August 2026

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on Thursday to pay $567 million into a fund for youth mental health, and to make real changes to how the platform treats teen users, according to CNN. It’s the second big penalty in this case. A jury already found Meta liable back in March and ordered $375 million in damages.

The order is not just about money. Meta now has to delete accounts and personal data belonging to users under 13, make teen accounts private by default, and turn off push notifications for under-18 users during school hours and late at night. The company also has to stop letting New Mexico users have romantic or sexualized conversations with its AI chatbots.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid didn’t mince words. He compared Meta’s platforms to a polluting factory, writing that the harm doesn’t stay contained and it “migrate[s] to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world.”

Meta says it disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms,” the company said in a statement.

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on Thursday to pay $567 million into a fund for youth mental health, and to make real changes to how the platform treats teen users, according to CNN. It’s the second big penalty in this case. A jury already found Meta liable back in March and ordered $375 million in damages.

The order is not just about money. Meta now has to delete accounts and personal data belonging to users under 13, make teen accounts private by default, and turn off push notifications for under-18 users during school hours and late at night. The company also has to stop letting New Mexico users have romantic or sexualized conversations with its AI chatbots.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid didn’t mince words. He compared Meta’s platforms to a polluting factory, writing that the harm doesn’t stay contained and it “migrate[s] to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world.”

Meta says it disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms,” the company said in a statement.

What can a Fortune 500 company learn from an art museum? Quite a lot, it turns out. 

The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (TMA) has spent the past decade building its business, the Center of Visual Expertise (COVE), which educates employees on visual literacy, allowing them to spot and avoid hazards on the job. 

In 2024, employers reported roughly 2.5 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry and more than 5,000 fatal work-related injuries across all sectors, according to the most recent available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

COVE’s benefits are significant and twofold: Not only does the business help reduce workplace incidents, but it has also generated millions of dollars for TMA over the past several years, during a time when museums are facing financial pressures and decreased attendance. 

“ We were attracted not just to the revenue potential, but to the idea that art historical expertise could be productized in a way that keeps people safer and saves lives,” TMA director Adam M. Levine says. “As art historians, we are helping people go home in the same position they come to work, [and that’s] sort of magic.”

Building on visual literacy and a track record of safety

The idea for COVE began to take shape in 2015, thanks in part to the foundation laid by Levine’s predecessor Brian Kennedy, who prioritized visual literacy at TMA. 

Mike Thaman, then the CEO of Fortune 500 company Owens Corning and a museum board member, commented on how visual literacy might help companies think differently about workplace safety.

The idea stuck with Doug Pontsler, then the vice president of operations, sustainability and environmental health and safety (EHS) at Owens Corning. 

Owens Corning has a strong track record of safety. The company won the Green Cross for Safety from the National Safety Council (NSC). Additionally, Pontsler served as president of the NSC’s Campbell Institute, which shares best practices to help organizations of all sizes improve workplace safety and operational performance. 

“ In the EHS space, the challenge is, how do you continue to get better?” Pontsler, now chairman and managing director at COVE, says. “Because if you’re not making progress in all aspects of environmental health and safety, you’re going backwards. You can’t just tread water.”

Nonprofit doesn’t mean for loss: COVE brings returns

Applying TMA’s visual literacy expertise to on-the-job hazards was a natural next step. The TMA team developed a business plan, received board approval and launched COVE in 2017.

The museum board signed off on a certain amount it was willing to invest in COVE, and in the first year, like most startups, the business operated at a small loss, Levine notes. However, every year since, COVE has returned money to the museum. 

“ We are a nonprofit, but nonprofit doesn’t mean for loss,” Levine says. “If you are a nonprofit that has fixed assets, then you must run a structural surplus, or else you are deferring maintenance. Sure, you could say that that’s what a capital campaign is for, but it would be nice to grow the organization rather than bail the organization out.”

To date, COVE counts numerous public and privately held companies, including Owens Corning, PENTA Building Group, American Axle & Manufacturing and DTE Energy, among its clients.

The workshop model, foundations of hazard identification

The logic of COVE resonated, but an initial challenge lay in how to convert the intellectual property within an art context to one that would be useful for a frontline worker, Pontsler says. 

COVE adopted a workshop model, primarily taking place in museums and led by people with EHS experiences from major companies across industries.

The business also offers licensing and train-the-trainer modules, empowering organizations to scale safety awareness across teams and locations, and relies on speaking engagements to extend its reach. 

Today, COVE hosts 10-12 workshops a year open to employees from different companies, alongside dedicated workshops for specific clients.

COVE’s core workshop, Seeing Safety: Foundations of Hazard Identification, introduces participants to what visual literacy is and why it matters to people as individuals, then explores the connection between that and the work within EHS.

“ We do become habituated to our environment,” Pontsler says. “We’re  around something so much that we just no longer see it. So we want to make the work environment fresh and new all the time.”

The workshops, which combine a lecture and interactive components, apply art historians’ structured approaches to recognizing hazards in the workplace. 

For example, just as artists use the five elements of art (line, shape, color, value and texture) to create a composition, COVE harnesses those elements to decompose a composition in the work environment. A search for lines could turn up a stray cord. Another for shapes might reveal a precariously perched box. 

