Show Notes
70% of a room raised their hands when asked if they're exploring AI. But most of them are doing it wrong—starting with tools instead of systems.
Scott tells the Dr. Ryan story: a physician who spent 100+ hours trying to force Airtable into his business with no clear problem to solve. "He's not unusual. He's you. He's me." This is the hype trap—picking a tool and forcing it into your business.
The shift: It's never tool first. The tool is always the last decision you make.
Scott teaches the SCALE framework for building any process—manual or automated:
S - Scope the solution. Don't boil the ocean. Focus on one specific play, not end-to-end. Business is a series of plays, like football. Five yards at a time.
C - Clarify the flow. Map the process. Know where it starts and ends. Humans are better at certain things, machines at others. It's a braided river—handoffs between the two.
A - Automate the trigger. Manual triggers fail. People forget. People get sick. Automate how the workflow starts.
L - Leverage the data. Know if it worked. Know if it failed. Too many automations run silently with no feedback.
E - Elevate the experience. Make it sound human, not robotic. Every touchpoint—outputs, errors, notifications—should feel like you.
The Tesla story: The 2012 Model S had 5,000 parts. The 2026 version has 3,000. Only 3% of parts overlap. Most manufacturers take 36-40 years to reach that. Tesla did it in 14—because they focused on the system, not the parts. They asked: what can we remove?
That's the deeper principle: before you automate, ask if you can eliminate the step entirely. Even after you've automated something, revisit it and ask what can be removed.
The bottom line: Build your company with SCALE. Every process—manual or automated—starts with the system, not the tool.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
I was at an event a few weeks ago and the moderator asked who is exploring AI in their businesses and 70 % of the room raised their hands. Okay, like it was the quick raise of the hands. I'm trying to capture as many, like I'm trying to figure out like how much of this room is there. And by the way, I know people were using AI like me and I didn't raise my hand. So that 70 % is probably pretty low.
So AI is transforming businesses at an unbelievable pace, but it's also creating a lot of anxiety for a lot of people. But today I'm going to give you the exact starting point that you should look at for your business. Welcome to Fix My Business and I'm your host, Scott Todd. After leaving corporate America, I built multiple seven-figure businesses and this show is here to help you scale yours.
Seven years ago, I was wrapping up a workshop when a guy walked up to me, his name was Ryan, Dr. Ryan, and he was a physician and he was there trying to learn like different aspects of, you know, kind of automating businesses, et cetera. And he said to me, hey, how do you use Airtable? Now, Airtable is a
is a popular online spreadsheet. If you're not familiar with it, you may have heard it. It's very, very popular in certain business communities. And I said to him, I don't. And at the time, I didn't use it. I didn't use it. I really didn't like it. And he said to me, well, I thought everybody used it. I thought everybody in this group used it. And I said, well, I don't. And I said, well, what are you trying to do with it?
And he started laughing, but he was also kind of frustrated. And he said, well, I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to do with it. But I've spent a hundred hours trying to figure out how to put this into my business. And I can't figure it out. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. Why are you trying to use something that you don't really understand how it's going to fit in?
And he said, well, because everybody told me that they used it and that I needed it. So think about that for a second. Here we have a physician who has spent over a hundred hours trying to make some software fit into his business. Okay. With no real like, this is the problem I'm trying to solve. And the problem is, that Dr. Ryan isn't really unusual because he's you.
He's me. I have fallen for this like, ⁓ my gosh, you have to use this tool. And then you go look at it and you're like, okay, well, I'm not quite sure what problem this is solving in my business. Okay, so this is where the hype comes in. He picked a tool, he tried to force it into his business and that never works. It's a trap. Now, here's the shift that I want you to make because
This trap, this hype trap is going to get worse. It's going to get amplified when people tell you all the great things that they're automating their business, how they're doing. They got all these AI agents that are doing these things. And I'm not saying that they don't or it's not true. But when it comes to applying AI to your business, you have to look at this and say, OK, what problem are we trying to solve here? And I want to walk you through a way that
that you can do it, okay? Because it's never tool first. The tool is always the last decision that you make. And I see too many people that are out there that are hyping, like, you have to be on this tool. You have to use this AI model. And I think it's the wrong approach. When I see people like that, I just kind of like want to run. I just, that's me. I just want to run, okay? Because I realize it's never about the tool. It's always about the system. And
This whole thing doesn't just apply to AI. It applies to no code platforms, workflow softwares. It applies to automation. Anybody talking to you about automation, it doesn't matter. But it's never tool first. It's never the tool. So then what is it? It's the system. So let me share with you how I teach this and how I put it into practice in my own business.
