Kimberly Fischer on the Energy Money Matrix, AI and Motipulation

🎧 Listen: Castos  |  📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube

Kimberly Fischer was working twelve to sixteen hour days at her restaurant and crying on the couch when a ruptured disc forced her to learn how to be an owner instead of an employee of her own company. Kimberly is an entrepreneur, speaker and the author of The Motipulation Method: How to Get Your Team to Follow Through Without Force, Guilt, or Yelling. She owns Main Event Grill & Catering, and her site describes 27 years as a business owner and an award-winning restaurant and catering company in Alaska. On this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, she and host Jeremy Rivera talked about mapping your day on her energy money matrix, what an hour of your time really costs, why AI shouldn’t be telling you what to do, and how you get people to choose to follow you.

From self-employed to owner: what a ruptured disc forced her to figure out

Kimberly started her first business in 1999 and opened her food business in 2016. Looking back at the years before it, she says, “I was sort of dabbling in being self-employed more than being an owner.”

A couple of summers ago she was exhausted. She told her husband “he’s got a year, he needs to sell or figure out something because I’m not gonna do this anymore.” That Christmas she ruptured a disc in her back, and she still had customers and employees counting on her. So, in her words, “I figured out how to actually be an owner instead of an employee of my company. And it changed the world for me.”

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you may recognize what she wanted when she started: “I wanted to be in control of my schedule. I wanted to be able to have time with my family.” Jeremy said he feels that pain too. As he put it, “there is a big difference between owning a business and owning your job.” Peter S. Bergeron has a name for the same bind in the second job nobody warned you about.

The energy money matrix sorts your day into four boxes

Jeremy asked what process changed things for her. Her first move was a question: “what am I doing with my time that is not necessarily being an effective use of my time.” The tool she uses to answer it is a chart she calls the energy money matrix, and it’s in her book.

You draw a grid with energy on one side and money across the top. Every task lands in one of four boxes:

• Makes you money and gives you energy. She feels “80% of my day should be on that.”
• Makes you money but drains you. The work that feels like “the soul is being sucked out of my body.”
• Gives you energy but doesn’t make money. The box she says owners give up first.
• Neither. The box to look at hardest.

Then you line up everything you do in a day and read your own chart. Her question for you is “how much of my day is in a box that doesn’t give me energy and isn’t making me money?” From there, you ask two more: “Does this belong on my schedule? Can I find somebody else that can help me do this?”

Her example is bookkeeping. She did her own from 1999 until she hired someone five years ago, and she describes “reconciling accounts in March of the next year” while trying to remember what a January charge was for. Once she hired a bookkeeper, “it was just like life was so much better.” Maya Weinreb covers the same handoff from the bookkeeper’s side in her episode on AI bookkeeping and clean books.

The box you give up first is the one that keeps you going

Here’s what surprised her. “The things that don’t make me money, but they give me energy, that was the first thing that I gave up.” She sees it in her business owner friends too. About 550 days ago she decided working out was off the table for negotiation: “It can never be sacrificed.” She goes to the gym every day, whatever season the business is in, because it’s what lets her show up for the business.

She runs the matrix at every event she teaches. Two weeks before we recorded, an owner came to her conference ready to quit. After they talked, she says, he told her “I haven’t slept for three days. I’m so excited.”

An hour you save can cost you the call that pays for the year

Owners talk themselves into the money-but-no-energy box with one sentence, she says: “I’ll get it done in an hour.” The problem: “we don’t realize what that hour is actually costing us.”

She told a story from a business owner she was talking with, who fixes and flips houses. He needed a new water heater, got frustrated with his contractor, and did the job himself. It took him three hours. While he was working, he missed a call about a house he could have bought and made a hundred grand on. As she tells it, he said “That three hours that I saved not paying this contractor cost me a hundred thousand dollars because I wasn’t available to answer the call.”

