I’m not an expert. That’s the point.

I’ve spent 20 years in financial management and operations. For the last 10 of those years I’ve been at JB Sales, the B2B sales training company founded by John Barrows, where I serve as COO. I’m not a technologist. I don’t have a technical background. I’ve never written a line of code in my professional life.

About a year and a half ago I enrolled in a mini-MBA program focused on AI. It was informative. It was not transformational. I walked away understanding the concept of AI without having any real idea what to do with it.

The shift happened when JB Sales needed to solve a specific business problem.

We were repositioning some of our services to include advisory offerings alongside our core sales training work. The challenge was that the buyer for those advisory services was different from our typical contact. We needed to reach VP and C-suite level decision makers. Different buyer, different message, different channel.

We needed to get the word out without launching a traditional email campaign. That led to exploring how to grow our newsletter subscriber base. Which led to building a ManyChat to Kit automation. Which led to learning about AEO and how AI tools surface information. Which led to an audit of our existing content. Which led to this.

One business problem. One domino. A full AI learning journey I didn’t plan for and couldn’t have predicted.

I’m documenting it here because I suspect I’m not the only non-technical operator who found themselves in the middle of something they didn’t fully understand, trying to figure out how to make it work anyway.

John Barrows introduced me to the concept of being 1% better every day. Read one article. Try one tip. Find one person already doing what you want to do. I’ve applied that principle to this journey and it’s the organizing framework behind everything you’ll find here.

This is The Operator's Notebook. I’m glad you found it.