Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law 20 years ago and is about to sign its 5,000th intellectual property client, and on Unscripted Small Business he explains what AI just broke. Copyright attaches the moment you create the work, "the best deal in intellectual property law ever," but registering it is what unlocks statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per occurrence. AI cannot be an author and AI cannot be an inventor, so using AI as a tool is fine and the trap is scope, because the problems start "when AI starts adding ideas to the invention that the inventor never contemplated." Richard also covers Getty demand letters, why a trade secret dies the moment it can be reverse engineered, and the expert-witness case where LLM-drafted work got turned over in discovery and killed the case.

Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten.

Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Phil Crowley spent 30 years in the Johnson & Johnson Law Department, about seven of them as chief FDA regulatory counsel for J&J's biotech and high-technology products, before he started Crowley Law for life sciences and technology founders. He was a research physicist first: Stevens Institute, then the PhD program in experimental physics at Harvard, working on superconductivity.

He opens with the client who wanted to save money and pulled an operating agreement off the internet for his LLC. It was not an operating agreement. His partner was supposed to run the distilling side of a new vodka brand and instead got, in Phil's words, a little bit too fond of the juice and slept at the plant. There was no legal way to remove him, the partner sued first, and the client nearly lost the $50,000 he had put in.

His book is Avoid Startup Failure: Learn the Top Ten Causes of Failure for Technology Startups and How to Turn Them to Your Advantage, on Amazon in softcover, Kindle, Audible, and Spanish softcover. The Amazon link is an affiliate link.

More from Phil on the business divorce problem and on handling a partnership dispute, and there is more on scaling without losing your core over at SEO Arcade.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews with small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.

Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership, runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures on repeat.

The opening move of the workshops he runs with chief executives is to take the thing they have been selling off the table. If raw analytical capability is now abundant and cheap, nobody is paying you for being clever.

What is left is judgement, which is knowing which of the available answers is the right one here, and wisdom, which is knowing which question was worth asking. Neither compresses well.

The reassurance and the warning arrive together. The unit being automated is the task, not the role, which means most jobs survive in a changed shape.

The exception is the role that was only ever a stack of tasks with a person on top managing them. Brett is direct that those people are the ones who should be worried, and that the fix is to move up into deciding rather than doing.

He cites the framing that easy tasks become automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible. That third clause is where the opportunity actually is and where almost nobody is looking.

The reason it works as a framework is that it stops the conversation being technical. A leader who is strong on two and blind on the third will make predictable mistakes, and you can name which ones.

For a small business he does not recommend transformation. He recommends compounding. One per cent better each week, across the whole team, is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output by the end of the year.

The point of framing it that way is that nobody has to be convinced of anything dramatic. It is a small enough ask to survive contact with a busy week, which is the only test that matters.

His concrete example is request-for-proposal responses going from thirty or forty hours down to about two. That is not a strategy, it is a Tuesday, and it is where most of the available value sits.

His advice is counter-intuitive and correct. Customer service is the last place to deploy this, because it is where a bad answer costs you a relationship rather than a draft.

It is also the best place once you have it right, for exactly the same reason. The stakes that make it dangerous are the stakes that make it valuable.

The structural warning attached is about ownership. AI strategy handed to the IT function becomes a procurement exercise, and procurement exercises do not change how a business operates.

Owners tend to weigh generated content as a quality question. Brett weighs it as a trust question, which is a larger number.

Publishing volume that says nothing is not neutral. It teaches the reader that your name is attached to filler, and that lesson is expensive to unteach. There is a longer version of that argument in what actually works in LLM search.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

His site is brettschklar.com. Hear more small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business.

Schklar, Brett. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “AI Isn’t Taking Your Job. It’s Taking Your Tasks.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking-your-tasks

Sherri Langburt bootstrapped BabbleBoxx into an Inc. 500 influencer marketing agency that productizes campaigns for every kind of business — not just the beauty brands everyone pictures. She argues small local brands actually hold the biggest opportunity, and that the first hurdle is fear, not budget: not every creator costs a million dollars, and the real question is whether the influencer you pick can move a sale — because selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara.

Sherri walks through the pre-flight checks that decide whether a campaign converts or embarrasses you (inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency), makes the case that AI cannot replace the human in the loop, and names the channels nobody is crowding: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch and LinkedIn. Creators can pitch her team through the BabbleBoxx influencer sign-up.

Read the full recap: Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara

In this episode:

Connect with Sherri: babbleboxx.com · LinkedIn · case studies and trend reports via [email protected]

More episodes: Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Most companies buy AI backwards — they pick a platform before they have named what they are actually trying to fix. James Ernst of Core Order thinks that single inversion explains most of the disappointment small and mid-sized businesses feel about AI.

James spent eighteen years in marketing and public relations at agencies around the country, took a three-year detour running his own restaurant in Buffalo, and has spent the last two years working in AI full time. Core Order isn't an AI agency — he calls it a growth architecture firm, and the distinction is the whole argument.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Cameron Tope runs a several-hundred-door residential property management company in the Greater Houston area — and he operates it 100% remotely from San Diego. In his second visit to Unscripted Small Business, the founder of Emerson Property Management lays out why $20,000 a month in marketing is worthless if nobody answers the phone, how AI became a delegation tool rather than a magic box, and why he gives his entire playbook away on purpose.

