🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube
This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Mitchell Wilson, founder of Coachbirds, a business coaching practice for tradies, professionals and local service business owners across Australia and New Zealand. Mitchell’s framework is sales, systems and strategy, in that order. If you’re working harder every year and making a bit more money with no more time, this episode is about why. His short version: you can’t scale chaos, and more leads won’t save a sales process that leaks.
Doing the boring stuff consistently is the job
Jeremy opened by asking what advice Mitchell gave the last client he spoke to. It was a young owner who’d spent about six months on a product with no traction. The fix wasn’t a new tactic. It was where he spent his time, and one unglamorous habit:
“Doing the boring stuff consistently.”
Mitchell says that applies at every stage, not just to beginners: “it doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out or whether you’ve been in business five, 10 years, sometimes we need to remember to go back to the basics and ensure that they’re being done right and consistent.”
He also named the trap new owners fall into. The fit-out, the tools, the setup are the fun part, “it’s kind of like building that Lego set.” Then the doors open, and a lot of owners ask, “now what do I do? I’ve done all the fun part.” Jeremy, a self-described ADHD enthusiast who loves the start of a project, compared SEO to Tai Chi: small repeated movements that look like nonsense on their own and pay off if you keep doing them.
Mindset comes first, then habits, then systems your team will actually follow
Jeremy asked whether running a business well is mostly mindset or mostly written-down process. Mitchell’s answer: you need both, in a specific order. And most owners skip the first one, because “sometimes mindset is the last thing they think about. They think that their mindset is great.”
When it’s just you, the work is habits. “We need to get these processes like it is brushing our teeth.” You can fall off for a day, as long as you’re back the next one. When you have a team, the habits become written systems. His one warning is about the corporate binder nobody opens:
“So these systems need to be, I’d preach like really, really simple. So people actually follow them.”
If you want to see what a business looks like when those systems are in place, Brad Poulos on building a business that runs without you is the companion listen.
Know your numbers before one client gets too big
Jeremy brought up the big fish problem. He once worked for an agency that hired two or three dozen people to service one multi-million dollar client, then lost that client market by market as it moved to AI writing. How big should any one client be?
Mitchell wouldn’t give a single percentage. He said it depends on the business and how much risk the owner wants to take. But he was firm on what comes first:
“So step one is actually knowing your numbers, knowing actually who your clients are and what the risk is each client has.”
He thinks plenty of owners have a client, or a sector of clients, creeping up as a share of revenue, and they don’t know it. Then he flipped the problem around. When a bigger competitor is chasing the same work, small is an advantage: “This is what I actually love about small business, that you are or can be a lot more nimble than the bigger guys.” You can change faster, decide quicker and tailor the offer to win the client. “So let’s turn it around to that winning mindset.”
Your team needs access to AI, not just a better prompt
Jeremy described a pattern he keeps seeing, which he calls crab theory: different people inside the same business adopt AI separately and end up building similar things in different ways. He’d been talking about it with Daniel Hebert of Oleno, which keeps a company’s positioning, product facts and brand guidance in one shared place for both the team and its AI tools. Daniel’s point was that a team needs a shared AI playbook, so everyone is working from the same context.
Mitchell hasn’t hit that problem with his clients yet. He sees an earlier one. In a lot of small businesses, the owner or the senior people are using AI, and everyone else is waiting for permission:
“the rest of the team hasn’t actually been given that access and that authority to actually use it.”
So his focus right now is getting more of your team using AI at all, even in plain chat form. He was also blunt about who counts as an expert: “anyone and everyone can be an AI expert because we’re all learning it together.”
Jeremy connected it to his interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on why employees resist AI: owners love the shiny new tool, and employees often hear a threat to their job. Mitchell’s answer was to treat it the way we treated the internet. “We need to realize that AI is just another tool.”
The AI manager is a job title that doesn’t exist yet
Mitchell pictured George Jetson pressing one button all day. Then he pointed out that ten years ago, a bank wouldn’t have had a social media manager either. Now corporations hire several.
“And I actually think there will be an AI manager, like you’re talking about before, to roll it out, to figure out how the team should be best using it, and be the champion of that”
Jeremy said that role already exists at Ross Hudgens‘s Siege Media, which has a director of automations coordinating how people use Claude Code and Obsidian vaults. He also admitted why he’s paying attention. When he took over this show from its previous host, Mark Preston, he went looking for prompts to clean up transcripts, and one recap article went out with part of a conversation that never happened. He had to correct it. Mitchell’s view is that problems like that are temporary: “these problems that we’re having today will be solved.”
AI makes owners braver, and the lawyer is still worth calling
Jeremy asked what knock-on effects Mitchell sees. His answer: owners are more willing to try things they had no idea about before. He told the story of someone (not a client) who was advised to get a lawyer to review a contract. They did. Much of the advice had nothing to do with their original question, the bill was in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, and “the advice was the same as what they did in a couple of seconds through ChatGPT.”
He didn’t stop there, though. “Please go to the lawyer still.” His point is that you now get to choose how much expert time you buy. And the lawyer who loses small jobs may gain on the other side, through the efficiencies AI gives them.
Which industries are safe? Mitchell coaches painters and builders, and he doesn’t teach them to paint or build. He works on the business side, and every business has one. A builder looks insulated because “AI can’t swing the hammer,” but Mitchell says they’re being affected, “but in a positive way,” because the quoting, invoicing and admin get faster. “I do actually think everyone will be affected by AI in terms of when it comes to businesses.”
