The 5P Framework: How to Build an AI Backlog for Your Solo Business

Transcript

The Challenge for Solo Founders

Today we’re walking through my hierarchy of documentation that’s going to help you implement AI in an effective way that’s going to deliver results for your business. G’day. My name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and if you’re a solo founder, you know that your hats that you wear are very numerous.

You wear many, many hats and you are very, very busy.

The goal that I’m going to walk you through today with this framework is to show you how to get started with understanding the things that go into making you faster so that we can start to hand off to AI and automation to be able to free up your time to do that. So here we go. I have a framework, it’s called the 5P Framework. It covers off on Persona, Profile, Process, Procedure and Performance.

It is a hierarchy of a framework in that you start at the top and you work your way through to the bottom.

And throughout that time, you start to get an idea about the purpose, about why you operate in the business, how you operate in the business, the things that need to get done, and the things that you need to track to make sure that you are performing well and being effective. I’ve had a lot of business owners recently start to say, I don’t actually know how to get started with AI.

I don’t know what I should be giving it to do. I don’t know what it can do. And the biggest piece of advice that I can give is to start to list down the things that you do.

This is not actually any different to how you would start to make your first hire.

Okay, we think about it in very, very much the same ways in that you are very busy, you’ve got a lot of things to do, you want to start to give other people things. What is it that you do?

The easiest thing to do is just to list out a whole bunch of the tasks that you do every day and then figure out which one that you want to document and delegate first.

That is an effective way, but it’s not a systemized way and it’s not a sustainable way if you wanted to build an ecosystem that is scalable over time. So this is what the 5P Framework helps you do.

P1: Persona

So I’m going to give you a little bit of a quick tour through the components, but I’m going to spend a lot of the time on the process and procedure components. So, P number one is Persona. Who are you and what are your goals? This is not necessarily business focused, it’s just, why did you start your business?

What do you want to get out of it. What do you want to achieve? What are your goals? What are your aspirations? What are the moments that you want to be having more of? Okay.

Not just the big stuff, but the little stuff. Okay. We live our life in a series of moments. What are all those things? What do you want to achieve? Go ahead and document that out. What do you like?

What do you don’t like? We need to include those things. This is going to start acting as a filter as to what you are going to get AI or other people to do.

P2: Profile

So that’s number one. Number two is Profile. So this is building up a profile of your business. You should be able to do this on one page. Okay?

Think of it as two long vertical boxes on either side of a large square. The left one is supplier. This is who you are dealing with to get things from so you can operate your business. The right hand side is customer.

It’s where you’re sending value to, right? It’s your client and customer base. In the middle is your business.

And in there you’re gonna start listing at a high level the types of things that you do to deliver value to your customer. And you can use relatively high level language here. Okay, Manage delivery.

You might want to be more specific than delivery, but that is the essence of it. Okay, Manage sales, manage marketing, manage human resources. All these types of things are like really high level process language.

Okay, Verb noun, because you’re doing something.

P3: Process

Then underneath that, we’re gonna start targeting out those different processes that you do and we’re gonna list out the tasks in more detail.

So let’s say you want to start with your marketing processes, right?

So my marketing processes include podcast, recording, editing, publishing, newsletter writing, post writing, publishing to YouTube, all those types of things. And those things can be put into an end to end process.

So they are discrete tasks that need to be done and they deliver a certain outcome which hopefully is more leads, right? And that is the same for you. So you start to list that out and you start to list it out in order. Okay?

So we’re going to go from left to right and we’re going to put in boxes what those activities are. Okay? Again we want to use verb noun because you’re doing something. Write social post, record podcast episode. Okay? You start to list those out.

You draw it on a map, okay? Make a process map and draw them out in order that you do things. Now at the moment, if you’re a solo founder, you are. It is all you. It is all you.

That’s what’s happening. You are doing all those things, assign all those things to you.

You’ll also want to go and list out other stakeholders that you deal with on those processes. I cover this off on a recent episode where I talk about the handoff problem.

Being able to understand how you interact with different people throughout your process, it doesn’t have to just be internal to your business, but it can be your customers and suppliers as well, because we want to minimize those delays as we build things out. So list those things out, and then you can list out the documents and the systems that you use along the way.

This helps build up a repository of the different types of templates that you can start to make.

