#300 - What AI Actually Replaced On My Team (and What It Never Will)

A few years ago, I had a team of 6 people and I don't think I've ever been more stretched, more stressed, or slower to actually get anything done. On paper, it looked like I'd made it, right? A real business, a proper team, a Slack channel full of very clever people. Underneath it, my profit was thinner than it had been in years. My calendar was wall-to-wall with meetings and every little thing I wanted to do suddenly had to pass through 5 other people before it could happen. Today, my core team is a fraction of that size. I work school hours and the business makes more money and moves faster than it did back when it was quote unquote bigger. So when a bunch of you started messaging me asking what my team actually looks like now, especially with all that's going on with AI, I thought, right, let's pull back the curtain all the way back. And that's exactly what I want to walk you through today. The whole thing. Who's on my team, who isn't, what I handed over to AI, and the bits I will never hand over to anyone. Hey, hey there. I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. This one's a proper behind the scenes episode because you asked for it. And I'm always happy to talk about this stuff because I think there's a story we've all been sold about what a grown-up business is supposed to look like. And I think it's quietly costing a lot of people their profit, their time, and their sanity. Here's the thing I wanna name first. Somewhere along the way, we all absorb this idea that the next step, that the marker that you've really made it means a bigger team, more people, more hires, team photo, team retreat. So you get to a certain point, things feel hard, you're maxed out, and everyone around you says the same thing. You just need to hire. You need to get that off your plate. And it makes sense. You're drowning. Of course, more hands sounds like the answer. But have you ever noticed what actually happens in those first few months after you bring someone on? You're not suddenly magically free. You're training. You're in more meetings. You're writing briefs, reviewing work, giving feedback, answering quick questions that are never really that quick and pull you out of what you were actually doing. The thing you wanted to hand off is now a thing you have to explain, manage, and check. And weirdly, you feel busier than you did before you had the help. So let me say the part nobody says. If you hired too soon and it made your life harder, that is not you being a bad leader. It's not that you can't delegate. It's not that you picked the wrong person. It's that hiring is a system. And if you bolt a person on top of a business that doesn't have its system sorted yet, you don't remove the chaos, you just add a salary. Now, a bigger team was never the proof that you've built a real business. Plenty of businesses with big teams are held together with duct tape and everyone's overtime. The real flex is a business that makes great money and stays as light as you want it to. Where growth doesn't automatically mean more people, more overheads, more of you in the middle of everything. That's the lens I want you to hold while I take you through my actual team, because it's small on purpose. Okay. So who's actually here on Team HelloFunnels now? First of all, there's me, of course, and I work somewhere between part-time and full-time. Basically, I work school hours with the odd bit on a weekend to make up for the fact that my weekdays have a hard stop. That's a deliberate design by choice, and everything else is built to protect it. Then there's Kim, my General Manager. Now, please don't get scared off by this title. I've pretty much always had someone in this role. Think of it as your second in command, your right hand, a trusted long-term person with a broad generalist skill set that's complementary to your own. Someone who can hold a lot of moving parts so that you don't have to. For me, what that looks like is Kim runs the rest of the team. She's across our reporting and our operations. She owns our tech setup and our buildouts. Kim is very senior. She's amazing. We've worked together for years. So she has a senior version of that role, a more senior title. But here's what I want you to take from that. Most coaches and course creators don't need a Kim yet. You don't need that level of detail, experience, or expense, but you do need that entry-level version of that role. Someone who can come in, schedule your emails, schedule your social, build out email sequences, set up your landing pages, come back with all your reporting, the stuff that you should not be doing yourself. That is the first stuff to get off your plate, not the last. So Kim's part-time, by the way, around 20 hours a week, and the rest of the team reports into her, not to me. Next is my VA, who's around 25 hours a week. Now, her main world is customer service, plus a lot of the nitty-gritty behind the scenes. Though, spoiler, a lot of that is now things that we are handing off to AI or using AI to support her with, which I'll come back to. She's also the person who quality checks our work, and this is a little thing that matters more than it sounds. Kim and my VA Sarah check each other's work. One sets something up, the other checks it. That's the real reason why I love to have at least 2 people, not so that you can do more, but so you're not the one proofreading everything at 10:00 PM. And also, so you always have a backup when someone goes on holidays or gets sick. Next, there's Keely who helps with our social media. And this is a nice example of a split that I love. I still create the actual posts. Well, me and Claude, that's us, but Keely creates our daily stories using our emails, and our social posts for inspiration. And she schedules everything straight into the app rather than through a scheduler. So we get all the benefits of picking trending audio and any other new features that come online. She's a contractor, a few hours a week, but honestly couldn't live without her. So that's my core team. Then a bit wider, we have our coaches and mentors. So we have a team of mentors who help out inside our coaching community. And I've got a head coach who I work closely with, someone I'm in regular contact with every day or so. Then we have expert coaches who come in on their specific zone of genius. So Facebook ads, tech, copy and design. They jump into the community every day, answer their questions, run their calls, and then that's it. There's very little left on my side. Now, here's a change I actually love and is a good example of smaller and simpler beats bigger and fancier. I used to have a separate bookkeeper and a separate accountant. I paid a lot for both. And they'd go back and forth, each not loving how the other did things. And I'm in the middle of all of it. They always wanted to jump on meetings as well, which I never loved because boring. And every time I come away thinking, I'm not sure what I actually got from that. Because here's the thing about my particular business model. I am very across my numbers and my forecasting is driven by marketing, not by someone coming in to restructure costs or anything like that.. So that big, expensive, high-touch setup, that just wasn't actually giving me much extra value. So I scaled it right back. Now my accountant