to what AI actually is, how it works, what the main tools are, how to use them properly, and where the real opportunity is for someone running a business. By the end of it you’ll have enough to stop dabbling and start building something that compounds.

To be clear, here are some things I’m not going to tell you you should be doing:

• using AI to do anything you actually want to be doing

• using AI to do anything only you can do

• using AI to replace your creative practice, whatever that is

• using AI as a therapist, lawyer, accountant, doctor or any other professional

Instead we are going to go right back to the beginning and the fundamentals of AI, what it is, and how you can and should, in my humble opinion, be using it.

Artificial intelligence has been part of your life for longer than you may realise. ChatGPT may have given AI mainstream attention, but it has actually been embedded in your everyday life for a long time. Every time Spotify serves up a song you didn’t know you needed, every time Google finishes your search sentence, every time Netflix knows what you want to watch before you do — that’s AI. It has been running quietly in the background of the internet for decades, powering the systems that make your digital life feel frictionless without you ever having to think about it.

The moment everything changed wasn’t when AI was invented. It was November 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public and put a conversational AI interface in front of anyone with an internet connection. Before that, AI was infrastructure — something that happened to you, invisible and automatic. After that, it was a tool you could actually use. Within five days of launching, ChatGPT had a million users. Within two months, it had a hundred million. Nothing in the history of consumer technology had ever grown that fast — not TikTok, not Instagram, not Spotify.

That release didn’t just introduce a new product. It started a race. Within months, every major technology company in the world had announced or launched a competing model. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon — and a wave of smaller companies building on top of the underlying technology. The pace hasn’t slowed since. If anything it has accelerated.

Which is where the overwhelm comes in.

Why this feels so hard to keep up with

There are three distinct reasons AI feels overwhelming, and it is worth naming them separately because they require different responses.

The first is the pace. New tools launch daily. Capabilities that didn’t exist six months ago are now completely outstripping previous tools. Something you learned last quarter may already be outdated. This isn’t your imagination — the field genuinely moves faster than any previous technology wave, and the people telling you to just keep up are usually the ones being paid to follow it full time (like me!). For someone running a business and a life, the speed alone is a reasonable source of stress. My knowledge of this field is not the starting point you should be aspiring to when you just want AI to do the heavy lifting for you. Do not under any circumstances compare where you are with AI usage with me. I have an unfair advantage of time and experience. Does that mean you shouldn’t up-skill and learn? Absolutely not. The good news is, you are already reading this article and everything in AI is learnable and teachable.

The second reason AI feels overwhelming is that most of the information about AI is still written by technical people for technical people. The mainstream coverage tends toward either breathless hype or existential panic, neither of which is useful if you just want to know whether it can help you write a proposal faster or do the work you don’t want to do. The gap between what AI can actually do for a business owner and what most people understand about it is significant.

The third is harder to articulate but worth giving a shot. The speed of AI growth raises real questions — about jobs, about creativity and ownership, about what happens to human connection when so much can be automated, about the environmental cost of running these systems at scale. These aren’t fringe concerns. Feeling unsettled by them isn’t technophobia. It’s a reasonable response to a genuine shift, and no one should pretend otherwise.

What AI actually is

Ok, let’s get into what AI is. At its most basic, generative AI tools (like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini) are built on large language models. Think of these as prediction systems trained on an enormous amount of text. Books, websites, code, conversations, academic papers. Through that training it learns patterns: how language works, how ideas connect, how questions tend to be answered. When you type something into it, it predicts the most useful response based on everything it has learned. It is quite literally deciding what are the statistically most-likely next set of letters this person wants to see based on the set of letters contained in their prompt.

A quick pause here for you to reflect on the inherent bias in this training data. Socio-economic, racial, geographical, political and gender-based bias that exists everywhere. And the more AI is trained and used by people from one (or even several) sub-sections of society, but not others, the more bias exists in the world as AI continues to perpetuate a confident narrative to users. Another reason it is so important that people from all walks of life use it and train it.

AI is not thinking (even if it says “thinking” while it generates a response). It does not know things the way you know things. It is pattern-matching at extraordinary scale and speed, which produces outputs that can feel uncannily intelligent but are fundamentally different from human reasoning.

This matters because it explains both the capability and the limitation. The capability: it can process, synthesise, draft, summarise, translate, explain and generate at a speed no human can match. Increasingly, it can also perform basic actions based on training.

The limitation: it can also be confidently wrong, it has no lived experience, it cannot verify facts in real time unless it is specifically built or trained to do so, and it has a knowledge cutoff — a point beyond which it hasn’t been trained on new information.

Understanding this doesn’t make it less useful. It makes you a better user of it.

The landscape

The main tools worth knowing about:

ChatGPT — built by OpenAI, the one that started the public wave. The most widely known and widely used. Strong general capability, large user base, extensive integrations. Has a free tier and paid plans.

Claude — built by Anthropic. Known for longer context windows, nuanced writing, and a stronger ethics focus. Particularly good for document work, detailed reasoning and extended conversations. Also has free and paid tiers.

Gemini — Google’s model. Deep integration with Google Workspace — Drive, Docs, Gmail. If your business already runs on Google, this has obvious appeal.

Perplexity — built specifically for research. Pulls from live internet sources and cites them, which makes it more reliable for current information than models working from training data alone.

Of course, this is far from an exhaustive list, but honestly, when you are starting out these are the only ones you need to know. The differences between the top models doesn’t really matter, especially at beginner level. Picking one and learning it properly will take you much further than switching between all of them trying to find the best one.

How to actually use it

Most people who feel like they’re not getting much from AI are using it like a search engine. They type a short question, get a generic answer, and conclude it isn’t that useful. This is the equivalent of hiring a highly capable person and only ever asking them yes or no questions.

The shift that turns AI from glorified search engine to genuinely useful tool is understanding context. The more you give an AI model, the better its output. Your role, your business, your audience, your constraints, what you’ve already tried, what good looks like — all of it is relevant. A prompt that takes thirty seconds to write will almost always produce a worse result than one that takes three minutes.

A few things worth understanding before you go further.

Tokens are the unit of measurement AI models use — roughly three quarters of a word each. I think of tokens like syllables. The more syllables, or the longer the words, or the paragraphs of text, the more tokens you use. This matters for a few reasons. The first is that models have context windows, meaning limits on how much they can process in a single conversation. Most modern models have large enough windows that this won’t be a daily constraint, but it explains why very long conversations can start to degrade in quality toward the end. The second reason tokens matter is that if you are paying for an AI tool and you are charged on usage, that fee will likely relate to “tokens processed”. Aka, the more you use it, the more it costs. This is relevant on both sides. If you are a consumer you want to be mindful of limits and if you are a business owner charging for an AI functionality such as a chatbot, you need to be aware of its costs. Finally, each token requires processing by the model. Which means energy usage. Essentially the takeaway and lesson for you is: invest the time in training your AI so you get the best output on the least amount of tokens. It’s more cost efficient and environmentally efficient in the long-run.

That said, iteration matters more than the first output and you should always treat whatever comes back as a draft. Push back, redirect, ask it to try again with different constraints. The conversation is the work, not the prompt.

Be specific about format. If you want bullet points, say so. If you want a particular tone, describe it. If you want it shorter, say how short. Vague instructions produce vague outputs.

One last thing, stop using it as a therapist. AI will tell you what you want to hear. It has no stake in your decisions, no knowledge of your actual situation, and no ability to push back in the way a person who genuinely knows you would. Using it to validate ideas or process decisions without challenge is one of the more seductive and least useful things you can do with it.

Where the real opportunity is

Ok let’s get into the opportunities. As I said, most people using AI are either typing questions into it like a slightly more conversational Google, or using it to generate content they then post as their own. Both of these are the shallow end. They’ll save you twenty minutes. They won’t change anything.

The people building real leverage with AI are doing three things that most people haven’t started yet. And this is what you are going to do next.

The first is training it on their actual thinking. Not asking it generic questions and getting generic answers back, or even using “viral prompts”, but feeding it their real frameworks, their standards, their “this is what I would do in this situation” reasoning. The output of this is something closer to a decision-making database — a resource that reflects how you actually think rather than how the internet on average thinks. When a client situation comes up, when you need to write something, when you’re making a call about pricing or positioning or a difficult conversation, you’re not getting a statistically average answer. You’re getting your own thinking reflected back, stress-tested and structured. That’s a completely different tool.

The second is stopping the single chat habit. Every time you open a fresh conversation with an AI tool, you’re starting from zero. You’re re-explaining yourself, re-establishing context, getting a version of the tool that knows nothing about you or your business. The people getting the most from AI are building things that compound — Projects in Claude, custom GPTs, trained assistants that hold your context, your tone, your preferences, your history. The gap between someone who has been building one of these for six months and someone who opens a new chat every time is not small. Start building something permanent as soon as possible, even if it’s basic. It gets better the more you use it.

The third is treating repeated admin as something AI should be doing, not you. Anything that happens more than once — a type of email you send regularly, a brief you write for every new client, a set of questions you answer every time someone enquires, a report you pull together weekly — should be something AI handles with you as the final check, not the person doing the work from scratch. The test is simple: if you’ve done it more than once and it follows a pattern, it doesn’t need you to do it again. It needs you to build the system once and then oversee the output.

None of this requires technical knowledge. It requires a decision to use AI as infrastructure rather than a novelty — and then actually building the thing rather than thinking about building it.

What it can’t do

The most important thing to understand about AI before you build anything around it is that it will confidently tell you things that are not true. Not occasionally — regularly. It doesn’t flag uncertainty the way a person would. It produces the most statistically likely answer based on its training and delivers it in the same tone it uses when it’s completely correct. This is called hallucination and it is not a bug that will eventually be fixed. It is a feature of how these systems work.

This means anything that matters needs to be verified. Specific statistics, legal or financial information, dates, names, citations — treat all of it as a first draft until you’ve checked it. The more obscure the fact, the higher the risk.

The second limitation is that it doesn’t know you unless you train it or pay for it to know you. Every new conversation starts from nothing unless you have built something with memory. The version of Claude or ChatGPT you spoke to last Tuesday has no recollection of what you discussed. It doesn’t know your business, your clients, your preferences or your standards unless you tell it every single time — or unless you’ve built a system that does that telling for you. Which is exactly why the next section matters.

