In this practical episode, Tim Harrison, Founder and CEO of Coaching Innovation Lab, shares how AI can be your most powerful leverage tool as a stage 2 solopreneur. If you’re overwhelmed wearing every hat, struggling with time constraints, and doing too much low-value work yourself, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What it takes to build simple systems that multiply your impact and productivity
– Why AI is now the essential third option beyond just eliminate or delegate
– How to focus on your zone of genius while letting AI handle everything else
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host, Scott Retheimer, and today we’re talking to the founders who want to win in what I think is aptly, should aptly be known as the automation age, especially those of you who are in level two and are doing absolutely everything yourself, because historically, if you’re in level two and it’s just you and maybe one or two people helping you, kind of had two choices, you could either, if you were, if your schedule is full, you could either stop doing something, we would call that eliminate, or you could hire somebody else and delegate to them, and both of those opportunities can be helpful, but they have their flaws, and more than ever, there is a third option that’s available to us, and that is the ability to automate and to unpack that, what it would look like, and how you can start implementing it today.
I am thrilled to welcome Tim Harrison, who is a pioneer at the intersection of both coaching and AI. As the founder of Coaching Innovation Lab, he specializes in advising, training, and consulting solopreneurs and organizations on the practical application of AI. Tim’s leadership in the field is globally recognized. He’s one of the eight experts selected for the International Coaching Federation’s Global Task Force on AI, helping to shape industry standards around the use of AI. His innovative work includes founding the nonprofit EPO G Academy, which developed Power Path, an AI-powered coaching system designed to bridge guidance gaps in education, and leading Project Beacon, an NIH study measuring the impact of coaching for underrepresented biomedical PhD students. He’s here with us today. Tim, I’m really excited about this conversation. One of the things I said is a lot of times these conversations on AI can just go 1000 different ways all at once, but I love your specialty in this, or your focus in this on how we can use it for for solopreneurs, and to an extent the organizations that they start, and so I’m wondering if just right out of the gate you can start with the mindset shift that you’re seeing solopreneurs have to make in this age, where so many AR tools are available.
Tim Harrison
Yeah, there, Scott, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. There is so much information out there about AI. There’s so much hype. Is it going to destroy the planet and destroy us, or is it going to be our savior, and I think you have to have a balanced perspective. When I say AI, I like to say applied innovation, because it’s never about the technology, it’s about our ability to do things better. And for solopreneurs, many of them, like you said, are the only person in their business, they’re doing everything, they’re wearing a lot of hats, and so there’s never been a more powerful technology and opportunity to expand what’s what an individual is capable of than now.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. One of the reasons I’ve seen folks be somewhat reluctant is they just don’t know how to start, so I would imagine that most people have kind of started now, but let’s say we had the opportunity to kind of push reset and start the best way possible. What’s the best way to start thinking about and using some of these AI technologies?
Tim Harrison
Do what you do best, let AI do the rest. Right, there is now an opportunity to rethink what is it that’s worth doing, and where should I be spending my time? Everyone has the same challenge. There’s only 24 hours in a day, and everyone has the same challenge, that most of what we do doesn’t matter at all. There’s something called the Pareto principle, or the 8020 rule, where 20% of our input is responsible for 80% of our output, and the opposite is also true, 80% of what we spend our time on is only responsible for 20% of our output, and so if you want to maximize your impact and your influence and your productivity, you have to figure out how to maximize the time spent in that 20% that has outsized returns, and AI is now that third option, like you mentioned, you can eliminate things, take things off your plate, you can simplify them, do the minimum viable version of it. Now you can automate. Now you can automate, right. And so what you want to do is, you want to look at, well, what are the things that AI is just as good as I am, or better at, or better, and trade off, hand it off to AI, hand it off to those systems, right. Everyone has four zones of ability: you have your zone of incompetence, your zone of competence, your zone of excellence, and your zone of genius.
Zone of incompetence are things that maybe you’re not great at, or things that anyone can do just as well as you, right, like the. Data entry, you know, basic analysis, basic summary, that kind of thing. Your zone of competence are things that you do average. Most people can do them, you’re not bad at it, but you know it’s pretty average. And the zone of excellence are things that you do above average, right? And then zone of genius are the things that you do that are unique to you that you tend to get the most fulfillment and reward from, and they have the greatest impact on your business. So, you want to do is, you want to minimize your time spent doing the things that are average or below, and you want to maximize time spent on the things that you’re above average or great at, right? And that makes sense. And so, now AI is an opportunity to hand off those things that are average or below, so you maximize time spent on the things that have the greatest impact.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s really helpful. One of the things I’ve seen, and I’d love your insight on this, is there are some things that AI isn’t good at, or as good as it needs to be, and sometimes it can make mistakes and errors, and one of the challenges I’ve seen is folks who have jumped straight to the bottom of that tank, like these are the things that I don’t do well, let me have AI do them, and one of the challenges with starting there is you don’t know if the output is good or not to some extent, right, like if I was, if I was going back to school to be a rocket scientist or something, I don’t know if that’s a thing, but I wouldn’t know if the answers that it was giving to me were right or wrong. That’s not very helpful, whereas in that zone of competence, things that I can do but I don’t really care to do, it’s much easier to see, hey, am I getting a good result back or not? And I have found that that tends to be some of the lower hanging fruit. Would you agree?
