83% of our market were already customers

Eighty-three percent of my market were already my customers, and I kept spending money trying to find new ones.

In my first business, I ran fifty online launches in five years, for events, products and services. Launches are brilliant at bringing in new customers, and ours worked well enough that I never stopped to question them.

But we had already found nearly everyone there was to find. The easier way to grow was to cross-sell to the clients we already had. It takes far less effort than a launch, and the margin is far better.

It took me years to see it, because a strategy that works well enough is the hardest one to question.

I watch owners do the same thing with AI now. They ask me which AI tool to buy before they've asked where their growth is actually going to come from. The tool question feels like progress, but it skips the decision that matters.

So before you spend anything on AI, answer one question: what's the one problem that, once it's solved, makes everything else easier or unnecessary?

Write every problem in the business down, however small. Give the list to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to question you about which problems cause the others. Keep going until one problem sits underneath most of the list.

Then judge every AI tool against that one problem. If a tool doesn't move it, it waits, however good the demo looks.

Our next sale was sitting in our own client list the whole time, and I was too busy looking for new customers to see it.