It also cannot replace your judgement on the things that actually require it. It has no skin in the game. It doesn’t know what your best client relationship took three years to build, or why you made a particular decision, or what your instincts are telling you that you haven’t put into words yet. It can help you think. It cannot think for you.

On the broader concerns — the questions about intellectual property, the environmental cost of running these systems, the displacement of creative and administrative work that real people depended on — these are not resolved and they are not trivial. Using AI as a serious business tool means holding these questions rather than dismissing them. The answer isn’t to not use it. The answer is to use it with your eyes open and it’s one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about people up-skilling in this area.

What you don’t need to worry about

AI wrapper tools — these are products built on top of the underlying models from the likes of Claude or ChatGPT. They take the base technology and package it into a specific interface, often for a specific use case. A writing tool that promises to match your brand voice, a customer service bot, a social media scheduler with AI built in — these are all wrappers. They’re not doing anything the underlying model can’t do, they’re just presenting it differently in a highly trained way, usually with a monthly subscription attached.

Some of them are genuinely excellent. But when you are just starting out, they add a layer of cost and complexity before you’ve understood what the tool underneath is actually capable of. Learn the base model first. Once you know what Claude or ChatGPT can do natively, you’ll be in a much better position to judge whether a wrapper is solving a real problem or just repackaging something you could already do yourself.

A few other things that can wait:

API access and integrations. Connecting AI directly into your systems via code is powerful but it’s not where you start. The consumer interfaces — the chat windows — will take you further than most people realise before you need to go anywhere near a developer.

Every new tool that launches. The volume of new AI products is relentless and following it is a full-time job. Ignore the noise and instead pick one model, build with it, and only look up when you have a specific problem it isn’t solving or you are convinced a wrapper tool can do better because it is trained better.

Prompt libraries and frameworks. There are entire courses and templates built around prompting. They’re not useless but they’re also not the foundation. The foundation is understanding how these models work and the rest follows naturally.

If you are looking for more detailed guides on specific tools or platforms I write three times a week here on Substack and you can start with my two most recent guides on Claude and Claude Co-Work.

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If you have any questions about AI, how it works and how you can use it specifically, please drop them in the comments — I’d love to hear from you!

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This is the first guide in a series on Claude Co-Work, how to use it and step-by-step instructions for setting it up exclusively for paid subscribers of Really Rich. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber you can upgrade below for less than a large coffee and a tiny cake.

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And so they get stuck. Not because they don’t understand what’s required, but because they never wanted to do it in the first place and everything they read about it assumes they do. Every guide to building a personal brand and creating content is written for someone who is excited about building a personal brand and creating content. Every piece of advice about content strategy assumes the reader is at least somewhat interested in content strategy. Sounding familiar?

If you are a business owner who finds the whole thing faintly exhausting before you have even started, there is almost nothing written for you. So here it is — the bare minimum guide to showing up online to promote your business. Not to become a content creator. Not for creative expression. But as part of a wider customer acquisition strategy.

Before we get into it, I want to begin by reminding you of something important — you fundamentally do not need to show up online to make a lot of money in business. I know that sounds counter intuitive given the title of this piece and we’ll get back to showing up in a sec but it’s worth underlining this at the start because the internet will have you believe otherwise.

Let me give you an example… in May 2025, hand sanitiser brand Touchland sold for $700 million. The founder is not a household name. She does not have a personal brand or a thought leadership platform or a following built on sharing her expertise online. She built a genuinely better product, got it into Sephora and Ulta, grew revenue to $130 million a year, and sold it for the better part of a billion dollars.

Millions of businesses turn over millions every year with founders nobody has heard of. Showing up online is a strategy — often a very good one, particularly when you are growing organically or without a marketing budget — but it is not the price of entry to building something valuable, and treating it like it is will make you hold on so tightly that it stops being useful.

That grip is what gets people stuck. The belief that they have to get this right, have to have the strategy sorted and the branding cohesive and the content calendar planned out before they can begin. And so they read another guide, watch another person talk about content pillars, feel increasingly behind, and do nothing.

What most people call personal branding is really about presentation — the aesthetic, the tone of voice, how consistent everything looks when someone lands on your profile. What actually converts, what actually builds the kind of trust that shortens a sales cycle or makes a referral land with real weight, is something different. It is showing up with a genuine perspective on your industry, your customers, the problem you solve, and saying it clearly and often enough that the right people start to associate it with you. Don’t get me wrong, the aesthetic matters and builds confidence and trust and it will come, but it is not what does the commercial work at the beginning and it is not where you start.

This is where you start. What follows in this guide is my take on how you find that perspective and starting to put it out there — promoting what you do, telling your story, getting your name in front of the people who need to find you. Not a formula and not a content system. The one thing that actually matters, and the minimum viable way to begin…

Step one: get specific about who you are talking to

Not an industry and not a demographic but a specific human being with a specific problem that you understand better than most, because you have seen it up close repeatedly and you know what it costs people to leave it unsolved.

The more precisely you can see that person, the less content you need to produce, because everything you say lands with more force when it is aimed at someone real rather than a vague category of people who might theoretically be interested. Vague targeting requires volume to compensate for the lack of precision. Precise targeting does not, and at the start when you are building the habit of showing up before you have an audience, that is probably more important than you realise.

Write one sentence that describes who needs what you do and why now. Not a niche statement and not a brand positioning exercise — just the clearest possible description of the person and the problem. If you cannot write it without immediately wanting to qualify it and cover all the possible variations, that is the thing to sit with before anything else, because everything that follows depends on it.

Step two: find your perspective

This is the heart of it, and the thing this entire guide is really about. Everything else — the platform, the production setup, the profile, the content structure — is in service of this one thing. Without it you are just making noise at regular intervals and hoping something lands. With it, everything you put out has somewhere to go.

A perspective is not a niche and it is not a USP and it is not a list of content topics you have decided to cover. It is what you actually believe — the things you have come to think through your own experience that the people you want to reach either have not heard said plainly or have not been able to articulate themselves. It is the thing you know that is genuinely worth knowing, said in a way that only you would say it, to a person who specifically needs to hear it.

Most people get stuck here because they approach it as a branding exercise, sitting down to craft a point of view as if it is a deliverable with a deadline. It is not. It already exists somewhere in what you have built, what you have seen, and what has frustrated you enough that you find yourself saying the same thing over and over to anyone who will listen. The exercise is not invention. It is excavation.

Start with the conventional wisdom in your industry — the things most people in your space say, the advice that gets recycled endlessly, the way the work is generally framed and sold and talked about. Now think about where you quietly disagree with it, or where you think it is incomplete, or where you have seen it fail the people it was supposed to help. That gap between what is commonly said and what you actually know to be true is almost always where a perspective lives.

Then think about the thing you find yourself explaining repeatedly — on sales calls, to clients, to people who ask what you do. The pattern you keep seeing, the mistake that keeps showing up, the thing that feels so obvious to you now but is clearly not obvious yet to the people who need to hear it. That repetition is not a coincidence. It is your perspective trying to make itself known.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’ll share my own point of view in business as a worked example, because abstract advice about finding a perspective is not particularly useful on its own. This is not one polished statement but a set of connected beliefs that all point in the same direction.

1. That being rich is not a number — it is having a business with enough leverage and enough income that you can actually live the life you are building it for, rather than becoming so consumed by the building that the life disappears in the process.

2. That AI is one of the most significant tools available right now for creating that leverage, and that millions of people are not using it not because they are incapable but because nobody has explained it in a way that makes it feel accessible rather than technical.

3. That you do not need to work yourself into the ground to make very good money — that building something in part time hours with real intelligence behind the structure is not only possible but is what this entire publication exists to demonstrate. Not for everyone, and not if the goal is a global empire with hundreds of employees. But for financial independence, genuine wealth, and a life that is actually happening while you build it, absolutely.

None of those beliefs came from a branding exercise. They came from my own lived experience — from building businesses a particular way, from starting and failing, from making money without sacrificing everything else, from seeing what was missing in the conversation and deciding to say it plainly. Your perspective will come from the same place. It will be the accumulation of what you have actually done and seen and learned, pointed at the person who most needs to hear it.

Once you have it, content and showing up online becomes considerably less mysterious. You have a client result that proves the point. A question you keep being asked that lets you explain it in a different way. Something you observed this week that illustrates it. An uncomfortable truth that follows directly from it. A content calendar stops being a source of paralysis and starts being a loose structure around things you already know you want to say — which is what it is actually useful for. The calendar does not generate the content. The perspective does. The calendar just helps you be consistent about getting it out.

Step three: pick one platform and actually show up on it

The standard advice is to go where your audience is, and that is true as far as it goes, but the platform also needs to be somewhere you will physically show up without constructing reasons not to every time you sit down to make something. Those are not always the same place, and pretending the second consideration does not exist is why a lot of people end up on the platform that made strategic sense and never post on it.

When I started creating content I chose TikTok, and the honest reason had nothing to do with audience demographics. It was easy to create there, and my friends and family were not on it, which meant I could find my feet without the specific awkwardness of people I knew watching every uncertain early attempt. That is a more legitimate factor in the decision than most guides will acknowledge. A lot of people stall not because they do not know what to say but because they cannot separate the performance anxiety of being seen by people who know them from the actual work of showing up. Removing that variable at the start is a reasonable and genuinely underrated choice.

That said, where your buyers actually spend time does matter, and at some point the two things need to align. But to begin, pick the platform that sits at the intersection of where your people are and where you will consistently create, then stay there long enough to get good at it before you consider expanding. A clear perspective on the slightly wrong platform will always outperform a vague presence on the right one.

Step four: the actual setup

I have been creating content online and making money from it for nearly four years. I still film on the front camera of my iPhone.

I film either straight into TikTok and edit in the app, or I record on my camera roll and edit in CapCut. I have an incredibly cheap clip-on mic — linked here — which makes a real difference to audio quality without adding any complexity to the process, and a clip light — linked here — for when there is not enough natural light coming in. I use a tripod — linked here — so I am not holding the phone. That is the entire kit and it has not changed because it does not need to. Sometimes I say I’m going to step it up and occasionally I’m tempted by a fancier set-up, but the reality is it ain’t broke so I’m not going to fix it.