And the framework that I created, the framework that I use in my business is called the scale each letter has a meaning. S is for scope, scoping the solution. And when I talk about scoping the solution, the one thing that I'm not talking about is trying to boil the entire ocean. I don't want to boil the ocean.
I want to be specific to a specific play. In business, too many times we think about automation and we think about it as this like end end thing that we do. But in fact, business is a series of plays. Think about football for a minute. Some plays, the offense, they get five yards. Some they get zero yards. Some they get 50 yards, okay?
To get a touchdown in football, it's a series of plays. They go one after the other after the other, and hopefully they can put them all together to where they get the end result, which is a touchdown. ⁓ We want a series of plays in our business, but we can never try to automate the entire play. We can't go from one end of the football field to the other. We have to think about it in a series of plays, a series of different... ⁓
pieces that come together to make one specific longer term play or output or process. So when we're thinking about automating, what we're trying to do is we're trying to focus on a specific solution. What is it? What's the beginning and what's the end? The C is for clarify the flow. And what I mean by that is this is where we want to go in there and we want to map out the process. We want to go in there and we want to say, this is where this play starts.
And this is where it ends. And automation, as much as we want to talk about or dream about these systems that are just doing the work for us or for our people, the reality is that we still need people. I call it the braided river. I'll talk about it later on. I'm not going talk about it But this concept is that humans are better at certain things. Machines are better at the others. We have to hand it off. It has to be a handoff back to a human for certain pieces.
and then the automation can take the other stuff. It's the two systems working together. So when we talk about mapping this out and clarifying the flow, that's what we want to think about. The A is for the automating the trigger. We need to figure out how we can automate these triggers. In your business, if you have triggers that are manual, meaning that somebody has to remember to do it, those are a mess. Manual never works. People forget.
People are out on vacation, people are sick, manual triggers are the worst. So what we want to figure out is how can we automate all of our workflows as much as possible so that it's never driven manually. L in scale, the L is for leverage the data. And what I mean by that is that what we need to know and we need to map out at the time we're building this process is we need to map out, hey, this...
is how we're gonna know that it worked and this is how we're gonna know that it failed. I tell you, there's so many automations that are out there that people never know if they worked and they never know if they failed unless they go and they check and then they are disappointed, okay? It happens all the time. If it fails, we need some trigger. We need somebody to be alerted that, this thing failed. And if it succeeded, we still need to know that it succeeded
So we wanna leverage the data that we have there. And the E is elevate the experience. And specifically what I'm talking about there is thinking about this from a standpoint of being this human voice, not a robot. Okay, and it goes to every touch point in this process. So what's the output? Does it sound robotic or does it sound like you? What about system errors? Does it sound robotic? I mean, I've seen...
I've seen like system errors that say like system 19 errors and you're like, what is that? ⁓ you got to go Google it. It's like, it's a memory overload. Well, why don't you just say memory overload? So we want to elevate the experience back to the human. Okay. So this is the thing is that automation is never like this one big bang event. It never is. It's something that happens over the time, over time. It's continuous.
I recently read about Tesla's Model S and this whole story, when I read the Tesla Model S, thought the first thing I thought of is this is the scale framework. This is what we do with automation. The Tesla Model S from 2012 to 2026, if you just looked at the car, you would think that they're the exact same car. It hasn't changed at all, but it has changed dramatically. It's a completely different car.
Even though your eyes look at it, you're like, I don't see, I don't see a body change. It all looks the same, but inside, let me tell you how bad, how big of a change it is. Not bad. How big of a change that it is. Okay. The 2012 car had 5,000 parts. I didn't realize cars even had 5,000 parts. That's a lot of parts, but the 2026 car has 3000 parts. Think about that for a second. 2000 less parts.
Now, what's even more amazing is that the overlap between these two cars, meaning that from 2012 to 2026, the number of parts that are still in both versions is around 3%. Now, to put this into context, every six years when most manufacturers, when they change their models, when they change the generation of the vehicle,
they tend to overlap the parts by 50%. That means that you need to go six to seven generations before you get down to a parts overload of 3%. Okay, now six years times, guess what? Times six generations, because that's what it's gonna take to get there to down to the 3%, six generations, that's 36 years, 36 to 40 years, somewhere in that range. But Tesla did that in 14 years
Okay, think about the speed. Now, what had to happen for that to be true? They had to take a different approach. And it always looked at the system. They always looked at how do we make this car system better, streamlined. And it was never about the parts. It was always about what can be removed. See, it's never about the parts.
