I Got "Clawpilled" In Miami
Freedom Firm Insider #024
I spent this week in Miami for a speaking event at the Small Business Expo.
I drove down instead of flying. Seven hours each way. I wanted the time to think.
But I didn’t just think. I talked.
I’ve been building out a small team of AI agents through a tool called NanoCLAW.
One of them, Andy, is my strategic planning assistant.
He lives in a Slack channel on my phone.
So as I’m driving through Florida, I’m leaving voice notes for Andy.
Ideas for our strategic planning session.
Thoughts on where the business is heading.
Half-formed concepts that I’d normally forget by the time I got to a laptop.
Andy organized all of it into a prep document. By the time I arrived in Miami, I had a structured strategic planning brief ready to review. It would have taken me hours to write that out. Instead, I talked while I drove.
It gets better.
While I was at the event, I had Andy create a second agent. This one does SEO for our website.
I sent the SEO agent a voice note through a private Slack channel: “Run an audit on our website.”
The results were not pretty.
We were basically invisible to search engines.
Years of great content.
Books, webinars, talks.
None of it was working for us online.
So I started talking to the agent. Through Slack. Through voice notes between sessions at the event. “Fix this. Rebuild that. Here’s what I want.”
By Wednesday night, less than 48 hours after I created the agent, he had rebuilt the entire website. Upgraded the look and feel. Written 25 SEO-optimized articles based on everything I’ve created over the last few years.
My books. My webinars. My signature talks.
The articles are in my voice.
They reflect our unique ideas.
They’re accurate.
And I built all of this by talking into my phone while attending a conference.
This is the part that matters.
This AI agent is not replacing anyone on my team. Nobody was doing SEO for us. We weren’t going to hire someone for it. The economics didn’t make sense for a firm our size.
The agent gave us a capability we couldn’t afford to have before.
That’s the shift I’m seeing. AI isn’t taking work away from people. It’s giving small firms capabilities that were previously only available to companies with big budgets and big teams.
One more thing…
Andy is decidedly a junior team member. He’s got more technical capability than judgment. There were multiple times during this process when I had to steer him in a different direction than where he was heading. I knew better. He didn’t push back.
We’re still in charge. These tools still need a lot of direction.
I’m sharing all of this because it connects to something I saw at the same event that’s been eating at me all week.
The Consultant in Miami
At the expo, I got into a conversation with a consultant.
Smart guy.
Good at what he does.
But he told me he’d really struggled to acquire new clients over the last year.
I asked what he’d been doing for business development.
His answer: LinkedIn.
I asked him to walk me through his strategy.
He posts one short post per week. He connects with five to ten people per week. And he admitted that some weeks, the busy ones, he doesn’t even do that.
Then he said the thing I hear all the time:
“LinkedIn doesn’t work.”
I didn’t argue with him. But I’ll tell you what I was thinking.
LinkedIn didn’t fail him. He never actually tried LinkedIn.
The Minimum Effective Dose
In medicine, every drug has a minimum effective dose.
Below that dose, the drug doesn’t work a little…
It doesn’t work at all.
The molecules never reach the threshold needed to trigger a response in the body.
Give someone half a dose of antibiotics, and the infection doesn’t get half-killed. It keeps growing. The drug did nothing. You wasted the pills and the time.
Business development works exactly the same way.
One LinkedIn post a week isn’t a small dose of marketing.
It’s a sub-therapeutic dose. It’s below the threshold where anything happens.
Five connections a week isn’t cautious networking.
It’s invisible.
That consultant in Miami wasn’t doing LinkedIn marketing. He was doing homeopathic marketing. Doses so small they couldn’t possibly produce a result.
The real cost is bigger than you think.
He didn’t just waste the 30 minutes a week he spent posting and connecting.
He wasted the 52 weeks that went by without results. A full year.
And at the end of that year, he drew the wrong conclusion.
He decided LinkedIn doesn’t work.
When the truth is, he never gave it enough volume to find out.
The Pattern Nobody Talks About
I see this everywhere. At every event. In every conversation with a struggling business owner.
The pattern is always the same:
They post on LinkedIn. But just a little.
They go to networking events. But just a few.
They connect with people online. But not that many.
They try email outreach. But only a handful.
They dabble in speaking. But only when it’s convenient.
Five channels. Half measures in all of them. Zero results from any of them.
And they wonder why nothing’s working.
Here’s the physics of it:
20% effort across five channels doesn’t produce 20% results from five channels.
It produces zero results from five channels.
Because none of them ever reached the minimum effective dose.
The math changes completely when you flip it:
100% effort in one channel produces breakthrough results from one channel.
Not because that channel is magic. Because you finally gave it enough volume to actually work.
Why This Happens
The reason most experts do half measures isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of discipline.
It’s capacity.
They’re too busy delivering the work. The thing they’re really good at, serving clients, running projects, solving problems, takes all their time and energy.
Business development gets the scraps.
The leftover 30 minutes on a Tuesday.
The LinkedIn post written between calls.
The networking event attended once a quarter.
And because the volume is so low, they never see results. And because they never see results, they conclude the strategy doesn’t work. And they move to the next channel. Where they’ll do half measures again.
It’s a cycle. And it’s brutal.
This is actually what I was solving on that drive to Miami.
Those AI agents I was building?
They’re not about efficiency.
They’re about capacity.
Filling roles my team doesn’t have. Doing work we weren’t going to do because the economics didn’t make sense.
For the first time, a small firm can actually reach the minimum effective dose across multiple channels. Not by working harder. By adding AI capabilities that didn’t exist a year ago.
But most people miss the critical piece.
AI can only amplify what you’ve already made clear and tangible. The reason our SEO agent wrote 25 articles in my voice, with our unique ideas, is because those ideas are documented.
In books.
In talks.
In frameworks with names.
If your thinking is still locked in your head, undocumented, unnamed, unstructured, AI produces generic, sloppy output. Because generic input produces generic output.
The experts who are about to pull ahead aren’t just the ones using AI. They’re the ones who have something clear and tangible for AI to amplify.
The Question
That consultant in Miami is going to try something new this year.
Maybe Instagram.
Maybe podcasting.
Maybe short-form video.
And he’s going to do half measures.
And he’s going to get zero results.
And a year from now, he’ll tell someone at another event that “marketing doesn’t work.”
Meanwhile, the expert at the next table? The one who’s documented their unique methodology, built real volume in one or two channels, and started leveraging AI to expand their capacity? That person is going to wonder what all the fuss is about.
Because for them, business development won’t feel hard anymore.
The difference isn’t talent.
It isn’t strategy.
It isn’t luck.
It’s dosage.
Are you above the minimum effective dose?
Or are you taking sugar pills and wondering why you’re still sick?
See you next Saturday,
Steve “minimum effective dose” Gordon
P.S. Next week: There’s one number that tells you whether you’ve reached the dose. Most experts have never measured it. I’ll show you what it is and how to track it.
P.P.S. When you’re ready, here are three ways we can help you:
Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]
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