Day 2 of 100: "Hey AI, Build Me a Million-Dollar Business" Is a Bad Delegation. Here's a Good One.

Yesterday I said every task in my business climbs the same ladder: in my head, written down, handed off, runs itself. Today I want to explain how that actually works, because this is the part most people get wrong with AI.

It started with people

Before any of this was AI, it was team members. I'd assign someone a task and they'd have to get it done. Some did. A lot of the time they didn't, and usually it wasn't because they were lazy.

So eventually the question became: could I assign that same task to AI and have it get done?

The answer is yes. But only if it's definable. Or really, only if the AI knows everything it needs to know to actually execute it.

The password problem

This is the part I got from Ari Meisel. Say you delegate something to a virtual assistant. "Log in to this site and update X." But you never gave them the password.

They're not going to finish. That's not a bad VA. That's a bad delegation.

And that's the exact same mistake most people make with AI. They say "hey AI, go build me a million dollar a year business" and then they want to go sit on the beach. That's not how it works. That's the password problem times a thousand.

It all comes down to two things:

1. Definition. Does it know exactly what done looks like, and everything it needs to know to get there?
2. Tools. Does it actually have access to do the thing? The logins, the APIs, the data, the permissions. If it can't log in, it can't do the job, same as the VA.

How I go from idea to done

So here is the structure I use across all four companies:

• Goals. The big thing, per project. What "done" looks like for that business or project.
• Targets. A goal broken into the next few concrete objectives that actually move it.
• Passes. Each target broken into chunks of work defined well enough that AI can pick one up cold and finish it without asking anybody anything. (We call them passes. You could call them tasks.)

A pass isn't "work on marketing." It's closer to a work order: what to do, what done looks like in a way you could actually check, where the relevant stuff lives, what it's allowed to touch, and what it has to stop and ask a human about.

And anything that can't be defined yet doesn't get guessed at. It turns into a question that goes to the one person who can answer it. Answer the question, and the pass becomes workable.

The nice part

AI can help with the strategy too. It can help you go from a goal all the way down to workable chunks, which honestly is most of the job. But you do have to have a structure. Without one you just get a really fast guesser.

I've learned a whole bunch of things building this, most of them the hard way, and that's what the next 98 days are. Tomorrow I'll get into one of them.

If you want to follow along, follow me on X, where I post every day. And if you run a company and you're thinking "I want this in my business," tell me about it here.

-Matt