AI Strategies for Small Business Growth
▼ Summary
– Sam Finnegan-Dehn works full-time in charity fundraising and tutors math and philosophy part-time from his London home.
– He uses AI, specifically Notion AI, to handle secretarial tasks like managing digital notes and connecting ideas across notebooks.
– Notion AI records client meetings with consent and generates summaries that Finnegan-Dehn uses to refine his teaching strategies.
– AI assists with goal-setting by generating concrete steps from his written “North Star” goals, helping him prioritize tasks.
– He also uses AI for lesson notes, invoicing, and generating and syncing social media posts for his tutoring business.
Sam Finnegan-Dehn has a full-time job in charity fundraising, but after hours, he runs a side business tutoring university students in math and philosophy from his London home. It’s a way for him to put his philosophy degrees to use and share his passion for the subject. However, the actual work of tutoring involves far more than just meeting with students. He must plan lessons, source fresh reading materials, create assignments, send invoices, and stay current with new research, all while holding down his regular job. With so many demands on his time, Finnegan-Dehn finds it difficult to focus on expanding his client base.
To address this, he has started using AI to streamline the day-to-day operations of his tutoring business. He describes the technology as functioning like a second memory, helping him connect ideas scattered across his digital notebooks. In these notebooks, he records reminders about client progress and new readings, and AI now pulls that information together seamlessly.
After testing tools like Claude and ChatGPT, Finnegan-Dehn settled on Notion AI because it integrates smoothly with his existing tutoring notes stored in the Notion app. While he avoids using AI to generate teaching materials, he does use it to record client meetings (with their permission). The automated summaries that Notion AI produces then help him refine his teaching strategies. For instance, if a summary reveals that a particular technique wasn’t effective for a student, he can adjust his approach for future sessions.
Beyond meeting summaries, Notion AI assists with goal-setting, drafting lesson notes, invoicing, and creating and syncing social media posts. When it comes to goal-setting, Finnegan-Dehn explains that he knows his long-term business ambitions but often struggles to map out the concrete steps needed to achieve them. He starts by writing down a “North Star” goal, such as reaching a specific number of clients by year’s end. Then, he asks the AI to generate a step-by-step plan based on the profile he has built within the app. After reviewing the suggestions, he decides which tasks to prioritize.
(Source: MIT Technology Review)
