Your day
- Dinner without the laptop, because the follow-up went out at four.
- You finish things. Being interrupted stops being the job.
- You spend more than six hours a week on the work you are actually good at.
Founding cohort · six Thursdays · begins October 1
There is a version of your week where the first draft is already waiting.
Six Thursdays, two hours each, where you build four AI employees on your own business. Chief of Staff, Sales Follow-Up, Marketing, and Operations. Plus the Business Brain they all draw from, holding your offers, your voice, and your clients.
Merilyn Thompson teaches every session herself. Thirty years at the intersection of people, process, and technology. She has led major technology transformations for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers, run a technology company for twenty-four years, worked as a board-certified psychotherapist for over a decade, and is a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member.
Founding rate holds through Tuesday, September 29. Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
Where this actually starts
There is more work than there is you.
It is Tuesday morning and there are fourteen things open.
The lead from last week is still waiting on a reply. The invoice did not go out. Something needs posting and you have not thought about it since Thursday. Two clients need answers today, and one of them needs the long answer, the one only you can write.
You are good at the thing your business does. It is why clients stay and it is why the business exists. You do that thing about six hours a week now.
The rest of the week goes to keeping everything from touching the ground.
It is eleven at night and the laptop is open again. You were half present at dinner. And there is no version of next week that has more hours in it than this one did.
Last November you tried to take a week off. You came back to two hundred and forty emails, a client who had gone quiet, and four days spent catching up on the week you were supposed to be resting in. You have not tried since.
What nobody tells you is that this becomes a weight you stop noticing. It has been sitting on you for years. You have adjusted your whole life around carrying it, and you have stopped calling it heavy because it is simply how the business runs.
You already know what would fix it. Someone to follow up before the lead goes cold. Someone to keep the content going. Someone who knows how the work gets done, so you stop being the only one who does.
You have also already priced that and decided against it. Most owners have. For a lot of businesses that decision got made by the last two years rather than by the owner.
So the question stopped being who you could hire. It became how much longer this can keep running through you.
Here is the part worth knowing before you read another word. Most of what feels overwhelming feels that way because it has never been broken into pieces. Named, sorted, and written down, it is smaller than it has felt for years.
That is what the six Thursdays do.
Which of these is your week?
Not all four at once. It is almost never all four. It is one of them, stopped, with you standing in the gap holding it open by hand.
Sales
- The lead came in Tuesday. Nobody replied until Friday.
- Every person handles a lead differently, so the result depends on who picked it up.
- You cannot forecast, because you cannot see the pipeline.
- Sales stops entirely in the weeks you are unavailable.
- Hours go into the CRM by hand, and the data is still wrong.
Marketing
- Weeks pass with nothing posted, and the business starts to look inactive.
- Content is slow and expensive and needs a skill nobody on the team has.
- The message changes depending on who wrote it that week.
- Leads arrive, nothing follows up, and they quietly disappear.
- Campaigns are reactive rather than planned, because there is no room to plan.
Operations
- The process lives in one person’s head rather than in a document.
- The same questions get asked every week, because the answer is buried in an email from March.
- A new hire takes three to six months to become useful.
- You are the chief problem solver, interrupted all day, finishing nothing.
- Nobody can see where the work is stuck, including you.
Client delivery
- The client experience depends on who happens to be handling it.
- Deadlines slip because ownership was never clear.
- Reporting takes hours and still goes out late.
- Scope creeps, because the boundary was never written down.
- Delivery cannot grow without adding people first.
Whichever column you just recognized is the AI employee you build first. You decide that on your Week 0 call with Merilyn, before Week 1 begins.
The part nobody admits
You have probably bought something about this already.
It is still in a tab. Thirty percent finished. Bought in a month that turned out to be as full as this one.
You were never behind. You were never shown the part that works.
Most AI programs teach prompting, and prompting makes one person faster for an afternoon. By Thursday the work still routes through you.