Tim Harrison
I would agree in the fact that you’re not able to evaluate the response as well if you don’t, if you’re not skilled in that area. However, if you’re not skilled in that area, the odds are that the basic that you’re going to get from AI might actually exceed what you’re doing. So it’s a trade off, and the areas that I’m great at, I’m able to distinguish and have judgment and taste around what’s good and what’s not, but if I’m not able to do that, the odds are that the AI might actually boost my baseline for that. Right, there was a research study that they did called the Cybernetic Teammate. You can look it up, but what they did is they had individuals use AI and compare them on performance to teams who didn’t use AI right, so imagine you had someone who was a marketer and someone who was, you know, had a financial background, and they had them run a campaign together, and then you had an individual who was either a marketer or a financial advisor, or had a finance, you know, was a finance professional, and they used AI for the opposite, so the marketing person use AI for finance, the finance person use AI for marketing.
The individuals who use AI outperform the team of the marketer and the financial person. Wow, right? And this is good news if you’re a solopreneur, because you’re wearing a lot of hats: you’re wearing the marketing hat, you’re wearing the financial hat, you’re wearing whatever service you provide hat, you’re wearing the backend hat, all of that at once, and so it’s actually good news, but when you double click and look into why it worked, well, it bridged the skill gap, so the financial person must have been well below average on the marketing side, and vice versa, and the AI bridged that gap, it actually raised their level, so they could be average or above average, however, it didn’t improve their existing skill, so AI didn’t make them a better marketer, or AI didn’t make them better at finance. So, there’s a saying I like to say: is it raises the floor, but the ceiling is still up to you, right? So, it can bridge the gaps of things that you’re not good at, but you still have to work on your judgment and your taste, so using AI is an excuse not to develop skill, but it allows you to choose which skills have are worth developing, because you can augment the rest of them.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. That is great news from a study standpoint, and really, really helpful insight. So, you work a lot with coaches, and I would say coaches are kind of a helpful example of what a lot of long-term solopreneurs are, right, professional service providers, folks that are good at what they do, and, and for those folks, one of the biggest things, and you touched on this in the very beginning of the show, is to get as much of the other stuff off of your plate as you can, and that allows us to maximize our dollars per hour worked. It allows us to do things that we enjoy doing, and can fill in some really, really big gaps, because most of us aren’t great at everything, right. And so, for a coach looking at how to start automating AI, maybe they’ve separated some of these different zones. What are some of the best ways you see coaches or other professional service providers using AI to save time?
Tim Harrison
Yeah, for one, you have to just use it. You are the expert at your business, and you’re the expert at your domain, and these companies, OpenAI. Google Anthropic, you know, X AI, they’re going to come out with these incredible models, and they’re going to get smarter and smarter and smarter, but they’re not going to tell you what that actually looks like in your business, right? And so you have to get your hands dirty and start using it, because that’s where first value is going to going to come. After that, it’s not just about using the tools, right? You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, and the people who have the greatest results with this are the ones who built a system around it. When you look back at the past, sometimes you can predict the future, and in the last great technological revolution, we had the combustion engine, right, that was invented, and everyone knew, just like they know now, that this new powerful technology was going to transform the way that people do transportation and transform the way that they do work. But if you go back, you can look this up.
What were some of the early mock-ups, some of the early inventions with the new engine? And you would see a horse carriage with an engine in the back, because they thought, oh, wow, this is going to make the horses faster, they’re going to be able to carry heavily, heavier weight, they’re going to last a lot longer, because there’s less wear and tear, and it’s very logical to think that, because they spent their whole life traveling via horse, so that was their only mental model, and we look back at that, and we laugh, because we think obviously it was the automobile, it was the Model T that ended up being the real breakthrough that the combustion engine allowed for, and if you look at a lot of current AI use today, it’s like that engine-powered horse and buggy, we have this new AI-powered engine, but we’re just slapping it on and bolting it on to the existing way that we do things. The greatest opportunity with AI is not just doing things a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, it’s in the new things that are now possible. What’s the Model T in your area? And so, for people who are looking to get the most out of it, don’t just ask, “Hey, can AI do this? Ask, what is now possible, and that’s the difference between being able to go from zero to 60.
