January is full of noise. New planners. New goals. New promises to “do more.” But if you’re serious about growth this year, the smartest move you can make isn’t adding more to your plate; it’s deciding what to stop doing. This is a contrarian guide to reclaim your time, sharpen your focus, and lead your business like a CEO.
Most small business owners don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they’re buried in low-value work that keeps them stuck in operator mode. And now, with AI advancing faster than most people are willing to admit, there’s no excuse to keep doing things the hard way.
This year is about leverage, elevation, and CEO-level decision-making. Let’s talk about what needs to go and what should replace it.
Stop Doing Work That AI Can Do Faster
If you’re still spending hours writing emails, social posts, outlines, proposals, summaries, or first drafts, you’re wasting your most valuable asset: your thinking. AI is not here to replace your expertise. Here’s how to get started with AI:
Getting started with content and AI workflows requires focus, clarity, and a few smart decisions up front. The goal is to build repeatable systems that save time and improve consistency.
First, pick one AI tool you are willing to pay for and commit to using. Free tools are fine for experimentation, but paid tools give you better memory, reliability, and features. Choose one primary platform for content creation and workflow support so your team is not bouncing between tools. Mastery beats variety every time.
Second, create a clear brand tone guideline. This is non-negotiable. Define how your business sounds in writing. Are you bold, warm, direct, sassy, authoritative, or educational? Include phrases you use often and phrases you never use. Share if you only want bold font for headings and subheadings, no emojis. Teach the tool your point of view and how you speak to customers. AI performs best when it understands your voice and values.
Third, upload your existing signature content and sales copy. This includes blogs, emails, landing pages, webinar scripts, proposals, and social posts that already convert. Treat this content as training material. The more high-quality examples you provide, the more accurate and helpful your AI outputs will become.
Fourth, map your core content workflows. Decide what you create each week and month, such as emails, social posts, blogs, or videos. Then document the steps from idea to publication. AI can help with ideation, outlines, drafts, and repurposing once the workflow is clear.
Fifth, define approval and quality control rules. Decide what AI can publish with a light review and what requires your final sign-off. This protects brand integrity while still saving time.
Sixth, decide what success looks like. Measure time saved, consistency, engagement, and lead generation.
When done right, AI will help you show up more often, with better messaging, without burning out your team or diluting your brand.
Now that you know how to leverage AI, here’s what you should stop doing:
Writing from scratch every time
Rewriting the same explanations to clients
Manually summarizing meetings or notes
Creating one-off content with no system
Use AI as your first-pass assistant. Let it draft. Let it outline. Let it summarize. Then you refine with your voice, experience, and judgment.
High-impact CEO activity:
Deciding what messages matter
Setting the strategy behind the content
Approving, refining, and distributing at scale
The CEO decides the “what” and “why.” AI handles the “how.”
Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Business
If everything runs through you, nothing scales.
Many business owners confuse control with leadership. They insist on touching every task, approving every detail, and responding to every message. That’s not leadership; that’s fear disguised as responsibility.
What to stop doing:
Reviewing every piece of content line by line
Being the only one who knows how systems work
Personally, handling customer follow-up
Managing instead of leading
What to do instead:Document your processes once, then let AI and systems carry the load.
AI can:
Create SOPs from your voice notes
Turn Loom videos into written workflows
Draft customer responses and FAQs
Help onboard new hires faster
High-impact CEO activity:
Designing the system
Choosing the tools
Training the people
Monitoring outcomes
Your job is to build the machine, not run every gear.
Stop Chasing More Leads Without Fixing Your Sales Process
This is where a lot of businesses lie to themselves.
They say they need more leads when what they really need is:
Better follow-up
Clearer offers
Stronger positioning
A real sales process
AI won’t close deals for you, but it will expose your weaknesses fast.
