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Use AI to Protect Accounts, Improve Margins and Plan Growth
Every Founder Is Building Something
A business. A reputation. A future.
You start with an idea, find your first customers, make promises, deliver the work, and earn enough money to do it all again.
One customer becomes ten. Ten become a hundred.
You build relationships, develop your services, hire people, and create something valuable.
Then the business grows.
More customers. More employees. More responsibilities. More opportunities.
And somewhere along the way, the business you built to create freedom starts consuming nearly every hour of your day, seven days a week.
I’ve been there.
I’ve operated businesses with multiple locations, wholesale customers, employees, and all the moving parts that come with keeping the doors open.
I know what it’s like to build a business while carrying the responsibility for keeping it running.
For founders of high-growth-potential businesses, that responsibility can become enormous.
Which customer needs attention? Which account is at risk? Which employee needs help? Are we delivering what we promised? Where are our profit margins going?
What happened to that promising sales opportunity?
Every customer relationship matters. Every contract, renewal, and delivery commitment represents revenue, responsibility, and the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.
And somehow, the founder is expected to know what’s happening everywhere.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to figure out how to grow.
You want more customers, stronger margins, better services, and new opportunities. You want to build a company capable of generating substantially more revenue without requiring the same increase in employees, expenses, and founder involvement.
But how do you build tomorrow’s business when nearly all your attention is consumed by today’s?
You cannot spend every day putting out fires and expect to build the company of tomorrow.
And adding another application, another dashboard, or another subscription doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
Someone still has to operate the software, interpret the information, and decide what happens next.
I wanted to find a better way.
That’s where my thinking about artificial intelligence began.
The first responsibility: Protect the Customer
My original idea was simple.
What if I could give AI a responsibility?
Not another application. Not another complicated dashboard. Not another piece of software I had to learn how to operate.
An actual responsibility.
Protect my customer accounts.
Every customer relationship represents something a founder has worked hard to earn. Trust, promises, delivery, and the opportunity to do business again tomorrow.
But as the company grows, keeping track of every relationship becomes increasingly difficult.
A customer stops responding. A delivery promise slips. A renewal approaches. A profitable opportunity gets buried beneath a hundred other things demanding attention.
The information might already exist somewhere in the business.
The problem is finding it, understanding what it means, and acting while there’s still time to make a difference.
I wanted AI to help with that.
Review the available information. Recognize changes. Identify risks and opportunities. Bring the important findings to my attention.
Then stop and let me decide what happens next.
AI wasn’t supposed to replace the founder’s relationship with the customer. It was supposed to help the founder protect it.
That original idea became the Protector of the Accounts, which I later developed into the Agency Control Snapshot.
Illustrative example: An AI customer account review
Imagine a founder running a recurring-service business.
Input:
The founder provides AI with an account’s recent customer communications, project updates, delivery commitments, renewal date, and available profitability information.
The review is limited to this account and the information supplied.
AI finding:
The customer has an approaching renewal. Recent delivery updates have been delayed, and several additional service requests appear to fall outside the original agreement.
The AI flags a possible relationship risk and an opportunity to review the account’s scope and profitability.
These are findings for the founder to verify, not conclusions that the customer is about to leave or that the account is losing money.
Founder decision:
The founder reviews the evidence, checks the delivery situation, and decides to contact the customer personally.
They address the outstanding concerns, clarify expectations, and determine whether the additional work warrants a revised proposal.
No customer message is sent, no pricing is changed, and no new commitment is made without the founder’s approval.
That’s the idea.
The information was already there. AI helped organize it into something the founder could act on.
One focused review. A clearer decision. A customer relationship that receives attention while there’s still an opportunity to make a difference.
And something interesting happened.
Once I gave AI one serious responsibility, I started asking what else it could do.
If AI could help protect customer relationships, could it also help protect the company’s profit margins?
Could it recognize problems affecting the team?
Could it help us identify opportunities that might shape the company’s future?
Four responsibilities emerged.
Accounts. Margin. Team. Future.
Not four more applications to manage.
Four clearly defined responsibilities, each designed to examine a specific part of the business and bring useful intelligence back to the founder.
And that’s when I began imagining something bigger.
A Castle.
Every founder is building a Castle 🏰
Your Castle is the business you’ve worked so hard to build.
Its walls aren’t made of stone.
They’re built from customer trust, valuable relationships, talented people, hard-earned knowledge, and the financial strength that keeps everything moving forward.
Some castles are just getting started. Others have grown into remarkable enterprises.
Every founder has something worth protecting.
But as the Castle grows, protecting it becomes more complicated.
A business can look successful from the outside while problems quietly develop within its walls.
An important customer begins losing confidence. Profit margins slowly erode. A valuable employee becomes overwhelmed. A promising opportunity slips away because nobody had time to pursue it.
These problems rarely announce themselves.
And the founder is usually busy somewhere else, serving customers, managing operations, solving problems, or planning the next stage of growth.
The founder cannot be everywhere, see everything, and remember everything.
That’s the purpose of the Castle.
Four protectors. Four responsibilities.
