In this episode of Million Dollar Grit, host Julie Chenell recaps her recent two‑day "AI and Sheep" workshop, a hands‑on program where participants build AI‑driven business workflows on her farm. She contrasts the in‑person experience with a prior virtual run, noting similar productivity but highlighting the benefit of seeing participants' screens directly. Julie stresses that AI should be judged by concrete business outcomes—either increased revenue or reduced work hours—otherwise it becomes a distracting dopamine loop. She introduces a "problem‑first" approach: entrepreneurs list very specific pain points, deconstruct the existing process step‑by‑step, and then label each step using a 1‑2‑3 framework. Step 1 (rules & tools) covers deterministic automations; step 2 (synthesis) leverages AI’s pattern‑matching and summarization strengths; step 3 (decision/judgment) requires human discretion, though AI can sometimes fill the role. She walks through an Instagram DM lead‑generation example, showing how each step is classified and how the workflow is built, tested, and measured over 30 days for revenue or time‑saving impact. Julie also shares a demonstration of scaling Claude, an AI assistant, from one‑dimensional to five‑dimensional capability, and recounts a participant’s emotional reaction to using a 4D Claude to win back a client—illustrating that AI cannot resolve underlying fear‑based or mindset issues. The episode closes with announcements for upcoming workshops, a call for interest in virtual sessions, and an invitation for listeners to suggest future topics.
Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there.
Hey everyone, this is Julie in my car again. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. I just finished the 2-day AI and Sheep workshop at my home, and I wanted to drop in here and give you some quick takeaways before it left my brain. For those of you who don't know, I am running 4 workshops this summer called AI and Sheep. The sheep is just, you know, a hat tip to the sheep farm that I'm building. I am inviting people into my home for 2 days to work on AI workflows and agents. And also I have sheep, so come and see the sheep. It's sold out for 4 sessions, and it's been really interesting. I did a virtual version of it in May, and this was the first in-person event. We got tons done, and it was interesting to see the difference between what you can get done virtually versus in person. I think it was very similar. Which is nice to know if I want to do it virtually. You can get close to the same amount done. The only advantage to in-person, of course, is that I can look at your computer and some of the AI tools that we're using, like Obsidian and Cowork, they are local to your computer and that adds just a touch of complexity. Okay, I want to get to the big takeaways. And I teach an infrastructure of AI that basically is like teaching you how to fish. I don't want to just hand you a bunch of agents and workflows and say, here, use this and never work again. I don't think that's an effective way to learn. I think that when things break, you don't know what you built. And, you know, there are a lot of different tools out there. And if I can teach some basic foundational skills of how to approach AI workflows in your business, then I feel like I've set you up for the long game. And the first thing that I tell everyone who comes to an AI cheat workshop is that if you are not seeing either an increase in revenue or a reduction in work hours with AI, then AI is simply a distraction. And I mean, it's pretty easy to see if you are working less, like, okay, I was working 40 hours and now I'm working 20 hours thanks to AI. Technically that's more revenue per hour and we consider that growth. Or if your revenue is going up because of AI, then that would be an example of AI actually, you know, being beneficial for your company. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people where they don't see any revenue growth and they're not working any less. They may be enjoying working more. You know, there are some people that are just like so in the dopamine pool of AI that they're working, you know, 12, 16-hour days and loving it. I don't know, you do you, but this is part of the problem with AI is that because everything's a possibility, nothing actually becomes priority. And that's the danger of AI. The guardrails are gone. The constraints around what you build are gone. How are you making decisions? Before, you, you know, you needed a team of developers, you needed to know code, you needed $100 grand, whatever it is. Now you don't need any of that stuff. But just because you can build it doesn't mean you should. And that's sort of the big moment I want to teach folks before they dive too deeply into AI. So are you making more money or are you buying your time back? The second thing that I share with people at these events is that we want to do problem-first building. And if you are someone who has a negativity bias or you're a good, good black hat thinker, this is amazing for you. If you're like toxically positive and always looking on the good side. You're gonna have to work at this. I want you to complain, rant, vent, just get upset. Think about every single thing that's wrong in your business and make a giant list. And the more specific, the better. The better. I don't want you to say I have a problem with lead generation. That's like vague as hell. I want you to say I can't get anyone in my DMs on Instagram over to my email to book a call. That's a problem. That's a specific problem. I want you to get really specific. And we do problem-first AI building, and we look at, okay, You can't get people from your Instagram DMs into your email. That is a problem. What we're going to do is we're going to then deconstruct what the normal process is when it does work, even if it doesn't work very often. If it's never worked, we have to think about, okay, well, what's— what, what is missing here? We're going to write steps, you know, step by step by step. Well, first I respond to someone in DMs, then I ask a follow-up question because I don't want to just immediately ask for their email. Then, you know, whatever, step 1, 2, 3, 4. We build out the step-by-step, and then what we do is we apply a framework that I did not invent. I read it somewhere. I'm sorry that I can't remember where, but we apply a framework to every step of this workflow and we ask ourselves in this step, is it a very simple task, like a black and white task? Okay. If it is, we label that number 1, which is rules and tools. These are things like if this email comes in with this subject line, do this. We don't need AI for this. This is a waste of AI tokens. You can just use an automation. You can use filters. You can use Workspace Studio. You can use Zapier, Make, like a tool, some sort of tool, FG Funnels. When the step is pretty black and white, we're going to put a number 1 around it. And that's a rule and tool. If the step requires some sort of synthesis, that's the best word I can come up with. That means you're looking for patterns, you're extracting summaries, you're curating analysis, you're like something where you're doing something with