Self-paced asked for the one thing you do not have, which is an evening. Nothing was waiting for you on a Thursday. Nothing you built was ever looked at. And the examples ran on a made-up company while your actual proposals and your actual clients sat untouched.
There is also the version where you did try. You opened a chat window, asked it to write something, and got back a paragraph that sounded like a press release from a company you do not recognize. So you closed it and concluded this was not for a business like yours.
What changes a week is not a better prompt. It is something that already holds your business, follows the standard you set, and has the first draft ready before you ask.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
My career has never followed a straight line.
For thirty years I have been helping people through change. Sometimes the change was technology. Sometimes it was a business. Sometimes it was a life.
I have worked in technology, leading complex system implementations for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers. Multi-year programs, multi-million dollar budgets, environments where being wrong shows up in a patient’s care or a business’s ability to operate.
I ran a technology company for twenty-four years, helping organizations navigate large-scale transformation and implement systems that people depended on every day. For ten of those years I also worked as a board-certified psychotherapist. I trained hundreds of people in systems, applications and tools.
Here is what that taught me, and it has almost nothing to do with software. Projects do not fail at the tool. They fail at implementation, testing, quality control, and handoff.
The build works in a demo. Then it turns out how to run it was never written down. There was no test anyone agreed on, so nobody can say whether it passed. And the person who inherits it is the one who finds out it did not work.
Technology has never once created a transformation. People do.
That is the same failure I see in a six-person business. Different scale, identical shape. Everything the business knows lives with one person, and that person is also the one without an hour to spare.
Ten years as a psychotherapist taught me the other half of it. People rarely describe what they are carrying as heavy until another person names it first. And adults do not learn by watching. They learn by building.
When AI arrived in 2023 I did not watch from the sidelines. I enrolled in everything I could find. I experimented, I built, I tested, I failed, and I learned. Then I put it to work inside my own businesses, and what happened there is the reason this Academy exists. Work that used to take days took hours. For the first time in my career, an owner with no budget and no technical team had access to something that used to require a department and a year.
I did not build Novativ AI Academy to sell another course nobody finishes. People do not change because they consumed information. They change when they see what is possible and another person walks beside them while they build it.
That is why I teach every session of this program myself.
The part nobody says out loud
Every piece of work in your business contains two jobs.
Making it exist. And deciding whether it is right.
You are excellent at the second one. It is judgment, and taste, and years of knowing what a good proposal looks like the moment it lands in front of you. It is the reason clients stay, and it is the reason the work carries your name.
And you spend almost the entire week on the first one.
Not because you chose that. Because there has never been another person to hand it to. So the best judgment in the business spends Tuesday writing a follow-up from a blank page, and then gets used for about four minutes at the end.
You were never supposed to be doing both halves.
An AI employee takes the first job. You keep the second.
That is the whole of it. Not a tool that makes you quicker at producing. Something that produces, so that producing stops being your job and deciding becomes it.
- You stop waiting for the perfect hire to reduce the workload.
- You stop using AI randomly and start building it around real work.
- You create a business asset every week instead of another set of notes.
- You get AI support without handing over judgment or accountability.
- You leave with a system you keep improving, not a course you finished.
You stop being the person who makes the work. You become the person who says yes to it.
Six pieces of your actual week
Look at who is holding the pen in each row, then look at who is making the call. The second one never changes.
The work
Today
After six Thursdays
Following up a lead
Friday, if Friday happens. Sometimes not at all.
Drafted Tuesday evening, in your words. You change two lines and send it.
A proposal
You open the last one and rebuild it from there.
Drafted to your encoded standard. You price it and approve it.
Monday’s plan
Built from memory, over coffee, before anyone else is awake.
Waiting as dated actions with names against them. You adjust and go.
The questions your team asks
Asked again this week. The answer is in an email from March.
Answered once, the same way every time, without reaching you.
This week’s content
Written in the week you happen to find an hour.
Drafted before you find one. You choose what goes out.
Onboarding a new person
Three to six months before they are useful.
Weeks, because how the work gets done is written down and they can read it.