Accounts: Examine customer relationships, delivery commitments, renewals, and revenue opportunities.
Margin: Examine profitability, scope changes, delivery costs, and opportunities to improve financial performance.
Team: Examine workload, communication, delivery capacity, and signals that deserve the founder’s attention.
Future: Examine customer needs, emerging opportunities, and capabilities the business could put to better use.
Each protector has a defined assignment.
Instead of producing another mountain of information, the Castle is designed to produce a focused review of what matters, what changed, and where the founder should direct their attention.
Over time, those reviews also build something valuable.
A memory of the business.
What happened. What changed. What worked. What the founder learned.
I call this Founder Intelligence.
And when the Castle has a useful record of the business, we can begin asking much bigger questions. Better questions for AI to solve.
Because protecting what you have is only half the story.
Beyond the Castle walls, there’s a world of opportunity.
And that’s when the Mermaid appears. Quarterly.
The Mermaid 🧜♀️
Protecting the Castle is important. But she has ambition and high standards.
We don’t believe the purpose of building a business is simply to survive another month, pay the bills, and keep everyone busy.
We want to help you win.
That means looking beyond today’s problems and imagining what the company could become over the next several years.
So I imagined a Mermaid.
She lives beyond the Castle walls, exploring new possibilities and searching for treasure.
And she has to win. She wants to win.
She wants more customers, stronger profit margins, better services, greater efficiency, and opportunities the founder hasn’t discovered yet.
But she doesn’t start with an empty treasure map.
She starts with the intelligence collected by the Castle.
The customer relationships, financial history, operational lessons, team capabilities, and opportunities the business has accumulated along the way.
She looks at everything the founder has already built and asks a different question.
What could we accomplish with all of this?
1 Could an existing customer relationship become a much larger opportunity?
2 Could the company introduce a more profitable service?
3 Could we improve how the work gets done without sacrificing quality?
4 Could AI help us serve more customers without increasing overhead at the same rate?
Because conventional business growth often comes with an expensive catch.
You sell more, hire more people, purchase more software, increase expenses, and take on more responsibility.
Before long, the company is generating more revenue, but the founder is working harder without enjoying more profit or freedom.
That’s not the treasure I’m looking for.
The Mermaid’s north star is 10X ARR.
Ten times the company’s current annual run rate.
Not a promise. Not a guarantee. An ambitious direction worth exploring.
Imagine a founder operating a $300,000 business with a vision of reaching a $3 million annual run rate.
The question isn’t simply how to sell ten times more.
It’s how to build a company capable of generating that revenue without requiring ten times the employees, software, expenses, and founder involvement.
1 What would need to change?
2 Which existing capabilities could become more valuable?
3 Where could we eliminate unnecessary work?
4 What new opportunities could we create from relationships and knowledge we already possess?
The Mermaid is designed to use the Castle’s accumulated Founder Intelligence to investigate those questions.
She will map a 10x ARR in 24 months plan and a 10x ARR in 36 month plan of action.
Her assignment is also to explore four ways to improve efficiency and four opportunities to grow the business.
For each possibility, she examines the potential financial value, the assumptions behind it, the resources required, and the practical steps the founder would need to consider.
Some ideas will be promising. Others won’t survive closer inspection.
The purpose isn’t to manufacture an impressive-looking growth forecast.
It’s to help founders discover opportunities grounded in the business they actually own.
The Mermaid can search for treasure, draw the map, and suggest a route.
But she doesn’t get to spend your money.
The radical AI shift
For decades, founders have been expected to adapt to computers.
We’ve purchased software for accounting, sales, customer relationships, project management, marketing, and nearly every other part of running a business.
Every application promised to make life easier.
But every application came with another learning curve, another subscription, another dashboard, and another collection of tasks demanding our attention.
Somebody still had to operate the computer.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to reverse that relationship.
Instead of learning how to operate every application ourselves, we can increasingly direct AI to work with the information and, where supported, the applications we already have.
Research the customer. Review the account. Examine the numbers. Organize the information. Prepare the report. Identify what needs attention.
The computer does more of the computer work.
The founder becomes the supervisor.
This is a fundamental change in how we can operate a business.
And it brings us to the Chris Thomas Method.
The Chris Thomas Method: Limited by Design
My philosophy is simple.
Just because AI can do more doesn’t mean we should make everything more complicated.
Give AI a serious, specific responsibility.
1 Provide the information it needs.
2 Establish clear boundaries.
3 Keep the 4 assignment manageable.
4 Expect useful work.
Then stop.
Let the founder inspect the results, make corrections, and approve what happens next.
I use the Rule of Four to keep the work focused and the results practical.
Four responsibilities. Four important signals. Four useful findings.
Enough information to recognize what matters without burying the founder in another mountain of information.
AI does the computer work. The founder makes the consequential decisions.
AI can prepare an account review, but it doesn’t own the customer relationship. It can identify a financial opportunity, but it doesn’t authorize an investment. It can propose a growth strategy, but it doesn’t decide the company’s future.
That’s the boundary.
And that’s how we can begin creating more freedom without surrendering control.