the data in some sort of, you're manipulating the data in some way, writing, thinking, bullets, patterns. Ideas, all of that, that is in number 2. And AI is absolute rock solid at number 2 skills. And if your workflow says, okay, step 1, drop a link in Instagram for an opt-in, that's a rule and tool. That's not hard to do, right? What would you use? You'd use FG Funnels or ManyChat, something like that. And then the follow-up, you know, which is like reaching out, that's not really pattern matching. That's not analysis. That's not curation. That's actually a number 3. Number 3 is where we put decision, discernment, taste, and judgment. And sometimes AI can do this, but oftentimes it still works best as a human. So every step of your workflow, you're looking for what can be a rule and tool, and number 1, what is some sort of synthesis of information, which is number 2, AI, or is it something that's a decision, discernment, judgment, taste? That's a number 3. And there you just have to make a judgment call. Are you going to have AI do it or are you going to have a human do it? Now, if we're going to just use this example of you drop a link in the DMs, right? This is the problem-first AI building. If you are in FG Funnels, you've got your Instagram connected to your FG Funnels account. It's automatically dropping a link. That's a rule and tool. Now, that follow-up, if you're in FG Funnels, technically you can deploy a conversational AI. So some— someone might hear this and be like, you know what, that follow-up, I'm going to use AI. I'm going to make a judgment call and I'm going to make AI do that. That's number 3. And remember, number 3 are decisions, and that's sometimes AI and sometimes human. Now, that person may notice that people don't respond, in which case maybe they made the wrong the wrong call. Maybe a human would really be better there. But if you're not really sure what to say and you need a constant idea bank of replies in your workflow, then you would change your workflow, right? Number 1, drop the link. It's a number 1. It's a rule and tool. Number 2, get— have DM idea replies at the ready. That's synthesis. That would be AI. Maybe you would have that in a note somewhere or in a Google Sheet or whatever. Number 3, reply. That's a discernment judgment decision. And someone might choose a conversational AI bot and say, let's have AI do it. And another person might say, you know what, I'm going to grab the best idea from that sheet and I'm going to respond. Now you've just created a workflow. AI is maybe helping with that workflow in a big way or maybe in a little way, but is it actually helping you? Now the next thing you might say about this workflow is, okay, well, the problem is that I forget to follow up, right? And maybe you want in that workflow a scheduled task that AI is doing to remind you and give you ideas, something like that. And this is how we build AI workflows. We start with a problem, always with a problem. And then we, we write out the steps in very, very specific detail. And then we label every step a 1, a 2, or a 3. And that way it helps us determine how best to build the workflow. If it's a 1, you're going to find a tool, some sort of tool to do it. If it's a 2, AI should do it. And if you don't know how to make AI do it, you are not up on AI, this would be a reason to work with someone who can teach you. And then for things that are number 3, you have to make a decision yourself. Are you going to just do it? Are you the human going to do this part of the workflow, or are you going to have AI do it? Sometimes having AI do it works. Other times, eh, it's better to just be human about it. Once that workflow is created and you've got that whole process in place, then you want to test it for the next 30 days. And you're looking for two things. Number one, are you making more money? Or number two, are you saving time in some form? If you stick to these primary, primary, uh, I don't know, philosophical foundations that AI should be helping you make more money or buying back time, that you should always have specific problem first building, and you should deploy this framework around rules and tools synthesis, and decisions, you will probably be okay in the AI world. If you don't do this, you could very, very easily get lost. And that was probably the biggest takeaway of AI in Sheep. Now, I did explain, I taught everyone how to take Claude from 1D, one-dimensional AI, to five-dimensional. And we went through all of those dimensions, 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, 5D. And we built out a 5D Claude. And once we did that, we then began with our problem-first building It was so fun to see the things that people did that they were able to accomplish. One really interesting part about the event is that, you know, when you're looking at your business and you're saying, okay, well, what are the problems that are running in my business? And most people have revenue problems or lead generation problems. You know, that's the primary, primary thing we were working in. AI was solving the, the workflow, right? I had one, one client in the room who, you know, she was, she'd gotten her Claude all the way up to, you know, 4D, I think. And she looked at the response. Uh, it was like trying to help win back a client. She was like floored. And it was this like, oh my goodness moment that she had. And I said to her, I said, okay, well go ahead and send it. And she just froze. She's like, I'm not gonna send it right now. I said, yeah, why not? She said, well, I have to tweak it a little. I said, okay, cool, tweak it and send it. I don't know if she actually ended up sending it or not, but I thought, well, this is at the end of the day, if the business problems you're having are, you know, fear-based problems, mindset-based problems, nervous system regulation problems, no AI in the world is gonna solve this for you. And it was a really interesting little example or tidbit in the workshop because AI had successfully done exactly what she had hoped and dreamed that it would do, but she still had to then put it out there into the world and, you know, face possible rejection or possible kickback. And, you know, those are the things that really are the sort of root causes of why businesses don't succeed. All the strategies and the tactics in the world, uh, can't overcome those kinds of issues. Anyway, I'm super excited. I've, I've learned so much teaching this several times now. My next group is coming in July, and I would love to know from my audience if you are interested in learning this kind of thing, this AI, uh, 5-dimensional Claude is what I'm calling it, and working on these workflows, just let me know. You know, you can email me, you can hit me up in the DMs on Instagram. I'm going to consider if I am going to do another virtual version just because I know for a lot of folks it's hard to get out to my farm to see the sheep. Anyway, it was a great, it was a great week and I'm excited for the next one. And as always, if there's something you want me to talk about on Million Dollar Grit, please hit me up and let me know. You have a great week.
And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.