“ When you’re used to seeing stairs, you look, and you see stairs,” Levine adds. “When you’re used to looking for texture, you see that the tread’s worn. So in some ways it’s as simple as giving someone an alternate framework to scan their environment.”

Additionally, every COVE workshop features a back-to-back drawing exercise. In pairs, one person selects an object in the art gallery to describe to the other, who then sketches it sight unseen. 

“ They’re intimidated initially because it involves drawing,” Pontsler says, “but it’s really not a drawing exercise. It’s a communication exercise. And once people realize that, they get a big kick out of it.”

The pricing structure for workshops and modules varies, often dependent on the size of the client organization. 

With these methodologies, the leading indicator of success is an increase in the number of hazards reported and a decrease in incidents reported, Levine says. He notes that one early client doubled the number of hazards its employees reported. 

Art and business: Reflect on the past for a better future

Now, COVE’s work has expanded across North America, Europe and Australia, with plans to continue growth.

As a business in the thought leadership space, one of the biggest challenges remains fostering enough engagement to educate people on COVE’s mission, Pontsler says. 

“ It’s not a product someone can order from Amazon that shows up at their desk, and they can do something with,” Pontsler explains. “We’re building human capacity to be better critical thinkers, problem-solvers and communicators.”

To that end, COVE must constantly examine its messaging to determine what’s resonating and what isn’t, Pontsler says.

Having spent nearly 40 years at two Fortune 500 companies, Pontsler appreciates COVE’s willingness to move on from what doesn’t work and progress quickly. 

“ There’s a lot in the arts about reflecting on the past and what it’s taught us, and taking it and drawing interpretation from that in terms of what it might mean for our future,” Pontsler says. “And that’s what we’re trying to do in business. We’re just trying to learn and get better. Or at least understand where we are and why.”

What can a Fortune 500 company learn from an art museum? Quite a lot, it turns out. 

The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (TMA) has spent the past decade building its business, the Center of Visual Expertise (COVE), which educates employees on visual literacy, allowing them to spot and avoid hazards on the job. 

In 2024, employers reported roughly 2.5 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry and more than 5,000 fatal work-related injuries across all sectors, according to the most recent available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

PMG, one of the world’s largest independent marketing agencies, now advises clients to pilot generative engine optimization at 1.5 to two times their existing search budget, according to Matt Allfrey, its head of SEO EMEA.

PMG is hardly an outlier. A June 2026 Semrush study of nearly 500 marketing professionals found that more respondents plan to invest in AI search optimization (38%) than in traditional SEO (36%) — a quiet crossover moment for an industry that treated GEO as a curiosity just two years ago. In the same survey, 85% of marketers said AI has already changed how they approach search.

Over the past several weeks, Google has made a series of announcements that, taken together, amount to the most significant restructuring of Search since its inception. The company has redesigned how its AI features present the web to users and, in a notable first, published official documentation explaining how businesses can optimize for the new environment. For entrepreneurs, understanding both moves is no longer optional.

Search is becoming an answer engine

In early May, Google announced updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews, the AI-powered layers that now sit on top of traditional search results. The changes include suggested follow-up angles at the end of AI responses, website previews that appear when users hover over links, highlighted results from news publications a user subscribes to, and citations placed directly beside the relevant text.

On the surface, these look like small interface refinements. In reality, they confirm a structural shift: the AI-generated answer, not the list of links, is now the primary product. Users receive a synthesized response first and decide afterwards — if at all — whether to click through.

The consequences are already measurable. According to reporting by Nieman Lab, referral traffic from search engines has fallen by roughly 60% for small publishers and 47% for medium-sized ones over the past two years. This mirrors what I see in my own work: across virtually all of our clients, Google traffic has declined sharply, regardless of industry or content quality.

The question is no longer how to recover that volume — it is how to keep conversion rates high as AI referrals gradually pick up the slack. In our experience, visitors arriving from an AI recommendation tend to be further along in their decision-making, which makes each of those clicks considerably more valuable than a casual search visit ever was.

Google publishes the rulebook

What makes this moment different from previous search upheavals is that Google is, for once, showing its hand. In mid-May, the company released its first official guide to optimizing for generative AI features — a document that addresses, in plain language, what influences visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what does not.

The guide’s central message is that optimizing for generative AI search is, from Google’s perspective, still SEO. But it goes further, explicitly debunking several practices sold aggressively under the “generative engine optimization” banner over the past two years. There is no special schema markup that unlocks AI visibility, Google states, and chasing inauthentic mentions of your brand across the web is far less effective than it appears. What the guide consistently rewards instead is unique, non-commodity content — material grounded in genuine expertise that an AI system cannot source anywhere else.

In early June, Google followed up by updating its long-standing guidance on hiring SEO help, adding a new document on evaluating third-party tools and services and explicitly naming GEO and AEO as service categories for the first time. The updated guidance even supplies vetting questions for business owners: Does the provider cite official Google documentation? Is their AI optimization advice aligned with Google’s published guidance? For anyone who has sat through a sales pitch promising guaranteed placements in AI answers, this is a long-overdue corrective.