The founder no longer needs to personally perform every computer task to remain responsible for the business.
That is the operating principle behind the Castle and the Mermaid.
I’m developing these tools with ChatGPT, but the Chris Thomas Method isn’t tied to one company, model, or software platform.
The principles are designed to work with other capable AI systems as the technology evolves.
I don’t want founders rebuilding their businesses around every new application.
I want them building something they can keep.
Founder Intelligence is a business asset
Most businesses collect enormous amounts of information.
Customer conversations. Financial reports. Project histories. Sales opportunities. Problems solved. Lessons learned.
But collecting information and building intelligence are two very different things.
I’ve seen how much valuable knowledge gets trapped inside a founder’s head, buried in an inbox, or forgotten inside software nobody has time to revisit.
A customer problem gets resolved, but the lesson disappears.
A promising opportunity gets discussed, but nobody follows through.
A profit margin starts slipping, but nobody remembers when the problem began.
Six months later, we’re solving the same problems all over again.
I believe a business should remember what it learns.
That’s another reason I designed the Castle.
Each month, its four protectors can contribute to a focused internal review.
What changed? What deserves attention? Where is the risk? Where is the opportunity? What should the founder consider doing next?
The founder inspects the findings, makes corrections, and approves the record.
Then we keep it.
Month after month, the Castle builds an organized history of the business.
Not just what happened, but what we noticed, what we learned, and what we decided.
Those dated records can be retained in a portable spreadsheet rather than depending entirely on one application’s memory.
Once enough history has accumulated, the Mermaid can examine patterns across previous reviews.
She can investigate recurring problems, compare opportunities, and explore what the company could accomplish with the resources it already possesses.
Instead of asking AI for another generic list of business growth ideas, we’re giving it something far more useful.
The actual history of our business.
Our customers. Our margins. Our capabilities. Our challenges. Our opportunities.
This is Founder Intelligence.
And I want founders to think about it as an asset they own and can carry forward as the technology improves.
What works today, and what comes next
I want to distinguish what founders can begin doing with AI today from the larger vision I’m building toward. Eventually AI can do everything better.
What we can do today
With ChatGPT and a structured, supervised process, we can already assign AI a bounded responsibility and provide it with relevant business information.
The Agency Control Snapshot is one example of this approach.
A founder can provide account information, request a focused review, inspect the findings, make corrections, and save the approved results.
The same approach can be applied to margins, delivery, team information, and growth opportunities.
By repeating these reviews and preserving their results, a founder can begin building the historical records that support the Castle.
Once sufficient history exists, AI can also help compare previous findings and investigate potential growth opportunities.
These capabilities are useful now, but they have practical limits.
The information must be supplied or made accessible. AI findings require verification. Business records need to be maintained. Financial estimates depend on the quality of the underlying information.
These are supervised workflows, not a promise that AI is continuously monitoring every part of the company.
The future vision
I envision the Castle and Mermaid becoming increasingly capable as AI develops and connections to business systems improve.
Imagine AI carrying out assigned computer tasks while the founder is meeting customers, traveling, or enjoying an afternoon away.
Authorized workflows could collect information, organize business records, recognize changes between reviews, and prepare useful decisions for the founder.
The Mermaid could use a growing history of Founder Intelligence to investigate increasingly sophisticated growth opportunities.
The founder would return to work that is ready for inspection, correction, and approval.
Reaching that vision requires reliable integrations, appropriate permissions, defined operating boundaries, and continued development.
The important part is that founders don’t have to wait for that future to begin.
We can start with one responsibility, develop a useful review process, preserve what we learn, and expand as the technology becomes more capable.
The treasure beyond 10X
I talk about 10X because I believe founders deserve an ambitious future.
But building a larger company is only part of the vision.
What good is building a successful business if you never have time to enjoy the life it was supposed to create?
I don’t want founders spending the next decade chained to their computers, learning another application, managing another dashboard, and personally handling every little task that keeps the business moving.
I want them doing the things only a founder can do.
Meeting customers. Building relationships. Developing new opportunities. Making important decisions. Imagining what comes next.
And yes, taking an afternoon off.
Spending time with family. Traveling. Enjoying the rewards of everything they’ve worked so hard to build.
That’s what makes this opportunity so interesting.
The Castle gives us a way to protect what we’re building today.
The Mermaid gives us a way to explore what we could build tomorrow.
Founder Intelligence preserves the knowledge we accumulate along the way.
And the Chris Thomas Method provides a practical way to put increasingly capable AI to work.
Together, they represent something much bigger than another collection of AI tools.
A different relationship between the founder, the business, and the computer.
One where the business can become stronger without demanding more of the founder’s life at every stage of growth.
Because the real treasure isn’t simply reaching 10X.
It’s building a business that creates more opportunity, more independence, and more life.
Protect what you’ve built. Pursue what comes next. And never lose sight of why you started.
Build your Castle. Follow the Mermaid. Keep moving toward your north star.
Less Computer. More Life.
Chris Thomas
Green Light Blue Sky
Take Action. Be Optimistic.