For us, running operations is talking to clients, partners, users, leads, while taking care of a myriad small tasks. How could you ever do that on your own, as a solo entrepreneur?

Yesterday my colleague came to me with a list of more than 50 todos in the backlog.

The list includes following up on leads, planning meetings, updating clients, creating our new website, processing incoming tickets, testing and approval. Even more crucially, it includes completing our ISO 27001 certification todos, sending renewal contracts.

Let me explain.

Our software company is a just small team. Together, and using AI, we move mountains. But like sand from between the cracks it’s the little things that keep our business together that’s seeping away.

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If talking to people is the norm, then so much for solo entrepreneurship.

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It’s something I say a lot: we don’t have jobs, other people have jobs.

What I mean is, they go to work in the morning, get a coffee in the company restaurant, talk to their colleagues a bit, how are the kids etc, go to their meetings, have lunch together, and in the afternoon they hop in their company car for another meeting. At five, they’re heading home.

Their entire day is made up of talking to people.

Working in a highly diversified corporate environment means that you have a specialist role which is your job. You don’t have to worry about unpaid invoices unless you work at finances.

It’s not that we dislike talking. But we’re always acutely aware of the fact that we’re not getting our work done. Of which one is sorting unpaid invoices.

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Automate everything. Fine, but I can’t automate away talking to people. Or can I?

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I suppose if you run a small, bootstrapped SaaS you could get away with not having to talk to people. But if you’re like us, a software company building unique products, you’re talking to clients. If you’re funded, you’ll be talking to stakeholders.

Yes, you’ll have reports. We’ve been doing automated weekly and monthly reports even before AI.

But we’ve also seen how valuable it is to sit down with your clients, and your users, and talk things through.

Our developers are only asked to join meetings when their specialist expertise is required. But they’re perfectly capable of leading the account. We should let them.

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Solo-entrepreneurship is a myth, the myth of the ultimate generalist.

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If just half of us is working for our business while the other half is doing their jobs, no wonder we’re struggling.

Agentic AI is quickly raising the bar of what it means to build software. Devs now work at the level of modules, not classes and methods, syntax and inheritance. They’re rising up through the hierarchy towards business goals.

It’s tough though. For the most part we grew up in a world where people had jobs. They were concerned with a specific part of the business and maybe even got struck down if they ventured beyond their expertise. Being a specialist was considered a badge of honour.

But here’s the lesson. Now that AI is capable of doing so many cognitive tasks that were previously thought to be specialist jobs, we should be looking upwards.

Take off our specialist badges and become generalists.