This week’s episode of Win The Hour, Win The Day Podcast interviews, Kris Ward. You're not tired. You're everybody's answer. And nobody has ever named that out loud, so you keep treating it like a discipline problem. Friends, family, clients, the team. Something breaks and the phone rings and it's you, because it is genuinely faster to handle it than to explain it. You have been that person since you were the kid taking somebody else's crisis at eleven at night, and twenty years of practice later you carried the whole habit straight into your business. Here's the thing, that isn't a work ethic, it's a setup. The more you can handle, the more you get handed, and the more you get handed, the more you prove you can handle it. I ran on that for years and called my speed a superpower. It was a symptom, not a strength. So watch the next moment somebody tells you a problem they haven't actually asked you to solve. That gap, between hearing it and fixing it, is where most of your week is going. The work that would move your business forward isn't lost to laziness, it's lost to everything you picked up before anyone asked.

This week’s episode of Win The Hour, Win The Day Podcast interviews, Kristi Mitchell. Your email list might be too big. Not too small. Too big. I always assumed the people who never open my emails were harmless. They sit there, the number stays respectable, and maybe one day one of them wakes up and buys something. Email Strategist Karen Grill set me straight on this week's episode. Since the 2024 authentication rules came in, inbox providers watch who actually opens you. Keep sending to people who never do and you start to look like a spammer, so they throttle you. First a slice of your list, then a bigger slice. The people who want to hear from you stop getting you, because of the people who don't. That one landed. I have been protecting a number at the expense of the people who read every word. Karen's rule is simple. Ninety days with no open and they go. And an unsubscribe is not a rejection, it is someone telling you that you are not right for them right now. She also wants us to stop asking founders how big the list is. Five hundred people at a sixty percent open rate will out-sell five thousand at five percent, every single time.

Your AI content is well written. That is the problem. You typed in the topic. You read it back. It sounded good, professional even, so you posted it. Then nothing happened. Here is what nobody tells you. Well written was never the goal. Sounding like you was the goal, and those two things are not the same. I get compliments on my podcast all the time and they are never about how polished it is. People tell me it sounds like they walked into a room and got to overhear two people talking. We talk over each other. I fumble my words. That is the compliment. Kristi Mitchell said something on this week's episode that I keep coming back to. You are the expert and you need to stay the expert. The AI tool is only there for the execution. Which means the order matters. Your voice and your experience come first, then the tool turns it into the post. Most people are doing it the other way around. They ask the tool to be the thought leader, then wonder why the content sounds like everybody else in their industry. You already have the good stuff. It just comes out of your mouth instead of your keyboard.

People started booking calls with her and telling her an AI sent them. That's Michelle B. Griffin, and she's back on the show because she went and found out why it was happening. She asks every person who books how they found her. It's a question on her scheduler and she actually reads the answers. Then the answers started changing. Somebody said they asked Claude about personal branding and her name came up. Then it happened again, and again, and it stopped looking like a fluke. Here's the shift. People aren't only searching now, they're asking. Who's the best person for this. And what comes back is a recommendation, not a page of rankings. I've been on hundreds of podcasts, we write blogs every week, there's a book on Amazon, and I've got my own show. So I asked her the selfish question, which is whether we're in better shape than we were back when the whole game was chasing back links into bigger websites. She said yes, because the work moved. It isn't chasing anymore. It's whether the trail you already left says the same clear thing everywhere. Her framework is three Cs. Clarity, so you're positioned for something instead of being one of thousands of business coaches. Credibility, which means third party proof, because AI doesn't want your word for it. Continuity, which means recent, because if every clue about you is from 2019 you're clearly not in the mix. And she gave one thing you can do this week. Open a private window, log out of every paid AI account so it doesn't know it's you, and ask who you are and what you're known for. Then ask who's the best in your lane and see if you show up. She found out she'd been featured in Success Magazine months earlier and had no idea.

She got thirty minutes notice. Thirty minutes before a Zoom room with about thirty people in it, I asked her to host a session she had never run in her life. Our Marketing Manager, Maura, had to go. Her sister went in for a basic surgery, there was an infection and a complication, and inside a couple of days it was life or death. She needed to be at that hospital day and night. We didn't know if she'd be gone three days, three weeks or three months. So we met as a team and split her Super Toolkits up. Criz got the Leadership Program, which is the biggest piece of it. Criz isn't the speaker on our team. She's the one in the background making everything run, and she was nervous. I told her I could take the session myself, and then I told her I thought that was the wrong call, because everybody in that room already saw her as the person beside Maura, and stepping in front of her would have shrunk her. She opened Maura's toolkit. What to do when you come into the Zoom. Ask the VAs how they're doing. Five minutes in breakout rooms. Housekeeping. The topic was already drafted, because drafting it in advance sits in Maura's job bio. I watched the replay and we all teased her, she looked like a game show host. She was that good because she wasn't spending anything on remembering what came next. All of it went into being the host. Maura was gone three weeks. Her sister turned it around and she's fine. Not one client noticed a thing. And Criz came out of it with the line I keep repeating. Your systems get tested during an emergency, not during convenience.

