Christy Morrell-Stinson

Here’s why Greg is wrong, from someone who bought, grew, and sold one of these: Nobody running of these is dumb, and the fact that they've survived is testament to the fact that they're smart. To me, baked into this strategy is a sense of paternalism. Look at these dumb boomers. I can come in with absolutely zero industry experience and a Claude Code subscription and change this industry!! The most pervasive dynamic within Main Street businesses is resource scarcity. Not enough time or money to do any of the million things that you plan to. Awesome, so you want to do some big Claude Code thing? Cool, you're going to need to find time to do that between figuring out how to repair the trucks, fix your broken Google My Business listing, and not take a salary that month because of the reinvestment you're making with the hope that it will pay off. Getting a CRM implemented correctly is hard enough!! You need managers who enforce the process, employees who change their habits, and someone accountable when things break. Now try rebuilding delivery around AI WHILE KEEPING THE BUSINESS ALIVE AND SERVICING DEBT. You come in full of piss and vinegar and on day four your operations manager quits because she liked doing things the old way, and suddenly you’re covering her job instead of building agents. Greg acknowledges key-person risk, but it deserves far more weight in his economics. The people, process, and change management required to make even basic technology productive can consume years. Innovation has to improve the performance of the whole business. Justin Roff-Marsh and I have discussed the sequence: identify the constraint, get more productive use from its existing capacity, then add capacity where necessary to increase throughput. Said another way ---If an accounting firm’s bottleneck is senior review, generating drafts ten times faster may just create a bigger queue. You have to show how AI frees the reviewer, change the workflow so that capacity gets used, and then upgrade whatever limits further growth. Technological innovation must drive global maxima, not local maxima. Even real savings elsewhere need to be converted into lower expenses (which is only weak replacement) or redeployed against the constraint. A list of automated tasks tells me very little about how much more profitable work the firm can complete. Now put a large, expensive acquisition loan underneath that transition. In the SBA buying range, debt payments compete with the money you need for implementation, training, replacement hires, and additional capacity. Saving people time doesn’t automatically remove their salaries. Your plan is to do what? Have Betty train you in the first three weeks to replace her, and then you're gonna fire her. Let me know how that goes for you with a big ass loan due every month. More than likely you're going to end up keeping Betty and adding a bunch of AI expenses, which are going to reduce all of your fancy pre-acquisition projections. You can spend months paying for the existing payroll, new software, and human review before realizing any savings.... If at all. And cutting a support role can make your scarce, expensive specialists less productive if they inherit its work. Ultimately a playbook like the below is achievable but requires an enormous amount of experience, judgment, skill, etc. And the idea that a corporate refugee is going to parachute in out of their W2 with a couple agents and transform a business model fundamentally feels like something that someone who's never tried to do it before in a real business would say. I'm happy to have this debate with anybody who'd like to have it. I've both owned these businesses and built agents in an enormous number of these categories referenced.

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