The editing is not complicated either. Captions on every video, because most people watch without sound and if they cannot follow what you are saying they will scroll before you have made your point. Then cutting out the breaths and the dead pauses, which tightens everything without requiring you to become an editor. That is it. No colour grading, no motion graphics, no complicated transitions. The perspective is doing the work, not the production.

If talking to camera feels impossible at the start, begin by recording with no intention of posting at all — just to get used to seeing yourself on screen and hearing your voice played back. Do it until the discomfort becomes ordinary, which it will, faster than you expect. You can also make things and post them privately, or send a video to one person you trust (honestly, send them to me if you want to!), before you publish anything publicly. You do not need an audience to start building the muscle. You just need the reps, and the reps are the only thing that actually works.

Of course, none of this requires you to ever appear on camera at all. People have built enormous, commercially valuable audiences on Substack without filming a single thing — just writing, consistently, with a clear perspective and a specific reader in mind. Instagram accounts built entirely on carousels, Substack publications with tens of thousands of paid subscribers, podcasts where the host never shows their face. The format is not the point. The perspective is the point, and it can travel in whatever form you will actually sustain. If writing is where you are most comfortable and most consistent, write. The production setup above is for people who want to create video content — it is not a prerequisite for any of this.

What can wait

Professional photography. A website redesign. A brand colour palette. A lead magnet. Multiple platforms. A logo refresh. Anything that feels like it needs to be sorted before you can properly begin is almost certainly not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the absence of a clear perspective and a specific person to direct it at, and even the perspective does not need to be perfectly packaged before you start — it sharpens through the doing, not before it. Show up with what you have and get better over time.

Remember — that is what most people who have built a business and who show up online actually did, even if the version they tell afterwards makes it sound more considered than it was.

What you are building towards

A profile with one sentence that says what you do and who for — not a tagline but a description that works as a filter, so that anyone landing on it knows immediately whether they are the person being spoken to. Then a body of work that accumulates slowly and then compounds, the way these things always do when the foundation underneath them is solid.

Show up with the perspective as consistently as you can manage without it becoming something you dread. Two to four times a week is a reasonable rhythm for most people. Once a week is fine if it is genuinely substantive. The frequency matters considerably less than the consistency over time, and the results take longer to arrive than anyone wants them to — which is the main reason people stop, usually just before the accumulation starts to turn into something.

I know you all love a target so aim for 100 (yes if you are starting from zero then your first 100 repetitions of something will be practice) pieces of content before you give up or change direction.

Finally, view everything through the lens of trust, authority and your specific view. If something does not serve one of those three things it is probably not worth your time.

How you know it’s working

Not follower count, which measures reach and matters eventually but tells you very little about whether any of this is doing its actual job in the early stages when the numbers are small and the feedback is sparse.

The signals worth paying attention to are these: inbound enquiries that reference something specific you said. Sales calls where the buyer has already done most of the convincing themselves before they have spoken to you, because they have been reading or watching for weeks and already know they want to work with you. Referrals that arrive with context — not just a name passed along but someone saying you need to speak to this specific person, they said something I have not stopped thinking about.

The person with 200 followers and a clear perspective will have a more commercially valuable presence than the person with 15,000 who has been posting consistently but saying nothing in particular. Same hours, same effort, same platform, very different result. That gap is explained entirely by whether there is a genuine point of view underneath the content or not — which is why finding yours is not one step among several in this guide. It is the whole point of it.

This is the only time I’m going to send a preview of Sunday Supplement for all subscribers so consider this fair warning, if you want this in your inbox each week, you’ll need to upgrade to paid for less than a coffee and a tiny cake each (well worth it if you ask me).

I don’t know about you but I have been craving print media recently and after being inspired by Gabby Whiten, I decided to create a weekly newspaper-style Sunday supplement. The content is exclusive for paid subscribers of Really Rich and covers content across all four R.I.C.H life pillars. From recommendations and tools, to guides, news and what is on my mind in business each week — the Sunday Supplement is my essential reading for the week ahead. And just for fun, I’ll be adding some traditional print nostalgia for good measure…

I won’t lie — this has taken me HOURS to think of and create (no AI here!) so I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved making it.

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Here’s what I have to say, and as always, I will be direct… (because at this point, you know me, I don’t know how to do anything else!)

The worst thing you can do in an economic downturn is freeze. The second worst thing is panic. The third worst thing — and this is the one that gets the most otherwise intelligent people — is to assume that a downturn means people stop spending money.

They don’t. They never have. Not in 2008. Not in 2020. Not in any recession in modern history. Consumer spending doesn’t disappear during economic turbulence. It migrates. It moves from one set of categories to another, and it does so in patterns that are remarkably consistent and remarkably predictable.

The people who come out of a downturn in a stronger financial position than they went in are not the ones who hunkered down and waited for it to pass. They’re the ones who understood where money was moving and positioned themselves — their skills, their businesses, their offers — in the path of that movement.

That’s what this piece is about. Not the general “how to survive a recession” advice you can find in any weekend newspaper. The specific, practical, historically grounded breakdown of what people actually spend money on when the economy tightens, why they spend on those things, and how you position yourself or your business on the right side of that shift.

Whether you’re already running a business, building something on the side, or still in a job wondering what your options look like if things get rocky — this is the piece I’d want someone to hand me if I were sitting where you are right now.

This deep dive is one of the many perks of being a paid subscriber. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber you can sign up below for less than the price of a large coffee and a tiny cake.

The spending migration: where money actually goes

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In case you are new here, my background is in early-stage venture capital which means my job (before I went on sabbatical) was Dragon’s Den in real life and I saw behind the scenes of hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses every year. So when OpenAI released their LLM (large-language model) ChatGPT to the masses in November 2022, I knew it was going to be BIG.

And I was right. Since then, ChatGPT has largely dominated the mainstream narrative and mass adoption by non-technical people until now. Because whilst OpenAI have been releasing newer models and foraying into the world of image and video with tools like Sora (which they just canned last week), Anthropic have been quietly getting smarter and smarter with Claude.

And whilst I still use the fundamental LLM behind ChatGPT — OpenAI’s code using APIs —(more on that another time), Claude is now my predominant go-to for any AI work that isn’t done by AI Agents in Notion, and it’s very, very good.

So with that in mind, I thought it was about time I shared a detailed beginners guide to using Claude.

In this piece I’m going to walk you through what Claude actually is, why it is different from ChatGPT, what every feature does and why it matters, what you get for free versus what is worth paying for, how to set up custom instructions so Claude actually sounds like you, the specific use cases that will make the biggest difference to your business, how to prompt it properly with real examples, and a simple workflow you can implement today.

No jargon. No developer nonsense. Just practical, real world guidance for someone running a business who wants to work smarter and use AI.

What is Claude, and why should you care?

Claude is an AI assistant. Like ChatGPT, you type something in and it responds. But the similarities are more surface level than you would think.

Claude is built by Anthropic, a company founded by former senior team members at OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT). Their whole thing is building AI that is genuinely safe and useful, and honestly, I think you can feel it in how the tool works. Claude does not try to impress you with flashy tricks, it doesn’t hallucinate as much and it doesn’t give you that over-eager, slightly manic energy that ChatGPT sometimes has where it agrees with everything you say and adds seventeen exclamation marks.

Claude thinks. It reasons. It pushes back when your idea has a hole in it. And when it writes, it sounds like an actual human being wrote it, not a LinkedIn influencer…

The thing that makes Anthropic genuinely different is something called Constitutional AI. Rather than just training the model on human preferences, they gave Claude a set of principles and taught it to reason about its own behaviour against those principles. That constitution has grown from 2,700 words in 2023 to over 23,000 words today. What is actually means is that Claude is less likely to confidently tell you something wrong, and more likely to say “I am not sure about that”, which means it is significantly better at nuanced, thoughtful work than tools that are trained purely to be agreeable.

For business owners, the difference is night and day once you start using it for real work.

Claude vs ChatGPT: The breakdown

I use both. I am not dogmatic about this. But here is where they genuinely differ and why it matters for you.

Writing quality. Claude writes better prose. Full stop. If you are creating content for your business, writing emails to clients, drafting sales pages, putting together proposals, or writing anything that needs to sound like you and not like a robot, Claude is significantly better. ChatGPT tends to default to a particular cadence, a sort of peppy, over-structured, bullet-pointed style that immediately screams “AI wrote this”. Claude can match your voice if you give it the right context, uses varied sentence lengths and it understands nuance.

Thinking depth. When you ask Claude to help you think through a business problem, it doesn’t just give you the first answer that comes to mind. It considers trade-offs and will tell you when something is a bad idea. The biggest difference I see is that it asks clarifying questions that actually move the conversation forward rather than just padding out a response. If you are working on pricing strategy, repositioning your brand, or figuring out whether to hire or outsource, this depth of reasoning makes a genuine difference. ChatGPT will give you an answer quickly but Claude (in my opinion) will give you a better answer, even if it takes a moment longer and even if that answer is “actually, I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle.”

Context window. This is a technical term but an important one. The context window is how much information the AI can hold in its ‘head’ at once during a conversation. Claude can handle up to a million tokens, which is roughly 750,000 words. That is several books. That means you can upload your full client programme materials, your brand guidelines, a competitor analysis, six months of sales data, and your business plan, and Claude will hold all of it in working memory while helping you. No other tool matches this for long, complex work and a bigger memory means better, more coherent work.

Where ChatGPT wins. Image generation, if you need that. It also has a bigger ecosystem of third-party integrations which is why I still use OpenAI APIs every day for embedded AI workflows. And if you are already deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, Copilot (which runs on GPT) might be more convenient for certain tasks. But for the core work of running and growing a business (thinking, planning, analysing, building, and systemising), Claude is now my top pick.

Everything Claude can do

Most people use Claude (and all AI for that matter) like a search engine. They type a question, get an answer, and close the tab. That is like buying a sports car and only driving it to Tesco. Let me walk you through every feature that matters and why.

Projects. This is, in my opinion, the single most important feature for business owners. A Project in Claude is a dedicated workspace where you can upload documents, set custom instructions, and have ongoing conversations that all share the same context. Think of it as giving Claude a brain that is specifically trained on your business in a similar way to CustomGPTs in ChatGPT.