P4: Procedure

Then underneath that is Procedure. Procedure is how things are done. So each one of those tasks becomes a procedure. How do I record a podcast episode?

Okay, so I do.

I prepare, I review my list, I get the content ready, I sit down, I open up Descript, where I record it, I set up my camera, click record, you know, take my millennial pause and a big deep breath, and then I start to talk. Those are the types of things that would be on a procedure for me to record my podcast episode. That is a procedure.

And it takes you through all the step by step, little step by step things to produce that particular outcome, which in this case is the podcast episode, the draft, which then goes off to my producer who does things to it, which makes you end up with what you’re listening to right now. Okay, so that’s a different task that’s in his ecosystem.

Where AI Fits In

It’s in here that we start to identify the different things that AI can start to help us with. So I’m going to give you an example now. An example of this will be I have my list of episodes that I’m going to be recording each week of the year.

Already, already planned. Okay. It is sitting in Asana or in a content calendar project, in a podcast episodes project as well. Just so we can have that visibility.

An AI agent might be used to get the next open podcast episode task. And it might take the title and the subtitle that’s in there.

And then it might take some of my other knowledge information from my 5P Framework and from my AI work that I’ve been doing with people. And it’s going to construct out a bullet point list of the things to do to talk about.

That’s a very, very simple example of what I can start to do with that. We can already start to see that there are things here that can be automated. They don’t have to take all this manual effort anymore to do.

What does that mean? Well, it might mean that I get to save 10 or 15 minutes a week instead of having to do that myself.

I can just get the output and then take less time to review and then record. It will streamline my review process and it will streamline the recording of the podcast task.

That means that I get that extra time back to do something else. Means I can deliver faster. It means I can increase my revenue and increase my cash flow, which is excellent.

Okay, now you might go, well, 10 minutes isn’t much a week.

Yes, but you add this up to a lot of the other tasks that you’re doing throughout other processes and it will stack on top of each other and you’ll start to reap those rewards in hours or days rather than minutes.

P5: Performance and the Time Flux Method

That is how you basically create the list of things to do from a process perspective. The fifth P is Performance.

We’re not going to touch on that today, but Performance is basically, let’s take what we’re doing and seeing how we’re performing on that. You might be tracking revenue, you might be tracking cycle time of certain processes or tasks. Those things are important to track.

You might track other things that are important to you, such as time off or evenings worked or not worked, things like that. The other method of being able to get your list of things is what I call the Time Flux method. What this does is this is basically a calendar audit.

What you can do is you can go into your calendar and you can see what you did on specific days. If you don’t plan different things in your calendar, I encourage you to do that for two weeks.

Just plan out what you’re working on or put in your actuals about what you’re working on in 15 or 30 minute blocks and start to understand the complexity of what those tasks mean and the types of things that go into that. Each one of those tasks can also be documented, right? So you can go and create a procedure on how to do each of those things.

If you do that, you will be able to find more opportunities for AI to be able to take over and to be able to help you do those things in a better, more consistent way than you were doing before.

Getting Started

So there’s your list. It really is that simple. This is not rocket science.

This is something that you just need to dedicate a little bit of time to, to be able to pull together. And I know you’re busy, I know that you’re working those long, long weeks.

I know that you don’t have any quote unquote spare time, but this is going to free up hours upon hours upon hours of your week throughout the weeks of this year.

And I want you to be able to do this and to be able to look back on what you’ve done for the year and I want you to be able to look back and say, wow, before I was working those 70 hour weeks and now I’m working 40.

I actually have a healthy personal life and I have better balance in my life because I’m not working as much and I’m still reaping the rewards of what my business is providing me. That’s what I really want for you. That’s going to do it for this week. Thank you so much for your time.

I really appreciate you joining me today and learning how to work through how to build an AI backlog by looking at your different processes and tasks. You can head over to my website, lonewolfunleashed.com and you can head over to the resources page there. There’s heaps of resources there.

Now I’m building up a library for you to be able to start this journey yourself. And I also run a program called the Wolfpack.

It is a place where I help you and others walk through the framework and I help you and provide more hands on resource to be able to build up these capabilities in your business and in your life so that you can start to live your life on your terms. Right? It’s your time, it’s your terms. Thank you so much. Head over there, check that out. I’ll see you next week.