Why Entrepreneurs Deserve More Credit

SPEAKER_01 0:25

It's not really fair to put yourself as an entrepreneur on LinkedIn. Really, you've had so many jobs and you've managed all of them and you've had to learn to be an SME in all of those areas. That's enormous. So one, we got to start celebrating entrepreneurs more and understanding the work that it takes to be successful. Uh, I don't think we uh in society do a good enough job doing that.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Welcome back to Plan Like a Boss. Sarah Potter Genot is a growth strategist, published author, and FinTech founder with two successful exits. She's been featured on Forbes, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance, sharing insights on growth leadership, customer experience, and the emerging hybrid human era. Beyond her professional accomplishments, Sarah is an entrepreneur at heart and a leader who has

Meet Sarah Potter Genot

SPEAKER_00 1:14

also held executive roles in large organizations, giving her a rare, dual perspective on how both startups and enterprises grow, adapt, and scale. Sarah, welcome to Plan Like a Boss. I am so excited to have you here today.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

So you've done a lot. Like a lot. So my question for you to start with is tell us how you got here. What is your story? How did you end up where you are today?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Yeah, and I can fair that I have a bit of a unique story. And I also have a challenge for everybody who's a listener to say, and for my kids in the future, I want my story to be more common. And I'll start with where it all began. And it began in a classroom. I was actually started out my career as a teacher and never thought that I was going to eventually

From Teacher To Self-Taught Trader

SPEAKER_01 2:10

run my own business, sell a business, and or become a C-suite in a really large, like multinational enterprise. So we know those stories of like, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? And where I actually am today is probably not where I had originally foreseen where my future was going. So for anyone who's saying to them right now, what do I want to be when I grow up? Or what do I want to do in a couple of years? I think it's okay to give yourself a bit of grace to say, I don't know, but I'm certainly going to try some new things and I'm going to see where things stick. So my story began, I was a teacher and I wasn't feeling super fulfilled there and decided I was going to do what my parents thought was terrible, which was quit teaching. Why would you do that when you have a salary and you have a pension and it's solid full-time work? What's what are you thinking, Sarah? So a moment where I was super proud of myself because I was like, I want to learn how to trade and I want to be able to work from home. And I, you know, I want to be working from home when at the time, now it's more common, but then it was never common. Why would you do that? And so decided I was going to take a leap and I wanted to learn how to trade for myself. And in that process, I didn't even know I was going to start my own business, to be very honest. I started uh journaling my process of learning how to trade for myself using my own money. And along the way, I was doing, I just finished my master's of education in adult learning theory, and I started doing these little trading tip comic strips for fun on this side. And then I started posting them and sharing them and then realizing, oh, wait a minute. There's a bit of an audience here. Like people are interested in this, and this is something that's exciting. And then from there, just decided to start sharing more and more, and then started realizing, oh, there's an opportunity here. I can take my skill set of learning and teaching and a skill set of what I'm learning to do now in terms of financial literacy and combine those and make a business. Um at the time I grew that, uh, and that ended up evolving into being quite a financial education super a financial education supplier for many brokerages, banks, um, behind the scene uh content that we were creating at the time. And that grew and then, yeah, eventually built that into something that somebody acquired. And then from there got the great opportunity to be part of growing a brokerage and building and expanding that within a very large institution. And then I've just kind of shifted around from there and now I'm landed in this incredible opportunity as there is AI and uh and helping companies build and grow utilizing this incredibly new tool. And here I am today.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

That's awesome. I love that story, and I love that you were a teacher. I think so many teachers end up in business because we naturally know how to explain things. Yeah. And I love that evolution from teacher to educational finance to brokerage to now AI, which is the new thing. I mean, think back to the computer when it was first developed. AI is that.

Building A Financial Education Business

SPEAKER_00 5:20

It's gonna change the world forever. Now, you had mentioned in your bio, it mentions the future of work is human plus AI, not human versus AI. And I want to start with that. We're gonna kind of go all over your expertise today, but I want to start with that because AI is all over the news right now. A lot of colleges just graduated, and at least in the US, we had huge graduating classes booing anybody who mentioned AI in their addresses. So tell us how the future of work is human plus AI, not human versus AI, because there's a big human versus AI rhetoric going on at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

