I'm writing this from a pool deck.

Bloody Maria in hand. That's a Bloody Mary with tequila instead of vodka... sounds awful, actually pretty good. (My liver might disagree.)

Sun hitting the water at that perfect afternoon angle. Mountains behind me. Pacific to the left. Life is good.

Last full day in Cabo. (You’re reading this tomorrow.)

Flying back to Florida tomorrow for Reba's birthday... day cruise on the intercoastal, pick up the dog, drive back to NC Monday.

Real life resumes.

But before I pack up and head home, I owe you an honest download on the last four weeks.

Last issue I talked about the 4-hour workday... the $426/month AI team, Thinking Time, Strategic Laziness, the whole blueprint for running a business without being chained to it.

(I also dropped the grandpa news. Yep, still processing that one.)

This newsletter is the field report.

Because I don't believe in only disclosing the wins. That's not how building in public works.

First though... quick trip highlights.

We drove down to Florida, dropped the dog with family, flew out of Orlando to Cabo. Spent the first 11 days at a smaller resort in San Jose Del Cabo... quieter, more local, one of my favorite spots in Mexico.

Good food. Good energy. Tourists, expats, fishermen all mixed together.

Did a day trip to Todos Santos. Wandered around. Ate well.

But the unexpected highlight was when our guide offered a 1-hour off-road detour through some seriously technical terrain.

I raced the Baja 1000 back in 2008. (Back when I was younger and considerably less smart about risk.)

Haven't felt that particular flavor of adrenaline in a while... so that was a nice taste.

Then the whale watching. Humpbacks. Mating season. Close enough to feel the mist. I lived in Alaska for years... I've seen more marine wildlife than most people will ever see.

This was still something else.

Bottlenose dolphins followed the boat the whole way back... full aerial acrobatics, like they were showing off. (I was grinning like an idiot. No apologies.)

Last few days I moved to an all-inclusive about 15 minutes from San Lucas. Quieter than Cabo proper. Beautiful views. Good service. That's where I'm sitting right now.

Okay. Enough vacation content.

Here's what you're actually reading for.

The AI Team Experiment

Honest grade: C+.

I worked 1-2 hours a day, 3-4 days a week. That part worked... better than I expected, honestly.

My wife will corroborate there were days I didn't open a laptop at all.

Four newsletters went out on schedule.

The CRM ran semi-automated... replies, course access grants, lead flagging, support escalation. Not perfectly. But mostly.

That's the passing-grade stuff.

Everything else?

Pretty much fell on its face.

Automations broke. Multiple times. Which meant I was yelling at my AI team over Telegram (and later Discord) to fix sh!t. (And yes... I understand how absurd that sentence is. But that's where we are in 2026.)

It was easier than opening a laptop and running terminal commands from a beach chair... but it wasn't seamless.

Not even close.

The daily business briefs I set up... fired reliably exactly once. On the final day of the trip. (Appreciate the urgency, team.)

Jenny... my OpenClaw agent... went down more times than I can count. I stopped counting around day 8. At one point she was unresponsive for six hours before the health check caught it. That's six hours of incoming CRM messages just sitting there.

In my old business, that kind of downtime would've cost real money.

So no... this wasn't the "my AI team ran everything flawlessly while I sipped Mai Tais" story. If that's what you were expecting, I'm sorry to disappoint.

But here's the part that matters...

What Actually Saved the Operation

Manus.

If you haven't heard of it... Manus is a cloud-based AI tool that I set up before leaving with a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that has remote SSH access to my Mac Mini back in my home office.

So when something breaks, I open Manus on my phone, describe the problem in plain English, and it diagnoses and fixes things remotely.

No laptop. Don't even have to be near a computer.

The VPS also runs automated health checks every 15 minutes.

OpenClaw goes down... it gets restarted automatically.

That's the self-healing system I talked about a few weeks ago. This is what it looks like in the real world... imperfect, but functional.

One example. Sometime around week two, Jenny stopped responding to CRM messages completely.

I noticed because a lead came through that I happened to see on my phone.

Opened Manus. Described the problem. Manus SSHed into the Mac Mini, checked the logs, found that the gateway had crashed from a stuck voice session... same issue I'd seen before. Restarted it.

Jenny came back online in about three minutes. Whole thing took maybe five minutes of my time.

Without Manus, I would've had to open a laptop, VPN into the machine, navigate terminal commands, and troubleshoot manually.

From a pool. In Mexico.

Probably would've taken 30-45 minutes and killed whatever mood I was in.

That setup kept the wheels on while everything else was falling apart. Without it, this whole month would've been a genuine mess.

I also made a move last week... shifted from Telegram to Discord for managing the AI team.