You could create a Project called “Client Delivery” and upload your programme materials, your onboarding process, your pricing structure, examples of great client communications, and a description of your ideal client. Then every conversation you start within that Project automatically knows all of that. No more re-explaining who you are and what your business does every single time. You could have a Project for client proposals, one for financial planning, one for product development, one for operations and SOPs. Each one carries its own context, its own instructions, and its own separate memory. This is the feature that takes Claude from “useful chatbot” to “indispensable business tool”. Caveat here is that at the moment, these cannot be connected into external workflow tools. So if you are happy working inside Claude, great, but right now, these can’t be pulled into another tool like Notion or Asana (which is what I do).

Memory. As of March 2026, Claude remembers you across conversations, and this is now available on the free plan too. I love this feature because it’s now not just within a Project but across your entire account. It learns your preferences, your business context, your communication style, and carries that forward. You can view, edit, and delete what it remembers in Settings under Capabilities. The memory updates roughly every 24 hours based on your conversations. This means the more you use Claude, the less you have to explain, and the better it gets at helping you (because, you know, AI). You can also import your memory from other AI tools if you are switching over, which is very useful.

Research mode. This is where I started with Claude, because aside from Perplexity, I do think the Research capability is excellent. This is when you need Claude to actually go deep on something, Research mode is extraordinary. It searches the web, reads multiple sources, synthesises everything, and presents you with a thorough analysis rather than a surface level summary. This is not the same as Googling something and getting ten blue links. Claude does the reading for you, cross-references the information, and tells you what actually matters. Genuinely useful for competitor research, market analysis, understanding industry trends, pricing research, or preparing for a big decision.

Artifacts. This is a feature that most people walk straight past, and it is one of the most powerful things Claude does. When you ask Claude to create something substantial (a document, a chart, an interactive tool, a calculator, a flowchart, a website mockup), it does not just dump text into the chat window. It creates what is called an Artifact: a live, interactive piece of content that appears in a dedicated panel next to your conversation.

Let’s say you ask Claude to create a client onboarding checklist or an SOP. It builds that as an Artifact, which you can then edit specific sections of without Claude rewriting the whole thing. You can iterate on it, version it (Claude keeps every version so you can compare or roll back), and when you are happy, you can publish it with a shareable link or download it.

But checklists barely scratch the surface. Ask Claude to build you an interactive pricing calculator for your website and it will create a working one, right there in the panel, that you can test, tweak, and share. Ask it to create a flowchart of your client journey and it will build an interactive diagram you can click through (I use this for customer journeys). Ask it to visualise your revenue data and it will create actual charts with proper formatting. Ask it to build you a quiz for your audience that recommends a product based on their answers. Ask it to create a meal plan generator for your nutrition clients. These are not mockups. They are working, interactive tools you can publish and share with a link. All from a conversation. No code. No developer. Just describe what you want and iterate until it is right. There is even a public catalogue of Artifacts other people have built that you can browse and remix for your own use.

The mental shift here is significant because Claude is not just answering your questions, it is building things for you.

File creation. Separate from Artifacts, Claude can create actual downloadable files. Word documents with proper formatting, spreadsheets with formulas, presentations with slide layouts, PDFs. Need a client proposal in a Word doc? A cash flow projection in a proper spreadsheet with tabs and formulas? Claude builds the actual file and you download it. This is not “here is some text you could paste into Word.” It is a formatted, professional document ready to use.

Cowork. This is the newest and, frankly, most exciting feature for non-technical business owners. Cowork is available through the Claude desktop app (Mac and Windows) and it turns Claude from a chat assistant into something closer to an actual team member. You give it access to a folder on your computer, describe what you need done, and it handles multi-step tasks autonomously. It plans the work, breaks it into steps, executes them, and delivers the finished result.

The kinds of things Cowork handles: organising a chaotic file system into properly labelled folders. Turning scattered notes and transcripts into a formatted report. Pulling data from screenshots or PDFs into a structured spreadsheet. Processing a batch of invoices. Creating a weekly report from your analytics dashboard. Drafting follow-up emails from meeting transcripts. Anthropic calls this “vibe working”, the non-developer equivalent of vibe coding — you describe the outcome you want, and Claude does the work.

The difference from normal Claude chat is significant: instead of asking one question at a time and getting one answer, you describe a complete deliverable and walk away while it works. You can even start a task on your desktop and check progress from your phone. You can set up recurring scheduled tasks, too: have Claude pull your metrics every Friday and compile them into a report, or process new files in a folder every morning.

If you have been saying “I need to hire someone to just sort all of this out”, Cowork is worth trying first. It uses more of your usage allocation than regular chat because the tasks are more complex, but for the right jobs it is transformative.

Connectors. Claude connects to Google Workspace, Slack, and a rapidly growing list of other tools through something called the Model Context Protocol. This means Claude can read your Google Docs, check your calendar, search your emails, pull data from your Notion, and use that information in its responses. Instead of copying and pasting context from six different apps, you just ask Claude and it pulls what it needs. You set up connectors in Settings and approve access the first time each one is used.

Claude Code (yes, even for non-developers). I know the name sounds like it is not for you. Stay with me. Claude Code started as a tool for software developers, and it is still primarily that. But it is increasingly being used by non-technical people to vibe-code, which essentially means describing what you want in plain English and letting AI write the code for you.

Why does this matter if you are a nutritionist, or a coach, or running a product business? Because the things you used to need to hire a developer for (a custom client portal, a booking tool, an internal dashboard, a simple app for your clients, a bespoke calculator, an inventory tracker) are now things you can prototype yourself by describing what you want. I built my own AI-powered analytics tool, Frankly Social, using this approach. People with no coding background at all are building and launching real tools. The barrier between “I have an idea for a tool” and “I have a working tool” has collapsed.

Personally, I use specialist vibe-coding tools to do this but I am playing around with Claude Code at the moment and I’ll write a more detailed breakdown of how this works soon.

You do not need to learn to code. You need to learn to describe what you want clearly, which is a skill you already have (or you can learn much more easily).

If this interests you, the easiest entry point is Artifacts in the regular Claude chat. Ask Claude to build you an interactive tool and see what happens. If you find yourself wanting to build something more complex, Cowork handles more sophisticated file and multi-step work. Claude Code itself (the terminal-based tool) is the most powerful option but requires a bit more comfort with technology. The important thing to know is that this spectrum exists and that you are not locked out of building things for your business just because you are not technical.

Web search and visualisations. Claude can search the web in real time and, as of March 2026, automatically generates charts, diagrams, and interactive visualisations directly inside your conversations (not just in Artifacts). If you are discussing your quarterly revenue, Claude might generate a bar chart. If you are working through a process, it might create a flowchart. These are not static images; they are interactive and you can ask Claude to modify them as you go.

Free vs Paid: what you actually get

Let me be straight about this because the pricing page does not make it obvious.

The free plan gives you access to Claude’s Sonnet model (which is honestly excellent for most tasks), web search, memory across conversations, Artifacts, basic file creation, and visualisations. You get a limited number of messages that resets every few hours, roughly enough for light daily use. During peak hours you may hit a queue or face slower responses. You cannot create Projects on the free plan, which is the main limitation. You also cannot use Research mode, Cowork, Claude Code, or connect to Google Workspace and other external tools. Your conversations may be used for model training unless you opt out. There is no access to Opus, the most powerful model.

If you are just curious about Claude and want to see what it can do, the free plan is a great starting point. You can use memory, create Artifacts, get files built, and have substantive conversations. You will feel the limits once you start using it for real work, which is the point.

Pro at £20 per month is where it gets serious and where most business owners should land. You get roughly five times the usage of the free plan (around 50 to 100 messages per five-hour window depending on complexity and length), access to all models including Opus (the most intelligent model, significantly better for complex strategy, nuanced writing, and deep analysis), Projects with custom instructions and document uploads (unlimited Projects), Research mode for deep multi-source analysis, Claude Code in the terminal and via web, Cowork for autonomous desktop tasks, file creation and code execution, Google Workspace and other connectors via the Model Context Protocol, extended thinking (where Claude shows its reasoning step by step on complex problems), and the ability to opt out of your data being used for training. This is the same price as ChatGPT Plus and the plan I use.

Max at £100 or £200 per month is for power users who hit Pro limits regularly. You get five or twenty times the Pro usage respectively, higher task output limits in Cowork, persistent memory across longer sessions, early access to new features, and priority access during peak times. If you are using Claude as your primary work tool for several hours a day and consistently hitting the Pro usage caps, Max makes sense. For most people, Pro is more than enough.

Teams at £25 to £30 per seat per month (minimum five seats) adds shared Projects where your whole team works from the same context, admin controls, Slack and Microsoft 365 integrations, single sign-on, centralised billing, and organisation-wide search. Premium seats at £150 per seat add Claude Code access and early collaboration features. This is for when you have a team and want everyone working with the same brand context and standards.

Honestly start on free. You will know within a week whether you need Pro. Most business owners who use Claude for real workflows upgrade within days, not because the free plan is bad but because once you see what Projects, Research mode, and Opus can do, you will not want to work without them.

How to set up custom instructions (step by step)

This is where most people leave enormous amounts of value on the table. Custom instructions tell Claude how to behave every time you talk to it, either globally across your account or within a specific Project. Here is exactly how to set both up.

Global custom instructions (applies to every conversation):

Go to claude.ai and click your name or initials in the bottom left corner. Select Settings. Look for “User preferences” under the profile section. This is where you write instructions that apply to every single conversation you have with Claude, regardless of which Project you are in or whether you are in a Project at all.

Write something like this (and adapt it to your actual business):

“I am [your name]. I run a [type of business] in the UK. My audience is [describe them specifically]. I write in British English. I never use bullet points unless specifically asked, or any of the following phrases: unlock, level up, dive in, game-changer, at the end of the day, it is worth noting that, in today’s fast-paced world. My tone is direct, warm, occasionally irreverent, and never preachy or condescending. I prefer prose over lists. I value varied sentence length. When I ask for help with strategy, push back on my assumptions and tell me what I am missing rather than just agreeing. When I ask for help with writing, match the tone and rhythm of the examples I have provided rather than defaulting to generic AI voice. I work [X] hours a week and value leverage over hustle.”