There is, and there is a lot of fear in what this can help us with or what this can replace us with. And I think that's incredibly valid. The speed at which AI is being implemented in not just our businesses, but in our lives, it's incredible. And it's hard to be able to keep up. It's hard to be able to understand and control that information of what is actually going on, who does what anymore. So I understand how people can have fear about what this is. At Procedure Flow, we believe that if you layer in AI responsibly in an organization and you still leverage our human capacity and find roles that actually work in terms of building out your biggest advantages for your human team as well as your AI team, we think that is where the future of work plays. And I think that's an all a credible opportunity for companies who are looking at building revenue and saying, okay, well, I mean, the first, you know, is AI is going to help solve all of these problems in my business. And it's going to be so much cheaper to integrate AI versus having human capital to do that task and to do that work. And I think that there was a wave of that. And that is, that is in the marketplace today. And what they're actually finding, though, if you took a look a lot of the research, is that the implementation of AI has has been put into organizations, but the results haven't actually produced what they were hoping for. So in terms of ROI hoping to like decrease um problems, and what actually what we've seen is an increase of hallucination or decrease the amount of time of capacity, like the amount of team members we need to have on Teams. But actually, sometimes AI tools on their own can actually escalate and customer service decreases because now there's more steps that are required before somebody really gets to a human who really gets to the answer they're looking for. And then we have all sorts of like risk in terms of compliance. And what are we ensuring that we are protecting within an organization in terms of our information? And we thought AI would just do it all. And in fact, actually, it does need guardrails. So that's kind of what our product does at Procedure Flow, but I think it also just represents so much of who we are and our culture and how things are shifting and changing so quickly. And to assume that AI is just going to wipe us out forgets all the special pieces about humans. I mean, think about it in a classroom, right? And we have different tools to help students or adults learn. And you need the tools to help engage the learning, to help solidify what you're learning or what you're teaching. But you still need a teacher for classroom management to learn the individual strengths and needs of each person, to help layer in supports when they need. And so oftentimes I think people forget that those skills, our skills, at least for now, are still required in order to integrate AI very successfully within organizations. So I think it's okay to be cautious. We should always be questioning everything. But it's also okay to say, where in my organization does this make sense to put it? What's the hype? And then really what's the output that actually it produces.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Gotcha. That makes total sense. And the teacher analogy was perfect there. That is so true. We need that human element. And I think many of us are very frustrated with AI and big business, as you know, say this, or you would all you want to do is talk to a person, and it just keeps giving you that automated menu, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah. I mean, what person? Okay, I'm gonna just personally like who wants to call a contact center because like I forgot my pin on my bank card and I need answers, and I call, and all I get is something that's clearly AI, or something that's clearly not getting to me the answer I want. What does that do? It makes me frustrated. It makes me push zero, zero, zero. Like, how do I get to the person? Because we still want people. I still want to talk to someone.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Especially the um the AI-generated computer clicks, like it's actually typing. Yeah. Now, the majority of people that listen to this show, they are solopreneurs or entrepreneurs with a very small team of two or three. And as they start to begin to hand more of their workload over to AI, how do they ensure that they don't lose the humanity and connection that makes their small business special? Because I know a lot of them are nervous about implementing AI because they don't want to lose that humanity that makes them special.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Absolutely. I mean, hey, I was an entrepreneur too and started as just one person trying to do everything. And I get it, right? And so there is a bit of an appeal to listen to AI and think, oh, it can do all these tasks for me that I don't have to do anymore. I'm gonna free up all of my time. But I think as any entrepreneur can probably relate to, you're an entrepreneur because you love to be an entrepreneur, which means you like to do a little bit of everything.

