Think AI Podcast - Meet My AI Crew | Ep. 11

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

🎙️ Meet My AI CrewI opened the garage door on the system that runs my company. Not a chatbot. A real crew of AI employees with names, jobs, and shifts that show up on my calendar every morning. I will not hand you the secret wiring, but by the end you will know exactly what is possible and have the shape to build your own.**In this episode:**00:00 The handbike and the garage door01:11 The real bottleneck was me03:24 What an AI employee actually is (not a chatbot)05:29 Meet the crew: Maya, Morgan, Sasha, Owen, Felix, Harper, FIO07:39 MCP vs API in plain English10:05 Inside Felix, my CFO financial cockpit16:41 Watching my AI employees clock in on my calendar24:25 A Fortune 500 back office for the cost of a coffee a dayIf you have ever felt like your business only moves as fast as you do, this one is for you. Subscribe for more, drop a comment with the first role you would hand to an AI employee, and if you want the step by step build, come join me.👉 Learn to build your own AI crew inside Grow Without Sacrifice: https://growwithoutsacrifice.com---#AIcrew #AIemployees #GrowWithoutSacrifice #SmallBusinessAI #SoloFounder

For years, I blamed the wrong thing. Whenever something didn't work, I told myself it was the idea or the timing or the market. It was none of those. Every business I run broke in the same exact place, me. I built a AI crew to carry the business while I did. So that's what today is. I'm opening the garage door. This is my AI crew.

Welcome to the Think AI podcast. Each week we talk about the most exciting AI research, tools, case studies and more. I'm your host Dave Goir and I've been working behind the scene in data and AI for over 30 years. Whether you are an AI expert, skeptic or something in between, this podcast is for you. In my last episode of Grow Without Sacrifice, I told you a story about a hand bike that set in my garage for six months while I worked myself into the ground and Saturday I finally wrote it again. Because I build a AI crew, which is the set of AI employees, to carry the business while I did, a lot of you sent me the same message over and over again.

Same version, which is, okay, Dave, this is a nice story. Now show me the actual thing. So that's what today is. I'm opening the garage door. this is my AI crew one promise before we start i'm going to show you what this AI crew does and why i build the way i did i'm not going to hand you my secret recipe the exact wiring inside each employee but by the end you are going to know exactly what's possible and you will have the shape of it clear enough to start your own let's go For years, I blamed the wrong thing. Whenever something didn't work, I told myself it was the idea or the timing or the market. It was none of those. Every business I run broke in the same exact place, me. Here's what actually looks like. Every lead came to me, every follow-up waited on me, every question, every scheduling clash, every decision.

precision, all of it, landed on one desk. And that feels like control, but it's not. It's really a ceiling. The business could only ever move as fast as I could, and it stopped the second I did. When I slept, it slept. It slept. When I got sick, it got sick. So what I did that everyone tells you to do, I hire help, and I spent my days training them. queuing their work, checking their work. I turned one job into three. I hired agencies, got beautiful decks, and not a lot of movement. I bought software and spent more nights configuring tools than running the company. And every one of those fixes had the same flaw.

They all still run through me. I just build a more expensive version of the same bottleneck. And that's when it finally clicked. I didn't need more hands to do the work. I needed something that I could actually own. I didn't need more people. I needed a system that could hold a role. Let me say the real problem in one sentence,

because naming it is what unlocked the solution. The business could run a single function without me. Not run worse without me, could not run. There was no marketing function. There was just me doing marketing. There was no sales process. That was just me chasing deals. So I stopped asking the question everyone asked,

which is what task I can automate. And I started asking a different question. What job could I actually fill? And here's the definition that changed everything for me. An AI employee is not a chatbot. A chatbot waits for you. to type. An AI employees four things. A job, a memory, a routine, and a folder it owns. It wakes up on its own schedule. It does the work. It writes back what it learned and it briefs me in the morning.

And that's the difference. It does everything. Automation does a task once an AI employee owns the outcome. Quick gut check on who's listening because I want you to know I'm talking to you. If you are AI curious and you have played with chat GPT and you are wondering if any of this is real for a business your size, it is. Stay with me. If you are an AI enthusiast, you have already built a few automations and you want to see what a real production setup looks like. This is one. I run my company on it. And if you are a real builder who's already thinking, I'm going to copy this.

good but I'm going to show you the shape so you can build your own not clone mine your should feed your business not mine so here is how it actually works day to day I don't open an app I declare an intent and the right part of the company wakes up I say I'm doing build or marketing or sales or ops or finance and the system loads up that department and the right leaders step forward. Let me introduce the crew now. Because I want you to meet them like you would meet a real team. Maya is the chief of staff.

