How I Use AI And A Small Team To Buy Back My Time

Not that long ago, I was doing everything myself.

I coached every client. I filmed and edited all my content. I sent all the DMs. I was trying to build partnerships, work on the business, and lead my family. I have three kids, I am married, I train as a hybrid athlete, and I am involved in our church. I wanted to help as many people as I could, but I was out of time.

Here is a question that helped me. If wealthy, successful people have the same amount of time as you, how are they getting more done? The answer is leverage. For me that means AI, systems, and a small team.

What You Actually Want Is Freedom

Outside the freedom we have in our salvation, most owners want three things. More money. More time and flexibility. And more impact.

Money and time often fight each other. You can take a job that pays well and work eighty hours a week. Or you can have time and no money. Neither one feels good. And underneath both is impact, because God wired us to serve people. We find a lot of meaning in helping others.

AI can help with all three, but only if you build the right systems around it.

The Four Skills You Keep Growing In

Every business owner keeps growing in four skills:

• Marketing. Telling people what you do.
• Sales. A business does not really start until money changes hands.
• Fulfillment. Delivering the service or product.
• Leadership. Setting up systems and automations and leading people.

Dan Martell talks about a hiring ladder in Buy Back Your Time. If you feel stuck, you are probably in the weeds on your calendar, your inbox and your delivery. So you start buying that time back. An assistant first. Then someone to help with fulfillment. Then people for marketing and sales. Then you are leading the team.

Keep Marketing On Your Calendar

Even at the top, if you are building a personal brand, stay close to marketing. Everything depends on leads.

People connect with people more than with brands. That is why so many brands have a face. So carve out time on your calendar to make content, and have a plan for your reels, videos and podcast episodes.

My team now has an assistant, a coach in my coaching offer, people who help with marketing and distribution, and people who set and close sales calls. That lets me show up to lead my team, serve my clients, and make content.

Where AI Saves Me The Most Time

Prep before calls. Before a sales call or a podcast, my assistant uses AI to pull together a short brief. What they filled out, the links in their bio, what their show is about. Doing that by hand could take thirty minutes to an hour. Now I read it a few minutes before and I am ready to help.

Content. I use AI to script about 95 percent of my thoughts ahead of time. I am not reading a teleprompter. It gives me bullet points of what to cover. I also build AI helpers for clients that get them most of the way there, so they can block an hour or two a week to film.

Editing and publishing. My team edits with AI tools like Descript and Opus Clip. I record podcasts in Riverside, which keeps everything in the cloud for my team. Scheduling tools let us post across every platform.

DMs. My team can screenshot a message and drop it into an AI that knows my offer and my voice. It helps keep replies steady, even on a day when I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

Why One Platform Is Not Enough

There is an idea I come back to often. Before someone buys from a cold start, they take in about seven hours of content, across eleven touch points, on four platforms. If all you post is sixty second reels, that is a lot of reels.

So spread your content out. Your team can take one long video, turn it into a transcript, and use AI to shape posts for other platforms.

And it does not have to be expensive. You can find good, affordable editors and managers overseas. Some things, like thumbnails, can cost less than a hundred dollars.

How I Write Prompts

AI does not know who you are. If you just say "make a video," it pulls from everything. So I give it context.

• A role. "You are the best YouTube script writer there is."
• Context about me. Who I am and what I am about.
• The layout. Five bullet points, an intro, a call to action.

I tell my team to think in systems. If you can think in systems, you can hand off the common tasks. That is how you buy back your time and keep your focus on the people you serve.