His biggest weakness turned into a strength
Mitchell shared his own story. He has ADHD and a little dyslexia. Writing was always the weak spot: “While I just passed English, I only passed it with fifty percent.” Maths was never the problem.
“Now when AI came along, my biggest weakness now just turned into a strength.”
Work he once needed a partner to help with, he now handles with “this buddy that’s sitting with me on my phone on my computer.” He says the content he can create has gone tenfold.
Speed to lead is a systems job, not an AI job
Jeremy raised speed to lead, citing Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital, who does digital marketing for property managers and has made the case for replying to a form fill the moment it lands.
The research behind that comes from Jake Melendy of Ignitvio, who mystery-shopped service businesses. In Ignitvio’s mystery-shop study, over half of the businesses Jake contacted never responded at all, and only 2% of the ones that did followed up more than once.
Mitchell agreed the gap is real but disagreed on where the fix lives:
“I don’t actually think that’s an AI job. I think that’s sort of more of a systems job.”
You use automations where they help, but he wants “some form of human interaction there somewhere” in the process, at least for now. The goal is to “have those systems in place so we can get to those customers and not drop the ball.” If you run a property management company, Cameron Tope’s speed-to-lead playbook shows what that system looks like in practice.
Jeremy quoted Brett Schklar: AI is not out there to take your job, it’s there to take your tasks. Mitchell’s response for anyone worried about that: “Yeah, you need to adapt. And I would say the first place is just learn how to use it.”
Sales, systems, strategy: the order matters
Outside of AI, this is Mitchell’s core framework: “Well, our framework that we look at really consists of sales, systems, and strategy.”
Sales first. Most owners think the answer is more leads. Mitchell often finds the opposite: “A lot of people think they just need more leads where their sales funnel just could be looking like a sieve.” So he fixes the sales process first, “and make sure it is a process that the same result happens time and time again.” Only then does marketing, SEO included, get to push traffic at it. The math behind that is in why a 5% close-rate lift beats 20% more leads.
Systems second. This is where the episode title comes from:
“As they start growing, we need to make sure that we’ve got the systems in place. Because honestly, you can’t scale chaos.”
Most of the owners he works with are doing far too much. “They’ve ended up building a busy job with overheads.” There’s a team running around, the owner works harder and harder, “So maybe they’re making more money, but they just don’t have any time.” The point of the systems is freedom, “rather than just be handcuffed to the business,” which is often why the owner left a job in the first place. Peter S. Bergeron calls this the second job nobody warned you about.
Strategy last. “What direction we’re going to take and are we focusing on the right priorities at the right time.”
Mitchell gave a test you can run on yourself. Ask a painter what they earn and they quote an hourly rate. But “they’re not including all that time behind the scenes where they are invoicing, looking for new work, ordering what they need to.” Add those hours back and the rate looks different. And once you have a team, the business has to run when you put the phone down. “Otherwise you still have got that job.”
Before you spend another dollar on leads, run Mitchell’s three checks. Do you know what share of revenue your biggest client is? Does your sales process produce the same result every time, or is it a sieve? And if you put your phone down for a week, what stops? Mitchell lays out the full framework in the BOSS system: sales, systems and strategy on the Coachbirds blog.
The biggest pitfall is thinking nobody can do it as well as you
Jeremy asked what mess Mitchell most often has to coach people out of. His answer went back to mindset. “Once you’ve got your mindset right, then it is so much easier to get the positive habits in place.” Owners stuck putting out fires rarely stop to ask whether they should be the one doing the work at all.
“And a lot of them, honestly, a lot of them think no one can do it as good as me.”
Jeremy asked if that’s ego. Partly, Mitchell said. “We need to be able to be a leader, not just the best person.” And if you don’t want that, it’s fine to admit it: “you don’t have to own a business. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur.”
If something is working, do it more
Jeremy closed on fads. In SEO there’s a tactic of the month. Jeremy Moser of uSERP, a GEO agency, was the one who flagged listicles as the current example: everybody and their mother now knows that getting listed works, in Google and in LLMs.
Once everyone piles in, Google adjusts and the results drop. Jeremy asked whether entrepreneurs do the same thing, “monkey see monkey do.”
Mitchell split that into two different behaviors. Chasing what competitors are doing is “shiny object syndrome.” Repeating what already works for you is the opposite, and he says most owners don’t do it enough: “Well, I would argue, people probably don’t do that enough.”
“If something is working in business, do it more.”
If a sales or marketing process brought in clients, he doesn’t want you to call it a win and move on. “Now on to the next thing. No, no, no, no. Repeat that.” And when results start to slip, that’s when your numbers tell you to change course: “So, if something’s changing, we need to pivot.”
Also on Unscripted Small Business
Mitchell’s point about getting your team access to AI pairs with the free AI adoption SOP, built from Dr. Gleb Tsipursky’s episode.
Want the step-by-step version? Use the free Simple Systems SOP built from this episode – eight steps and a printable one-page worksheet.
Two more takes on this conversation: why more leads won’t fix a leaky sales process on SEO Arcade, and Jeremy’s own reflection on doing the boring stuff consistently.
Connect with Mitchell
- Website: Coachbirds
- The Business Nest: coachbirds.com/nest
- Blog: the Coachbirds blog
- Podcast: Let’s Talk Small Business
- LinkedIn: Mitchell Wilson
- Instagram: @coachbirds
🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube
Sponsor disclosure: Oleno, uSERP and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.
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