She runs my morning stand-up and she triages my inbox and calendar before I even awake. Morgan, she's my CMO. She owns the content calendar. the publishing and the marketing strategy. The video you are watching went through her pipeline. Sasha, she is my VP of sales. Pipelines, proposals, sales strategy, CRM, HubSpot. Everything goes through her, the strategy, the execution and the monitoring.

Owen, my VP of operation, manages delivery health, vendors, keeping projects on track and deals with the firefighting situation. situations. Felix, my CFO, invoicing, expenses, cash flow, runway, what if the month and close, everything goes through Felix. He is really a CFO managing the business and keeping it healthy. Harper, my VP of HR, the roster, onboarding, tracking, who can do what in their performances. Feel my CTO. Theo's job is the crew itself. He maintains the skills, the rules, the plumbing,

that keeps everything running and everyone running. And behind all of them, there's a build team for when I needed a brand new capability. One research is, one architect, one builds, and one tests it. Like a little product team that hires the next employee. Now here's the part I want you to be really clear about, because people get scared by the word AI employee. Every one of these AI seats has a human counterpart in my team.

Same task list, same definition of done. This doesn't replace my people, it multiplies them. Not parts in a drawer, a company with a front door. Now some of you will argue this is going to increase my work. No, it's not. They are doing the actual work, but there has to be someone managing when they go wrong or if something goes wrong. And that could be just one person taking all these AI employees reporting to them. It could be you.

That's how I'm running the business for one of my businesses. Okay, so let's do a little bit of technical fork in the road. I'm going to keep this plane. To make AI do something useful, it has to talk to your tools, your systems, your email, your calendar, your CRM. And there are two ways to do that today. An API, which is like calling a restaurant's kitchen directly and reading your order over the phone. It works great, but you have to know what specific kitchen rules are.

MCP, AI-friendly, and it's newer. Think of it as a standard doorway so any tool can talk into kitchen the same way, one common language. So why pick one over the other? MCP is faster to wire up and it speaks one language across everything. The raw API gives you more control and honestly it often costs less when you're running a lot of volume. Our rule is simple. Use MCP when it's clean and already built for us. Drop down to the raw API when the MCP doesn't exist or it's.

or it's flaky or it's getting expensive. And I'll be honest about the trade-off, because nobody tells you this part. You only see shiny objects on the road. MCP can hide your cost, and it can break the day a vendor changes something. The API is more work up front, but then you own it.

Use the doorway when it's there. Build your own door when it isn't. Okay, so let's dig in it. to the fun part. Here's the real example of that. I have a financial cockpit. My CFO, Felix, needs the book, but accounting system doesn't always hand a nice, clean doorway. So here's what Felix does. He pulls the books, reconcise them against our CRM, and says what's actually closed, and flags anything that doesn't match, and critically anything that touches money, still come to me for approval.

But I don't want to leave it there, because pulling a snapshot isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what Felix built on top of these books. He doesn't hand me a spreadsheet. He hands me a cocktail. Let me show you,

because this is the part I'm proudest of. And one note before I do, every number you see on the screen is blurred for the video. That's on purpose. And that's my real. company's money, but you don't need the numbers. You need the shape that tells you the whole story and help you build your own. The way Felix thinks is simple. The whole dashboard exists to answer

three questions I ask all the time. Am I healthy? Which is my business is healthy. Can I reinvest in what's coming in? Up in the header or the main page, he keeps two lenses side by side. One is a cruel, which is structural profit, is the business itself actually healthy, and the other one is cash, which is the survive and reinvest view. What literally goes in the bank? Same company, but two honest angles. Now let me walk you through the six views, because each one answers a different piece. First, the overview. This is the cockpit. Up top, there's a plain English verdict line, something like, healthy, this much reinvestible above the floor and cash is still climbing. There's a language I like, you can change it, and under it, five gauges.