She catches herself doing this at home too, with things like mowing the yard and meal prep. Every time her housekeeper comes, she texts to say thanks and to say “because of her I can do what I do.” If you want a way to put a number on your own hour, Louis Swart’s $100/hour rule is a good next listen.

Jeremy took the missed call in a different direction: speed to lead. He pointed to Ignitvio’s lead response study, which found that 68% of 1,824 local businesses never responded within 24 hours. He doesn’t think these owners need to answer every call themselves. An automatic text back, a call center or a person hired to book appointments all beat a voicemail with no reply. His own test was a blinking light on a circuit at his house. “Called five different handymen. Never got a call back.” Meanwhile, he said, sit down with that same owner and you’d hear “I’m not getting any leads.” The AI Lead Callback SOP is one place to start fixing that.

Stop letting AI be your boss

Kimberly recently recorded a video on this because of what she was seeing. “A lot of people utilize AI to help them, but actually they turn it into their boss.” You ask how to do something, it hands you a list, and “Now your AI is telling you what to do.” Her version flips who has the job:

“I don’t say, how do I do this? I say, how can you do this without me?”

She warns about the tool-first version of this. If you buy the latest thing “but you don’t know how to use it, it’s not gonna make your life easier.” Jeremy asked for a quick win, and hers started with her leadership team. She built a second brain they all share in a shared AI tool, then went around the room asking “what is one problem in our company that we could automate that would make life easier.” Two days later, “I keep getting text messages from my leadership team telling me all the amazing things that they’re able to accomplish.” One of her partners set up an AI for recipes the same morning he thought to ask her about one.

That approach lines up with what Jeremy remembered from Dr. Gleb Tsipursky’s research: when a leader puts on a big AI demo, the team can see parts of their own jobs on the screen and turn AI resistant. Asking people what they want fixed runs the other way. Gleb’s AI Adoption SOP walks through it.

Jeremy brought up a conversation with the team at Oleno, which builds shared marketing context for AI tools. His point was about shared SOPs. The same prompt can get you a different answer on Claude’s web app, its desktop app and Claude Code, and answers vary even more from person to person. “The context has to be there for the answer to come out,” he said, so “you need some sort of shared workflow system.”

His own biggest wins come from checking whether your software has an API or MCP and moving toward Claude Code, then telling it to “display this outcome as a browser tab” so you get charts in place of a wall of text. He says a business dashboard can come together in a few hours, and “you don’t have to know any coding.” If you’d sooner start with the people side, try the AI Job Description SOP.

Communication is the skill that makes both AI and teams work

Kimberly’s answer to what people need most: “the number one skill” is communication. She told a 16-year-old whose school restricts AI that schoolwork matters for learning to read and write, and that outside of it, “learning how to communicate with AI and people are gonna be the two biggest skill sets” ahead of us.

Then she told the latte story. She and her husband were working through a problem at the kitchen island, and he offered to make coffee. She asked for a protein latte and told him to use a room temperature one, thinking it would get hotter with the steaming. He poured the espresso into the room temperature protein and handed it over. What he said was “That’s what you asked for.” She wanted a hot latte. It made her laugh, because “that’s exactly it. If you don’t prompt it correctly, you don’t have the right communication, then you’re gonna not get to get the output that you’re trying to receive.”

“Communication is not about what you said. It’s about what they received.”

Her leadership team has the people version of the same argument. “No one listens to me. I’ve already said it a million times.” Her reply: “just because you said it doesn’t mean they understand it.” Repeating yourself isn’t training, and she’s written more about that in I Told You 10 Times and You Can Be Right and Still Trigger Resistance.

Jeremy connected this to attorney Delina Yasmeh, whose point to him was that AI struggles with prompts largely because context is almost always missing. It’s math and probability, he said, playing off Data from Star Trek, who is a character with lines written by a human writer.

He shared his own version. One podcast interview can become articles, social posts and a newsletter if “you give it the right context for processing a transcript.” Without the context, the prompting and the tools, he said, what comes out is AI slop, as his friend Michael McDougald calls it.