What to stop doing:
Running ads to broken sales funnels
Sending generic follow-up emails
Selling offers that are confusing or bloated
Avoiding sales conversations
What to do instead:
Rewrite landing pages for clarity and conversion
Improve follow-up sequences based on buyer psychology
Analyze objections and refine your messaging
Create sales scripts and call frameworks
High-impact CEO activity:
Designing outcome-based offers
Deciding pricing and positioning
Training your sales support
Reviewing conversion data weekly
Revenue grows when leadership takes sales seriously.
Stop Creating Low-Value Offers
Busy doesn’t equal profitable.
Many entrepreneurs are sitting on a pile of low-priced, underperforming offers that drain energy and deliver minimal return.
What to stop doing:
Launching new offers without retiring old ones
Selling cheap products that require high support
Customizing endlessly for every client
Confusing variety with value
What to do instead:Simplify. Consolidate. Elevate.
Analyze which offers drive the most profit
Package existing knowledge into premium programs
Clarify transformation and outcomes
Create scalable delivery assets
High-impact CEO activity:
Choosing one or two core offers
Raising prices with confidence
Designing leverage into delivery
Protecting your time
Fewer offers. Higher margins. Better clients.
Stop Making Decisions Based on Feelings Instead of Data
If your business decisions change based on your mood, the last client interaction, or what you saw on social media, you’re not running a business; you’re reacting.
What to stop doing:
Guessing what’s working
Avoiding numbers because they feel overwhelming
Making changes without tracking results
Ignoring leading indicators
What to do instead:
Summarize financial trends
Highlight anomalies in sales performance
Turn dashboards into plain-English insights
Forecast scenarios
High-impact CEO activity:
Reviewing weekly sales metrics
Monthly financial reviews
Quarterly strategy adjustments
Making proactive decisions
Clarity beats chaos every time.
Stop Doing Worker Bee Tasks When You’re the Queen Bee
This is the hardest shift and the most important.
Worker Bee tasks:
Answering every email
Scheduling everything yourself
Fixing minor issues
Being “busy” all day
Queen Bee tasks:
Vision
Strategy
Partnerships
Talent decisions
Revenue growth
AI is your Worker Bee army.
What to stop doing:Anything that doesn’t directly increase revenue, leverage, or leadership capacity.
What to do instead:Deploy AI and systems so you can focus on:
Big-picture planning
Strategic relationships
Product and offer innovation
Building long-term value
A Queen Bee doesn’t prove her worth by working harder. She leads the hive.
Stop Resisting AI, and Start Leading With It
Here’s the truth: your competitors are already using AI. Some quietly. Some poorly. The winners this year won’t be the most technical; they’ll be the most strategic.
What to stop doing:
Waiting until you “have time” to learn AI
Assuming it’s only for tech companies
Treating it like a novelty
What to do instead:Adopt AI intentionally as a business tool.
High-impact CEO activity:
Deciding where AI creates leverage
Setting guardrails and standards
Training your team
Measuring ROI
This is not a trend. It’s infrastructure.
The Real Question for This Year
The real question isn’t what should I add to my business. The better question is, what am I finally ready to let go of? Most businesses don’t stall because owners aren’t doing enough. They stall because owners are doing too many of the wrong things. Growth requires subtraction. Leadership requires restraint. Freedom requires systems that replace constant decision-making and manual effort.
This year, stop doing the tasks, habits, and offers that keep you small and tethered to daily execution. Stop being the default problem solver, the bottleneck, and the safety net for everything that goes wrong. When you hold onto work that no longer requires your unique expertise, you rob your business of the chance to scale and yourself of the opportunity to lead.
Start doing the work that moves you into the CEO seat. That means focusing on strategy, revenue, partnerships, systems, and talent development. It means designing processes once instead of repeating tasks endlessly. It means making space to think, plan, and lead, rather than reacting all day.
Your future business doesn’t need more hustle, longer hours, or constant urgency. Hustle is not a strategy. It needs better decisions, clearer priorities, and smarter leverage. When you let go of what no longer serves you, you create room for growth, clarity, and sustainable success.
