Three years ago Infinite Edge had seven people on the team.

Today we have four.

We’ve got more clients than we did then. Higher revenue. Better margins. The team works fewer hours and spends them on better problems. Nobody got let go. Two people moved on for reasons that had nothing to do with the work, and we didn’t replace them.

I want to walk through what changed, because every time I talk about this with another business owner, the conversation goes the same way: “Yeah, but you’re a tech business, you can do that.” And the answer is no, this isn’t about being a tech business. It’s about applying the same logic we now apply to clients.

The first thing we got wrong

When we had seven people, we were busy. Too busy, in fact, to think clearly about what we were busy with. Senior people were doing data entry. Project managers were chasing approvals. The bookkeeper was reconciling things our accounting software should have been reconciling automatically.

We weren’t lazy. We weren’t unaware. We just hadn’t stopped to look.

The first thing we did was an audit of where everyone was actually spending their time. Not the work they thought they did. The work they actually did, hour by hour, for two weeks. The result was uncomfortable. About 40% of senior team time was on tasks that didn’t need senior judgement. Most of it was on tasks that didn’t need a human at all.

What we automated first

We didn’t go after the big stuff first. We went after the easy stuff first.

Internal admin. Invoicing. Following up on overdue invoices. Creating standard project documentation. Onboarding emails for new clients. The bookkeeper’s daily reconciliation. None of this needed AI - most of it just needed the existing tools to be configured properly.

That alone gave us back about 12 hours a week across the team. Which is roughly 1.5 days of someone’s time.

The AI work came next. Drafting client communications. Summarising meeting notes into actionable lists. Pulling data out of PDFs we’d been retyping for years. Each one was small. Together they added up.

We didn’t shrink the team because AI replaced people. We grew the work each person could do, and the right size for the work turned out to be smaller.

The thing we got most wrong

The mistake I see most often when working with other businesses is going after the wrong tasks first. Everyone wants to automate the thing that’s annoying them most. That’s usually the wrong call.

The right call is automating the highest-frequency, lowest-judgement work. The boring stuff. The stuff that runs every day without thinking. Those are the tasks where automation pays back fastest and most reliably.

The annoying stuff is annoying because it’s complex, edge-case-heavy, and judgement-driven. Automating that is harder, slower, and often a bad fit for AI in 2026. Save it.

What we trained the team on

The other piece nobody talks about is the training. Tools alone don’t shrink a team. People with skills do.

We made everyone responsible for being competent with the AI tools we’d implemented. Not “AI literacy” in the abstract. Competent enough to do their actual job 30% faster. We measured it. We did short check-ins each fortnight on what was working and what wasn’t.

The team that was anxious about AI six months earlier was now suggesting new uses we hadn’t thought of. That’s the moment when adoption became real. Not when the tools went live. Months later, when curiosity replaced anxiety.

What we tore out

This part doesn’t get talked about enough. We removed more software than we added.

We had subscriptions to tools nobody was using. Tools half-configured. Tools that overlapped with other tools we were also paying for. We did a clean audit and shut down about $14,000/year of redundant licensing.

Some of that money went into the new tools we did need. Most of it just stayed on the bottom line.

What’s left for four people

The work the four of us do now is mostly senior work. Strategy. Implementation alongside clients. Collaborative delivery. Difficult conversations. The stuff where the value of a human is highest.

Anything that’s high-frequency or low-judgement runs without us. Anything that’s medium-frequency or medium-judgement has a tool doing the first 80% and one of us doing the final review.

We’re not anti-human. We’re anti-waste. There’s a difference.

Why I’m telling you this

Most consultants don’t eat their own cooking.

I’m telling you our story because every recommendation I’ll make to your business is something we’ve already done to ourselves. The framework I use - Time, Team, Technology - is the framework I used on my own team three years ago. The implementation gap I talk about is the gap I fell into the first time and the gap we built our offer around closing.

If your team is busier than they should be doing work that’s not their best work, the path through is doable. It takes a serious audit, a willingness to tear out tools that aren’t earning their keep, and the patience to train people instead of just buying them another subscription.

If you want to walk through what that looks like for your specific business, book a Discovery Call. 30 minutes. Bring one specific problem. We’ll show what’s actually possible.

That’s it.

  • Marty