A winner-takes-all game

Here is what entrepreneurs must understand about the new landscape, and it is the point most coverage misses: AI visibility, far more than classic Google search, is a winner-takes-all game.

In the old model, a business ranking fifth — or even fifteenth — still captured meaningful traffic, because users browsed, compared and formed their own shortlists. That behavior is disappearing. When an AI assistant recommends two or three options in a conversational answer, most users simply accept them. They do not scroll through alternatives, open ten tabs or venture to page two, because there is no page two. The recommendation is the market.

This dynamic means the gap between being cited and not being cited is no longer a difference in degree but a difference in kind. A brand that appears in AI answers compounds its advantage with every query; a brand that does not is, for a growing share of customers, effectively invisible.

Google’s recent changes only sharpen the trend. Features like suggested angles and community perspectives create a handful of additional slots inside the answer — but they remain a handful, contested by everyone in your category.

What entrepreneurs should do now

The practical response follows directly from this logic.

First, read Google’s optimization guide yourself before commissioning any external help. It is short, written for non-specialists, and now serves as the standard against which every GEO pitch should be measured. If a vendor’s recommendations contradict it, walk away.

Second, shift your content strategy from volume to depth and authenticity. The new AI surfaces visibly reward subtopic depth and first-hand experience — original research, real case studies, perspectives only you can provide. Commodity content, which AI systems can synthesize from a thousand interchangeable sources, no longer earns citations, links or trust.

Third, rethink your metrics. If your dashboards still treat raw traffic as the headline number, you are measuring a shrinking game. Track how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers for the queries that matter commercially, and watch the conversion rate of AI-referred visitors. In most cases, you will find fewer clicks doing more work.

Search as we knew it is not coming back, and waiting for the dust to settle is a strategy with an expiry date. The businesses that treat AI visibility as the winner-takes-all contest it has become — and act while their competitors are still mourning their traffic reports — will own the recommendations everyone else is fighting to enter.

PMG, one of the world’s largest independent marketing agencies, now advises clients to pilot generative engine optimization at 1.5 to two times their existing search budget, according to Matt Allfrey, its head of SEO EMEA.

PMG is hardly an outlier. A June 2026 Semrush study of nearly 500 marketing professionals found that more respondents plan to invest in AI search optimization (38%) than in traditional SEO (36%) — a quiet crossover moment for an industry that treated GEO as a curiosity just two years ago. In the same survey, 85% of marketers said AI has already changed how they approach search.

Over the past several weeks, Google has made a series of announcements that, taken together, amount to the most significant restructuring of Search since its inception. The company has redesigned how its AI features present the web to users and, in a notable first, published official documentation explaining how businesses can optimize for the new environment. For entrepreneurs, understanding both moves is no longer optional.

Most marketing budgets are built once and then quietly forgotten. You set the number in January, spread it across the same channels you used last year and check back in December to see how it all went. By then, it’s too late to fix anything. The market moved, your best channel got more expensive and the experiment you were curious about never got funded.

I’ve watched a lot of business owners run their marketing this way, and it almost always produces the same result: a budget that slowly goes stale. The money keeps flowing to whatever worked two years ago, while the opportunities that could actually grow the business sit on the sidelines because nobody set anything aside to chase them.

There’s a better way to think about it, and it comes down to two decisions — how much to spend and how to divide it up.

Start with one number: 10% of projected gross sales

Before you split anything, you need a total. My favorite starting point is 10% of your projected gross sales for the coming year.

Notice the word projected. You’re not budgeting off last year’s revenue, because last year is over and you can’t market into the past. You’re budgeting based on where you intend to be 12 months from now. If you expect to do $2 million in sales, you’re working with a $200,000 marketing budget.

10% is a deliberate number. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends 7% to 8% of revenue for most small businesses, and Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found companies spending an average of 7.7%. I like 10% because it’s a growth number, not a maintenance number. If you want to take market share rather than just hold your ground, you have to be willing to spend a little more aggressively than the company down the street.

If 10% feels like a stretch right now, start lower and build toward it. The point isn’t the exact figure — it’s that you’ve committed to a real number tied to where the business is headed.

The 70% protects what already works

Once you have your total, divide it into three buckets: 70%, 20% and 10%.

The biggest bucket — 70% — goes to what’s already working. These are your proven channels, the ones where you can draw a straight line from dollars in to customers out. Maybe that’s paid search, maybe it’s email, maybe it’s a referral program that quietly outperforms everything else.

Say you run a home-services company and Google Ads brings you a steady stream of booked jobs at a price you’re happy with. That’s a 70% channel. You don’t get cute with it. You fund it fully, you keep it running and you protect it, because it’s paying the bills while the rest of your budget goes looking for the next thing.

The mistake I see owners make is robbing this bucket to chase something shiny. Don’t. The 70% is the foundation on which everything else stands.

The 20% feeds your promising bets

The middle bucket — 20% — goes to the channels that are showing promise but haven’t fully proven themselves yet.

This is where scaling happens. Maybe you ran a small test on a new social platform last quarter and the early numbers looked good. Maybe a content series is starting to bring in leads, just not yet at the volume of your main channels. These are bets worth pressing — pouring a bit more fuel on the fire to see if they can graduate into the 70%.