You are still in every single row. You are simply no longer the one starting from a blank page.
What actually changes
Not one thing. Twelve, and you will feel the first three within a fortnight.
Your business
- The same question gets one answer, and the team stops routing it to you.
- A new person is useful in weeks rather than months, because how the work gets done is finally written down.
- Every client gets the same experience, whoever is handling it.
- The pipeline is visible, so forecasting stops being a guess.
- Work stops waiting for you to be available.
What it makes possible
- You can take a week off and come back to a week, not to two.
- You can say yes to work you would have turned down for lack of room.
- You can grow delivery without adding payroll first.
- What the business knows belongs to the business rather than to you, which matters the day you sell it, hand it over, or get sick.
That last one is the quiet one. Six Thursdays from now, the most valuable thing your business knows is written down somewhere other than your head.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
A prompt helps you work. An AI employee does the work.
An AI employee is a configured workspace with a named job and a defined point where it hands back to you. It holds your approved knowledge, your agreed instructions, and your encoded standards, and it produces the first pass of that job to the standard you set.
Not a chat window you introduce yourself to every morning. Something that is still there on Monday, still knows what it knew on Friday, and still sounds like your business rather than like a press release.
Reviewing a draft takes minutes. Writing one took an hour. That gap, repeated across a week, is where the week comes back.
Your AI employees do the work, you approve it. Nothing reaches a client, a candidate, a regulator, the public, or a bank account without a human saying yes.
Four AI employees, built on your business, in the session
One for each of the four columns you read earlier. You build them in the order that produces a result fastest for your business, decided on your Week 0 call.
You do the building. That is the whole point of the format. Every session runs on your own live work, and both of your team seats can be in the room doing it with you.
The Novativ AI Business Flow™
Business Rhythm Flow™ · Week 2
Your AI Chief of Staff
Monday morning, and the week is already drafted. What was agreed last week is sitting there as dated actions with names against them. You are editing a plan instead of building one from memory, and for the first time in a while you start the week ahead of it.
Revenue Flow™ · Week 3
Your AI Sales Follow-Up
The conversation was Tuesday afternoon. By Tuesday evening the follow-up is drafted, in your words, against what was actually said. You change the two things only you would know to change, and send it. The lead that used to cool over three days moves the same day.
Visibility Flow™ · Week 4
Your AI Marketing Content
It is the busiest week of the quarter and your business is still saying something. Not because you found an hour, but because the first draft was waiting when you had fifteen minutes. The weeks you are heads down stop being the weeks you disappear.
Client Value Flow™ · Week 5
Your AI Operations and Client Delivery
A new client signs on a Thursday while you are on a plane, and onboarding starts anyway, at your standard, in your words. The questions clients ask every time get the answer you would have given, whether or not you were the one at the keyboard.
And underneath all four, your Business Brain
A configured workspace holding your approved knowledge, your agreed instructions, and your encoded standards. Built in Week 1, because everything after it draws from it. It is also the week how your business works stops being something you carry and starts being something your business owns.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
Three reasons this one does not end in a tab
Two hours. One day. That is the ask.
Two hours every Thursday, and office hours in Weeks 2, 3, and 5, the three weeks that historically need them. Everything is built during the session, on your own work, so the hours you give this are hours spent being helped rather than hours alone with a deliverable.
Merilyn teaches every session herself.
Not a coach, not a moderator, not a recording with a host in the chat. The person who spent twenty-four years being called in when something important had gone sideways is in the room on Thursday, looking at what you built and telling you what she would change.
It does not end at Week 6.
Adoption is not lost during a program. It is lost around week three afterward, when the quarter gets busy and the novelty wears off. So there is a check-in on December 10, a results review on January 14, and your cohort channel stays open for ninety days. Somebody comes back to see whether your four employees are still running.
Three seats come with every enrollment, you plus two of your team, because a standard only one person has seen is not a standard yet. The course is built on Claude and a paid plan is required. The method transfers to any platform, because it is a build sequence rather than a product feature.