Cash in hand, revenue, Ibitra, net cash flow, and reinvestible surplus, or the runway that could survive your company. The word floor matters. The floor is the cash reserve. Felix will never let me count as a spend. It's the line he protects. It's the rainy day. Savings. The goal of this whole screen is one thing. Can I sleep tonight? And it answered it to me in one glance. Tap two, profit and loss. Now, each of the books or online software has its own version of profit and loss. But in my world, this is different. This is a waterfall. It starts at revenue. steps down, then show the cost to deliver the work, then overhead, what we pay to the owners, the techs, and then lends on the profit at the bottom. What I love is that Felix separates the

profit, the business is making, and what we pay ourselves. And it is important and big. Because those are two different questions, this one tab answer, is the engine actually profitable before I take a dime out. That's it. Third tap, cash flow. And here's a hard lesson every owner learns through its own painful way. Profit is not cash.

You can be profitable on paper, still not be able to make your own payroll. So this tab shows cash in versus cash out. Month by month, where the cash actually went, broken into vendors, owner draws, overhead, techs, and how fast our clients are actually paying us. The goal is to catch the gap whether we are profitable or if we are out of cash before it catches me. Fourth tab, forecast.

If the others are the dashboard, this is really the windshield. It projects our ending cash in six months out. Draw a downside line at break-even and mark stuff floor down again. And the part that makes it real, it's live. Felix can change an assumption, say revenue drop 20% or growth 50%. The whole line redraws in front of you. The goal is to see the wall while it's still far away, not after I hit it. Fifth step, AR and AP.

In simple language, account receivable and account payable is who owes me and who I owe. The receivables are aged into buckets, current 30, 60, 90 plus. And the 90 plus bucket is the one that bites, and it bites hard. That's money I earn. That's quietly turning into a problem. On the other side, the bill's coming due. The goal is simple. Pull the money in before the money goes out.

Sixth tab, this is about the owners, you. I call this the honor. step. It lays out what the partners actually draw the split between salary and profit share. What we can keep in the business and how it is text, because the real CFO question isn't, can we pay to the owners? It's can we pay the owners without starving the business? And that's the real question. And this steps keeps me honest about that. And then a bonus tab, there's a tab where I can just ask. I type a question in plain simple English. Now this is the really AI first approach. How much can I reinvest right now or how much I can save for a larger project that is coming

in future? Freelick answers in one sentence and with the actual numbers behind it, no spreadsheets plunking. I ask, he answers. So pull back for a second. The lesson from the integration still holds and write this one down. You will almost never get the perfect integration. You get a good enough bridge and you put a human checkpoint on anything that moves money. But the bridge was never the price. The price is what Felix built on top of it.

Felix doesn't hand me numbers. He hands me a decision. Now my favorite example, because it's the one people light over others, I live in Microsoft 365 email calendar and all of it. And we tried the Microsoft 365 MCP, the ready-made doorway. For what we needed, it had real limitations. So I had two choices. Wait around and hope it got better or build the piece I needed myself. So we wired directly into Microsoft's own Graph API for email and calendar can be extended to

teams chat and one note. And here's the payoff. Every job my crew runs on a schedule shows up on an actual event on a real calendar in my outlook. So I can open an outlook in the morning and literally see my AI employees working. Their shifts are on the calendar. And you will see it. The lesson, a missing integration is not a stop sign.

If the platform has any door at all, even a hard one, you can build the part you need. My calendar doesn't show you my meetings. It shows my employees shifts. So here's a mistake I made early, so you don't have to. The crew needs memory. But so do the humans on my team. And if the AI knows something my team doesn't, I haven't built a system. I have built a silo with extra steps.

So there's one central place my humans actually live in. And in our example, this is notion. It manages tasks, projects, single source of truth, my daily stand-up, everything that is happening living there. And the discipline that makes it work in this, one source of truth, no duplicates. If a task lives in notion, it does not live in three different places, which will quietly go out of date. The fastest way to break trust in a system is to have two answers to the same question. So here's a quick example.

My crew runs a whole content pipeline, drafting, designing work in Canva, short form video pipeline, publishing out of the platforms. Now, I'm still doing a lot of work. Still generating ideas, fine-tuning those ideas, polishing those ideas through AI, recording the videos like this, cleaning them up, making sure everything looks cleaner, nicer, and creates a story. But the real work is executed by my AI crew. And where a platform gives us a clean door, we push everything through one publishing layer. So a single piece of content fends out to LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta, or YouTube.