Why Work Becomes Human Plus AI

SPEAKER_01 10:57

And I get, I'm guarantee that, you know, even though we get a little frustrated, or at least I used to be frustrated with like, oh my gosh, I have so much to do, and my plate is always full. Even if I replace some of the things with AI, I still manage to, well, it wasn't AI then, like replace it with some different employees. I still manage to keep my plate super full. So obviously, entrepreneurs, I think, are a little overachiever, anyways, and that's okay. And you have to own who you are as a human. Like, what are what are the skills that you as an entrepreneur make you successful? And those skills are going to have soft skills as well as the hard skills that you're delivering on. And if you think about what can AI do to help me, sure, there's some hard skills there that might be able to help serve you to be more efficient within a day. But don't be afraid that remember the people, they're gonna choose you. The customer is gonna pick you because they like you as an entrepreneur. They they can relate to you and your experience or how you help them make them feel or the efficiencies you deliver. And those things will always be true to you as a successful entrepreneur. And we shouldn't be scared that AI is gonna replace those things. They're never gonna be able to replace you because you're you.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Yes, I love that. And I feel like maybe entrepreneurs have just a little bit of an edge over big companies because they still have that human component more so. Um, I'm in a mastermind group, and one of the ladies in my mastermind group had posted in our Slack channel, can someone help me? I forget what it was like to be a beginner. And I need to work on my messaging and how to speak to people who are just starting out. And I feel like maybe entrepreneurs have any advantage over huge companies employing a lot of AI because they still remember and know what that human aspect is.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Absolutely. And that is so essential. And they can be so much more nimble. One of the lessons I, a hard lesson I had to learn after I sold my business and started working in a really large organization was I never realized how slow some of them can move. And because many of us, our biggest strength as an entrepreneur, is like, oh, a month later, there's an opportunity here. I can pivot and realign what I need to to make sure I can get that opportunity. Whereas large organizations, it's a lot slower, slower to build change. So if you recognize that in your business that you're working on, that there is an advantage, a strategy advantage, and AI may be able to help you with that. Where is there a shifting need, a second hustle, another line of revenue I can build? Maybe ask AI things like that and then help them build back the structure you need to help build your business and remaining tight on the wonderful pieces about who you are and what makes you is you still remains at the forefront of where your business is today.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Got it. Now you talked about building alignment with your business. Is there a way that solopreneurs in small teams can use AI to build cross-functional alignment across maybe their marketing, their product, their sales, operations?

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Yeah, I mean, there's so many things. It's endless. And what I think I wouldn't want people to feel is overwhelmed by the opportunities. I think everybody can even use AI or use Google, whatever you, and you're out there and you're saying, well, what can I use this for? And then basically the LLM's like, everything, which perhaps is true. I think if uh solopreneurs want to really say, what are some areas that I really want help with that I'm just really struggling with because we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. So let AI do the areas that you are weaker in. So if you need help blocking out your calendar to make sure that you're being the most efficient, use AI for things like that. If you need help with writing in terms of marketing, like content creation, we know that right now there's so much content, you're just inundated with so much, trying to make yours super unique and something that somebody's gonna open in terms of your like mailing list or connection on socials. Those are really hard to do right now. And so I would caution a little bit that everybody says, we'll just have AI do it, but AI might be able to give you some ideas that you are then going to begin to co-create yourself. And that's the alignment piece. It's not about handing it all over to AI to say, hey, you do this all for me. I'm not gonna do this anymore. It's saying I might need some ideation here, and I'm still then going to edit it. And I do believe, especially if you're a solopreneur, your customers and clients will understand your tone of voice. How you speak is incredibly important, and you can even read that, and they know whether it's AI that's written it or you've written it. So be careful with luring yourself into this idea that AI is gonna do it all for me. Make sure your voice is strewed, still true in your business.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Yes, I that is so, so true because different AIs write in different ways anyway. So say we're using Claude, because I feel like Claude does copy just a little better right now, at this moment, today, at this second. It could be someone else tomorrow. But say someone's using Claude, it's so tempting to just copy and paste that email over. But you're right, a lot of it, it doesn't sound like it's in your tone. Even though it might be well written, it may not match the way you speak. I was interviewing a guest the other day, and she just had a book come out, and she's like, my plan was to have AI write the book. And I realized very quickly that wasn't gonna happen. It took me, I think, longer using AI because I had to rewrite the whole thing to make it sound like me. So I think you're right, you know, use it for those ideas. Use it maybe to generate outlines, but then you do the actual writing.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah. And I mean, going back to teaching, it's another great way to reference back. What did we do most often to help students make sure that their reading was really good? We talked about like hamburger paragraphs. So you were helping them build their structure first before they write. Maybe instead of AI writing it all for us, we need to go back and say they are the ones that are going to build the structure, and then we're still gonna come in and have to do that final copy. I do think that's critical, and I think that's a differentiator for solar printers. Right now, what you're seeing, because you're everyone's inundated with content written by AI, if you're still going in and editing and you're sending those pieces out, I do believe that, because it is a human reading it, that they are going to notice, and that will be a big difference as you move as we move ahead, is that personalization, that tone will prove to be a higher value product than something that just now becomes noise. And AI can create noise in content very quickly. So think about that. What are your strongest differentiators as your business? And make sure those are still loud in whatever marketing or whatever pitches you're doing, which that remains solid in that tone of yours, like your own.

