As I rolled out of bed at 5:41 AM this Saturday morning, I declared, “It’s time to make the donuts.”

My first donut? This blog.

And we have a few more donuts coming your way. 🙂 Our Black Friday offers for our limited 2027, 40 Strategy Growth Workshops and 40 Plus, business growth strategy and execution services open Friday, November 20th. More on that below.

First, let’s talk about whether all this donut-making is actually making you more dough.

The famous line from those classic Dunkin’ Donuts commercials has been a mainstay in my lexicon for decades. The Fred the Baker campaign began in 1982. 

I am an achiever. I find joy in working. However, there are times when you don’t want to work. Especially at 5:41 on a Saturday morning.

For me, “making the donuts” has also meant making money. Making the “dough.”

Pretty simple connection.

Quality Work Delivered = Quality Money Earned

Or so we hope.

My friend, author, and extraordinary business leader Trey Taylor made me reconsider that equation. His recent Plant Your Flag article, “Our Daily Work,” changed this blog. It had a different title and everything.

Darn you! 🙂 

Thank you, Trey. This is what they call an influencer. You influenced this article. Heck, Trey wrote the forward to my book, Lost at CEO. 

Trey describes how AI is changing both his productivity and his sense of accomplishment. A proposal that once took a day can now take an hour. Multiple projects can move forward simultaneously.

But when you can accomplish so much more, how do you know when you’ve done enough? And with six things underway, did you finish the one that mattered most?

His article got me thinking about the business behind the work.

If robots are making the donuts, are we actually making more money?

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber illustrates an owner’s struggle through Sarah, a woman who opens a pie shop. Coincidentally, another bakery.

My simplified version of the pattern:

You are really good at something. You decide to start a business doing it. You expect more freedom and better income.

Then you discover you also own the hiring, marketing, billing, customer complaints, and payroll problems.

You work longer hours. Your take-home pay may be less than you earned at your previous job.

You wanted to own a business. Somehow, you created a job that won’t let you leave.

You are trapped working IN the business, making donuts, with little time to work ON the business.

Enter AI.

Now you can draft proposals faster. Create more content. Analyze more information.

Those improvements can be valuable. But do they improve the financial results of your business?

McKinsey’s 2026 global AI survey illustrates the gap: 80% of respondents reported improved individual productivity, while only 37% attributed some company-level earnings impact to AI. That doesn’t mean everyone else received no benefit. It does mean personal productivity and business profitability are different measures.

This problem is NOT NEW.

One of my favorite books, The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, was originally published in 1984. It explores how a struggling factory improves through the Theory of Constraints. The lesson: making individual operations more efficient does not automatically improve the whole business.

Let’s bring this back to our donut factory.

Imagine customers want 100 dozen donuts an hour.

Your team can prepare dough for 100 dozen. It can decorate and package 100 dozen.

But your fryer can handle only 40 dozen.

The fryer is your bottleneck.

Now imagine you purchase a fancy machine that doubles your dough preparation.

Congratulations! You can prepare dough for 200 dozen donuts an hour.

How many finished donuts can you produce?

Still 40 dozen.

You have more dough waiting around. You may have more waste. You certainly have something impressive to show visitors.

But you haven’t increased the number of donuts you can sell.

To increase output, your improvement efforts need to address the fryer’s limitation—and the rest of the operation needs to support it.

Now consider the opposite situation. Your factory can make 100 dozen, but customers buy only 30 dozen.

A faster fryer won’t solve that problem. Your constraint is somewhere else.

This is why “Let’s use AI” is an incomplete strategy.

Use AI to improve WHAT?

“Well, Carl, I saved time.”

Good! If you work fewer hours and get your Saturday morning back, that has real value.

If you use that time to address what limits the business, even better.

But if those hours disappear into five additional projects while the same bottleneck remains, have you improved the business or filled your day?

Before you automate another task, ask:

What is actually limiting the success of my donut factory?

Next week, in Part II, we’ll discuss how to turn that answer into focused action.

And speaking of what’s next: our Black Friday offers for 40 Strategy Growth Workshops and our business growth strategy and execution services open Friday, November 20th, and run through December 1. Workshop prices will increase in 2027.

Stay tuned to an email near you!

Now, it’s time to make the donuts.

Let’s make sure we’re working on the part of the factory that matters.