Season 2
SEASON 2 EPISODE 5
Before Andrea Palacio built Crewless, she and her husband acquired a Florida lawn care company on an SBA loan, their personal assets as collateral, while she was pregnant with her second son. Within two months, the business was losing clients, revenue, and crew. It went from 12 employees to 2. Her husband was doing labor in the Florida heat. She was answering 50-plus calls a day with a newborn in her arms, trying to field every complaint, book every lead, chase every estimate. That's when she turned to AI, not as a trend, but as a way to stop giving her kids what was left of her at the end of the day.
“ There's certain things that you do not want to delegate to AI, and one of those things is leadership.”
—Andrea Palacio
We explore:
How AI analyzes your business constraint and targets the right problem first
The first three moves Andrea made: client feedback automation, AI receptionist, CRM lead capture
Why leadership, vision, and presence can't be delegated to AI or anyone else
How to save 20 hours a month by finding the 30-minute tasks you're still doing manually
The real resource implications of AI: data centers, water, energy, and what it means to use it responsibly
Andrea's philosophy on technology and ecological stewardship
The systems she built to survive her business became Crewless. She's also spent four years living on a sailboat in the Caribbean, and she carries that time with her: the plastic she witnessed on remote island beaches is part of why she thinks carefully about the resources any technology requires.
If you are looking for effective ways to free up time in managing your business, this episode is for you.
Andrea Palacio is co-founder of Crewless, an AI implementation consultancy helping home service businesses identify constraints and build automated systems to solve them. She and her husband also co-own a Florida lawn care company, where she first developed the operating system that became Crewless. Before going into business, she spent four years living on a sailboat, sailing the Caribbean.
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