Keeping The Human Touch With AI

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Yes, I love that. Now, you said earlier you walked away from the security and the pension of a teaching career to start your own business because you wanted to make your own money, even though your parents were like, I don't think that's such a good idea. I can relate, my parents were the same way when I said, I want to be a music major. And they're like, eh, you better get that education degree too. What advice do you have for women who are terrified to leave the safe path of a regular job and deal with the identity shifts that come with entrepreneurship? Because entrepreneurship is awesome. I love it, but it's not easy.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

It is not easy. And for someone who's been in both places, uh, one, it's your biggest superpower, anybody who is an entrepreneur. I wish we'd highlight that more for people. If if you're doing this on your own, that means you can wear so many hats in your business. That means it's not really fair to put yourself as an entrepreneur on LinkedIn. Really, you've had so

Women Taking The First Risk Steps

SPEAKER_01 20:10

many jobs and you've managed all of them, and you've had to learn to be an SME in all of those areas. That's enormous. So one, we got to start celebrating entrepreneurs more and understanding the work that it takes to be successful. Uh, I don't think we uh in society do a good enough job doing that. So that's an area that I think overall we need to improve. For those who are thinking about it, if you have something in your gut that you're like, ugh, you know, I don't really look forward to my Mondays. And I really like doing this other thing instead. And I don't know what the thing is yet, but there's something there I would really encourage you to explore what that is. Now, I am Sarah is not saying quit your job on Monday before you have it all figured out. That is not what I'm saying. But I am saying that, especially women, we have voices in our guts. And I do think that when we listen to our guts and our deep feeded, like this is what makes us happy. If you are doing something that makes you happy, you will ultimately be able to find a business related to whatever that is that will make that work. But you also have to be okay with the bit of risk of taking a few steps in saying, what does that look like? Right now I'm talking to a friend, and I I feel like because I have evolved a little bit in my career over the years, people often come to me when they have those inklings of change. What do I do? And one thing I've really noticed with her as we're talking about it, because she also is thinking of shifting out and starting something new, is you think about, well, I need all this. Well, what look where you're at, Sarah, and this is where I am, and I can never do this. And I always say, no, that's not true. At the beginning, nobody knows where the path is going. At the beginning, your only first step is to take steps one through five, and that is identifying what it is that you want to do, how is it that it could potentially build revenue, how much time would that take? And what does that look like to start? Those pieces, if you can just start answering some of those questions, gosh, ask Claude what does he think to start with your basic structure, and then you'll realize, you know what? I have more information here than I even realized I did. Sometimes we're so full of our own self-doubt of taking a risk that we're afraid to even explore what the risk could look like. We decide no before we even start. So I would strongly encourage people to start evaluating what the risk or the opportunity could actually be and enjoy that period of time of thinking about it. It could be a side hustle at the beginning. It's exciting. If we celebrate that ability to take time to figure out what the risk is to honor that part of us, then I think we start building our future steps. So don't say no before you've thought about it because you might have something great in there that the world needs.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I love that concept. And I love that you can look at it from both sides. I've only ever been an entrepreneur, with the exception of in high school, I was a grocery store cashier. Beyond that, I've only been an entrepreneur. So I don't know the corporate side of it. And I'm sure that there is a lot of comfort that comes. comes in that benefits package that comes along with it. And being an entrepreneur rips all that away. But it can be so fulfilling.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Now you have oh go ahead. Sorry. I just wanted to say that like I you know how sometimes like in large organizations they have different days. Like I wish they would have days where they would just bring entrepreneurs in and talk about the excitement and enthusiasm that you feel when you land a deal or close off a project or those feelings are so unique to being an entrepreneur that we need to like help spill that over into larger enterprises to build the risk, the project completion, the feeling of pride that I think is so special for entrepreneurs. And if we talked about that more, I think there'd be more value of that in larger organizations as opposed to sometimes I think that in larger institutions we think entrepreneur, oh consultant, oh replaceable, oh just comes in and does something and goes. And actually there's so much efficiencies that come from people who are solopreneurs and they can do so many things. I think we should celebrate a little more.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

I love that national national uh solopreneur day. That's it. Well we're gonna make it today today June 18th. There you go. Done. Done. Now you have successfully built and exited two fintech ventures. Let's say the solopreneur who isn't even planning to sell four years or maybe doesn't even know that selling their business is an option for them. What is one operational must-have that they should start thinking about and organizing today so that they're not caught off guard later if they choose to sell.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Yeah. So when I started I well one I didn't even know I was starting a business and then two, as the business growed and it grew and I realized there was opportunity and then we built and grew it into two different directions.

