How AI is helping solo founders make their first hires

• For solo business founders, making a first hire can be risky and time-consuming.
• AI has helped capture one founder's expertise into a workflow that made a new hire more effective.
• A real-estate solopreneur was able to add a contractor after improving her firm's visibility on AI platforms.

During her nine years as a financial strategist running her own business, Katherine Pomerantz often considered hiring a business manager as her first employee.

However, she put off the adding an employee, saying that she struggled to distill her expertise and voice-driven client communications into standard operating procedures that an new hire could follow.

"Being able to turn it into a step-by-step workflow for someone else, I just don't think that way," said Pomerantz, the owner of Money Storyteller, which offers tax and financial services for small companies.

Her perspective changed when she started using generative artificial intelligence.

Pomerantz and another founder, Danielle Nazinitsky of Decode Real Estate, told Business Insider that generative AI has helped them make effective first hires and, in turn, scale their small businesses further.

AI can help streamline employee processes

Pomerantz started using ChatGPT for her business about a year ago, she told Business Insider. Quickly, she came to view the generative AI platform as a "second brain," using the technology to streamline administrative and organizational tasks.

ChatGPT helped her reverse-engineer her strategic thinking into day-to-day processes. Pomerantz fed client call recordings, emails, brainstorming sessions, and other material into the model, which helped her identify patterns in her workflow. Soon, she had procedures that others could follow.

Last year, Pomerantz hired two employees: an administrator in the US and a bookkeeper in the Philippines. She said that they help her get twice as much work done as she did as a solo operator.

"We have more clients, and are meeting all deadlines well ahead," Pomerantz said.

In addition to helping establish standard operating procedures, Pomerantz said she uses ChatGPT to create documents that detail her decision-making. Now, when a client emails with a question — for example, whether to use a Roth IRA — Pomerantz's administrator can ask AI to provide a detailed overview of when Pomerantz would recommend a particular financial strategy.

Ultimately, Pomerantz will discuss key decisions with the client, but using AI and her administrator to organize information in advance allows her to save time while delivering prompt, in-depth responses, she said.

That makes her clients feel like they're always getting a high level of service, without requiring more working hours from Pomerantz. "We want them to feel like they get a lot more of my time than they do," she said.

Generating leads using AI referrals

Danielle Nazinitsky, the owner of the boutique New York City real estate firm Decode Real Estate, also found generative AI useful for scaling her business and bringing on new hires.

She told Business Insider that ChatGPT has acted as "a referral engine" for her services.

From inbound leads, Nazinitsky said she discovered that some prospects were finding her name via ChatGPT. To build on this momentum and steer clients toward her company brand, she retained a GEO firm to boost Decode's brand recognition.

She learned that to reinforce her standing in GEO results, she needed to do more brand blog posts, and to encourage her clients to leave reviews on Google. Nazinitsky used AI in part to help bolster her content.

Nazinitsky said that, in part due to her GEO-related growth, she had the resources to hire a second broker six months ago. As with most real estate brokerages, her second broker is a contractor, not a full-time employee.

In addition to using AI to market her business, Nazinitsky said that it's been just as important to learn when she shouldn't use AI. She said she pays professional contractors to write press releases, handle branding, and oversee client transactions.

"When I spend the money on an actual expert, I get a much better result," she told Business Insider, adding that she spends less time redoing work or handling costly mistakes than if she outsourced the highly specific work to generative AI.

"As a solopreneur, your time is your most valuable asset," Nazinitsky said.