by John Parkins
I talk to a lot of business owners around Lima, and lately the same thing keeps coming up. Not in these exact words, but always some version of it: "I know I'm supposed to be using AI by now, and I feel like I'm getting left behind."
Then they tell me what they've tried. They signed up for ChatGPT. They watched a few videos. Somebody in a Facebook group swore by a tool, so they poked at it for an afternoon, got something halfway useful, then got busy and never went back. Now there's a low hum of guilt every time AI comes up at a networking thing.
If that's you, I want to take some pressure off. The short version: you're not behind, you're buried, and the fix isn't more learning. It's having somebody point at the two or three things that matter for your business and tell you to ignore the rest.
Am I actually behind on AI?
Probably not. You're not behind, you're drowning.
You're not stuck because you're slow or because you don't get technology. You're stuck because you're drinking from a firehose.
There is an absurd amount of AI content out there right now. New tools every week. Hot takes. Threads with forty steps. Courses promising to turn you into a "prompt engineer." Most of it isn't wrong, exactly. It's just not about you. It's not about running a heating and cooling company, or a three-location restaurant, or a law office where you're also the one doing the books. It's generic, and generic is what's drowning you.
Here's the part nobody selling an AI course wants to say out loud. You do not need to learn AI. Not all of it. You need the two or three things that actually move the needle in your specific business, and you need somebody to tell you, plainly, what to ignore. That second part matters more than the first.
Why doesn't the free YouTube stuff get me there?
Because a video can't tell you what to skip.
YouTube is great when you already know what you're looking for. It's rough when you don't. You search one thing, the algorithm hands you ten more, and now your watch-later list is basically a to-do list you'll never finish. Every video assumes a different starting point. Nobody's there to say "skip that one, it doesn't apply to you, do this instead." That filter is the whole game, and a video can't give it to you.
Same problem with the big online courses. Seventy hours of curriculum is impressive right up until you realize you have a business to run and you needed the answer last month. You don't have a knowledge problem. You have a "which of these forty things actually matters for me" problem. More information makes that worse, not better.
What actually works is kind of boring
The thing that moves an owner from stuck to using-it-every-day isn't flashy. It's somebody who understands your kind of business sitting down with you and saying: here's the one workflow that'll save you the most time, here's how to set it up, go do it this week, and we'll look at it together next time. Small. Specific. Yours.
I mean genuinely boring stuff. A contractor who stops writing follow-up texts from scratch and gets solid first drafts in ten seconds. A shop owner who turns one photo and a sentence into a week of social captions instead of staring at the post box on a Sunday night. An office that finally has a clean, repeatable way to summarize long emails and documents so nothing important gets buried. None of that is going to win an award. All of it gives you hours back, which is the only thing you were ever actually after.
When you get one or two of those working, the fear goes away. Not because you became an expert, but because you proved to yourself you can make this thing useful. That's the whole shift.
Where I'm coming from
People keep telling me I'm good at this. I usually just say thanks. But the truth is I've been following AI since the early days, back when most of it was a toy, and I kept paying attention while a lot of folks waited for it to matter. At some point it dawned on me that the thing I'd quietly gotten good at was something I could just hand to other people.
I'll be straight about who's writing this. I run a small marketing shop. We're not a big agency with a floor full of people. Part of how a shop this size keeps up with the work is that I use these tools every single day, on real client work, not for demos. So I'm not coming at this as a guy who read about AI and got excited. I'm coming at it as somebody who'd honestly be underwater without it, and who has spent a couple of years sorting out what's worth the time from what's a shiny distraction.
That sorting is the part I can hand to somebody else. Not everything there is to know about AI. Just what's worth your time, for your business, in the order you should do it.
What AI coaching actually looks like
AI coaching, the way I mean it, is just somebody who already uses these tools every day sitting down with you to set up the two or three that fit your business, then checking back in while you actually use them. That's it. No certificate, no forty-step framework.
We're starting to offer that directly here at BeyondVivid, for owners around Lima and Northwest Ohio. One-on-one, in plain language. You tell me a bit about what you do and what you've already tried, we get on a quick call to figure out where you're actually stuck, and then we work through it together over a few sessions with a little homework in between so it sticks. The goal isn't to make you an expert. It's to get you using one or two things with confidence and to make that left-behind feeling go away.
And if you'd rather keep figuring it out on your own, good. Some people learn fine that way. But if you've tried that and you're still staring at thirty open tabs wondering what you're missing, the missing piece is usually just somebody to tell you what to skip.
If that sounds like what you've been needing, that's the reason I wrote this. Let's talk.
A couple questions I get
Do I need to be technical? No. If you can run a business and text your kids, you can do this. The whole point is that I handle the technical part and you walk away using the result.
How is this different from watching free videos? Free videos teach you everything and sort nothing. Coaching skips the everything and goes straight to the two or three things that matter for your business.
Who can actually help me get started with AI around here? That's us. BeyondVivid does one-on-one AI coaching for small business owners across Lima, Allen County, and Northwest Ohio, in plain English, no jargon.