It's in that case, it's about the system and removing from it. And that's what we're doing with automation. You see automation is again, never tool first. It's always system first. It's can we remove a step from this process before we automate it? And even if we've automated it and we want to go back to it, what can we remove? Okay, what can we remove from this process to make it more streamlined?
And that's how we want to build our company. I want you to build your company with scale. Okay, right from the get go. Build your processes. I don't care if they're manual or automated. Build every process with this scale framework. And I think that you're off to a great start. All right.
If you've got a business question, I want you to go over to scottodd.net forward slash ask. I read every single one of them and I will see you in our next episode.
I was at an event a few weeks ago and the moderator asked who is exploring AI in their businesses and 70 % of the room raised their hands. Okay, like it was the quick raise of the hands. I'm trying to capture as many, like I'm trying to figure out like how much of this room is there. And by the way, I know people were using AI like me and I didn't raise my hand. So that 70 % is probably pretty low.
So AI is transforming businesses at an unbelievable pace, but it's also creating a lot of anxiety for a lot of people. But today I'm going to give you the exact starting point that you should look at for your business. Welcome to Fix My Business and I'm your host, Scott Todd. After leaving corporate America, I built multiple seven-figure businesses and this show is here to help you scale yours.
Seven years ago, I was wrapping up a workshop when a guy walked up to me, his name was Ryan, Dr. Ryan, and he was a physician and he was there trying to learn like different aspects of, you know, kind of automating businesses, et cetera. And he said to me, hey, how do you use Airtable? Now, Airtable is a
is a popular online spreadsheet. If you're not familiar with it, you may have heard it. It's very, very popular in certain business communities. And I said to him, I don't. And at the time, I didn't use it. I didn't use it. I really didn't like it. And he said to me, well, I thought everybody used it. I thought everybody in this group used it. And I said, well, I don't. And I said, well, what are you trying to do with it?
And he started laughing, but he was also kind of frustrated. And he said, well, I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to do with it. But I've spent a hundred hours trying to figure out how to put this into my business. And I can't figure it out. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. Why are you trying to use something that you don't really understand how it's going to fit in?
And he said, well, because everybody told me that they used it and that I needed it. So think about that for a second. Here we have a physician who has spent over a hundred hours trying to make some software fit into his business. Okay. With no real like, this is the problem I'm trying to solve. And the problem is, that Dr. Ryan isn't really unusual because he's you.
He's me. I have fallen for this like, ⁓ my gosh, you have to use this tool. And then you go look at it and you're like, okay, well, I'm not quite sure what problem this is solving in my business. Okay, so this is where the hype comes in. He picked a tool, he tried to force it into his business and that never works. It's a trap. Now, here's the shift that I want you to make because
This trap, this hype trap is going to get worse. It's going to get amplified when people tell you all the great things that they're automating their business, how they're doing. They got all these AI agents that are doing these things. And I'm not saying that they don't or it's not true. But when it comes to applying AI to your business, you have to look at this and say, OK, what problem are we trying to solve here? And I want to walk you through a way that
that you can do it, okay? Because it's never tool first. The tool is always the last decision that you make. And I see too many people that are out there that are hyping, like, you have to be on this tool. You have to use this AI model. And I think it's the wrong approach. When I see people like that, I just kind of like want to run. I just, that's me. I just want to run, okay? Because I realize it's never about the tool. It's always about the system. And
This whole thing doesn't just apply to AI. It applies to no code platforms, workflow softwares. It applies to automation. Anybody talking to you about automation, it doesn't matter. But it's never tool first. It's never the tool. So then what is it? It's the system. So let me share with you how I teach this and how I put it into practice in my own business.
And the framework that I created, the framework that I use in my business is called the scale each letter has a meaning. S is for scope, scoping the solution. And when I talk about scoping the solution, the one thing that I'm not talking about is trying to boil the entire ocean. I don't want to boil the ocean.
I want to be specific to a specific play. In business, too many times we think about automation and we think about it as this like end end thing that we do. But in fact, business is a series of plays. Think about football for a minute. Some plays, the offense, they get five yards. Some they get zero yards. Some they get 50 yards, okay?