First Steps Before You Quit

SPEAKER_01 25:28

I also never thought there was a plan to sell when I first started. And what I look back on now and give advice to others about is you do want to start it as if you do have a goal to sell it at the end. And so I would suggest to everybody wherever you're starting now that doesn't mean you're going to be like I'm going to sell this in a year and make a million dollars but what it does mean is if that comes around in a year or two years, is the company set up operationally that if you disappeared and could the company operate without you? Now obviously you're the one doing the work but what I mean is is there have you written down what are all the things you do? What are the steps that are taken? Is that somewhere? Because that's the part that somebody wants to purchase generally so are you setting up your business in a way that there is some operational SOPs within whatever you're doing that that has some validity. I would also suggest you think about assets like email lists and followers on social again all these things I never really thought about at the beginning, but then recognize that there's value in those pieces. So how are you helping to nurture your brand around who you are as a solopreneur now and you don't even if because you don't know what you want 10 years from now. And if 10 years from now you say oh I want to sell and I wish I had done that you would say I wish today I'd listened to Sarah and said I really needed to make sure that I've nurtured my mailing list in a way that if if if I if Sarah walked away and this still existed, this would be something that somebody would purchase. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 27:09

That makes total sense because those systems are so important. And um I know this firsthand as someone who went through breast cancer treatment last year and you know I'm done with it. Everything's fine now but I'm still dealing with the aftermath the chemo brain and I've been told this sometimes never goes away where you just can't always remember things. And it became more important than ever for me to document my systems so I didn't miss pieces as I go. And I think that applies to solopreneurs in general you're doing so many things and they're all in your head. But at some point you're gonna add that next thing that you just don't have room for everything in your head and you need those systems documented so that it's so much easier to just follow the steps. Also if something happens and say you are a team of like two or three and you get ill and you need your team to take over, those systems are already there in place so that the business truly can run without you. And I never really equated that to preparing to sell but you're absolutely right and it's something that I've been doing in my own business right now.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Yeah. And you know and it's kind of daunt like let's also be real if you're if we're solopreneurs, we're super busy and there's so many things to do and you're often figuring out like how can I finish this all and move to the next thing. So sitting down and saying I need to write all of my processes down is very overwhelming. It's easier to just do a little bit of it at a time. So if you haven't done it before don't say tomorrow I'm gonna do all of it. I would say every week I'm going to choose to write just a little bit more down so that over time you can build some of that up so that there are some processes in place that actually like you said if something else happens someone could take these things over and the business can still run. It's kind of like as a teacher if if any of your teachers out there, it's like having that folder of lesson plans for your substitute when you're you know so much goes back to teaching I kind of think and not that I'm slamming people with MBAs they're also some great skill sets but people with uh experience teaching know how to manage a room know how to create priorities know how to work with very little to get the maximum out there's so many strengths that a teacher learns in their teaching experience that I actually I think is probably what makes me a good leader. And being like aware of how other people are feeling whether that's in a sales pitch, whether that's you know internally with what who you're working with, your customers or other people you need in terms of services like accounting, whatever you're working with, we have to be so aware of all those things as teachers. I do believe that teachers make great entrepreneurs they do.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

And teachers are naturally leaders and mentors in the first place. And I will never forget so my background I have a bachelor's degree in education and then my master's and doctorate are in clarinet performance. And I was teaching at the university level and they put me in

SOPs And Assets That Buyers Want

SPEAKER_00 30:23

a 300 person lecture hall and talk about overwhelm and I walked out onto stage because it was in the um in the music building so it was actually a stage and an auditorium and I prepared to start teaching and I was like you know this is just kind of like performing I'm just putting on a show to keep people entertained to listen to what I have to say. And from that on that point on public speaking was never a problem for me speaking to large crowd crowds and any teacher who has ever gotten a room full of kindergartners under control right corporate is nothing.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

I agree you're so right so awesome well where can listeners find you if they have questions or if they're growing what's the best way to get in touch with you so I've just launched a new podcast myself and I'd love for people if they're thinking about change or thinking about when I make my Mondays better in terms of life or business. It's called Why to the way and I would love for people to listen uh as well and we're kind of moving

Teacher Skills That Translate To Leadership

SPEAKER_01 31:31

through that story with with women in particular of different changes in your lives that you make and making sure that you're getting the best out of it, whether it's work or life. So please take a listen.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Oh I'm gonna have to take a listen myself and we'll make sure to put that down in the show notes. So whether you've been on the fence about making a change or you're already in the trenches of entrepreneurship and you're starting to want to implement AI, I hope that this episode gave you the permission you need to take that next step and do the scary thing. And until next time, keep planning like a boss