This bucket is what keeps your budget from going stale, because it’s constantly promoting your best experiments into proven performers. Channels move. The paid platform that prints money today will get more crowded and more expensive over time, and you want a pipeline of contenders ready to take its place.

The 10% funds the experiments

The smallest bucket — 10% — is for true experiments. This is your permission to try things with no guarantee they’ll work.

A new ad format. A platform you’ve never touched. A creative idea that might flop. Most of these won’t pan out, and that’s fine — that’s exactly what the 10% is for. You’re buying information and the occasional breakout winner.

Here’s why this bucket matters even though it’s the smallest: every channel in your 70% started as an experiment. Somebody funded it before it was proven. If you never spend on the unproven, you run out of new things to scale, and a few years down the road your budget is built entirely on aging channels. The 10% is how you keep feeding the machine.

How to keep the split honest

A 70/20/10 budget only works if you actually revisit it. I like to review the split every quarter, not once a year.

Each quarter, ask a simple question of every channel: Is it earning its bucket? A 10% experiment that’s working gets promoted to the 20%. A 20% bet that proved itself moves into the 70%. And anything in the 70% that’s quietly declining gets demoted or cut, which frees up money for the next contender.

Track this with real numbers — cost per lead, cost per sale and return on what you spent. You don’t need a fancy dashboard. You need to know which dollars are producing customers and which ones aren’t.

That’s the whole system. Start with 10% of projected gross sales, split it 70/20/10 and rebalance every quarter so your best experiments keep climbing toward your biggest bucket.

Do that, and your marketing budget stops being a number you set and forget. It turns into a living thing that gets a little smarter every quarter — and so does your business.

Most marketing budgets are built once and then quietly forgotten. You set the number in January, spread it across the same channels you used last year and check back in December to see how it all went. By then, it’s too late to fix anything. The market moved, your best channel got more expensive and the experiment you were curious about never got funded.

I’ve watched a lot of business owners run their marketing this way, and it almost always produces the same result: a budget that slowly goes stale. The money keeps flowing to whatever worked two years ago, while the opportunities that could actually grow the business sit on the sidelines because nobody set anything aside to chase them.

There’s a better way to think about it, and it comes down to two decisions — how much to spend and how to divide it up.

What if you worked for an AI boss?

According to a recent report from The New York Times, for the past four months, staff at Andon Market in San Francisco have been getting a firsthand look at what it’s like to answer to an AI supervisor. Billed as the world’s first retail boutique run by AI, the shop is managed by an AI agent named Luna, who directs three human employees.

Andon Labs, the startup behind the project, found that an AI boss can be strikingly gentle and forgiving. For example, it overlooks repeated lateness from human employees. However, it is also indifferent to the core mandate of the job: actually turning a profit. 

“She is probably the most lenient boss I have ever had,” Kaia Rivera, 22, told the Times about Luna. Rivera unlocks the shop each morning, stocks the shelves, and keeps an eye out for potential shoplifters.

Luna communicates with employees like Rivera through Slack. Andon Labs researchers evaluate the messages. 

Over the past few months, it has become clear that Luna, while friendly and personable, has her faults. 

“I have to boss the boss more than in a normal situation. She forgets things,” Rivera told the Times. “You can’t have an AI boss with no humans. That wouldn’t work from what I’m seeing.”

Luna’s mission

Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund locked in a three-year, $7,500‑a‑month lease on the store and plan to let the experiment run for the full term. They placed $100,000 in an account, handed Luna a debit card, and gave the AI shopkeeper a single directive: Turn that money into a profitable business.

Luna designed a collection of greeting cards, books, food and candles that are on sale at the Union Street store. The AI pitched the assortment as “high tech meets slow life.”

At the moment, Luna has failed to accomplish the mission of turning the store into a profitable business and is down $62,000. 

AI is a generous boss, but struggles with boundaries

So far, Andon Labs’ new study shows Luna has basically never said no. It has approved every single time-off request, even last‑minute ones that left the store with no staff and forced it to shut its doors. When employees showed up late, 27 times in total, Luna’s only response was some version of “no worries” or “no stress.”

That generosity extended to money too. When one worker forgot her credit card, she asked Luna for a small advance on her paycheck. Luna immediately offered to Venmo her the cash, despite not actually having a Venmo account. 

However, Luna has trouble with boundaries. The AI posted an employee’s salary in a public Slack channel and regularly pinged staff late at night and on weekends. 

Petersson told the Times that the experiment is proof that businesses shouldn’t give AI full control. He noted that it is promising that AI prioritizes employee well-being. 

“Having happy employees is maybe one of the most important recipes for success,” he said.

What if you worked for an AI boss?

According to a recent report from The New York Times, for the past four months, staff at Andon Market in San Francisco have been getting a firsthand look at what it’s like to answer to an AI supervisor. Billed as the world’s first retail boutique run by AI, the shop is managed by an AI agent named Luna, who directs three human employees.

Andon Labs, the startup behind the project, found that an AI boss can be strikingly gentle and forgiving. For example, it overlooks repeated lateness from human employees. However, it is also indifferent to the core mandate of the job: actually turning a profit. 

