My own mortgage broker said it like he was certain.
He and his wife have run the business together for years. Clients come back. Referrals come in. He's good at his job, and he genuinely loves the parts of it most people would automate first.
Then he said it. I can do this for another 20 years. I asked him how he actually knew that. Life changes in ways nobody sees coming. What would it feel like to have the choice to keep going, instead of needing to? He didn't have a quick answer.
That's not really a story about AI. It's a story about certainty, and certainty is the exact thing that has taken down businesses far bigger than a two-person mortgage broking firm. Kodak built the first digital camera and shelved it to protect film. Blockbuster watched a small DVD-by-mail company called Netflix build a subscription model for years and kept renting DVDs anyway. Nokia kept making the phones that had always sold while touchscreens took over. All three were certain the old thing would keep working, right up until it stopped. Fujifilm, Netflix and Domino's faced the exact same shift and asked a different question instead, and all three are still standing.
Coming back to SMB, nobody's asking either of you to reinvent an industry.
The businesses that last share one habit, whatever their size: the owner keeps asking what might replace the thing that's currently working, before they have to. A two-person shop can do that in an afternoon. It doesn't need a strategy offsite or a rebrand. It needs one uncomfortable question, asked honestly, on a normal Tuesday.
That's genuinely the thing I screen for now, in anyone I'd hire or any business I'd engage. Not whether they're all in on AI. Whether they've looked at it at all. A business that's actively curious tends to ask better questions about everything else too. A business that hasn't looked usually hasn't looked at much else recently either.
My mortgage broker went from defending how things work to asking how he'd actually do it differently, and that shift is worth more to him than anything I could build this month.
**Action points:
- Write down the sentence you're most certain about in your business right now. The "this always works" one.
- Ask yourself honestly: is it working because it's the best way, or because nobody's questioned it in a while?
- Pick one small, low-stakes way to test a different approach this month. Not a rebuild. Just a question you haven't asked yourself yet.
Until next time
Loz Demousselle
AI Adoption Consultant at One Level Up, helping 8 to 80 person firms get their whole team using AI, daily and safely.
More at onelevelup.com.au