I want to start with something Chelsea said that stopped me cold. 

“If you repeated this day every single day, would you be closer to your goals?”

That is a mindset question. And it is the kind that does not let you off easy.

Chelsea Jones has been building websites for retail brands for over 20 years. Her agency, Sunny Road, is a Shopify Platinum agency which means Shopify looked at everything her team does and said, yes, we want more of that. She has built for J.Lo Beauty, Liverpool Los Angeles, Chroma Wellness. She knows what is working in e-commerce right now, and she is not shy about saying what is not.

She came on the Richer Retailer podcast this week and what came out of that conversation was not what I expected. Yes, we talked about AI tools and search visibility and what you need to do with your Shopify store. But what I walked away thinking about was something bigger than that.

Being busy is not the same as being smart. And most of us know it. We just keep choosing to be busy anyway.

Your Products May Be Invisible and You Do Not Know It

Here is something Chelsea told me that I want every store owner to hear.

34% of product decisions are now being made through AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. That number is going up. And if your products are not feeding into those platforms, you are invisible to a growing percentage of shoppers who are actively looking for what you sell.

This is not about Google anymore. Shoppers are typing questions into AI search tools and those tools are pulling product results from specific feeds. If your store is not connected, you are not in the conversation.

Chelsea pointed me to a free audit at AgentShop.com. It takes five minutes and shows you exactly where your products are showing up across AI search platforms and where they are not. If you do nothing else from this episode, go run that audit. Know where you stand before you decide what to do about it.

The lesson: You cannot fix a visibility problem you do not know you have. The audit is free. Go find out.

Watch the Full Episode:

You Are Using AI Wrong

I hear from store owners all the time who say they tried AI and it did not really help. And when I dig in, I almost always find the same thing. They asked it something once, took the first answer, and moved on.

Chelsea calls this the checkbox mentality, and she is right that it does not work.

The retailers who are getting real results from AI are treating it like a feedback loop, not a one-and-done task. You put something in, you look at what comes back, you push back on it, you ask it to look again, you tell it what it got wrong and why. You keep going until the output actually serves you.

Chelsea has this way of describing it that clicked for me. She said most of us are used to thinking in a straight line. You have a strategy, you build a plan, you execute, you check the box. Done. But AI does not work that way. It works in circles. You have to keep poking at it, improving it, testing it. The moment you treat it as a finished product is the moment it stops working for you.

I have done this myself. I was in the middle of something and the AI said it was going to create a Google Doc for me. I waited. Nothing. I asked if it was still working. It said yes. More nothing. Finally I asked if it could not actually create a Google Doc and it told me no, it could not. The tool will tell you what it can and cannot do but only if you keep asking.

The lesson: Prompting AI once and accepting the first answer is not a strategy. The people winning with it right now are the ones who stay curious and keep the feedback loop going.

Stop Adding Tools. Start Getting Focused.

Here is where Chelsea said something that I think most people need to hear more than anything else in this episode.

She is at a stage in her life, she said, where she is ignoring a lot of things and going really deep on specific ones. She has a filter: healthy, wealthy, wise. Every decision she makes gets run through that lens. Does this move me toward one of those three things? If not, she does not do it.

That kind of clarity does not come from a tool. It comes from mindset work. Knowing what you are building toward before you say yes to anything.

I love this because AI has made the noise problem worse, not better. There are more tools being pitched at you now than ever. Every one of them sounds good. Every one of them promises to save you time or make you more money. And without a filter, you will spend all your time evaluating tools instead of running your store.

Chelsea’s advice was simple. Know what you are actually trying to build. Then only say yes to the things that move you directly toward that. The deep work happens when you stop switching between twenty things and commit to a few.

She also said something about morning routines that I want to pass on. She protects hers. Breath work, prayer, a few minutes of being present before the day starts. She is not jumping straight into her phone. She is not diving into the work before she has gotten herself settled.

I have to be honest about something here, because it would be unfair not to be.

We recorded this episode and then I sat with that advice. And I realized that very morning I had spent over an hour scrolling through Met Gala photos before I got out of bed. Now, I am not telling you that to beat myself up, because that is not useful. But Chelsea is right that there is a difference between how we say we want to spend our time and how we actually spend it. And sometimes someone has to say it out loud before you actually see it.

The lesson: More tools will not solve a focus problem. The mindset shift comes first. Know what you are building toward and use that as your filter for everything.

Fear Is Not a Stop Sign

Chelsea has been through a lot. Cancer. Rebuilding. Starting over more than once. And out of all of that, she has developed what I can only describe as a no-fear mentality not because she is not afraid, but because she has learned what to do with it.

She said this: counteract fear with curiosity.

When something scares you, instead of stopping, you ask questions. What is this? Is this a path worth going down? What happens if I say yes? What happens if I do not? You stay in motion by staying curious instead of letting the fear make the decision for you.

This is the mindset that separates the store owners who keep moving from the ones who stay stuck. Not confidence. Not certainty. Just curiosity.

There is someone reading this who has been seeing signals in their business for a while now. Something they know they need to look at. A change they know they need to make. And they have been calling it noise because it is easier than calling it what it is.

Chelsea would tell you that fear showing up around something does not mean you should stop. It means you should ask more questions.

The lesson: Fear is not a stop sign. It is a sign that you need more information. Stay curious. Take the next step.

Your Millie Moment

This week, find out where you actually stand.

Write down one thing you are doing regularly that is not moving your store forward. Just one. Then decide what happens to it.

One audit. One honest question. That is your starting point.

Resources & Links 

💚 Remember: Adding another tool won’t fix a scattered strategy. If everything feels urgent and nothing feels clear, the answer isn’t more, it’s a better filter. Chelsea breaks down exactly how she builds one in this episode.