In this short, Phil Risher warns business owners—especially in home‑service sectors—against spending their own time fixing Zapier, GoHighLevel, and CRM automations. He argues that the owner’s time is the most valuable asset and should be focused on scaling the business, not on technical troubleshooting. Risher explains that when owners act as the de‑facto CTO, they are doing someone else’s job and losing strategic focus. He offers a practical three‑step approach: (1) document troubleshooting steps with a Loom video, (2) hire or partner with a specialized company to handle automation building and maintenance, and (3) adopt a 10/80/10 workflow where the owner contributes 10 % of ideas, external experts build 80 %, and the owner reviews the final 10 %. The overall message is to delegate technical work so owners can concentrate on growth and bottleneck removal.
Chapters
If you own a business and you're troubleshooting Zapier connections, you are wasting your most valuable employee's time. I've worked with so many home service business owners and listen, technology, AI is so cool. We can vibe code things, we can build automations. However, if you are the business owner and you're the one that's duct taping Zapier together and you're troubleshooting GoHighLevel automations with Zapier and your CRM and trying to make it all make sense, this is not the best use of your time in a business. The most valuable person's time is the owner. And your job is to grow the business. It's scale the asset, find the bottleneck, repeat. If you're not doing those things, then you are doing someone else's job because you have a bigger job to be doing. So, if part of your job every single week is to go into Zapier and troubleshoot the issues that it's having and going to your agent and do these things, you are effectively the CTO of your business. And yeah, it's cool. You should know technology. You should be deploying agents. You should be doing these things. But that doesn't mean that you should be troubleshooting them. That doesn't mean that you should be the one fully building them. You can vibe code them and stuff. But that doesn't mean that you have to be the one that's doing everything in the tech stack. So, what you can do today is one, document the process. So, record a Loom video of you going through and troubleshooting Zapier and give it to someone else. Two is find a company that you can layer into your business that can take that off your plate. Then you can do what you do best. You can have ideas. You can vibe code things. You can do things and then partner with a company to actually build cool things. And then you do the 10/80/10. 10% of it is your ideas and ideation, 80% built by someone else, and then 10% reviewed by you and refined and then deployed.
