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Andrea Palacio and her husband bought a landscaping company and nearly lost it within a month — staff dropped from 12 to 2 and revenue was cut in half. She rebuilt it with AI: phones answered and leads booked automatically, Google Ads optimized by an AI agent. Now she helps other service-business owners do the same at RunCrewless.
Andrea Palacio and her husband bought a "boring" landscaping company expecting an easy win — and nearly lost everything within a month. This is the story of how she clawed it back with AI and automated it into a business that runs without her.
"Those companies are losing between 30 and 40% of their revenue just because they're not answering the phone on time." — Andrea Palacio
After a decade as an entrepreneur — including seven years running an e-commerce business from a sailboat in the Caribbean — Andrea Palacio and her husband decided to buy a "boring business" and put an operator in place. The reality hit fast: within a month of acquiring a landscaping company, the manager quit and told the crew to find other jobs, staff dropped from 12 to 2, and revenue was cut nearly in half. With their home attached as SBA-loan collateral and a second baby on the way, they were working 80-hour weeks and ready to sell.
Instead, Andrea went down the "YouTube University" rabbit hole and started solving her own problems with AI. In this conversation you'll hear how she put AI on every inbound phone call (answering and booking every lead automatically), how that stopped a 30–40% revenue leak, and how AI-optimized Google Ads increased their leads 20% while cutting ad spend. You'll also hear exactly how she runs ads with AI today — connecting Claude Code directly to Google Ads with an AI agent, while her non-technical husband uses Claude's Chrome extension to audit the account, catch broken links, and find ads running without landing pages. The business became automated enough that a buyer offered full asking price — so they kept it, hired an operations manager, and stepped away. That turnaround became RunCrewless.com, where Andrea now helps service-business owners build self-operating companies.
A note on this episode: Andrea and I ran into internet connection problems during recording, and much of the second half of our conversation couldn't be saved. The good news: the best moments from that half were captured — find them as Shorts on the Rainier RevOps YouTube channel, including her take on the founder "productivity trap," using AI to clean up messy CRMs, and why she tells business owners to go all-in on one AI tool.
Andrea spent 10 years building and exiting businesses — an e-commerce company she ran while living on a sailboat, then a landscaping company (Mokai) she and her husband acquired and nearly lost before automating it with AI. That turnaround led her to found RunCrewless.com, where she now helps service business owners run self-operating companies using Claude Code and automation. She's also a business coach in Dan Martell's Elite program.
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Recorded in Descript Rooms. Edited in Descript. Hosted on Transistor.
AI-Ready or Not is a production of Rainier RevOps.
Most companies are buying AI tools. Almost none of them have the data, processes, or systems in place for those tools to deliver.
The CRM is a mess. The processes aren't written down. The tribal knowledge is locked in three people's heads. Then the AI gets layered on top, and nobody understands why it doesn't work.
AI-Ready or Not is the show about fixing the foundation first.
Host Travis Scott talks with founders, operators, authors, and practitioners about how they're actually using AI. What's working. What's not. What they had to do to make it work.
New episodes every two weeks.