Five small businesses. Every number we could verify.
A nonfiction series about where AI actually fits in a small business, and where it does not. No predictions. No demos. The failures stay in the record.
The audit worksheet from Chapter 9
Six sections and a two-week baseline you can run on your own shop without buying anything. This is the full-page version of the worksheet printed in the book, with room to actually write.
How to run it in seven days
Map first. Buy later, or never.
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Day 1
Fill Sections A, B and C. Forty-five to sixty minutes.
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Days 2–15
Capture Section D metrics only. Do not fix anything yet. If you change three tools during the measurement window, you poisoned the baseline. Stop and restart the clock.
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Day 16
Score Sections E and F. Make a go or no-go call in writing.
The books
AI That Earns Its Keep
Where AI Actually Fits in a Small Business, and Where It Does Not. A pool service, a dental office, a food and housing nonprofit, a family cantina, and a two-attorney estate firm. What we measured before changing anything, the four jobs where a model earned its keep, the five where it did not, what starting cost each of them, and what broke in month one.
The Front Desk
The same five businesses, taken into phones, reception, scheduling and first contact. Who answers when three lines light up. When a helpful auto-reply becomes a trust leak. More numbers, more breaks, and less patience for demos that cannot survive a lunch rush.
A note on method
The five businesses in this series are composites. Each one is drawn from multiple real small-business engagements in the Coachella Valley and similar markets. Names, addresses and identifying details have been changed.
The numbers are realistic composites based on patterns from those engagements, not single-client measurements presented as one firm's books. If a figure looks clean, it is because it was averaged, rounded and checked against more than one source.
This series asks you to trust the numbers. Being honest about how they were built is the only way that trust holds.