Automate Your Small Business: Save 20 Hours a Week with Practical AI Automation Playbooks

Brian Knisley has spent the better part of two decades helping small businesses work with less friction and more margin — first as the operations manager of a forty-person services firm, and then as an independent automation consultant who has built systems for more than two hundred clients across retail, professional services, trades, and hospitality. His approach is deliberately unglamorous: he starts with a stopwatch and a time audit rather than a software license, and he measures every engagement in hours returned to the owner rather than features deployed.

He began writing about applied AI for small business in 2023, when he noticed the same pattern repeating: eager owners signing up for AI tools, then abandoning them within weeks because nobody had shown them how to weave the tools into real workflows. *Automate Your Small Business* is the result — a set of practical playbooks built from real client engagements, tested in real companies, and refined until they were simple enough for a busy owner to finish in an afternoon.

Brian is a regular speaker at small-business conferences and workshops, where he is known for a single question he asks every audience: "What did you do twice this week that made you sigh?" He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he runs his own consultancy, tests every playbook in this book against his own businesses, and keeps a weekly habit of auditing his calendar for time leaks.