To get a touchdown in football, it's a series of plays. They go one after the other after the other, and hopefully they can put them all together to where they get the end result, which is a touchdown. ⁓ We want a series of plays in our business, but we can never try to automate the entire play. We can't go from one end of the football field to the other. We have to think about it in a series of plays, a series of different... ⁓
pieces that come together to make one specific longer term play or output or process. So when we're thinking about automating, what we're trying to do is we're trying to focus on a specific solution. What is it? What's the beginning and what's the end? The C is for clarify the flow. And what I mean by that is this is where we want to go in there and we want to map out the process. We want to go in there and we want to say, this is where this play starts.
And this is where it ends. And automation, as much as we want to talk about or dream about these systems that are just doing the work for us or for our people, the reality is that we still need people. I call it the braided river. I'll talk about it later on. I'm not going talk about it But this concept is that humans are better at certain things. Machines are better at the others. We have to hand it off. It has to be a handoff back to a human for certain pieces.
and then the automation can take the other stuff. It's the two systems working together. So when we talk about mapping this out and clarifying the flow, that's what we want to think about. The A is for the automating the trigger. We need to figure out how we can automate these triggers. In your business, if you have triggers that are manual, meaning that somebody has to remember to do it, those are a mess. Manual never works. People forget.
People are out on vacation, people are sick, manual triggers are the worst. So what we want to figure out is how can we automate all of our workflows as much as possible so that it's never driven manually. L in scale, the L is for leverage the data. And what I mean by that is that what we need to know and we need to map out at the time we're building this process is we need to map out, hey, this...
is how we're gonna know that it worked and this is how we're gonna know that it failed. I tell you, there's so many automations that are out there that people never know if they worked and they never know if they failed unless they go and they check and then they are disappointed, okay? It happens all the time. If it fails, we need some trigger. We need somebody to be alerted that, this thing failed. And if it succeeded, we still need to know that it succeeded
So we wanna leverage the data that we have there. And the E is elevate the experience. And specifically what I'm talking about there is thinking about this from a standpoint of being this human voice, not a robot. Okay, and it goes to every touch point in this process. So what's the output? Does it sound robotic or does it sound like you? What about system errors? Does it sound robotic? I mean, I've seen...
I've seen like system errors that say like system 19 errors and you're like, what is that? ⁓ you got to go Google it. It's like, it's a memory overload. Well, why don't you just say memory overload? So we want to elevate the experience back to the human. Okay. So this is the thing is that automation is never like this one big bang event. It never is. It's something that happens over the time, over time. It's continuous.
I recently read about Tesla's Model S and this whole story, when I read the Tesla Model S, thought the first thing I thought of is this is the scale framework. This is what we do with automation. The Tesla Model S from 2012 to 2026, if you just looked at the car, you would think that they're the exact same car. It hasn't changed at all, but it has changed dramatically. It's a completely different car.
Even though your eyes look at it, you're like, I don't see, I don't see a body change. It all looks the same, but inside, let me tell you how bad, how big of a change it is. Not bad. How big of a change that it is. Okay. The 2012 car had 5,000 parts. I didn't realize cars even had 5,000 parts. That's a lot of parts, but the 2026 car has 3000 parts. Think about that for a second. 2000 less parts.
Now, what's even more amazing is that the overlap between these two cars, meaning that from 2012 to 2026, the number of parts that are still in both versions is around 3%. Now, to put this into context, every six years when most manufacturers, when they change their models, when they change the generation of the vehicle,
they tend to overlap the parts by 50%. That means that you need to go six to seven generations before you get down to a parts overload of 3%. Okay, now six years times, guess what? Times six generations, because that's what it's gonna take to get there to down to the 3%, six generations, that's 36 years, 36 to 40 years, somewhere in that range. But Tesla did that in 14 years
Okay, think about the speed. Now, what had to happen for that to be true? They had to take a different approach. And it always looked at the system. They always looked at how do we make this car system better, streamlined. And it was never about the parts. It was always about what can be removed. See, it's never about the parts.
It's in that case, it's about the system and removing from it. And that's what we're doing with automation. You see automation is again, never tool first. It's always system first. It's can we remove a step from this process before we automate it? And even if we've automated it and we want to go back to it, what can we remove? Okay, what can we remove from this process to make it more streamlined?
And that's how we want to build our company. I want you to build your company with scale. Okay, right from the get go. Build your processes. I don't care if they're manual or automated. Build every process with this scale framework. And I think that you're off to a great start. All right.
If you've got a business question, I want you to go over to scottodd.net forward slash ask. I read every single one of them and I will see you in our next episode.