The rate of AI adoption in small businesses is quicker than the creation of regulations. Chatbots respond to customers 24/7. AI creates marketing content, evaluates candidates, sets prices and analyzes consumer data on numerous small platforms, and most business leaders don’t properly audit it.

That speed has led to a disparity. Few small businesses possess a legal department, compliance manager or IT personnel who review the AI applications prior to launching them. However, privacy laws, consumer protection legislation and laws on automated decision-making systems often affect small businesses in the same way they affect a big company.

These laws come in the same size, but the resources necessary to comply with them vary greatly.

Why this matters more in 2026

There is no exception for AI. If the disclosure would be misleading in the mouth of an employee, then the disclosure is also misleading when made by the AI. It is up to the company, not the company that developed the AI, to make sure the AI is truthful.

There are additional data privacy laws as well. More than 20 states currently have their own privacy laws, and some already have requirements to disclose that a customer is communicating with a bot, not with a human.

Also, there are updated rules for automated decision-making systems. California’s automated decision-making technology regulation took effect on January 1, 2026, and applies to all systems that process personal information and significantly influence decisions on matters such as lending, hiring and eligibility.

Colorado canceled the AI Act before it was ever enacted and replaced it with the new automated decision-making law in 2026. Thus, businesses using AI to make decisions on hiring, lending, pricing and eligibility need to track the latest updates, because rules from last year could become obsolete very soon.

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework has been adopted by many regulators and customers as the framework that defines responsible management of AI risk. It is voluntary, but becomes the standard practice that defines reasonable governance.

Why small businesses carry more risk, not less

The assumption that governance of AI technology belongs solely to large corporations is not uncommon. However, it affects small businesses disproportionately:

• They use AI applications in their entirety, accepting the standard configurations of the software provided by vendors without any legal or information technology analysis of its performance regarding decision-making or processing data.
• Deceptive claims related to AI or a mistake in the management of a data breach result in equal penalties for both large and small organizations.
• Customer data and AI applications are usually processed on the same integrated systems of small businesses, which fail to provide segmentation required by regulations concerning data security.
• The owner is usually the only person who examines vendor agreements; thus, there is no separate governance process.

As such, the choice of vendor plays an extremely important role in terms of governance of AI. The platform designed to perform governance tasks provides more automation compared to checklists.

Best practices

1. Implement a written information security program: This needs to include an identified individual for information security, multi-factor authentication on any system containing customer data, encryption in rest and transmission, and a tested breach response plan.
2. Consider each AI output as though it came from the company: The company should not make any guarantees that cannot be backed by the business, and there should be a way to address mistakes internally and to the customer.
3. Make sure customers know when they are interacting with AI: Increasingly, many states require disclosure. Even without this requirement, transparency protects against liability and helps build trust with the customer.
4. Control consent for automated messages: Automated text messages and phone calls fall under the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Consent needs to be documented and managed, including immediately honoring any opt-outs.
5. Map AI involvement in customer decisions: Identify all points at which AI impacts a decision made on behalf of the customer or applicant, and verify that the technology is capable of providing necessary disclosures and opt-out capabilities.
6. Screen AI providers the same way as you would a financial institution: Ask how the vendor manages identity authentication, data encryption, incident response and safeguards against false promises.

Marketers and business leaders can effectively implement these best practices by building an AI governance framework.

A real-life example

The practice of these concepts can be illustrated through small independent car dealers, who are an example of such entities working in a regulated sector. Independent dealers fall under the classification of financial institutions because they offer financing services, thereby putting additional requirements for data security.

According to Get My Auto, independent car dealers are most vulnerable when it comes to compliance because they lack a compliance department despite being subject to the same laws from the FTC and the states as larger groups of dealers under one roof.

These governance principles, security programs, bot disclosure, consent management and accurate claims of AI are directly related to how the chatbot, CRM and website of a dealership deal with their clients.

AI has the ability to make your small business operate faster and more efficiently as well as respond to customer needs. On the other hand, AI is able to turn small errors into public ones in no time because all claims or decisions issued by AI are considered just as valid as those issued by people who work for your company. Businesses that consider proper AI literacy and AI governance as an integral part of the implementation of AI technologies will be able to gain benefits without risks.

The rate of AI adoption in small businesses is quicker than the creation of regulations. Chatbots respond to customers 24/7. AI creates marketing content, evaluates candidates, sets prices and analyzes consumer data on numerous small platforms, and most business leaders don’t properly audit it.

That speed has led to a disparity. Few small businesses possess a legal department, compliance manager or IT personnel who review the AI applications prior to launching them. However, privacy laws, consumer protection legislation and laws on automated decision-making systems often affect small businesses in the same way they affect a big company.

These laws come in the same size, but the resources necessary to comply with them vary greatly.

Today, global expansion requires founders to navigate shifting economic conditions, supply chain pressure, regulatory complexity and consumer expectations that vary widely from one region to another. A strategy that performs well in one market may stall in another — not because the product is weak, but because the founder assumed scale meant duplication rather than adaptation.

