How I Saved 20 Hours A Week...

I’ve always been a bit of a techy, an early adopter, and at the front of a queue for the latest bit of technological wizardry.Those that know me will ask how I am, how’s the family, and what’s the latest gadget I’ve purchased.

Over the years I’ve dabbled with a bit of coding from MS-DOS to Window to the Mac and more recently AI. Like most of the AI users, I flirted with it and tested it to produce things to help with our business and other aspects, until recently discovering the real value.

I have another role in life, that of Kit Man for our local football club. This is my 4th year and when I tell you we have over 1,200 children and 85 teams and they ALL want stuff for the new season, you start to piece together the picture of what my life looks like between July and September.Hours and hours and hours of calls, emails, WhatsApp’s, texts, messages....

The challenge is they ALL believe they are the most important and ONLY team ordering kit. And they expect everything to be INSTANT!...

“I need some shirts” ... “I’m starting a new team can I have some kit” ... or even the week before the season starts, I’ll get a message asking for a whole new kit for next Saturday.

Due to the random nature of communication, it could often take me hours to track down orders, understand what they actually wanted: “do you really want an extra-large adult top for an 8-year-old?” and then process the order with our supplier and check (double check) that what I received from the Coach translated to the exact same order I sent to the supplier. I get stressed just explaining it!

Added to all of that, last year our supplier’s office, production line and distribution centre all went up in flames mid-July, which meant I had to start all the orders over again as everything was lost.

This year, I’d decided to hand over the baton, as with all the above you get a lot of abuse for kit going missing or a wrong size sock, such is the life of a voluntary Kit Man!

But I had a thought, can AI help here?

Whilst I’m not a programmer, I knew how to structure functional requirements, and I used to run a few software companies so how hard it could be?Plus I felt guilty handing over something that could be a lot better. I had improved it to use a Google Sheet to collate orders into, but the taking of the orders was still a mess and open for mistakes and angst.

Sitting at my computer with my friend Chat, I commenced to write a prompt to help me design and code my new Kit Man App.

Well, If I thought taking kit orders was stressful, try asking Chat to help you code!After many failed attempts where it just blew up the code we’d created, I decided this was a no go.

Frustrated with the progress and the sudden death of my code, I was about to throw it all in when I discovered an app called Replit; based on my functional requirements it would create the code from scratch into an app…I was sceptical.

But, by early July, after spending a few Fridays with my new best friend Replit, my “Club Kit Pro” app already had 39 team orders of different shapes and sizes, which equated to over 323 items and 873 quantities of kit (the app told me!) and the best part of it all ... I hadn’t spoken to a single Football Coach!

I then rolled it out to the Coaches and administrators of the team with a 5-minute video embedded on how to use it and just sat back and watched the orders come into my spreadsheet.

No stress, no hassle, no mistakes (as we went through building the app we prevented obvious mistakes!).

Using AI at this level saved me around 20 hours a week during the Summer!

Imagine what AI could do for your business.

I said when AI started that it’s just like the Wild West and things will emerge from it that we don’t expect or could have thought possible.

But sitting back and using AI to write copy or things of that nature is a criminal WASTE of the capability that it has to catapult your business forward.

I decided from this experience to only use AI for the things that I’m not able to do rather than to make me lazy by getting it to do my thinking for me.

If I save 20 hours a week through one app, what is the real potential for your business of really using AI?

BW,

Martin

PS watch this space on how many orders me and my pal Replit are up to now!

Martin Norbury

Investor | Business Mentor at Advocate | Author of I don’t work Fridays