AI amplifies the human, and the human still has to know the work

Kimberly heard that as an argument in AI’s favor, because “it always needs a human.” Her comparison is a hammer. “I can take the hammer and I can go and do a lot of damage with it, or I can build a beautiful house.” If she bought nails and a hammer having never built a house, it wouldn’t go well. Someone who has been building for years goes further and faster. Her summary: “it’s just amplifying the human. It’s not taking away the human.”

She also pointed to electricity, which some people refused to put in their homes. “When the sun went down, everyone stopped working. Electricity meant we could work past that.” A business that adopted it could out-produce one that stopped at sundown. Her read on today: “It’s gonna change the job world.”

Jeremy noted “a whole class of tools” showing up to solve problems owners have, and named Blawgy, which he said helps you create content for your site quickly.

His broader point was about cost. Building software used to take tens of thousands of dollars in seed money, and now a small business can get a lot done without it. Kimberly’s reply was about control: “I’m no longer dealing with the man behind the curtain.” That’s most valuable, she said, “if I know my business well.”

Motipulation: your words, your actions and what motivates other people

Motipulation is the word behind her book, and her husband came up with it on a date night that turned into a business meeting. She’d told him “I motivate them and I kind of manipulate them at the same time,” and that it’s “not doing it for my sake, it’s for their sake.”

Its roots go back further. She told Jeremy her family had trouble with addiction when she was eleven, and that she lived in shelters, abandoned homes and foster care before getting her own apartment at 16. Later, as a business owner, she recognized that “I learned some communication skills during that time to get what I needed.”

She breaks it down to “my words, my actions, and what motivates other people.” You can’t force the rest, because “if I push you, people naturally push back.” She admits she has lost her temper as an owner, and that it never got her the result. Now in a hard conversation, “I’m focusing on the outcome,” and she checks how she’s talking and what her body language says.

What motivates each person is different. One of her employees “loves praise,” so when she posts a photo of something he baked, he “walks two inches taller that whole day.” For another, “money is very motivating to him.” Her training framework is the BETTER model: “build, encourage, train, trust, empower, and then reproduce.” She knows it’s working when employees write thank-you cards to her leaders instead of to her. Her first reaction is “What about me?” Her second is that “I built that leader that’s building other leaders.”

Jeremy added that an owner who doesn’t appreciate what each team member can do is missing out. Kimberly agreed, and passed along advice she credited to a leadership author: meet with at least one employee every single week. “If you’re looking at people as a number game, you’re never gonna be successful.” Barry Moline’s take on hiring for get-along ability pairs well with this.

Audit your time: the one thing Kimberly wants you to do

Jeremy asked for one takeaway. “Audit your time and have a serious conversation with yourself about what you do with your time.”

Her reason is a birthday dinner. She was sitting with her daughter and her whole family when the restaurant called to say it had run out of hamburger buns, and she left to go get them. “Anybody could have done that. It didn’t have to be me.”

“I sacrificed time with my daughter for her birthday to go get hamburger buns.”

At the time she “felt like I needed to do everything and that everything required me.” If that sounds like your week, the first step is the same one she took. To run it, use our Energy Money Matrix SOP, which has a printable chart. She also recommends Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time, a book she has gone through five times.

Two more takes on this conversation: what marketers can take from Kimberly Fischer on AI as a tool, not a boss on SEO Arcade, and Jeremy’s own reflection on owning a job vs owning a business.

Where to find Kimberly Fischer and The Motipulation Method

• Website: kimberlyfischer.com
• Her book, The Motipulation Method, is coming soon: reserve a free copy
• Her courses: The Freedom Blueprint and The Better Model
• Her blog: kimberlyfischer.com/blog
• Her podcast, Motipulation: Apple Podcasts and Spotify
• LinkedIn: Kimberly Fischer
• Instagram: kimberly.farmerfischer
• YouTube: Kimberly Fischer on YouTube

🎧 Listen: Castos  |  📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno, ClearLead Digital, OppAlerts and Blawgy are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

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