YouTube. I don't post four times. I approve once and the crew ships it everywhere. But some platforms still won't give you a clean door at all. So for those, the crew drives an actual browser using a tool called Playwright and post like a human would. Clicking through the screens, it's not the same lesson from earlier, but when there's no API, you automate the front door instead. The crew doesn't make the work. It ships the work. Now let me talk about the hard part because I'm not here to sell you a fairy tale. My crew runs on Claude and when Claude releases an update, things can quietly break. Permission gets reset, scheduled jobs lose their footing, sometimes even the underlying program gets swapped out from under you. The first time this bit me,

half my morning routine just didn't fire and I didn't know why. And here's how I solved it. I created one sanction upgrade path, one script, and on a schedule every Friday evening. It upgrades cleanly through the proper channel, confirm if it's correct and signed version, checks that every schedule job still point to something real,

and regrants the permission my OS needs to let the crew work. And I can do a dry run on Saturday. so that Monday morning everything is clean and fine. And the lesson is way bigger than clawed. A real system needs a maintenance ritual, not wives, not I'll deal with it when it breaks. You don't just build the thing, you keep it healthy on a schedule,

like any other real operation. Hand in hand with that, there's a single health check I can run any time. It validates that my data is fresh, reconcise the book, and confirms all. the pieces that systems are complete and consistent with each other. It's read only, totally safe, and I can run it whenever.

And here's why that matters. The health check is the thing that lets me keep adding to the crew without the whole thing getting wobbly. Stable base first is the principle. Then I build the next roof on top of it. You earn the right to add the 10th employee by keeping the first 9th, super healthy. Now let's talk money because this is where a lot of people's AI dreams die. Every word the AI reads or write cost you. The words are called tokens. Some words can be

multiple tokens. And tokens are the meters running in the background. A bloated, sloppy system is an expensive system. It will quietly eat your budget. So here's what we did. We kept each employee's instructions short and focused on one job. We wired them to call each other's instead of repeating the same information over and over again. And we run a token saving layer on the heavy technical commands. So the routine stuff cost a fraction of what it used to. And the mindset shift is this. Treat your AI's attention like payroll.

You don't drag every employee. into every meeting. You only bring in who the job really actually needs. A lean crew isn't just cheaper, it is sharper. I want to be straight with you about the failures too. Things break. A vendor changes their API overnight. A scheduled job misfires. A model update subtly changes how an employee behaves. But the fixes is never heroics. Never me staying. up till 2am is the same loop every time catch it in the hell check isolate the one which that broke and then write the lesson down the crew never repeats it once you fix it the last part is the secret my crew keeps a running log of its own lessons the system gets smarter over time because it remembers its own

mistakes not because i'm getting smarter because the system is getting smarter so now where is all this headed? A few honest fronts. First, a publishing layer. This is a real question of free versus paid tools, figuring it out when paying actually earns versus keeping it on a subscription you forget about. Second, MCP versus API. And I have done it already. So it's round two. As I grow, the game is lower cost and more control. And that actually means owning more of the myself. And the big one, I'm working on swapping some of the clod calls for an open source models. To cut cost on the work that doesn't need a top-tier brain. Use the expensive, brilliant model for judgment and advisory and writing. Use a cheaper model for the grant work. Same as a real

company, you don't put your most expensive employee on data entry. But here's the future that actually matters. It's not about me. What I just walk you through used to require a Fortune 500 budget, a whole back office, the whole operation team. A solo founder can now run that for a cost of a coffee a day. Now the door is open and it's not closing. The future isn't AI replacing the small business owner. Is the small business owner finally getting a team? I did. I didn't. I did build this crew to be impressive. I build it so I could close the laptop at 5 o'clock. So I could be in the room when my kid walks in and wants to play a chase game with me instead of three miles deep. So I could get back on that handbike on a Saturday morning and feel the wind again in the sea. This is the

crew. The crew is the how. Grow without sacrifice is the why. You don't train. your health for the revenue, you don't trade your presence for growth. And here's the thing. Everything I just showed you today, I teach step by step on how to build your own AI crew inside Grow Without Sacrifice Program. It's not automate your life hype. It's how to build a real team that runs your business without burning you to the ground. Go to grow without sacrifice.com and register. Because here's the truth I had to learn the hard way. You don't have to be the single point of failure anymore

and you don't have to figure it out alone. I'll see in the next one. You have been listening to Think Yeahi podcast with Dave. Take one idea from this episode and turn it into action.