That takes two minutes to write (in fact you don’t need to even write because you can now just copy the above) and will transform every single interaction you have with Claude from that point forward. It stops suggesting things in American English. It stops using the words you hate. It knows your constraints and it knows your audience. This is the single highest return-on-time-investment action you can take with Claude and takes seconds.

Project-level custom instructions (applies within a specific Project):

Click “Projects” in the left sidebar (Pro plan and above). Click “Create project” and give it a name, something like “Client Experience” or “Business Strategy” or “Q2 Planning”. Once inside the Project, you will see options to add custom instructions and upload knowledge files. The custom instructions here are specific to this Project and layer on top of your global instructions, so you do not need to repeat yourself.

For a Client Experience project, you might write:

“This project is for everything related to client onboarding, delivery, and retention in my nutrition coaching business. My services are: one-to-one coaching (£250 per month, 12-week minimum), a group programme called [name] (£97 per month, rolling), and a supplement line. My ideal client is [name]: [age], [job], [life situation], [what she is struggling with], [what she wants]. She is [personality traits] and responds to [what works] not [what does not work]. When drafting any client-facing communication, the tone should be warm, professional, and reassuring without being condescending. Never use clinical language. Never sound like a generic corporate email. Every touchpoint should feel like it comes from a real person who genuinely cares about their progress. When I ask you to build processes or systems, optimise for my time constraint of 15 hours per week and always suggest what can be automated or templatised.”

Then upload your files. Your service descriptions and pricing, your current onboarding documents, your programme curriculum or structure. Client testimonials and case studies, any client feedback or survey results and your terms of service. All of this context is now available in every conversation within this Project, and Claude will reference it automatically without you needing to remind it.

For a Business Strategy project, you would write different instructions emphasising your revenue goals, time constraints, and decision-making preferences, and upload your financial data, business plan, and quarterly targets. For a Product Development project, instructions about your product line, compliance requirements, and supplier details.

The result is that when you open a conversation in your Client Experience project and type “build me a better onboarding sequence for new one-to-one clients”, Claude already knows your services, your client, your tone, your time constraints, and your existing process. The output is specific to your business — not generic and not something you have to rework from scratch. Specific and usable.

The use cases that will save you the most time

Right, let me get specific. Because features are nice but what you actually want to know is how this makes your Monday morning easier. I am going to use the example of someone running a women’s health nutrition coaching and product business, but every single one of these applies to any service, product, or content business.

Client experience and delivery. This is where most business owners are leaving the most time on the table, and it is the use case I would start with. Set up a Client Experience project as I described above. Then use Claude to completely overhaul how you onboard, communicate with, and retain clients.

Start by uploading your current onboarding process (even if it is just a rough sequence in your head) and ask Claude to map it, identify gaps, and redesign it. Have it build a full onboarding email sequence, from welcome email through to the first session prep, the post-first-session follow up, and the check-ins at week two, four, and eight. Ask it to create a client welcome pack as a downloadable PDF or Word document with everything a new client needs to know. Have it draft personalised progress review templates that you can adapt for each client in under two minutes. Ask it to build an interactive FAQ as an Artifact that you can share with every new client via a link and update as new questions come in. Get it to analyse your client feedback or survey responses and identify the patterns in what people love, where they drop off, and what they wish was different.

The result is that your client experience starts to feel like a much bigger, more polished operation than a one-person or small-team business, because the systems behind it are doing the heavy lifting. You still bring the expertise and the human connection. Claude handles the process, the documentation, and the consistency.

Research and competitor intelligence. This is one of those tasks that everyone knows they should be doing and almost nobody has time for. With Research mode, Claude becomes your analyst. Ask it to research what your top five competitors are charging for similar services and present the findings in a comparison table. Have it analyse the reviews and testimonials on their websites and identify the promises they are making versus the gaps clients are complaining about. Ask it to research trends in your industry, pull recent data on market size or consumer behaviour, and summarise what it means for your positioning. Get it to investigate a potential supplier, partnership, or platform before you commit. All of this used to mean hours of Googling, reading, and synthesising and now you describe what you need to know and Claude does the legwork, presenting you with a structured analysis you can actually act on.

Product development. Talk through a new product idea with Claude as a thinking partner. Have it draft product descriptions, label copy, and compliance disclaimers. Get it to analyse customer reviews of competitor products on Amazon and create a gap analysis as an Artifact with charts showing where the opportunities are. Use it to build a launch plan with quarterly milestones, marketing angles, and a timeline as a downloadable spreadsheet with actual dates and dependencies.

Business strategy and financial modelling. This is where I become slightly obsessed with using AI... Upload your revenue data, your customer feedback, your current offers, and your goals for the next quarter. Ask it to identify your most profitable revenue streams and calculate your effective hourly rate across each one. Ask it to model what happens if you raise prices by 15%, or if you shift 20% of your one-to-one clients into a group programme. Ask it to project cash flow for the next six months based on your current trajectory versus your growth plan. Ask it to create the financial model as a proper Excel file with formulas, not just text. Ask it to challenge your assumptions and tell you which numbers look unrealistic. It is like having a very smart, very well-read advisor who never gets tired and never charges you by the hour.

Building tools for your business. This is the one that sounds futuristic but is happening right now. Ask Claude to build you an interactive pricing calculator for your coaching packages that you can share with prospective clients. Ask it to create a client intake questionnaire that auto-generates a personalised summary. Ask it to build a meal plan generator that takes macros and dietary preferences and produces a weekly plan. Ask it to create an ROI calculator that shows potential clients what working with you is worth. These start as Artifacts, working prototypes you can test and share with a link. If they work well and you want to take them further, Cowork or Claude Code is the next step. The barrier to building custom tools for your business has effectively disappeared.

How to prompt Claude properly

The quality of what you get from Claude is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in. A vague prompt gets a vague answer. A specific, context-rich prompt gets something you can actually use. Prompting is not about magic formulas or secret techniques. It is about communicating clearly. The same skills that make you good at briefing a freelancer or managing a team make you good at prompting Claude.

Here is my framework. I call it the CRISP method because I like a good acronym and also because it works.

C - Context. Tell Claude who you are, what your business does, and what the situation is. Even if you have this in a Project, adding relevant context to your specific request helps enormously. “I am preparing for a price increase in my group programme and I need to communicate this to 40 existing members, most of whom have been with me for three to six months.”

R - Role. Tell Claude what role you want it to play. “Act as a brand strategist” produces very different output from “act as a direct response copywriter” or “act as a CFO reviewing my numbers”. Be specific about the expertise you want it to bring.

I - Intent. What is the actual goal? Not “write me an email” but “write me an email that re-engages lapsed clients and encourages them to rebook a consultation without sounding desperate or discounting my services.”

S - Specifics. Length, tone, format, things to include, things to avoid, examples of what good looks like, examples of what bad looks like. The more specific you are, the less editing you do afterwards. Specifics also include structural preferences: do you want prose or a table? A narrative or a framework? One option or three to choose from?

P - Perspective. Who is reading, watching, or receiving this? What do they care about? What objections might they have? What are they feeling right now? Giving Claude the reader’s perspective transforms the output from generic to targeted.

Let me show you the difference with real examples.

Weak prompt: “Help me with my client onboarding.”

Strong prompt: “I run a women’s health nutrition coaching business. I take on new one-to-one clients at £250 per month on a 12-week minimum. My current onboarding is inconsistent: I send a welcome email, a questionnaire, and then we have a first call, but there is no proper sequence and clients often arrive at the first call without completing the questionnaire. I need a structured onboarding sequence that covers everything from payment confirmation to the end of week two. The tone of all communications should be warm, professional, and reassuring, not clinical or corporate. Think of it as making someone feel like they have made the best decision of their year, while also efficiently collecting the information I need to do my job well. Include what to send, when to send it, and what each touchpoint should accomplish. Flag any gaps in my current process.”

The second prompt gives you a complete, actionable onboarding system. The first gives you generic advice you could have found on Google.

For strategy work, an example of how to use Claude as a genuine thinking partner:

“I run a nutrition coaching business with three revenue streams: one-to-one coaching at £250 per month (12 clients), a group programme at £97 per month (40 members), and a supplement line averaging £35 per order (approximately 200 orders per month). I work 15 hours a week during term time and I am not willing to increase this. I want to grow revenue by 40% in the next 12 months. My gut feeling is that I should launch a new digital product, but I am not sure if that is right or if I should focus on what I have. Analyse my current revenue breakdown, calculate my effective hourly rate across each stream, identify which revenue stream has the most leverage given my time constraint, and tell me honestly whether a new product launch or optimising existing streams is the better use of my limited time. Present this as a proper analysis with numbers, not just opinions. Push back if any of my assumptions seem unrealistic. Then give me a specific quarterly plan with milestones I can actually execute in 15 hours a week.”

That is the kind of prompt that gets you genuine strategic value. You are not asking Claude to guess. You are giving it real data, real constraints, and permission to disagree with you. The response you get back will likely be more rigorous than what you would get from most paid consultants, because Claude will actually do the maths rather than giving you platitudes.

For building a client-facing tool (using Artifacts):

“I want to build an interactive supplement recommendation tool for my website. A potential client answers five to seven simple questions about their health goals, current symptoms, diet, and lifestyle. Based on their answers, the tool recommends one of my three supplement bundles (Essentials at £35, Complete at £55, or Premium at £79) with a brief explanation of why that bundle suits them. The tone should be warm, evidence-informed, and non-pushy. It should feel helpful, not salesy. Include a clear call to action to purchase or book a free 15-minute call if they want personalised advice. Build this as a working interactive tool I can test and share.”

See the pattern? Context. Role. Intent. Specifics. Perspective. Every single time.

One more thing on prompting that is more important than any framework: do not be afraid to have a conversation. The best results I get from Claude, or any AI for that matter, are never from a single prompt. They come from a back-and-forth. I give it a brief, it gives me a first attempt, I tell it what works and what does not, it refines. Three or four rounds of this and you have something genuinely excellent. Think of it less like giving an order to a machine and more like working with a very fast, very capable colleague who needs direction but brings their own intelligence to the table.