Set up individual channels per sub-agent... one for Dwight (dev), one for Gavin (creative), one for Murray (newsletters), a general ops channel for Jenny.

And it feels like a team now.

Mirrors how we used to run Slack with real humans.

Running simultaneous conversations instead of one at a time changes everything.

I can check the dev channel, see Dwight's latest commits, pop over to the content channel and see what Murray drafted... all without scrolling through one giant Telegram thread trying to find the thing I need.

The speed is real. The organization is real.

Wish I'd done it earlier. That one's on me.

What I'd Do Differently

If I ran this experiment again tomorrow, two things change.

First... I'd set up Discord from day one. Not Telegram. The single-thread limitation in Telegram cost me probably 10 hours of scrolling and context-switching over the month.

Dumb. Easily avoidable.

Second... I'd lower my expectations. Not out of pessimism. Out of realism.

I went into this expecting a B+. I got a C+.

And most of the frustration came from the gap between what I expected and what actually happened.

If I'd gone in expecting things to break... I would've handled the breakdowns a lot better.

(There's probably a life lesson buried in there somewhere. But I'll save the philosophy for when I'm not enjoying maybe my last Bloody Maria.)

Where This Goes From Here

Let me be blunt about something.

For this specific trip... I probably would've been fine with just Manus for the content workflow. It keeps getting better and better.

For most people reading this, Manus is honestly still what I'd recommend if you want a productivity tool that works without a lot of babysitting.

You don't need a Mac Mini and a VPS and custom cron jobs to get value from AI.

That stuff is bleeding edge. (And bleeding edge means you bleed.)

The broader AI agent stack still has a way to go before the average non-techie can run a one-person business on it.

I say that as someone who's reasonably technical and still had a bumpy month.

I'm optimistic about where it's headed. I'm not going to oversell where it is right now.

And honestly... that's fine.

Because six months ago I couldn't have done any of this.

Not the remote management. Not the AI team coordination. Not the self-healing infrastructure.

None of it existed in a usable form. The fact that I can give it a C+ means it's working well enough to grade.

But here's what I can't ignore...

My business partner (in a separate business) built a full sales dashboard using AI last month.

Lead scoring. Ad performance. Upsell tracking. Full reporting across campaigns. The kind of thing that would've cost six-figures to build properly a year ago.

He built it... and it's more solid than anything we'd put together previously. (And he's less technical than I am.)

That's not a small thing.

And I built out TimErway.com using Manus.

Set up the brand framework once... and now I talk into a microphone and the site updates.

Newsletters auto-convert to blog posts. Social content gets drafted from the newsletter. The infrastructure that used to require a team of people runs on a handful of tools and a few hours a week.

That's the real story here.

Not "AI does everything perfectly."

The real story is... the ceiling on what one person can build and run just moved.

And it moved a lot.

Here's What I Actually Learned

The tools aren't the problem.

I spent a month with Manus, OpenClaw, a Discord command center, custom crons... the works. And what I kept running into wasn't a tool problem.

Most people struggling with AI are chasing better tools. Wrong game.

The foundation is what matters.

Here's why leads kept coming in while I was poolside. Why calls got booked without me touching anything. Why I could check my phone and see new prospects in the pipeline every morning...

It's because I'd already built the underlying system. 

The automations that turn a stranger into a booked call without me touching anything.

The content engine. The funnels. The CRM. The lead capture.

All of it wired together and running.

That's not something you can prompt your way into. That's infrastructure.

Manus and OpenClaw didn't create any of that. They just ran it.

I've been getting a lot of questions about how to set all this up.

And I'm not going to pretend any of it is fun to build yourself.

It's tedious. It's technical.

It's where most people stall out and quietly go back to doing everything manually.

So here's what I'm doing about it.

I'm putting together a done-with-you build.

We extract your voice. Deep-train your AI writer. Set up your creative director. Build out your entire CRM... pipelines, funnels, calendars, email sequences. Wire up your lead capture.

The whole machine. Built with you.

Not handed to you in a course and wished good luck.

50+ qualified leads per month within 90 days. That's the promise. And if we don't hit it, we keep working with you until we do.

If that sounds like something you'd like to learn more about...

→ Reply to this email and say: "tell me more."

I'll have Josh on my team reach out. (He's a real human, by the way.)

You two can talk about how it works and whether it makes sense for your business.

Until next time,

—Tim Erway

P.S. A C+ isn't the grade I was hoping for. Obviously. But it's an honest one. That's the whole point of building in public... you get the real results. Even the underwhelming ones. The system gets better. That's how it works.

P.P.S. If you replied "tell me more"... Josh will be reaching out soon. He's going to ask about your business first. See where you're at and if we can help. If it's not a fit, he'll tell you. We've turned people away before. No weirdness.