Issue #005 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
Two years ago, the loudest fear about AI was that it would quietly shrink small businesses down to one exhausted owner and a pile of subscriptions. A new report out this week says something closer to the opposite happened for a lot of solopreneurs. I want to walk through what that actually means for a one-person shop, because the number that stood out to me isn’t the one you’d expect. Let’s get into it.
Trend to Watch: AI Didn’t Shrink the Team at Small Businesses — It Grew It
Intuit’s 2026 AI Impact Report, based on a survey of more than 34,000 small and midsize business owners alongside data from 5.3 million QuickBooks businesses, found that 77% of U.S. businesses now use AI regularly, up from just 48% in mid-2024, and 78% say it’s made them more productive. The number worth sitting with is what happened to headcount: four times as many businesses report that AI led them to hire more people as report it led them to cut staff, and 43% say AI increased their revenue outright, with only 2% reporting a decline. The tools got good enough to replace a task. What they didn’t do, at least so far, is replace the need for more hands once the work started growing.
Opportunity of the Week: Package the “First Hire, Done Right” Session
If more solopreneurs are hiring because of AI-fueled growth, a lot of them are about to manage someone else’s time for the first time in their business’s life — and most of that transition gets wasted in the first two weeks on a vague verbal scope, no shared folder, and no shared idea of what “done” looks like. Offer a flat-fee “first hire” session: in ninety minutes, you build the owner a one-page scope of work, set up shared access to the tools the new hire will actually need, and script a short list of 30-day check-in questions. It’s the paperwork nobody budgets time for on the way from a team of one to a team of two, and it’s the difference between a new hire producing in week one or week three.
Tool of the Week: Fathom
If you’re the one taking every discovery call, client check-in, and vendor negotiation yourself, try Fathom. It joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call automatically, transcribes it, and hands you an instant summary with the action items pulled straight out of the conversation — free for individual use. The feature worth building a habit around is “Ask Fathom”: type a question like “what did I promise this client across our last three calls?” and it searches your entire call history for the answer, instead of you digging through old notes trying to remember what you committed to.
Money Move: Nobody’s Collecting W-9s Until January
Any contractor or vendor a business paid $600 or more this year needs a 1099-NEC come January, and that form requires a W-9 on file — one almost nobody collects when they first bring someone on, because asking for a tax form on day one feels like a strange way to start a relationship. So every January, someone’s scrambling to track down a contractor who’s since changed their email, trying to get a form that would’ve taken thirty seconds to collect back in the spring. Offer a quick “1099 readiness” pass this month: pull the client’s list of everyone they’ve paid above that threshold this year, flag who’s missing a W-9, and send the request now while there’s still time to actually get it back. It’s a service built entirely around nobody wanting to send that email twice.
Resource Corner: Company of One
Company of One by Paul Jarvis argues that growth isn’t the only measure of a business doing well — that staying intentionally small can be the stronger strategy, not the fallback one. It pairs well with the trend above: bringing on one carefully chosen contractor because the work demands it doesn’t have to mean trading away the control you built a one-person business to get in the first place. Jarvis’s case is for staying deliberate about why you’re growing, not just reflexively growing because the data says everyone else is.
Forward Momentum
- If you’re about to make your first hire, write the one-page scope of work before you write the job post, not after.
- Install Fathom before your next client call and ask it what you promised someone three calls ago.
- Check your 2026 contractor list for anyone you don’t have a current W-9 on file for, and send the request this week.
Final Thought
The fear two years ago was that AI would make the one-person business a historical footnote. The numbers this month say something closer to the opposite: the business is still one person’s, the judgment still has to be theirs, and the only thing that’s changed is how much more of it one person’s judgment can now carry before another set of hands actually becomes necessary.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
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