#471: Tyler LaFleur | Stop "Playing" With AI

You hear the hype about AI every day, but when you try to use it, it feels like a toy rather than a tool that can actually help you reclaim your time.

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In this episode, I’m cutting through that noise with Tyler LaFleur, a former nurse and functional medicine practitioner turned Fractional COO. I brought Tyler on because he doesn’t look at business through the lens of "growth at all costs." He uses first principles thinking—the same diagnostic approach used in medicine—to find the root cause of what is keeping you stuck in the day-to-day.

We have a candid, practical conversation about why most business owners fail with AI because of "lazy prompting," and why Artificial Intelligence is useless without "Objective Truth." If you don’t have your financial constraints and ownership goals clearly defined first, applying AI is just pouring rocket fuel into a car with no steering wheel—you’ll just hit the wall faster.

Top 10 Takeaways

• First Principles Thinking: Just like in functional medicine, you must strip a business down to its core mechanics to find the root cause, not just treat the operational symptoms.
• The "More" Trap: When an owner lacks a definitive financial goal, the default strategy becomes a chaotic, exhausting pursuit of "more" revenue without more freedom.
• AI Needs Constraints: AI is a rocket ship, but it needs a rudder. Without the "Objective Truth" of your financial model and ownership goals, AI will hallucinate a path to nowhere.
• Visionary vs. Integrator: Visionaries are great at starting fires but terrible at putting them out. AI can act as the "Integrator" that documents processes and executes the details you hate.
• Don't Automate a Mess: Before building complex agents, start with "low-hanging fruit"—the repetitive administrative tasks that steal 6-10 hours of your time every month.
• Lazy Prompting: The reason AI "doesn't work" for most owners is that they treat it like Google. You must give it deep context (your strategy, constraints, and voice) to get boardroom-level output.
• Claude vs. ChatGPT: For business owners, Tyler recommends Anthropic’s Claude because its "Projects" feature allows you to upload your entire operating system as context.
• Cleaning Financial Data: You can teach AI a "Skill" (like cleaning a messy trial balance or categorizing expenses) by simply showing it a transcript of you doing it once.
• The "Ladder on the Wrong Wall": AI will help you execute a bad strategy faster. Efficiency is useless if it’s driving you toward a business model you hate.
• Just Start: You cannot break the AI. The biggest risk to your business isn't AI taking over; it's your competitor using it to move twice as fast while you wait for it to get "easier."

Tyler LaFleur is a Fractional COO and AI integration specialist who helps visionaries escape the weeds. A former nurse and functional medicine practitioner, Tyler bridges the gap between biological systems and business operations, using "first principles" to diagnose and cure operational bottlenecks. He specializes in practical AI application—moving beyond the hype to build custom agents, automate workflows, and clean financial data using tools like Claude and ChatGPT. 

Chapters: 

• (00:00) Tyler's journey from nursing to fractional COO to AI integration
• (06:23) First principles thinking applied to healt...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - Independence by Design: First Principles Thinking
• (00:02:59) - How to Lead an AI-Driven Company
• (00:06:01) - Nurses vs Business: What's The Connection?
• (00:08:11) - How Functional Medicine Became Outcome Driven
• (00:13:53) - Learning From the Pros
• (00:15:14) - Leadership Made Easy
• (00:20:32) - Dr. Thayer: I Interrupt My Guests
• (00:20:56) - The First Principles of Business in AI
• (00:28:09) - Steve Ballentine on Goals and the Process
• (00:32:41) - Board of Directors: The Cash Flow constraint
• (00:37:47) - The Objective Reality of Spending
• (00:42:21) - How to Manage Your Business's Financials
• (00:46:00) - Multiple Valuation For Small Businesses
• (00:47:49) - Steve Jobs on Strategic Planning, Sales and Marketing as Silos
• (00:53:59) - How To Manage a High Cost Business
• (00:54:23) -