Your simple workflow: start here today

You do not need to overhaul your entire business to start getting value from Claude. Here is a simple workflow you can implement this week.

Step one: Sign up. Go to claude.ai. The free plan is genuinely useful and includes memory, web search, Artifacts, and file creation. If you decide you love it (you will), Pro is £20 a month and unlocks Projects, Research mode, Cowork, Claude Code, and connectors. I recommend starting free and upgrading once you hit the usage limits, which for most business owners happens within the first few days.

Step two: Set your global custom instructions. Go to Settings and write your preferences as I described in the custom instructions section above. Name, business, audience, tone, language, things you never want Claude to do, how you want it to behave. This takes five minutes and improves every conversation going forward. It is the single highest return-on-time-investment action in this entire guide.

Step three: Check and curate your memory. Go to Settings and look at Memory under Capabilities. If you have used Claude before, review what it has stored. Edit anything wrong. Add things it should know. If you are switching from ChatGPT, you can export your memory from there and import it into Claude (Anthropic provides a prompt for this and instructions on their support site).

Step four: Create your first Project (Pro plan). Call it something that reflects its purpose, “Client Experience” or “Business Strategy” or whatever matches your biggest time sink. Upload your service descriptions, your ideal client profile, any existing process documents, and a brief on your business. Write custom instructions that tell Claude exactly how to behave within this Project, as detailed above.

Step five: Start with one task. Pick the thing that eats the most time in your week. For many business owners, this is client onboarding or admin. Open a conversation in your Project and ask Claude to help you map your current client journey from first enquiry to three months in. Ask it to identify where the gaps are, where clients might feel uncertain or unsupported, and what could be systematised. Then ask it to build the missing pieces: an onboarding sequence, a welcome document, a progress review template. Time how long this takes compared to doing it from scratch. The difference will be significant enough that you will not need me to convince you to keep going.

Step six: Build from there. Once you are comfortable, add Projects for different areas of your business. Start using Claude for strategy sessions, product development, financial modelling, and research. Try creating an Artifact: ask Claude to build you an interactive tool or a visual dashboard. If you are on Pro, experiment with Cowork by pointing it at a messy folder and asking it to organise everything. Each new use case builds on the last because Claude already knows your business, your standards, and your constraints.

Important notes:

I would not be doing my job properly if I did not mention these.

Claude is not a replacement for expertise. It is an amplifier of yours. If you do not know whether a supplement claim is compliant, Claude might not either. It is very good at reasoning, but it does not have professional qualifications and it cannot guarantee accuracy on regulatory or legal matters. Always have a human expert review anything that has legal, medical, or financial implications.

It can get things wrong. The model can be confidently incorrect, particularly about very specific or niche factual claims. Treat everything Claude produces as a starting point that needs your eyes, your judgement, and your expertise before it goes anywhere client-facing or public. The Research mode helps significantly with factual accuracy because it is pulling live data, but even then, verify anything critical.

Your data is your responsibility. You have to read the privacy settings. Understand what you are uploading. On the free plan, your conversations may be used for training. Pro and above gives you the option to opt out entirely. If you are handling client information, be sensible about what you share with any AI tool. Do not upload client medical records, financial details, or anything personally identifiable.

Cowork is still in research preview. It is impressive and genuinely useful, but it is new. Double-check its work, especially with anything involving numbers or file management. It will ask for your approval before taking significant actions, which is the right approach, but you still need to review what it produces before sending it anywhere.

And finally, AI is a tool. It is not a business strategy. The business owners I see getting the most value from Claude are the ones who already know what they are building and use AI to build it faster. If you do not have clarity on your offers, your audience, and your positioning, no amount of AI prompting will fix that. (But Claude can absolutely help you think through those things too, if you give it the right context, the right questions, and permission to tell you what you might not want to hear.)

This is one of those tools that, once you start using it properly, you genuinely cannot imagine going back. I know that sounds hyperbolic but honestly, using AI effectively has transformed my life and my businesses.

If you found this useful, you are going to love what is coming in the paid Thursday deep dive guides. You may have noticed that Really Rich is getting a wee glow-up at the moment so a lot more AI content is coming for paid subscribers soon as I consolidate my work and aim to provide you with the best resources on how to practically use AI in your business and life.

You can upgrade to paid for less than a large coffee and a tiny cake each month and get access to everything as soon as it lands as well as my full archive.

Here it is: you are stuck. Everything in your business (ok maybe not everything but a lot of things) have to be run by you. Maybe that is because you are a solo founder. Or maybe it is because you are the only one that actually knows what needs to be done. And that makes you, my friend, the problem.

But fear not, here I am, and I have been there, done that, got the t-shirt and now I have successfully made myself NOT the bottleneck so I shall impart my pearls of hard-earned wisdom with you on how to untangle yourself from this predicament…

Here’s what the bottleneck actually looks like:

Every message that needs your eyes before it goes out. Every invoice sitting in draft because you haven’t got round to approving it. Every piece of content that exists only in your head because no one else knows how you think. Every client question that could have been answered by a document you haven’t written yet. Every decision, however small, that routes through you because somewhere along the line you decided that was just how it had to work.

It doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. Your business might actually look quite good from the outside — revenue coming in, clients happy, a team in place if you have one. But you know the reality of it. You’re the last thing that happens before anything moves forward. You’re the person your business cannot function without, and some part of you has quietly accepted that as the price of doing things properly.

It isn’t. And the cost is higher than you think.

Why smart, ambitious people become the bottleneck

Becoming the bottleneck is not a failure of organisation. It’s a failure of identity transition — and it happens to the sharpest, most capable founders more than anyone else.

You built a good business because you were good at it. You knew how to write the copy, handle the client, make the judgement call. You had standards, and those standards were the reason the business worked. So you kept doing it. All of it. Because the alternative — letting someone else do it, letting it go out slightly differently than you’d have done it, trusting a system over your own instinct — felt like a risk you couldn’t afford.

What you were actually doing was staying in the role of operator when your business needed you to grow into the role of owner.

The operator executes. The owner designs. Most founders who’ve built something half decent are extraordinary operators, which makes the transition genuinely hard. It requires you to give up the immediate satisfaction of doing things well yourself in exchange for the slower, less tactile work of building something that works without you.

There’s also a control element worth being honest about. When you are the bottleneck, you are also the single point of quality assurance. Nothing goes wrong that you didn’t at least have the chance to prevent. The anxiety driving perfectionism is often the anxiety of visibility — of something going out into the world with your name on it that you didn’t fully sign off on. So the system you’ve built, consciously or not, is one where nothing happens without you.

That system got you here. It’s also the thing that will stop you getting anywhere further.

So let’s talk about what you can actually do about it and a practical guide for you to follow so that you stop being the bottleneck and how to create real leverage instead.

This rest of this deep dive is one of the many perks of being a Paid Subscriber to my Substack. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber you can sign up below for less than the price of a large coffee and a tiny cake.

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Both are more common than anyone admits. And both are fine.

I wrote at the start of the year about how to factory reset your life and plan your year so you actually get to where you want to be, and today marks the end of cycle 1.

ICYMI - I plan my year in four 12 week blocks with a rest week after each stretch to recalibrate and get ready for the next cycle.

Which means next week is a rest week — not a catch-up week, not a guilt trip, not a chance to cram in everything that slipped. It’s built into the calendar deliberately, and it’s non-negotiable. You sprint for twelve weeks, you stop, you review, and then you go again. That’s the system. And pinky promise you, it works.

Q2 begins on the 3rd of April. Whether you’re arriving at that date with momentum behind you or with a blank slate and a fresh start, what matters now is what you do with the week in between.

Here’s how to use it.

*Side note - The clocks go forward this Sunday in the UK to BST and it will still be light at 7pm. We have made it people!

The three planning mistakes that will derail Q2 before it starts

Before we get into the how, it’s worth being honest about why most quarterly plans fail. Because the same mistakes come up every single time and if you don’t name them you’ll repeat them.

Overestimating what you can do in a week and wildly underestimating what you can do in a quarter

Every Monday the list is too long. By Friday you’ve done half of it and feel behind. Repeat that for twelve weeks and you’ve spent an entire quarter feeling like you’re failing, even if you’ve quietly moved forward. The maths is broken from the start.

A quarter is twelve weeks. Twelve weeks of consistent focused effort on the right things compounds in ways a single frantic week never will. The person who picks two or three genuinely important things and works on them every single week for a quarter will outperform the person who has forty goals and a perfect system every single time.

Planning for the optimistic scenario

The plan assumes everything goes smoothly. No unexpected demands on your time, no week where everything falls apart, no curveball that lands without warning.

When reality doesn’t match the plan, most people use it as evidence that the plan doesn’t work. They replan, which feels productive but isn’t. They allow one bad week to become proof that something isn’t working for them, when really all it proves is that life happened.

But not you my friend, you know that unexpected items in the bagging area are to be expected, so we smart cookies are going to plan for the mess from the start. We’re planning actual lives here, not frictionless versions of them.

Playing small and calling it realistic

A lot of what gets framed as being sensible is just fear of setting a big goal and not hitting it. So the goals shrink. Safer. More achievable. And then nothing really changes. If you know anything about me by now, you’ll know that I’m likely to say GO BIG AND GO BOLD. PUNCH HIGHER.

A quarter is the right unit of time for bold action. Long enough to see real results. Short enough to course correct if something isn’t working. So at the risk of sounding like a broken record — stop planning for the version of your goals that feels comfortable and start planning for the version that actually requires something from you.

Step 1: Review Q1 honestly

Before you plan Q2 you need to spend time being honest about Q1. Not brutal — just honest. Because if you don’t understand what happened in the last twelve weeks you’ll make exactly the same mistakes in the next twelve.

Start with your life razor. This is the filter everything runs through — the single sentence that defines what you’re optimising for in this season of your life. If you set one back in January, read it back now. Does it still fit? Has something shifted in the last twelve weeks that means it needs updating? Your quarterly goals only make sense in the context of what you’re actually trying to build, so if the razor has moved, the goals need to move with it.

Mine is: I am the kind of person who does things with energy and intention.

Then ask: what did I set out to do at the start of January? What actually happened? What got done, what got half done, what got dropped entirely, and what did I quietly avoid?