Founding cohort · October 1 to November 5, 2026
You will not be waiting until Week 6 to have something.
Every phase produces work you own. The milestones below are the four moments where something real exists that did not exist before.
Week 0
Your Capacity Audit
Fifteen minutes on your own, then a call with Merilyn. Your week gets sorted into the work only you can do, the work that only feels that way, and the work that could have left your desk two years ago.
September 24 · the first honest numberEvery claim made in Week 6 is measured against it. On the call you decide together which employee gets built first
Weeks 1 – 2
Brain, then Chief of Staff
Your offers, your ideal client, your voice, and the documents that carry how you do things. Then the first named job, with the point where it hands back to you written down.
Week 2 · one real MondayYou leave having run an actual planning session from meeting notes you brought in
Weeks 3 – 4
Revenue, then visibility
Where your follow-up breaks, and your proposal structure encoded so it stops being re-explained. Then content trained on your own writing rather than on a competent stranger’s.
Week 3 · a live opportunityOne real opportunity in your pipeline receives a follow-up your AI drafted and you approved
Weeks 5 – 6
Operations, then proof
The three processes that hurt most, produced as complete SOPs live in the session. Then everything tested, and what fails fixed.
Week 6 · your number, movedThe capacity comparison against your Week 0 baseline, in your own figures, plus a thirty-day plan
Two hours every Thursday, plus sixty minutes of office hours in Weeks 2, 3, and 5. Plan on three to four hours a week in total, including the build you do between sessions. Build sessions are recorded. Office hours are not, deliberately, because people talk more honestly about a business when nothing is being captured.
See every week, and what happens after
Week 0
Your Capacity Audit, and your call with Merilyn
Thursday, September 24. Fifteen minutes on your own, then the call that decides which employee gets built first.
Week 1
Your AI Business Brain
Thursday, October 1. You will know it worked when you ask it a question about your own business and the answer sounds like it came from inside the company.
Week 2
Your AI Chief of Staff
Thursday, October 1. Office hours this week. Meeting notes come out as decisions, owners, and dated actions.
Week 3
Your AI Sales Follow-Up
Thursday, October 8. Office hours this week. By the end of it, one real opportunity has had a follow-up you approved and sent.
Week 4
Your AI Marketing Content
Thursday, October 15. Two weeks of content drafted that you would publish without a rewrite.
Week 5
Your AI Operations and Client Delivery
Thursday, October 22. Office hours this week. Three complete SOPs produced live, plus the standard that generates every future one in about twenty minutes.
Week 6
Test, prove, and plan
Thursday, November 5. Everything tested against your Week 0 number, including the parts that did not work, then the next three handoffs in order.
+30
Adoption check-in
Thursday, December 10. What is still running, what quietly stopped, and what it takes to restart it.
+60
Results review
Thursday, January 14, 2027. The sixty-day read against your number, and where you take it from here.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
What comes with your enrollment
A bonus is something you could do without. Nothing on this list qualifies, so nothing on it is dressed up as an extra.
- Six live two-hour build sessions, taught by Merilyn Thompson.
- Office hours in Weeks 2, 3, and 5, sixty minutes each.
- Your Week 0 call with Merilyn, and the Capacity Audit that sets your baseline.
- Three seats. You plus two of your team.
- Two required builds each week, plus optional stretch work for the weeks that have room.
- Built on Claude. The method transfers to any platform.
- A neutral demo business, a fictional twelve-person services company with a full document pack, if your organization restricts what you can upload.
- Full recordings of every build session for your team.
- Your cohort channel, open for ninety days after Week 6.
- The adoption check-in on December 10 and the results review on January 14, 2027.
- Certificate of completion from Novativ AI Academy.
Four answers to the four things you have not asked out loud
Each of these exists because the same question kept coming up. Not because a stack needed filling out.
The AI Employee Library™
The worry it answersFour is not enough, and I will not know how to build the fifth.
