Almost everyone selling AI to businesses like yours has never run one themselves.
That's not a cheap shot. It's just a fact... and it's the reason this newsletter exists.
The market is crowded with people who learned the AI playbook from a $2,000 course and now install "AI systems" for a living.
They've never carried a P&L. Never had to worry about making payroll. Never sat across from a client who's furious because something broke on a Friday afternoon.
They'll sell you a tool stack before anyone has worked out where your business is actually bleeding time, then disappear and leave you owning a chatbot that can't book a meeting and an invoice that renews whether it works or not.
I've spent more than 15 years on the other side of that table.
GM of an $80M business with 160 employees. CEO of a tech start-up that nearly went under (but didn't). And for the last few years, running my own business.
The systems I know are the ones I built to solve my own day-to-day challenges, that have now evolved to literally run my business for me almost on auto-pilot... as well as the ones I've built and installed for the consultants, coaches and founders who've hit the same friction in their own businesses.
One pattern I see constantly: you're genuinely good at the thing people pay you for, but your week doesn't look like an expert's week. It feels like most of it is taken up with admin, ops and business development... rather than doing the thing you're actually good at.
You know in your gut there is a better way to do it. You just don't know what it is and haven't found anyone you'd trust to go under the hood.
That's who this newsletter is for.
Force Multiplier is a weekly read for expert-led businesses that want AI doing real work, written clearly in plain English, by someone who installs it for a living and has actually run the businesses it's meant to serve.
What you'll get, every week:
One idea you can use. A specific place AI genuinely takes ops load off an expert business, explained so you can act on it without hiring a developer.
What's worth your attention, and what isn't. I'll name the theatre when I see it. There's a lot of it.
What I'm building, and what broke. The honest version, including the parts that didn't work.
What you won't get: recycled prompt tips, technical documentation, or the breathless this-changes-everything noise you're already drowning in.
And one belief sits under all of it: map before you build. The standard way these projects fail is buying the tool before anyone diagnosed the bottleneck. We go the other way, every time. Your time is the only currency that matters here, and the whole point is to stop spending it on work that was never your expertise.
That's the promise. If it's not for you, no hard feelings, and the unsubscribe link won't bruise my ego either. If it is, hit reply and tell me what's eating your week. I read every one, and it decides what I write next.
Welcome aboard.
— Tony