and my bookkeeper are the same person. It's one person, local, a general accountant on my high street, not an online specialist who charges 10x for the privilege. I don't have the same back and forth because there's no other person for them to disagree with. It's simple, saves a lot of money, and it does the actual job. Making sure I'm meeting my obligations and not paying a cent more tax than I need to. Our payroll runs through an app, mostly automatically, and I just review it and click a button once a week and it's done. That's it. Not glamorous, but effective. So next up we have Facebook ads. So Facebook ads, we used to have someone running our ads. We tried various different agencies. Now we actually do it in-house. I come up with the creative with help from AI. Kim runs and manages the ads, turning things on and off, reporting on what's working. It's actually quite a simple system. It works really well for us and it doesn't take that much time. Next is podcast editing. So we used to pay someone to edit and manage our podcast. Now I record it straight into Riverside. So I'm doing right now and I edit it in there myself in just a few minutes. Probably takes me about 15 minutes per episode to edit the entire thing. It's honestly on my list of something to hand off, but it's such a small job that it's just not freeing up enough of my time to make it worth it right now, but I'm sure it will be at some point. Okay. Right. The other bit you asked about, AI, what does that look like now? Well, let me tell you exactly what AI has replaced on my team because it's real and it's quite specific. So the number one thing that AI has come in and helped replace is content. So we used to have a copywriter for a very long time. Personally, I have been the creative director, not the actual doer of my content for probably 5 or 6 years if I'm counting. I have not been the one physically writing the content. However, this content still definitely comes from me. I come up with the ideas, I plan it all out, I write the brief email by email, post by post. And then I used to hand that brief over to a copywriter. Now instead, I hand it over to AI. It comes back, I give it my edits, and it's done. The turnaround is a fraction of what it used to be. And actually, the content one is the piece that you can grab for yourself today. It's always the first piece I say people should outsource, particularly with AI. So if you're sitting there thinking, that's the bit I want off my plate first, I want AI doing more of my content, that's exactly what our Cash Money Content System is. It's our simple system you set up once and then it shows you how to create content people actually stop, save, and buy from, and then hand the doing of it over to the AI. Thousands of coaches have installed this in their business and they all tell me that it's completely changed the way they create their content for the better. Honestly, handing my content brief to AI instead of a copywriter is one of my favorite things we've ever taken off my plate. So if you want your first AI team member running your content, this is where I would start. And if you want to use our proven prompts and system, you can grab the link in the show notes, get it installed today, and win yourself back a stack of hours this week. Okay, back to it. So this is what I mean when I say we have really stripped things back and simplified, and that it's actually made things faster and easier for us. It's not about having one shiny tool you bolt on or one big expensive hire. It's about figuring out Who is the correct workforce to do the tasks? What are the things that the humans need to do and what are the things we can put in place to help the humans do their job better, faster, more accurately? And here's the other side of this. What AI has not replaced, and as far as I'm concerned right now, never will. So number one is a strategy. The sales and marketing brain of this business, that is my core job. Coming up the campaigns, deciding what we're going to try, running experiments, watching what works, what flops, being a bit of a mad scientist with it all. That's not a task to outsource. That's my actual business, and it is one of my happy places. Next is product development. So the ideas, actually building our courses, our programs, again, that's still me. However, I definitely do get AI to help speed up some of the things like creating workbooks, creating transcripts, things like that. But the core ideas, all that, that still comes from me. Next, delivery to our clients. Yes, again, that is me with some AI touches. We have got AI coaches, we have got AI templates, we have got AI bots, and more of those coming soon, so that when we're in there and we're coaching our clients, we are able to spend our time focusing on the most important things, the things that need a real human sense of nuance, that real background information, the things that are going to give the highest impact, and that in between that our clients are as supported as possible through great smart and strategic AI tools. And then my final little confession: web design. To be honest, apart from the odd occasions where I have dabbled with outsourcing this, in the nearly 20 years that I've been in business, I've pretty much always done this myself. Yes, I probably should hand it off. Yes, it probably would be something to free up a lot of my time if I did, but the truth is I love it. It's my guilty pleasure. It is fun. I love procrastibranding, okay? And honestly, this is probably why I haven't dived like face first into all the AI design stuff yet, because I don't want a robot to take away my fun. I love it. I'm keeping it. So that's the line for me. The AI has taken the repetitive work. The AI is supporting the human work, but it is not touching the thinking, the taste, or the parts that are the reason that I built this in the first place. So if you take just one thing from today, let it be this: a bigger team does not have to be the goal. A bigger team does not— a mark of success. You can absolutely build and design and shape your business and your team around what works for you, around your preferences and your strengths. A business that makes great money without needing more and more of everyone, for me, that's the goal. I no longer believe that I need a big, shiny, expensive team to have a quote unquote real business. And I definitely don't believe that hiring before your systems are ready is gonna buy you any kind of freedom. All it does is buy you overwhelm and a whole bunch of extra steps. A couple of brilliant people who check each other's work, a strategic and dialed-in AI pit crew doing the repetitive stuff, supporting your humans, and then you staying across your own numbers and doing the important parts, the parts only you can do. That's not a smaller version of a real business. For a lot of us, that is the real business. And if you haven't already, and you want to dive into outsourcing some of these pieces, like I said, content is the first place I recommend you start. And if you haven't grabbed it yet, you're going to want to grab our Cash Money Content System. It is an absolute life-saving game changer for online course creators. It is the exact first thing that I handed to AI, and the link is waiting for you in the show notes. Alrighty guys, that's it for today. I will see you all next week.