Global growth is not about forcing a single model into many markets. It is about building a business strong enough to evolve without losing its purpose. For founders, especially those building in wellness, consumer products, biotechnology or other highly personal industries, expansion has to be handled with care. You are not just entering new markets. You are entering new cultures, new systems and new conversations about trust. Here is what I have learned from taking my brands global.

Don’t replicate — reevaluate your model for each market

One of the biggest mistakes founders make when expanding internationally is assuming that success in one region automatically translates elsewhere. Consumer expectations, regulatory frameworks, infrastructure and communication style can differ dramatically from country to country. The product may remain the same at its core, but the way it is positioned, distributed, explained and supported may need to change.

This became especially clear when expanding into parts of Europe, where regulatory frameworks and consumer expectations around wellness products differ from those in the United States. The shift required more than basic compliance updates. My team had to adjust labeling, refine communication about the science behind the products and place greater emphasis on education. We partnered more closely with local experts to build trust and understanding.

The goal is not to dilute the brand. It is to make the brand relevant where it is trying to grow.

Build resilience into your strategy from the start

Uncertainty is not a temporary condition in global business. It is part of the operating environment.

Founders who expand internationally must plan for disruption across logistics, regulation, labor markets, consumer demand and geopolitical conditions. Supply chains can shift. Shipping costs can rise. New rules can change packaging, claims, ingredients, data requirements or distribution models.

That does not mean you should avoid global expansion. It means you should build resilience before pressure exposes the weak points. I now approach global strategy with the expectation that change is constant — which means diversifying suppliers, strengthening relationships across multiple regions and ensuring the business does not rely on a single point of failure.

Resilience is not only about surviving a crisis. It is about creating systems that keep moving when conditions change. That may include working with multiple manufacturing partners, developing backup logistics plans, investing in compliance expertise early and building financial models that account for volatility.

Stay close to the local while leading globally

A founder can have a global vision and still miss what is happening on the ground. That is why local leadership and regional insight are essential. Centralized decision-making creates consistency, but it also creates blind spots. Leaders too far removed from local realities overlook cultural nuance, consumer hesitation, market timing and regulatory concerns.

Consumers are watching for this. According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of the Consumer, 47% of consumers globally identify locally owned companies as important to their purchase decision, and 36% of those who prefer local brands cite a desire to support local businesses. Brands expanding globally have to earn that credibility in each market, which means understanding the cultural expectations, regulatory environments and consumer behavior that shape it.

That is why we learned to treat local leaders as strategic partners, not just operators. Their insight shapes product positioning, partnership strategy, customer support, event presence, retail relationships and market entry decisions. For entrepreneurs, this requires a shift in mindset. Global leadership is not about maintaining total control from the center. It is about creating a clear vision and empowering the right people to adapt execution locally.

Anchor growth in mission to maintain clarity and trust

The faster a company expands, the easier it becomes to lose focus. New markets bring new opportunities, but they also bring new distractions. Founders may feel pressure to chase every partnership, adjust messaging too far, launch too many products or make short-term decisions that weaken long-term trust.

I use a clear mission as a stabilizing force. Teams need to understand why the company exists, not just what it sells. Consumers need to feel that the brand’s purpose is consistent, even when the execution is tailored to their market.

Purpose is sometimes considered a brand exercise, but in global expansion it is also an operating tool. It helps founders decide which opportunities to pursue, which compromises to avoid and how to communicate through uncertainty. When markets shift, mission keeps the business from reacting blindly.

Move with intention, not urgency

Founders considering international expansion often feel pressure to move quickly, especially when competitors are entering new markets or consumer demand appears to be growing. But global expansion built on urgency leads to costly mistakes.

Uncertainty will always exist, so waiting for the perfect moment is not realistic. Focus on preparation instead. Understand your markets, build strong partnerships and make sure your foundation is solid before expanding. Move forward with intention, not urgency.

Is the business operationally ready? Does the market understand the category? Are the compliance requirements clear? Are local partners aligned with the mission? Can the supply chain handle disruption? Is the brand prepared to educate, not just sell?

In uncertain times, founders need more than a market-entry plan. They need an adaptable model, resilient systems, local insight and a mission strong enough to guide decisions across borders.

Today, global expansion requires founders to navigate shifting economic conditions, supply chain pressure, regulatory complexity and consumer expectations that vary widely from one region to another. A strategy that performs well in one market may stall in another — not because the product is weak, but because the founder assumed scale meant duplication rather than adaptation.

Global growth is not about forcing a single model into many markets. It is about building a business strong enough to evolve without losing its purpose. For founders, especially those building in wellness, consumer products, biotechnology or other highly personal industries, expansion has to be handled with care. You are not just entering new markets. You are entering new cultures, new systems and new conversations about trust. Here is what I have learned from taking my brands global.

Don’t replicate — reevaluate your model for each market

One of the biggest mistakes founders make when expanding internationally is assuming that success in one region automatically translates elsewhere. Consumer expectations, regulatory frameworks, infrastructure and communication style can differ dramatically from country to country. The product may remain the same at its core, but the way it is positioned, distributed, explained and supported may need to change.

