Simon Coton: How to Build AI Systems That Do the Work of 14 People

EPISODE OVERVIEW Duration: Approximately 45 minutes Best For: Trapped entrepreneurs who tried ChatGPT, got generic rubbish back, and quietly decided AI was not for them Key Outcome: You will understand how to turn the knowledge that lives in your head into systems that run without you sitting at the desk Roy sat across from a marketing agency owner with 14 people on his books. Then he showed him what one AI system was already doing more than all 14. THE BOTTOM LINE You built this business because you wanted freedom. Then you ended up spending more hours at your desk than you ever did working for someone else. Roy and Simon Coton both know that feeling. The thing is, Simon has spent the last two years working out how to take everything that sits in your head, your voice, your brand, your process, and hand it to a system that does the heavy lifting. Roy walks through exactly how he used it. A book he could never start, written. A website rebuilt in a couple of hours. A month of LinkedIn posts gathered, drafted and scheduled. Two and a half days of podcast editing done in 15 minutes. None of this is about replacing the human. It is about raising the human up, so the skill you spent 15 years building reaches ten times more people while you work fewer hours. WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS TO YOU Every task you used to do by hand, finding a note, editing a video, writing a post, is time you will never get back. Simon shows how that time stops bleeding out the moment you build a system once and let it run forever. You have 15, 20, 30 years of business knowledge in your head. That knowledge is now the most valuable thing you own. This episode shows you why the person who understands their own process wins, and the person who hands it all to a black box loses. You are the bottleneck because nobody does it like you do. Roy reframes that. Your branding person, your developer, the people with the real skill can spend all their time on that skill instead of the busywork, and serve ten times more customers. That is how you stop being the centre of everything. Carry on doing it the old way and you keep paying 600 quid to a developer for a job that now takes two hours, you keep watching the clock, and you keep telling yourself you will get to your own ideas one day. KEY INSIGHTS YOU CAN IMPLEMENT TODAY You do not need to learn everything anymore. Roy could never get his book started. So he talked it. Sixty life stories spoken aloud, fed in with his own voice and writing style, and the first chapter brought him to tears because he had never heard his own story told back to him. The lesson hides in there. The thing you keep putting off because you are not good enough at it might just need a different way in. AI is a 60 percent tool, not a 90 percent tool. Roy keeps what he calls the architect role. He knows the vision, he knows the plan, and he keeps pulling the work back on track. The system does the lifting. He stays the one who decides. That is how letting go stops feeling like losing control. Starting now is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Simon makes the point that you can pick up 80 percent of what someone learned two years ago in a month or two, and you get all the mistakes they made for free. Feeling late is the thing keeping most owners from starting at all. The critique matters more than the praise. Roy's single most-used move in two years is feeding in an idea and asking what am I missing, what is wrong, go and research whether this actually works. We are all biased towards our own ideas. A system that flatters you is worthless. One that pushes back makes you sharper. Build outside the tool, not inside it. Roy keeps everything portable so he can move between Claude, Codex and others when one of them slows down or changes its pricing. If everything lives inside one platform, you are stuck the day that platform changes the rules. GOLDEN QUOTES WORTH REMEMBERING "You do it all in the name of freedom. And then you spend more hours at your desk than you ever did with a job." - Simon Coton "The most powerful people moving forward are those that have inherent inbuilt context that others don't have around their industry, around their niche, around their function." - Simon Coton "If we can raise the human up, those are the companies that aren't going to be delivering slop." - Roy Castleman "I read my first story and it actually brought me to tears, because I'd never heard my own story in that way." - Roy Castleman "The tools are getting easier, but the processes haven't changed. Everyone can now create a meta ad, but not everyone can create a brilliant one that returns on investment." - Simon Coton QUICK NAVIGATION FOR BUSY LEADERS 00:00 - Introduction: Why one in a hundred people ever build a business, and what that says about you 03:30 - Doing it for freedom: Simon on the moment the job became the cage, and why your desk feels different now 07:00 - The opportunity nobody is taking: everyone talks about AI, hardly anyone in the real world is using it 11:00 - The 60 percent tool: keeping the architect role so you stay in control while the system does the work 15:00 - Roy's book: how 60 spoken life stories became chapters in his own voice 20:00 - From two and a half days to 15 minutes: the podcast and content systems Roy built 26:00 - Doing more than 14 staff: augmentation instead of replacement, and freeing your team's real skill 32:00 - Where it is heading: autonomous systems, the danger of AI grading its own work, and why context wins 40:00 - The cost question: paying 300 a month instead of 20, and why value beats price 43:00 - Conclusion: where the Agentic Academy goes next and how to join GUEST SPOTLIGHT Name: Simon Coton Bio: Simon helps business owners build agentic systems that run their business. He runs a paid community of over 1,500 members and has taught more than 100,000 people online how to put these systems to work. He sits at the bleeding edge of this technology and explains it in a way that keeps the human at the centre. Connect with Simon: Website: https://skool.com/scrapes LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-coton-81608b98/ YOUR NEXT ACTIONS This Week: Pick one task you do by hand every single week, editing, posting, searching for notes, and write down the exact steps you take. That document is the start of handing it over. This Month: Get a proper subscription and spend a day talking, not typing, your knowledge into a system. Your voice, your process, your stories. Build one thing that runs forever. This Quarter: Look at your team the way Roy looked at that agency owner's 14 people. Ask what skill each person has, and free them to spend their time on that skill instead of the busywork. That is how you stop being the bottleneck. EPISODE RESOURCES Agentic Academy community (Simon Coton): https://skool.com/scrapes n8n - workflow automation tool mentioned throughout Claude Code and Codex - for building workflows and systems Descript - podcast and video editing WhisperFlow - voice dictation Notion - connected knowledge base Vercel, Supabase, Payload CMS - the stack Roy used to rebuild his site Book Magic by Lucy McGrath Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestly The Mom Test - on asking unbiased questions ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ READY TO ESCAPE THE TRAP? Take the Freedom Score Quiz: https://scoreapp.atpbos.com/freedom Discover how trapped you are in your business and get your personalised roadmap to freedom in under 5 minutes. Book a Free Strategy Session: https://www.allthepower.co.uk/contact Let's discuss how to build a business that works WITHOUT you. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST, ROY CASTLEMAN Roy is the founder of All The Power Limited and creator of The Owner's Thrive Method, a business coaching system for entrepreneurs ready to grow without burnout. As a certified Wim Hof Method Instructor and the UK's first certified BOS UP coach, Roy combines AI as a thinking methodology, wellness practices, and business operating systems to help trapped entrepreneurs reclaim their freedom. Website: www.allthepower.co.uk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roycastleman/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@allthepowerltd