How AI Gave Me Back 10 Hours a Week

Twelve months ago, I was doing what I tell my clients not to do: running the business from inside the business. Every caption, every carousel, every website page, every PDF and every product had to go through me. I was the strategist, the copywriter, the designer and the admin team. The admin team was not performing well.

Today, AI handles a big share of that work, and I've got up to 10 hours a week back. That's more than a full working day, every week, returned to strategy, clients and the occasional lunch that isn't eaten over a keyboard.

This isn't a post about how AI will change everything. It's about what it actually changed in one regional consultancy, and what I've learned about getting the same result for other small business owners.

The problem wasn't the work. It was where the work sat.

I've traded as Strategise Now for 14 years. In that time I've supported more than 200 businesses, run more than 60 workshops and delivered over 300 coaching sessions. I know what good strategy looks like.

What I didn't have was time to build the assets that let people find that strategy. A website. A lead magnet. A course. A steady stream of social content. Each one sat on my to-do list, waiting for a free week that never arrived.

Sound familiar? It's the same pattern I see in almost every owner I coach. Capable people, stuck doing $50-an-hour tasks because nobody else can.

What I actually built with AI

I use Claude as my working partner, connected to the tools I already use. Here's what came out of the last few months:

• A full website build on Kajabi. Five pages, from structure to copy, with Claude co-piloting the build screen by screen. Clear instructions, exact values, no guesswork.
• Legal documents that match my brand. Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Refund Policy, drafted to Australian standards and produced as branded PDFs from a single template. (Yes, a solicitor still reviews them. AI drafts. Professionals sign off.)
• A lead magnet and nurture sequence. The Owner Dependency Scorecard: a 12-question self-assessment, a five-email follow-up sequence, a web version and a six-page PDF.
• A $27 ebook, "Strategy First". Written, designed and later rebranded across every asset in one pass, not one painful page at a time.
• A bank of social content. Instagram carousel series, reel scripts and cover tiles, all in my brand colours and my voice, built as systems rather than one-off posts.
• Online courses and workshops. My AI starter course on Kajabi, plus the "Working with Claude" live workshop series, complete with slide decks, handouts, promo tiles and Zoom backgrounds.

None of this replaced my thinking. It replaced the hours between having the idea and having the finished thing.

Where the hours went

The real time-saver: connectors and plugins

Chatting with AI is useful. Connecting it to your tools is where the hours come back.

Claude in Chrome lets Claude work in my own browser, with my own logins. It can read a page, fill in a form, click through a setup screen and check what's live, instead of me copying and pasting between tabs all afternoon. For someone who has spent years toggling between twelve open tabs, this was the moment it stopped being a novelty.

Kajabi is where my website, courses and offers live. With Claude working alongside me in the Kajabi dashboard, a website build that would have taken weeks of evenings became a series of focused sessions. Claude knows the build plan, gives me exact values for each screen, and flags anything that doesn't look right before it goes live.

Skills and plugins mean I don't explain myself twice. My brand colours, fonts, voice and preferences are set up once, so every carousel, PDF and email comes out looking and sounding like me, not like a generic robot with good grammar.

The principle is simple: the fewer times you copy, paste, re-explain or reformat, the more hours you get back.

What AI didn't do

It didn't decide my pricing. It didn't choose my clients. It didn't work out that my core audience is women running successful businesses who feel every decision lands on them. That came from 14 years of sitting across the table from owners.

AI is a very capable assistant. It's a poor substitute for judgement. The businesses that get the most from it are the ones that already know what they're trying to achieve.

Now I'm helping small businesses do the same

Once I saw what was possible, the next step was obvious. Most of the owners I work with are drowning in exactly the tasks AI handles well: marketing content, documents, proposals, reports, research and admin.

So that's become part of my work. I'm currently showing an agronomist how AI can save time and lift productivity in a real agricultural business. I've built AI digital literacy training for young people in agriculture. And I'm running practical, plain-English sessions for business owners who want results, not a lecture on large language models.

There are three ways to start:

1. The AI Starter Course. A self-paced online course on Kajabi that walks you through setting up AI for your business, one practical step at a time.
2. Working with Claude workshops. Live online sessions where we build real things together, in real time.
3. Strategic Partner support. For owners who want me in their corner, working out where AI fits in their business and where it doesn't.

Where to begin

Pick one task you do every week and resent every time. Write down how long it takes. That's your first automation, and your first hour back.

Then get in touch. I'll help you find the next nine.

Shayne Miller is a business strategist, coach and the founder of Strategise Now. She works with small business owners, farming families and not-for-profits to move from overwhelmed to strategic. The strategist in your corner.