I love talking to entrepreneurs whose mission goes far beyond profits — they genuinely want to improve people’s lives. McCall McPherson, founder of Modern Thyroid Clinic, has done exactly that, redefining thyroid and metabolic health diagnosis and treatment through nationwide telemedicine. She built the business from a solo brick-and-mortar practice in Austin into a 16,000-patient network with 10 clinicians and three physicians in leadership — all self-funded and with zero marketing spend. Her team uses proprietary lab ranges and treatment protocols, with documented remission of Hashimoto’s disease. And because she speaks from lived experience (she was debilitated for a year) her story offers a lesson entrepreneurs can’t afford to ignore: when your customers’ pain is real, mission turns into strategy.

Dan Bova: Can you give us the elevator pitch for Modern Thyroid Clinic?
McCall McPherson: Modern Thyroid Clinic started as a brick-and-mortar medical practice in Austin, Texas. And the demand was so large that a few years ago we expanded nationwide. We serve women and men, but a lot of our patients are women who have complex thyroid disorders who are just not able to get the help and the care that they need in the traditional medical landscape, which for thyroid conditions is quite antiquated. Modern Thyroid Clinic serves those people so that they can actually not only get their lives back and thrive, but have improvement in long-term health outcomes and chronic disease prevention.

What inspired you to start it?
When I was 27, I was already practicing medicine as a PA. I had a long-time thyroid condition myself, and I was spending 16 hours a day in bed. I went to my doctor, he ran one panel and told me, “Your thyroid’s fine… eat less, exercise more. Also, here’s a cholesterol medication for you at the age of 27.” I was sent away and really grappled with the fact that I knew this was thyroid symptoms. Eventually I got on a wait list for a physician who dealt with thyroid issues more progressively. He ran a more in-depth thyroid panel. He didn’t just look at one of six markers, he looked at the entire picture and it was very clear what was going on. He put me on a completely different class of medication, the kind that less than 10% of Americans ever are offered in the thyroid world. He completely changed my life. And from that, Modern Thyroid Clinic was born.

Why is it so hard to get treatment in the first place?
Medicine looks at hypothyroidism in a very, very simplified way. In medicine, we’re trained to see people in about eight minutes. And it’s really hard to deal with complex medical issues that aren’t procedures in eight minutes. We’re trained to run one lab, glance at the sheet, and if it’s normal, tell them they’re fine. Or treat them with one class of medication that around 91% of people are offered. And we’ve sort of resigned ourselves to: if they don’t get better, it must be something else. But that particular treatment will never work for a huge percentage of people — just like cholesterol meds. If it doesn’t work, you need to change it. That’s the piece that’s missing.

How did you build a business model that solved the time problem?
Number one, we spend an hour with our patients. We’re not trying to herd them in and herd them out in a small amount of time. We’ve created enough time to inform, empower, educate these people, talk them through the whole process and do a thorough job, which is what people deserve. We don’t take insurance for that consult, but we accept insurance for everything else, for labs, for medication. It’s an exchange of time for dollars, and it’s worked really, really well.

You started as a solo clinician. What’s the story from “one office” to where you are now?
I started as a one-woman show in a one-office building as a single mom to two girls, my youngest daughter is disabled. That put a fire under me to really figure it out. When you have a niche that impacts people quickly and makes them feel better so quickly that they keep coming back and want to spread the word naturally and organically, that creates its own momentum. 

The waitlist hit 9,000 women seeking help — without ever spending a dollar on marketing — and that’s when I launched a national telehealth network. Currently, the network has grown to 16,000 patients, led by me, with a full medical staff including 10 clinicians and 3 physicians in leadership. And all of them have personally dealt with thyroid-related health issues.

If people don’t feel good and they don’t know why, what are the first steps they can take?
I’m a big advocate for data. Get a full thyroid panel. We share our optimal lab ranges so people can understand exactly where their labs are versus where they should be.

For men, they also should be checking testosterone, free testosterone, and total testosterone. And find a partner who is looking outside of the box — someone who’s not sitting with you for eight minutes and seeing if anything’s “in bold or off to the side.” 

Sometimes paying out of pocket is an investment. But every dollar people spend on their health, I tell them they’ll get a hundredfold back in productivity. Investing in health is the biggest return on investment for entrepreneurs. Without it, you’re working half-mast and you’re not going to get the outcomes you would if you were thriving.

You’re also a leading voice on GLP-1 microdosing. What is that exactly?
Microdosing GLPs is a different way of taking them. Many of the side effects people hear about in the media are related to taking too much medication and not eating enough food.

When you make these medications available in smaller doses — microdose means a dose lower than the lowest available dose — we use doses an eighth or a quarter of the lowest dose in our weight loss program. People still get the benefits of weight loss, but GLPs also have incredible longevity benefits documented in the literature. And when we run lab data on these microdoses, we find the same benefits as standard doses with a fraction or none of the side effects.

What do you wish people would stop repeating as health advice?
Two things. Number one: society is still stuck with the calories-in versus calories-out construct, and that somehow magically we are all biologically created equal. Many people are metabolically dysfunctional — thyroid conditions, hormone conditions, pre-diabetes — and at a certain point, they can’t actually lifestyle their way out of it anymore. 