Be specific. If you said you were going to launch something and you didn’t, that’s useful information. If you set a revenue target and missed it, you need to know by how much and why. If you had a goal you didn’t look at again after the first week of January, that tells you something important about how you planned it.

The audit isn’t about self-criticism. It’s about patterns. Common ones worth looking for: goals that were too vague to action, goals that had no connection to your weekly work, goals that assumed everything would go smoothly, and goals that were playing it safe.

Once you know what happened, you can plan for what’s next.

Step 2: Pick your boulders

A boulder is not a task. It’s not a project. It’s the big outcome that, if you moved it significantly forward over the next twelve weeks, would genuinely change something.

You get two or three. Maximum.

If you have ten boulders you have no boulders. The whole point of the boulder is that it gets consistent attention week after week for the entire quarter. You cannot do that with ten things. Picking your boulders is the hardest part of the whole process because it forces real decisions. To say this matters more than that. To accept that some things are not happening this quarter, and that’s okay, because the things that are happening are actually going to move.

A good boulder is specific enough that you’d know if you’d moved it. “Grow my business” is not a boulder. “Get to £10k monthly recurring revenue” is a boulder. “Be healthier” is not a boulder. “Train four times a week and be in bed by ten” is a boulder.

And here’s the thing worth remembering: your boulders shouldn’t all sit in the same area of your life. The R.I.C.H. framework exists for a reason. Resources, Inner Circle, Condition, Horizon. A quarter of nothing but business goals is a quarter that quietly costs you in other areas. Pick boulders that reflect the full picture of what you’re building — the business and the life.

Ask yourself: what are the two or three things that if I genuinely moved them forward between now and the end of June would make this a good quarter? Write those down.

Step 3: Set OKRs for each boulder

For each boulder, you write one objective and two or three key results.

The objective is qualitative. It’s directional. It answers the question: what am I working toward? It should be ambitious enough to stretch you and specific enough to mean something.

The key results are quantitative. They’re the specific measurable signals that tell you you’re making progress. Each one should be binary — either you hit it or you didn’t, no ambiguity. And they should be set at a level that requires real effort. If you’re confident you’ll definitely hit them, they’re too easy.

An example. Boulder: build a Substack publication that generates consistent recurring revenue.

Objective: make it a must-read paid publication that people actively recommend.

Key results: reach 250 paid subscribers by end of June. Publish three times a week without missing a week across the quarter. Launch one new paid offering by end of May.

See how each key result is specific, measurable and directly connected to the objective? Each one generates actual tasks when you break it down further. Each one tells you clearly whether you got there or not.

Do this for each boulder. This is the thinking work of the quarter. It happens once, at the start, and it doesn’t change — even when things get hard, even when a bad week happens, even when you fall behind. The OKRs stay fixed. What changes is how you respond week to week.

Step 4: Break OKRs into monthly milestones

A quarter is long enough that it’s easy to tell yourself you’ll catch up later. Monthly milestones stop that from happening.

For each key result, ask: what needs to be true by the end of April for me to be on track? What needs to be true by the end of May?

These milestones create checkpoints within the quarter so you know early if something isn’t working rather than arriving at the end of June having left it too late.

Using the example above: key result is 250 paid subscribers by end of June. Monthly milestones might be 150 by end of April, 200 by end of May, 250 by end of June. Now you have a clear signal every four weeks telling you whether you’re on track or whether you need to adjust your approach.

This step takes twenty minutes and saves an enormous amount of confusion and disappointment later.

Step 5: Break milestones into weekly tasks

This is where most planning systems completely fall apart — and it’s the most important step of all.

The quarterly goals exist in one document. The weekly to-do list exists somewhere else entirely. The two never speak to each other. So the big thinking stays as big thinking and the weeks just happen, filled with reactive work and urgent tasks, and the quarterly goals quietly get forgotten.

The cascade has to be explicit. Every weekly task needs to be traceable back to a monthly milestone, which traces back to a key result, which traces back to an objective and a boulder. If a task doesn’t connect to any of those things, it either shouldn’t be on your list or it belongs in the category of necessary operational work rather than goal-moving work. Those are two very different things.

In practice this means sitting down at the start of each week and asking: given where I am against my milestones, what are the specific things I need to do this week to stay on track? Not what feels urgent. Not what’s been on the list the longest. What actually moves the boulders.

Those are your non-negotiable weekly tasks. Everything else fits around them.

This is also why I now have AI agents running inside my Notion planner doing my weekly planning automatically in under five minutes — because once the boulders, OKRs and milestones are set, the weekly planning is a logical process not a creative one. It doesn’t need brainpower. It just needs to happen consistently. If you want to see how this works then you need to read this piece where I break it all down >>

Step 6: Plan for the mess

Your plan right now assumes everything goes smoothly. It won’t.

Build at least one buffer week into every month. A week where you’ve deliberately planned less, left space for overflow, and given yourself room to catch up if the previous weeks didn’t go to plan. Most people treat every week as equally full. The ones who actually hit their quarterly goals treat some weeks as sprint weeks and some as recovery weeks.

Also decide in advance what you’ll do when things go wrong. Not if — when. The come-back day is everything. When you fall out of routine, the easiest way back is to have already decided exactly when and where you’re going to restart. The more specific the better. For content and writing, mine is a Monday morning in a specific chair after the school run. For fitness it’s a Sunday evening. The specificity matters because it removes the decision-making at the moment you have the least energy for it.

One bad week doesn’t erase ten good ones. The goal isn’t perfection. An 80% completion rate across the quarter will move your boulders significantly. Plan for 80% and stop measuring yourself against 100.

Step 7: Put it somewhere you look every single week

This is the part that makes everything else work or not work.

The most beautifully constructed quarterly plan in a notebook on your shelf is useless. The goals you typed into a Google Doc in January that you haven’t opened since are useless. Your plan needs to live inside your weekly workflow. Not adjacent to it. Inside it.

This means a digital system where your boulders, OKRs, milestones and weekly tasks all live in one place — where every time you sit down to plan your week you can see the full picture and where each task connects back to what actually matters this quarter. Your annual goals at the top. Your quarterly OKRs beneath them. Your weekly tasks generated from those OKRs. All of it visible, all of the time. You see where I’m going with this don’t you?! It’s another sign to actually use Notion (honestly, I will convert you to it!)

When you sit down to review your week you shouldn’t just be looking at a to-do list. You should be looking at whether you moved your boulders. Those are two very different questions and the only one that matters is the second one.

What to do next:

The calendar for the rest of the year:

Q2: 3 April — 25 June

Rest week: 26 June — 2 July

Q3: 3 July — 24 September

Rest week: 25 September — 1 October

Q4: 2 October — 24 December

Rest week: 25 December — 31 December

Mark those now if you haven’t already. The rest weeks are non-negotiable. Trying to push through fifty-two weeks straight is exactly why people burn out and abandon everything 3 months in.

This week:

• Spend time on the Q1 audit. Start with your life razor — does it still fit, or does something need updating? Then look honestly at what happened across the last twelve weeks. What worked, what didn’t, what you avoided and why.

• Pick your two or three boulders for Q2. If you have more than three, you haven’t made a decision yet.

• Set one objective and two or three key results for each boulder. Spread them across the R.I.C.H. framework — not all business goals, the full picture.

• Map your monthly milestones for April, May and June.

• Break April’s milestones into the specific tasks you’ll work on in week one.

• Decide your come-back day for when things go sideways.

• Put all of it somewhere you will see it every single week without fail.

The thinking takes a few hours. The doing takes the next twelve weeks. And if you’ve done the thinking properly, the doing is just showing up and completing the tasks.

Reminder:

If you have a copy of my Notion Planner template we are coming together for our Q2 planning session on Thursday 2nd April at 12:30pm. There will be a reminder email with the link to sign up in your inbox shortly. (And if you don’t have the planner yet, but want it and to join the planning session then this is the link you need!)

Get My Notion Planner

If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that this Substack is about building a Really Rich life in every sense of the word. Resources matter (of course they do), but if your inner circle is weak, you’ll never feel abundant. You can have millions and still be poor where it counts.

Here’s what I know: networks make you robust. You can withstand shocks. But villages make you anti-fragile. You get stronger from shocks. Because when shit hits the fan, you have people. And people are the only resource that appreciates under pressure.

I’m very lucky to have an incredible village around me — mainly women, scattered across cities and timezones, who show up in ways that matter. It’s something I’ve intentionally built, but not in a transactional way. I don’t pay into the village because I think I’ll need a favour later. I show up because this is how I operate, and being a villager was modelled to me as a child. As an adult, it’s something I’ve consciously worked on and as a result, I have a village.

We hear about this illusive village all the time. It’s cited in articles and referenced in podcasts as the holy grail of support systems, often when you first have children as part of your caregiving set-up. But to me, a village isn’t about childcare, or even about geographic location — it’s a community and almost acts as an extension of your family.

The truth is, most people don’t have a village. They have a network — professional contacts, LinkedIn connections, people they’d grab coffee with if they happened to be in the same city. That’s not the same thing. A network is transactional. A village is reciprocal.

This past week I’ve been moving house and oh my goodness did the village show up for me. Borrowing cars to help me move, coming to my house to deep clean with me after nightshifts in hospitals, doing my food shops, packing and unpacking boxes and more emotional support than you can imagine. I am lucky to have this village but I have it because I am a villager.

If you don’t have a village yet, this piece is about how to build one. Not how to find one (you won’t). Not how to join one (that’s not how it works). How to become a villager — because that’s the only way the village forms around you.

Why You Need a Village (and why “networking” isn’t enough)

Let me be clear about what a village actually does, because this isn’t about having friends or being well-connected. It’s about having a structure around you that can hold weight.

The things a village does that nothing else can:

1. Holds you when systems fail

When childcare falls through at 7am and you have a client call at 9. When you’re sick and need someone to pick up your kid. When the business implodes and you can’t see straight. A village is the safety net nobody’s selling you. Not insurance. Not a service you can subscribe to. Not something you can optimise your way into. Actual humans who show up whether that is physically or emotionally.

2. Reflects you back to yourself

When you can’t see clearly — grief, success, transition, doubt, the fog that descends when you’re too close to something — you need someone who can say “that’s not you” or “that’s exactly you.”