A personality test told him he could never be in sales. He's been in sales his entire career and he's very good at it. That's Aleasha Bahr's husband, and she brought the story onto the show this week because it says everything about how backwards we've got this. He's an engineer. He sells to engineers. They like the patience and the detail and the fact that he isn't pushing them. The exact traits the test called a disqualification are the reason he wins the deal. Most sales training was built for one type of person, the fast talking one with their eye on the close. So everybody else runs that playbook, feels awful doing it, and decides they're just bad at sales. Aleasha's whole thing is that there are five sales personalities and every one of them has a real strength. The relationship builder who never pushes. The inquisitive educator who listens better than anyone. The analytical one who follows a process beautifully. The persuader who doesn't get distracted. The chatty charmer who never met a stranger. And there's one habit all five get wrong, which is talking for ten minutes straight and then asking if that made sense. She says stop after each piece and ask if it would make a difference for them. You find out what's actually landing while you can still do something about it. I was the over explainer. I'd tell people every touch point inside our Leadership Program because I was proud of it, and they'd walk away confused and exhausted from talking to me. They bought a red car with a cup holder. They didn't ask what was under the hood.

For years I blamed the assistant. Never to her face. I'm too nice for that (which, honestly, was half the problem). But in my head I'd decided she just didn't get it. The work came back not-quite-right and I'd think, well, I told her how I wanted this. Did I though? Here's what I actually said one time: "I wouldn't do it that way." That was it. My whole big direction. So she went and did it the way I said I wouldn't, and I sat there sure she'd dropped the ball. She hadn't. I never told her which way to go, or why it mattered. I handed her my opinion and called it leadership. I had Toby Myles back on the show this week, and she owned the exact same thing out loud. For years she figured her assistants were the problem. Wrong skills, oversold themselves, didn't get it. Then she landed in a setup that actually worked and the penny dropped. Oh. It was me. Now, when something comes back to me and my first thought is "they didn't understand," I already know how that sentence ends. I go hunt for the fuzzy thing I said. It's there about 99% of the time. I left a gap, and the person just walked into it. Nobody warns you about this part when you finally bring someone on. The instruction that lives crystal-clear in your head is almost never the one that came out of your mouth. So now I get clear before I hand anything over. Boring, specific, this-is-exactly-what-I-mean clear. Toby went from burning through assistants to building a full podcast in a month with one person she now calls her second brain. Same Toby. The setup was the only thing that changed. When something your team did comes back wrong, whose sentence do you go re-read first, theirs or yours?

I'm at my best in a private conversation. One-on-one, in the comments, on a call, I'm all in. Then it's time to be visible in public, and I shrink. For years I told myself the fix was to pitch harder. Get on a bigger show. Wait for someone with a larger audience to notice me and pull me up. Then Jamie Maglietta got on the podcast. She produced Vice President Kamala Harris at BET and spent 20 years inside MSNBC, Fox and CNN. She said one thing that rearranged how I think about being seen. You don't chase media. You produce it. That sounds like a slogan until she breaks it down. A national hit on CNN feels enormous and often brings in zero clients. She had a legal commentator on her show who'd been on every network, and it never turned into a single paying customer. Meanwhile her people go on one tiny local segment and pick up more followers in a day than any national spot ever gave them. Turns out the chase brings in almost nothing. What pays is being findable, clear, and someone people want to stay connected to. And here's the move I can't stop thinking about. Instead of sending some writer a "loved your article" note and hoping, find an expert you genuinely disagree with, say so publicly, and tag them. Now you're producing a conversation people actually want to watch, and you're in it as an equal. One more line of hers stung a little. You can be smart and really boring. Being the expert isn't enough. People have to want to turn you on. So where do you go quiet when it's time to be seen?

I once paid for months of coaching on software I never learned. This was back in what I call the dark years of my business. Some project management platform was going to change everything. Once I finally mastered it, the work would take care of itself. I gave it three months and a pile of money. I never even learned the thing. What I remember is how beat up I felt at the end. All that time, all that money, and I was further behind than the day I started. I thought about that this week because a client told me he'd just lost a whole day building AI prompts. Smart guy. Public speaker. Gets things done. He looked up and went, "What happened? I was supposed to do all this other stuff today." Here's the part nobody says out loud. AI was supposed to buy you time. Almost everyone I talk to is busier than they have ever been. Email was going to save us too, remember? You send one out and three come back. The tool was never the problem. It was never the whole answer either. AI just speeds up whatever you already have. And if what you already have is chaos, now you've got fast chaos. So the real question isn't "what can this new tool do." It's "what never lands back on my desk again." That takes a person who owns the work, using the tool to move quicker. Not you, at 10:30 at night, quietly turning into the one who babysits every shiny new thing. Your business is here to support your life. You didn't sign up to run a help desk for the robots. Are you running the tools? Or have you quietly become the person who manages all of them? 👀

I couldn't leave the store empty-handed. I was in Greece this spring... and wandered into this tiny shop. The woman running it was so warm... so genuinely lovely... that I found myself walking the aisles going, "I have got to find something I want in here. I am not leaving with nothing. We'll make something up if we have to." I didn't need a single thing. I just didn't want to walk away from her. I told that story to Karen Yankovich this week... (she's been teaching LinkedIn and PR for years)... and she nodded like, yes, that's the whole game. Because that feeling... the one where someone is so good to you... that you go hunting for a reason to stay connected... is exactly what your LinkedIn is supposed to do. And almost nobody uses it that way. Most people log in and pitch. They fire the templated "Hi, how's business?"... at total strangers and call it networking. (Half the ones I get don't even have my name right.) Karen's whole point: the people who might buy from you... are the category to stop chasing. The gold is in the other two. The referral partners, the ones with an audience... who will put you in front of it. And the press, the people you get to know long... before you ever need them, so you are the one they call. She built a real relationship from a single business card... and a few LinkedIn messages. It ended with her in front of 2,000 people. The publisher had never once heard of her. I've done this for years and I still forget it. You cannot copy-paste your way into that. You have to be the store nobody wants to leave. Who's the one person you'd go out of your way to work with.... even though they've never once pitched you? 👀