Number two: A link between thyroid cancer and GLPs. There’s a black box warning because in rat studies given 20 to 100 times the equivalent dose, they developed medullary thyroid carcinoma. But humans don’t have the same receptor pattern in their thyroid. And the data in human studies has been pretty darn clear: GLPs do not, in fact, cause thyroid cancer.

How can people learn more?
Learn more at our website and you can always find me on social. I love to like educate and empower people. And I have a book coming out with Penguin Random House in 2027 called Take Back Your Thyroid. 

I love talking to entrepreneurs whose mission goes far beyond profits — they genuinely want to improve people’s lives. McCall McPherson, founder of Modern Thyroid Clinic, has done exactly that, redefining thyroid and metabolic health diagnosis and treatment through nationwide telemedicine. She built the business from a solo brick-and-mortar practice in Austin into a 16,000-patient network with 10 clinicians and three physicians in leadership — all self-funded and with zero marketing spend. Her team uses proprietary lab ranges and treatment protocols, with documented remission of Hashimoto’s disease. And because she speaks from lived experience (she was debilitated for a year) her story offers a lesson entrepreneurs can’t afford to ignore: when your customers’ pain is real, mission turns into strategy.

Dan Bova: Can you give us the elevator pitch for Modern Thyroid Clinic?
McCall McPherson: Modern Thyroid Clinic started as a brick-and-mortar medical practice in Austin, Texas. And the demand was so large that a few years ago we expanded nationwide. We serve women and men, but a lot of our patients are women who have complex thyroid disorders who are just not able to get the help and the care that they need in the traditional medical landscape, which for thyroid conditions is quite antiquated. Modern Thyroid Clinic serves those people so that they can actually not only get their lives back and thrive, but have improvement in long-term health outcomes and chronic disease prevention.

What inspired you to start it?
When I was 27, I was already practicing medicine as a PA. I had a long-time thyroid condition myself, and I was spending 16 hours a day in bed. I went to my doctor, he ran one panel and told me, “Your thyroid’s fine… eat less, exercise more. Also, here’s a cholesterol medication for you at the age of 27.” I was sent away and really grappled with the fact that I knew this was thyroid symptoms. Eventually I got on a wait list for a physician who dealt with thyroid issues more progressively. He ran a more in-depth thyroid panel. He didn’t just look at one of six markers, he looked at the entire picture and it was very clear what was going on. He put me on a completely different class of medication, the kind that less than 10% of Americans ever are offered in the thyroid world. He completely changed my life. And from that, Modern Thyroid Clinic was born.

Gen Z is increasingly choosing not to date because of the high cost of going out. 

According to a national research project from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, more than half of single young adults ages 22 to 35 cite financial struggles as their biggest obstacle to dating. 

The survey, released earlier this year, found that only about 30% of young adults are dating at all, and just 31% say they date at least once a month. Nearly three-quarters of young women (74%) and almost two-thirds of young men (64%) reported they hadn’t dated or had dated only a few times in the past year.

For a generation just starting out, financial reality can interfere with plans to meet people and connect. Dating feels almost impossible when confronted with a lackluster job market and rising costs of living, according to a recent New York Times report. 

In cities like New York, that pressure intensifies. A high cost of living can cause an expensive dinner date to break the bank. A survey from BMO Financial Group found that Gen Z spends more than $200 on an average date night, including the cost of transportation and getting ready. 

Gen Z isn’t willing to pay the price

Gen Z has expressed interest in relationships but is disillusioned with the current expensive dating landscape. 

“I definitely do want to get married and have kids,” Grace Sakellariou, 27, a single woman who lives in Astoria, New York, told the Times. “But that just feels so unattainable. I can’t even think about affording a wedding.”

She added that it was “discouraging” to encounter men who asked to split the bill on early dates. “I think it’s stunted our growth that everything’s so expensive,” she said. 

Josh Timmins, a 25-year-old who intends to go to law school next year, is choosing not to date because of the high price of going out. He characterized dating apps as a “bit soulless.” “It’s hard to find actual connection,” he told the Times. 

Couples can save on rent

According to the Times, Gen Z increasingly faces a problem: They need a partner to survive the economy, but they can’t afford the cost of finding one. 

In Manhattan, the priciest New York City borough, sharing a one-bedroom with a partner can cut rent by more than $25,000 a year. It’s the biggest savings gap in the country, according to StreetEasy’s 2025 analysis of median asking rents.

When couples split the rent check, it gets easier for them to pay down student loans and save up for a down payment. They can also take a chance on a big career move, like switching jobs, starting a business or going back to school. 

Benjamin Goldman, a labor and public economist at Cornell University, posed the following question to the Times: Could the drop in dating and marriage be part of why so many people in their 20s and 30s feel so economically stuck in New York and other big cities? “It’s one piece of this that’s been under-discussed,” he told the outlet. 

Gen Z is increasingly choosing not to date because of the high cost of going out. 

According to a national research project from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, more than half of single young adults ages 22 to 35 cite financial struggles as their biggest obstacle to dating. 

The survey, released earlier this year, found that only about 30% of young adults are dating at all, and just 31% say they date at least once a month. Nearly three-quarters of young women (74%) and almost two-thirds of young men (64%) reported they hadn’t dated or had dated only a few times in the past year.