The slowest kid on the hike
In 1984, a guy named Eliyahu Goldratt wrote a business novel called The Goal. The idea at the center of it is the Theory of Constraints: every system has exactly one bottleneck, and improving anything other than that bottleneck is wasted effort.
The scene everyone remembers is a boy scout hike. The troop is strung out along the trail and the whole group can only move as fast as the slowest kid. You can give the fastest scout better boots, a lighter pack, a map, it still doesn’t matter. The group arrives at the same time. The only thing that speeds up the hike is helping the slow kid.
Goldratt’s point: find the constraint, fix the constraint, then find the next one. Everything else is motion without progress.
What’s the thing actually holding you back?
An easy fix vs. a meaningful fix
Right now, everyone’s talking about what their new personal assistant can do. From Muse to Instinct to GrokBot to Dots, the examples often sound like “look, it ordered my lunch on Uber Eats,” or “look, it booked me a haircut!” It’s genuinely cool, but are those actual problems that need to be solved? In most cases, businesses are automating whatever’s easiest to automate: Draft an email faster. Summarize a meeting. Generate social copy. Of course, all of these are useful, but the low hanging fruit usually isn’t the real bottleneck.
The personal assistant vs. the business assistant
The more time we spend building for businesses, the more we think the interesting question isn’t what your assistant can do. It’s whether it’s doing the thing that adds the most value.
Personal assistants can book your dinner reservation. Awesome! But what about leveraging an assistant to handle the stuff that’s truly capping how much your business can grow? Now that’s transformative.
We’ve been building personal assistants for small businesses that require a lot of coordination; where the work lives across a dozen places and somebody has to be the connective tissue. For a PR firm, for example, that’s an assistant that tracks opportunities, knows which client needs what, pulls the right materials, and makes sure nothing gets lost. For a fitness club, it’s an assistant that fills programming, follows up with members who haven’t returned in a while, and keeps staff aligned on the day's KPIs.
Franklin, one of our assistants for a racquet club, helps manage club operations and messages us proactively to give us updates.
In both cases, the assistant is focused on repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drive core workflows and revenue for the business. (It can order them lunch if they need it, too.)
The right question to ask
Before you ask what AI can do for your business, ask a smaller question: what’s the one thing slowing everything else down? Automate that. The dinner reservation can wait.
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
