Issue #006 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
I almost scrolled past this week’s number because it read like good news with no catch attached, and those always make me a little suspicious. Then I read the fine print and found the catch — it’s real good news, just lopsided in a direction I didn’t expect. Let’s get into it.
Trend to Watch: The Businesses Struggling Most Are Getting the Biggest Lift From AI
A new Liberty Street Economics post from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, built on the Fed’s 2025 Small Business Credit Survey of more than 5,200 employer firms, found that 46% of small businesses now use AI tools, with another 15% planning to adopt within the year. The surprising part isn’t that number — it’s who the lift actually favors. Among owners who describe their business’s financial condition as fair or poor, AI users expect employment to grow 21 percentage points more than non-users do; among owners already doing well, that gap shrinks to 10 points. The same pattern shows up in revenue expectations: a 24-point gap for struggling businesses versus 15 points for healthy ones. The researchers are careful to call this an association, not proof AI caused it, but the direction cuts against simple optimism — the businesses with the least room for error are the ones reporting the biggest expected payoff.
Opportunity of the Week: Sell the One-Workflow Build, Not the AI Pep Talk
If the owners seeing the biggest lift from AI are the ones under the most financial pressure, the service they need isn’t a broad “AI strategy” session — most of those end in a slide deck nobody opens again. What actually moves the needle is picking the single task eating the most hours — quote follow-up, invoice reminders, intake forms, appointment confirmations — and rebuilding just that one workflow around AI, with real guardrails on what it’s allowed to send without a human look first. Charge a flat fee for one workflow, run it alongside the owner for a week, and measure success by one thing: can they run it alone once you leave. That’s a sellable, repeatable offer, and it’s a much smaller lift than redesigning how someone runs their whole business.
Tool of the Week: Reclaim.ai
If your calendar is the first casualty every time a client emergency shows up, try Reclaim.ai. Connect it to Google Calendar or Outlook and sync your task list from Todoist, Asana, or Google Tasks, and it automatically finds space for those tasks around your existing meetings instead of leaving them to rot on a list you never open. The feature worth setting up first is AI Focus Time: tell it how many hours of deep work you need each week, and it carves out and defends that block automatically, rescheduling around whatever new meeting just landed on your calendar instead of quietly disappearing the way blocked time usually does.
Money Move: Nobody Wants to Send the Price-Increase Email
Costs have gone up for almost every small business over the last few years — materials, software, insurance, contractor rates — and a lot of owners have quietly absorbed every bit of it rather than tell existing clients their price is changing. Sending that email feels confrontational, so it gets put off for another quarter, then another year, until the business is effectively working for less than it did two years ago. Offer a “price letter” service: look at what’s actually changed in their costs since they last raised prices, draft the increase with a clear effective date and a grandfather window for existing clients, and send it on their behalf. It’s a short engagement, it’s not glamorous, and it solves a problem almost every service business has but almost nobody wants to be the one to start.
Resource Corner: Essentialism
Essentialism by Greg McKeown argues that the discipline worth building isn’t doing more — it’s getting ruthless about which few things are actually essential and saying no to the rest. It’s the right companion to this week’s opportunity: the owners getting the most out of AI right now aren’t the ones bolting it onto every part of their business, they’re the ones who picked the one workflow that mattered and went deep on just that. McKeown’s case is that the same discipline applies to your own week, not just your client’s.
Forward Momentum
- Pick the one task in your business (or a client’s) eating the most hours, and sketch what an AI-assisted version of just that task would look like.
- Set up Reclaim.ai’s AI Focus Time before next week’s meetings fill in around it on their own.
- If you haven’t raised your prices in over a year, draft the email this week — even if you don’t send it yet.
Final Thought
The data this month is worth remembering the next time an AI headline feels aimed at businesses bigger than yours: the lift isn’t going to the companies with room to spare. It’s going to the ones that picked one real problem and actually fixed it.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
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