3. Gives you permission you can’t give yourself

To rest. To pivot. To be ambitious. To say no. To want more. To want less. To stop performing. To start over. You watch someone else do the thing you thought was impossible — take the whole summer off, burn the business model down, admit they were wrong, ask for help without apologising — and suddenly it’s possible for you too. Permission is contagious in villages.

4. Distributes load

One person can’t be your therapist, business adviser, childcare backup, accountability partner, and best friend. That’s not a relationship, that’s indentured servitude. Villages work because needs get distributed across multiple people. Nobody burns out carrying you, because they’re not carrying you alone. You’re not “too much” in a village — the load just gets shared.

5. Makes you anti-fragile

This is the one that matters most, so I’ll say it again: networks make you robust. You can withstand shocks. You have options. You know people. Villages make you anti-fragile. You don’t just survive the shock — you get stronger from it. Because when everything breaks, you don’t scramble to figure out who to call. You already know. And those people don’t just help you limp through. They help you rebuild better. Anti-fragility isn’t an individual trait. It’s a collective one.

The Village Framework

Here’s how to think about villages versus what you’re probably doing now:

1. The Village vs The Network

Networks are transactional. I give you this, you give me that, we both keep score. We connect on LinkedIn. We “grab coffee” and talk about synergies. We make intros when it’s mutually beneficial. It’s professional. It’s strategic. It’s exhausting.

Villages are reciprocal. The giving flows in all directions. Nobody’s counting. The value isn’t always equivalent. I help you move house. You watch my kids. She sends the client. He talks me proofreads my book proposal and gives detailed notes in the margins with highlights. It doesn’t balance in any given week or month, and nobody cares.

Networks are built for ROI. Villages are built for resilience.

2. Being vs Having

You don’t have a village. You are a villager.

This is the shift most people miss. They think village-building is about collecting the right people, curating the right relationships, being strategic about who they invest in. That’s networking with a community aesthetic.

The identity comes first. You show up as someone who helps, who asks for help, who shares resources without an invoice. You operate from a place of reciprocity and mutual aid. The village forms around people who already operate this way. You don’t build it. You become it, and it coalesces around you.

3. The Three Village Currencies

What actually flows in a village, beyond the obvious practical help:

Attention — Showing up. Remembering. Witnessing. The “I remember you mentioned this three months ago and I saw this thing that relates” attention. The “I noticed you’ve gone quiet and I’m checking in” attention. Attention is the scarcest resource, and in a village, people spend it on each other.

Truth — Saying the thing nobody else will say. Holding the mirror. Not the brutal honesty that’s just cruelty with a disclaimer. The “I love you and this isn’t working” truth. The “you’re brilliant but you’re also avoiding the real issue” truth. Villages are where you can stop performing and someone will tell you what’s actually going on.

Permission — Modelling what’s possible. Giving others cover to do the same. You rest, so I can rest. You set the boundary, so I can set the boundary. You admit you’re struggling, so I can admit I’m struggling. Permission doesn’t work in isolation. It works in community.

4. Village Membership Criteria

Not everyone belongs in your village. That’s not harsh, it’s just true. Here’s how you know who does:

Mutual aid without ledgers — They help when they can. You help when you can. Nobody’s tracking. If you find yourself mentally calculating whether you’ve given more than you’ve received, that person isn’t a villager.

Asymmetric generosity — Comfortable with the flow being unequal at different times. Sometimes you’re the one catching everyone. Sometimes you’re the one falling. Villagers don’t need it to even out immediately, or ever.

Shared operating system — Similar values about reciprocity, autonomy, showing up. You don’t have to agree on everything. But you need to agree on how relationships work, what helping looks like, what’s expected and what’s not.

5. How Villages Actually Form

Not in some grand gesture or orchestrated community-building exercise. Here’s how it actually happens:

Small repeated acts over time. Not one big favour. Dozens of tiny deposits. The voice note. The article you forwarded. The “thinking of you” with no ask attached. The showing up.

Vulnerability before trust is “earned”. Someone has to go first. You can’t wait until you’re sure it’s safe to be real. Vulnerability is the catalyst, not the reward.

Proximity matters less than you think. Villages used to be defined by physical space. Now they’re defined by attention and access. This week my friends in Australia and the US have sent me no less than 4 hours of voice notes, gotten up early or stayed up late to chat to me on FaceTime as I packed and unpacked boxes and sent numerous care packages to not just me, but my mum too because they know she is carrying a lot of the physical load. These women are thousands of miles from me but they are still being villagers.

6. What Kills Villages

Making it transactional. The moment you start keeping score, you’ve left the village. You’re back in the network.

Extractive asks without deposits. All take, no give. Showing up only when you need something. Villagers can smell this, and they’ll drift.

Refusing to receive. Only playing the helper role. Never asking for anything. This seems generous but it’s actually control. It keeps you above the village instead of in it.

How to Become a Villager (when you don’t have a village yet)

Right. Here’s the practical bit. Because knowing you need a village doesn’t tell you how to build one.

Here’s what you need to know: You don’t find a village. You become a villager, and the village forms around you.

This is the only way it works. You can’t join someone else’s village (that’s not how it works). You can’t convene a village through force of will (that’s a book club, not a village). You have to become the kind of person a village forms around, and then wait for it to happen.

Start by being the villager you wish you had:

1. Give first (without keeping score)

Share the resource before you need the favour back. Forward the opportunity. Make the intro. Send the thing that made you think of them. Do it especially when you’re not sure it “counts” or if they’ll even need it.

The instinct is to wait until you’re sure it’ll be appreciated, or reciprocated, or noticed. Don’t wait. Give because that’s what villagers do. Some people will receive it and give back. Some won’t. That’s how you find out who your people are.

Example: this week I have moved into a new building with 7 new neighbours. My big priority this week is to introduce myself and my children to all of them, tell them what I do and what I can help them with if they ever need it (I work from home so I am around if they need me etc). This is step number 1 - because you can’t be a villager and have a village if no one knows you are there.

2. Ask for help badly

Don’t wait until you’ve earned it or until the ask is polished. “I don’t know what I need but I’m struggling” is a valid ask. So is “Can you just tell me I’m not insane?” So is “I need someone to hold this for me because I can’t hold it alone.”

Asking is not extractive. It’s offering someone the chance to be a villager too. Most people want to help — they just don’t know how, or they’re waiting for permission to offer. When you ask, you give them that permission.

3. Receive without performing gratitude

Let people help you without turning it into a transaction you now owe. “Thank you” not “I’ll pay you back” or “let me know how I can return the favour.” Being helped is participating in the village. You’re not in debt. You’re in reciprocity.

This is hard if you’ve been conditioned to never need anything. But refusing help — or receiving it with so much guilt and performance that it feels like work for the other person — is opting out of the village.

4. Show up in the margins

The village doesn’t form in scheduled coffee meetings or annual catch-ups. It forms in voice notes, DMs, random Tuesday check-ins. Reply to the Instagram story. Send the article. Remember the thing they mentioned last month and ask how it went.

Consistency matters more than intensity. One big gesture doesn’t build a village. Fifty small ones do.

5. Be specific about what you need (and what you can give)

Not “let me know if I can help” (nobody ever does). “I can take care of X for you” or “I’m good at X if you ever need it.” Not “I’m struggling” — “I need someone to tell me if this a bad idea.”

Specificity makes helping easy. Vague offers and vague asks make helping work. Villagers help each other, but they don’t have to guess what’s needed.

6. Build for asynchronous reciprocity

You help them now, someone else helps you later. They help you now, you help someone else later. The flow doesn’t have to be direct to be real.

This is the hardest shift if you’ve been operating in transactional mode. But it’s also the shift that makes villages possible. You’re not paying back the person who helped you. You’re paying it forward to someone else. The village holds it all.

Where to find villagers:

People already doing what you want to do.

Not your aspirational heroes. People one or two steps ahead, or right where you are. If you’re building a business that doesn’t consume you, look for people already doing that — not the ones performing it on Instagram, the ones actually living it. They understand the operating system. They know what reciprocity looks like in practice, not just in theory.

People in similar life transitions.

New parents. Just went freelance. Just moved cities. Just burned it all down and started over. When you’re in the same transition, you have aligned needs and no playbook. You’re figuring it out together, which builds the foundation for mutual aid. Nobody’s the expert. Everyone’s contributing.

People who respond when you give first.

You forward the article, make the intro, send the resource. Some people will respond with energy — they engage, they appreciate it, they might send something back eventually. Some won’t. You’re not tracking who gives back what or when. You’re just noticing: does this feel like reciprocity, or does it feel like you’re shouting into a void? The distinction isn’t immediate. It reveals itself over time, across multiple interactions. You’re looking for the people where the exchange feels alive, not the people who respond “correctly” to your generosity.

People who ask for help without performing helplessness.

There’s a difference between “I’m struggling with X, can you help me think through it?” and “Everything is falling apart and I don’t know what to do and I’m so lost and—” One is inviting you into reciprocity. The other is making you the rescuer. Villagers are comfortable with need. They’re not making you save them. They’re asking you to help them think, or hold something, or reflect back what you’re seeing.

What to actually do today:

Pick one person. Someone you already know loosely, or someone whose work you follow, or someone you see regularly but have never properly spoken to.

Send the DM. Reply to the post. Start the conversation at pickup. Make the small offer: “I’m good at X if you ever need it” or “I saw this and thought of you” or “Can I ask you about Y?”

Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Don’t wait until you have something big to offer. Don’t wait until you’re sure they’ll say yes.

Be the villager first. The village forms around people who are already doing it.

Timeline expectations:

This doesn’t happen in a month. It doesn’t happen in six months. It happens over years of small deposits.

But you’ll know it’s working when you have someone to call when things fall apart. When you’re not tracking who owes what. When helping feels easy because you’re not the only one doing it. When you can receive without guilt.

The first step is the same regardless: Be the villager. The village will find you.

Two things:

1. What do you need help with right now? Be specific. “Someone to review my pricing strategy” or “The best recommendations for family-friendly UK staycations for Easter” or “A second pair of eyes on this pitch deck.” Put it in the comments.

2. What can you help with? Also specific. “I’m good at Canva templates” or “I know North London nurseries inside out” or “I can proofread in exchange for coffee.”