The Call I Had Been Putting Off for a Year

Yesterday I got on a call with Paola. It changed what I think it takes to build a business alongside a day job.

I hired her in 2012. She was my first hire at Le VPN. For fourteen years she ran our marketing.

Days earlier, I had let her go. She was the last human left on that team.

I made the call to thank her properly. I did not want fourteen years to end with a DM.

I had been rehearsing an apology.

She had something else prepared. She thanked me. Then she told me she had spent years quietly building a business alongside her day job with us. It now employs six people, including her husband and her sister.

She had stopped needing our income a long time ago. She kept working with us because she wanted to.

I had also planned to ask what she needed next, and who I could introduce her to. It turned out she did not need anything from me.

I got off that call and realized I had misunderstood my role as an employer in the last fourteen years of running my own company.

She Built a Business Alongside Her Day Job, and I Was Her Unpaid Business School

Paola lives in Argentina.

When she decided to start something of her own, she had no money for business school. No executive program. No coach.

So she used what she had. Me.

“I was learning from you,” she said. “You were my example. I just copied everything.”

She was not being polite. She was being literal.

She took the marketing strategy we ran at Le VPN and ran it for herself. She took the way I built and managed a distributed team and used it to build hers. She took the way I coordinated projects across time zones and applied it to her own clients.

Everything I learned about business over fourteen years, I taught her in real time. She was doing the work beside me while I was still figuring it out.

She started as a freelancer. The first years were hard. She has been at it for a few years now and it works. Six people. Steady clients. A business that pays her.

She built her exit while she was still on my payroll. She mentioned it to me more than once. I heard it, and I never asked a single follow up question.

Small consistent action compounds. I have said that to clients for years. Paola did it for a decade in front of me and I did not think to ask.

The Part Where I Admit I Waited Too Long

Here is the uncomfortable half of this story.

Le VPN is fifteen years old and doing well. That is exactly why Paola’s job disappeared.

We integrated generative AI within the first month of ChatGPT’s release. Our first agent went into client support. Then marketing and social media. Then content creation. Then translation, across English, French and Spanish.

One by one, the jobs on my team stopped being jobs.

Paola was the last person standing. By the end she was working at less than ten percent of her old capacity, checking AI output and connecting the dots between our marketing platforms. Then that got automated too.

I will not share our headcount. I will say that Le VPN is now genuinely an AI first company, and that we keep humans in the key positions because a human signs off on everything we do.

In my other business, the Weatherproof Business™ Launchpad, the same thing happened faster. We started as five. Then it was me and my assistant. In the last year, AI replaced my assistant.

Today it is me and more than thirty AI agents. I have never moved faster or had more clarity.

And I still put off Paola’s call for a year. Not because the answer was unclear. Because I did not want to be the person who made it.

In the end she was the one who asked me. “Ksenia, do you actually need me? I don’t feel that you do.”

Why Paola Is Safe, and Why She Is Not Relaxing About It

Her business is legal translation.

Sit with that for a second. Translation is one of the four jobs I just told you AI replaced inside my own company.

We talked about it on the call. She is not naive about it. She is watching AI closely.

For now she is protected on two fronts. She still does the work better than the machine. And legal translation requires a human to sign off. It cannot be done by AI alone.

That is the same reason I keep humans in the key positions at Le VPN. Somebody has to put their name on it.

Here is what she is doing with that protection. She is not resting on it. She is teaching herself AI with free resources, and she is already running AI agents inside her own business.

She knows the wall she is standing behind may not hold forever. So she is learning to move before it falls.

Most professionals I speak to have three options and only three. Adapt, and become the person who directs AI inside your specialty. Build something of your own, with AI doing the heavy lifting. Or become redundant.

There are exceptions. Work that needs physical presence. Work that needs a human signature. Some of it will hold. Most of it will not hold forever.

Start Before You Need It

Paola did not build her business because she saw AI coming. She built it because she was paying attention to something she wanted, years before she needed it.

That is the only reason losing her job was a conversation and not a crisis.

I have coached more than 1,200 executives. Most of the senior women in tech I speak to want to build a business alongside a day job, and they are waiting for a clear signal before they start. A restructure. A bad review. A moment that makes the decision for them.

By the time that signal arrives, you are building under pressure, without income, and without time. That is the hardest possible place to start.

You have a salary right now. You have skills you use every day. You have a company teaching you things it does not know it is teaching you. That is not a small thing. That is your runway.

If you want the full Weatherproof Business™ Formula, and a clear way to build a business alongside a day job, come to my next live masterclass: Building a Tech Powered Business Alongside Your Day Job.

Find the next date and save your seat here: https://kseniavotinova.com/masterclass