Tariffs Are the Stress Test. Your AI Roadmap Is the Response.
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Researchers at Wharton tracked gym attendance over more than a year. Katy Milkman and her colleagues found visits jump 33.4% on Mondays. At the start of a new year, 11.6%. At the start of a new semester, 47.1%. They call it the fresh start effect. A temporal landmark on the calendar, a new week, a new month, a new school year, lets us file away the old version of ourselves and gives us a meaningful kick start to a new you. The thing we've been putting off suddenly feels possible. Here's why I'm telling you this in September. The trade war started all over again a few weeks ago. Maybe it doesn't touch your business directly. But I guarantee It still touches your customers, or your customers' customers. And when people get nervous, they spend less. Everybody tightens belt buckle. And every revenue dollar gets harder to earn. Never waste a crisis. A crisis is a stress test. It shows you exactly how defensible your business really is, who you rely on, and where you're exposed. You can waste that information, or you can use it to get stronger. Here's the playbook we teach. It's simpler than most people expect. And September is the perfect time to start with it. 1. Increase the Cadence Look at every meeting and increase the frequency and the cadence. The strategy session you used to run once a quarter? If your market is moving, you now run it once a month. And rerun every time you face a major bump. Not a longer meeting. The same five questions, faster, more often:
The world is shifting too often for a quarterly check-in. Are your customers absorbing the tariffs or walking away? Is a competitor cutting price? You want to catch that inside a week, not discover it at the annual offsite. The world and the market will make a a fool look like a genius and a genius look like a fool. I’d rather ride the wave than get run over by it. 2. Fix one workflow every 30 days That last question, the change you need to make, almost always points to a workflow. Rebuilding a workflow used to take the best companies 90 days. The average project cycle was closer to a year. With your people and AI, you can re-engineer your most complex workflow in 30 days. Done with your people, not to your people. AI as the co-pilot, not the pilot. Run that cycle every 30 days. Stay close to your market and what’s changing. You can quickly become a fast follower on what you know works. You stay hyper-competitive without betting the company on one big guess. Now here's the part I really want you to catch. That rhythm is the AI roadmap. The AI roadmap that actually works is an operating rhythm: a strategy pulse that tells you where the pressure is, and a 30-day cycle that rewires the engine (the workflow) underneath it. It's how you get through a crisis. It's how you integrate AI. And it’s how you emerge stronger. Same motion. You can't control what's going on in the outside world. You can respond to it, and you can respond fast. You either have a playbook and you're checking in on it, or you're letting the world drag you. If you don’t know where you are, well then I’m going to guess the world is about to drag you. A client once told us our work together moved them from unanchored anxiety to anchored anxiety. Still anxious. But now they knew exactly where to put the anxious energy, and what to do about it on Monday. That's what the rhythm buys you. One more reason to start now instead of waiting for January: Milkman's research says the start you make at a landmark is the one you actually follow through on. September is the strongest fresh start on the calendar outside New Year's, and it comes with four 30-day cycles before year-end. Four cycles. Four workflows. A weekly pulse to translate intention to execution. What would your business look like in January if you fixed four workflows between now and then? If you want help finding the first one, you know where we are. Talk soon, Matt - 3 New Prompt Downloads:
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