Cameron is broker, owner, and founder of Emerson Property Management, serving several hundred owners across Greater Houston while running the whole operation from California. He started the company after he couldn't find a manager for his own rentals — while at risk of losing his oil-and-gas job and carrying a lot of debt — and has done it full-time for six years (and unofficially for over ten). Returning listeners first met him in Episode 1: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity.

"You spend $20,000 a month on marketing, but you don't have anybody answer the phone, and you get back to them two days later — you're just lighting money on fire." — Cameron Tope"We can give them the recipe, but it's not going to taste the same." — Cameron Tope"RTMs are kind of the first step towards AI. If you have a good process, you can delegate it." — Cameron Tope

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find more episodes at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Richard Hickman spent his first career hunting Russian hackers as a digital-forensics consultant. Then he became a stepdad to five kids overnight, walked away from the on-call life, and started helping his wife build her coaching business — which accidentally turned into Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built entirely for high-ticket coaches. In this episode he hands Jeremy Rivera the exact playbook: the CRM foundation that comes before ads, the pricing math that decides who he'll even work with, and why you should be writing your website for the AI that's reading it, not just the human.

Richard's ideal client is an established coach making around $20k/month who's stuck under a "referral ceiling" — great at the work, no predictable sales system. His agency's job is to install the foundation, dial in the offer, and only then turn on paid acquisition. Along the way he makes a sharp case for answer engine optimization (AEO), email marketing, and never betting your whole livelihood on a single platform.

"You need to be building your website to where it's not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it." — Richard Hickman"Who reads blogs anymore? AIs do. Perplexity reads your blog. ChatGPT reads your blog." — Richard Hickman"Social media is great, but don't rely on it, because it could go away in an instant and we've seen it happen." — Richard Hickman

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

A broker once told a cocky 25-year-old plumbing-company owner five words that gutted him: "Louis, your business is worth nothing." Five years later Louis Swart sold his next business for $5M — and the only thing that changed was delegation. In this episode of Unscripted Small Business, Louis (founder of Iron Brij) unpacks the systems that turn a business you own a job in into one that's actually worth something.

Louis has built and sold companies the hard way — a plumbing business a broker valued at nothing, a later business sold for $5M, and another scaled to $35M and 450 staff. He's also the author of The B Myth (The Busyness Myth). Across the hour he trades practical, hard-won tools with host Jeremy Rivera on delegation, SOPs, creativity inside parameters, using AI without producing slop, and beating the "badge of honor" trap of being busy.

"Louis, your business is worth nothing."— Louis Swart (quoting the broker)"Would I pay somebody a hundred dollars an hour to do this task?"— Louis Swart"Creativity in, creativity out."— Louis Swart

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find every episode and recap at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com, and browse past guests by topic at unscriptedseo.com.

Ali Raymer launched her own agency the week this was recorded. Nine years in travel, a Title I high school English classroom before that, and a straight answer to the question her industry keeps ducking. No, you do not need a travel agent. Booking is solved. What she sells is the part that is left over.

None of that is necessarily hard. What you actually need is a travel advisor.

Her opening move is to concede the entire objection. You can book your own flights. Expedia works, the apps work, an AI assistant will happily do it. The booking layer is not where a person adds anything any more, and she says so before anyone else can.

What is left is judgement, and she describes it the way anyone selling a service against a free tool eventually has to. A client arrives certain they want Santorini because of a video. Ten minutes of conversation with them and their partner reveals that what they have actually described is Portugal.

So many of the conversations that I have go down that path.

She calls this the marriage counsellor part of the job. It is also the part a booking engine structurally cannot do, because it requires disagreeing with the customer.

Asked what regulation shapes her work, she gives an answer against her own commercial interest.

I think that we should have higher regulations, much like realtors do.

Realtors carry individual licences and have to keep them current. Travel advisors do not. Someone can sit under a host agency, use that agency’s licence number, and start booking other people’s holidays this week.

Even with realtors, you have to do continuing ed every year. We aren’t required to do that.

Her practical advice to consumers is to interview the person the way you would interview any other professional, because the industry will not do the filtering for you. Her worry is not fraud so much as absence: people who like travelling but will not answer the phone when something goes wrong in Greece.

Two lines. A planning or consult fee on genuinely custom trips, often waived on simple ones, and commission from suppliers. She puts a typical advisor yield at around twelve per cent.

The interesting part is how she handles the price objection, which is that there usually is not one.

Either Disney is getting that extra 10 % commission or a small business owner like myself is.

She does not fight the points-and-miles crowd either. She builds the whole trip, loads it with the hotel chain her client hoards points for, and lets him book those rooms himself. She still manages the trip and still earns on everything else.

Instagram and Facebook, split by age. Millennials and Gen X on one, retired boomers with time and money on the other. Nothing exotic, and no paid budget mentioned.

If I went to the gym and looked at my trainer and he didn’t have muscles, I wouldn’t go to that gym.

So every trip she takes personally becomes content, roughly monthly. She also reports, from the customer side, the shift marketers keep arguing about. At the end of a consult call she asks who she can thank for the referral, and the answer has started coming back as an AI tool rather than Google.

If you run a local business, hear that and wonder how you would ever prove it, the SOP for proving a local booking actually came from search is the unglamorous version of the answer.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

peaceandpearltravel.com, and Ali Raymer on LinkedIn, where she writes for the advisor trade rather than the traveller.

Raymer, Ali. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “You Don’t Need a Travel Agent, You Need an Advisor.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/why-you-dont-need-a-travel-agent-you-need-an-advisor-ali-raymer/