To give a very practical example, let’s say you’re a coach or you’re an advisor, you’re a consultant. What you do is you hop on calls with people and you’re paid for your expertise, right? If you have your system currently set up from an AI native perspective. You may have an AI note taker that is on the call, and here’s all the relevant context. And then you have your basic AI operating system, like your cloud or your ChatGPT or your Gemini in the middle. And then you’ve set up your back end, so where AI can access your context, what your business is about, your name, your brand, your packages, your contracts, and all that stuff. And then what that allows you to do, once you’ve set up that system, where it connects, you can do a simple prompt like this that might take you 10 seconds. Hey, I just got off a call with a leader, and they’re interested in me sending them a proposal. I want you to look at that called transcript and identify their core pain points. Then I want you to reference my existing services and packages and help me build a pitch deck for this engagement. Make sure you reference my brand colors, my logo, and all that. And then hit enter. And once you set up that system, the AI will go in, read the transcript, analyze it, reach back into your back end, like your Notion, your Google Drive, your Outlook, find your pre-existing services, blend those two together, and then I’ll write the code for an entire presentation. It’ll go ahead and build that out.
Tim Harrison
That might be six to 10 hours of work before that can now be initiated in the first, you know, 10 15 minutes, once you have that system in place, now it’s not final, because you know the AI is going to do its best attempt. You still need your judgment, you still need skill to review it, but sheesh, like you’re saving six hours, gets in, it gets compressed down about 15 seconds, and that sounds like hype, but so does seeing a car go from zero to 60 in less than 10 seconds if you spent your whole life riding a horse, it’s the equivalent today.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s fascinating. Fascinating. Well, Tim, there’s a question that I’m eager to hear your answer to. This question I ask all my guests, and it is this: What is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew.
Tim Harrison
I’ll say you’re already on that mountain. A lot of people look forward there, they have things they want to achieve and things that they want to accomplish, and it’s like it’s this mountain over there that they need to then start climbing. I think, when you actually get more granular, you realize there’s a lot of things that you’ve already done that are moving you in that direction, and you’re actually probably standing at the foothills or standing somewhere on that mountain, and it’s not somewhere that you’re that you’re not already, and I think the difference. Is when you’re on that mountain, it’s easier to continue when just looking at a big challenge. It’s easy to feel like you have to get started, and there’s all this inertia to overcome, but when you realize, oh, I’m already making progress in this direction, or I’m already there, then I think, I think it’s a lot easier.
You have to see yourself as already doing it, as already it, you know, when I got trained to become a coach, after you graduate from the certification process, so many people are like, when I get my first client, then I’ll be a coach, but then they don’t act in alignment because they don’t believe that’s who they are already, so they act as if they’re not a coach, so they don’t do the things that a coach would do, but as soon as you say, okay, I am this or I am that. It’s suddenly appropriate to do the things that that person would do, and I think a lot of people just get stuck because they, they choose to put it outside of them instead of seeing that they’re already there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so good, so good. Well, Tim, there’s some folks listening to this, and they’d love help, you know, taking the next step, whether it be the first one or the 500th into really putting AI to work in the and allowing it to shape their practice. Where can they reach out to you? Where can they find more out about the work that you all do?
Tim Harrison
Yep, find me on LinkedIn, Tim Harrison, and you can also find more at Coaching Innovation lab.com We put together a special package that special link for people who find out about me on this podcast, which will be included in the show notes, so make sure you check those out.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, fantastic, we’ll get that in the notes for everybody. And Tim, just really a fascinating conversation. Pleasure having you here. Thanks so much for being on the show, and for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed Podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10 question founders evolution quiz for free at foundersquiz.com That’s foundersquiz.com It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you. And let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So, keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Tim Harrison
Tim Harrison is a pioneer at the intersection of Coaching and AI. As the founder of the Coaching Innovation Lab, he specializes in advising, training, and consulting solopreneurs and organizations on the practical application of AI. Tim’s leadership in the field is globally recognized. He was one of eight experts selected for the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) Global Taskforce on AI, helping to shape industry standards around the use of AI. His innovative work includes founding the nonprofit EPOG Academy, which developed PowerPath, an AI-powered coaching system designed to bridge guidance gaps in education, and leading Project BEACON, an NIH study measuring the impact of coaching for underrepresented biomedical PhD students.
Want to learn more about Tim Harrison’s work at Coaching Innovation Lab? Check out his website at https://coachinginnovationlab.com/
Connect with Tim through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachtimharrison/