It is about 50 degrees and recently light. I have been set here since 6AM. Nothing has walked past me yet.
My business has been open the whole time.
While I have been sitting in this tree, my phone line answered a caller, asked them what they needed, and wrote it down. A pipeline researched a list of businesses, drafted a message for each one, and then stopped and waited, because the last step is mine. If something needs me, it reaches my pocket.
I am writing this post from up here too.
The book that got me in on this
Dan Martell wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. The principle in it is one sentence: do not hire to grow your business, hire to buy back your time.
That is the right idea and it was out of reach for most of the people I know. Hiring is slow and expensive, and it only works if there is enough repeatable work to justify a whole person. So most owners read a line like that, agree with it, and go back to doing the work themselves.
AI changed what that sentence costs.
What a digital employee really is
A digital employee is one who does not need you sitting in the office with them.
That is the entire definition and it is the part people miss. The value is not that the computer is fast. Computers have always been fast. The value is that the work happens whether you are at your desk, on a job site, at your kid's game, or in a tree in the dark. No commute, no schedule, nothing waiting for Monday morning.
I direct my business from my phone. I hand off tasks, I ask for research, I check on things that ran overnight. The work does not pause because I am not in the room.
The part nobody tells you
Two things, and I would rather say them than have you find out.
Someone still has to make the calls. My systems stop at the decisions. That is deliberate, and it is the first thing I build into anything I put in front of a business. A system that makes judgment calls without you is not freedom, it is a liability wearing a costume. Mine run until they hit something that needs a human, then they wait. The notification comes to my phone and I answer it in a minute.
The hours do not stay bought. This is the one that gets people. You automate the quoting, you get six hours back, and within a month the week is full again with something else. Time you did not decide how to spend will spend itself. So decide first. I decided some of mine was for sitting in a tree in October.
What it looks like in a real business
A client of mine runs a service business. The work used to be the work, and then there was the other job after the real one: writing the customer down, getting it to the crew, finding out whether it got done, and chasing the invoice.
We connected those. Signup, routing, completion, billing. Their weekly administration is close to zero now.
That is their time, not mine. They did not get a faster office. They got time back.
If you run a service business you already know which hours I mean. Jobber surveyed a thousand owners last year and the most time consuming parts of the day were paperwork, invoicing, and scheduling, in that order. None of that is the work. All of it has to happen.
The honest ask
I am not going to tell you to go buy software. Most of the owners I talk to have already bought plenty and are more tired than they were before.
The question I would ask is smaller than that. Think about yesterday. Name one thing that happened in your business without you touching it. If you cannot name one, that is worth knowing. If you can, the next question is what you did with the time, because that answer is the whole point.
I was in a tree. It was worth it.