Every role Novativ has built and documented, written as a working specification rather than a description. The named job, the instructions, the standard, and the point where it hands back to a person. When your business needs a role that is not one of your four, you open the library instead of a blank page.
The Encoded Standards Library
The worry it answersI do not have the evenings to write down how we do things.
The part that never gets done, done. Pre-written standards for the documents a small business actually produces, built to be edited rather than authored. You are correcting a draft instead of facing an empty page at ten at night, which is the difference between this happening and this staying on the list.
Live, ninety minutes · Wednesday, September 30
AI in a Regulated Business
The worry it answersWe handle sensitive information and I do not know what is allowed.
Taught by Merilyn. Twenty-four years of implementing systems for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers, turned into plain answers about what can go into a workspace, what cannot, what has to be logged, and where the approval gate belongs. Placed early on purpose, because the question arrives in Week 1 the moment you upload your first document.
Live, ninety minutes · Thursday, November 12
Build Your Fifth Employee
The worry it answersIt works while she is there, and then I am on my own.
Two weeks after the final build session, everyone comes back and builds one more, live, without the training wheels. You pick the role. The room watches you do it. Delivered live once per cohort, then recorded into your library, so you have both the experience of doing it unaided and the recording of yourself doing it.
The first five founding enrollments
A private ninety-minute build session with Merilyn, one to one, on whichever role is most urgent in your business. Five, because she runs them herself and the calendar is finite.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
This program is for you if
- You are working sixty-hour weeks and the week is not getting shorter.
- Your team asks the same questions every day.
- Your SOPs are scattered across files, or they live in your head.
- Payroll is up and output is not.
- You want to hire and the numbers do not work.
- You want systems that reduce the workload rather than adding to it.
- You are the last stop on almost everything, and you would like to stop being that.
If you recognized four or more of those, you are the person this was built for.
This is not for everyone, and it is worth saying which.
- If you have never used an AI tool at all, start with AI for Everyone Foundations™. This program assumes you are past that, and you will enjoy it far more from the other side.
- If you want AI that runs the business unattended, that is not what this is. A person approves everything before it leaves, and you will hear that said every week.
- If what you are looking for is a way to reduce a team, this is not the right program. What it builds is capacity, so you can take on more without adding to payroll. There are programs for the other thing, and I would rather say now that this is not one of them.
- If you want to build a consulting practice around AI, positioning it, pricing it, and finding clients, that is the AI Consultant Elite Bootcamp™. This one teaches you to build the thing you would be selling.
- If you want to watch rather than build, the six Thursdays will not repay you. Everything here is made on your own work, in the room.
- If you cannot give it three to four hours a week for six weeks, wait for a cohort where you can. It will still be here.
The founding cohort
Six Thursdays. Four AI employees. Every SOP you have been meaning to write for three years. A team that stops routing questions to you. A new person useful in weeks rather than months. And a business that keeps its own knowledge instead of storing it in you.
$3,997
or three payments of $1,399
Available until enrollment closes on Tuesday, September 29. From Cohort 2 the rate is $4,997, and Cohort 2 does not have a date yet.
What we hope for in return
If the program worked for you, one thing, and it is genuinely optional.
A testimonial at the sixty-day review. A few honest sentences about what changed, in your own words.
If you are willing, we would also love to write up what you built as an example. What was slipping, what you built, and what the numbers looked like against your Week 0 baseline. You do not write it. We write it from work you have already done, and you approve every word before it goes anywhere.
Your clients are never named. No financial figures appear. Your own name goes on it only if you want it to. And none of this is a condition of anything. The founding rate is the founding rate because this is the first time this program runs.
Seven days from purchase to change your mind, whenever you buy. After that your place transfers once to a future cohort.
What is stopping you
“I cannot give up three hours in one day.”
You are not being asked to. It is two hours on a Thursday, and sixty minutes of office hours in three of the six weeks if you want them. The rest is build time on work you are already doing, done once and kept.
“I am not technical.”
There is no code in this, by design. What it asks is that you can describe how your own business does something, and judge whether a draft is good enough to send. You have been doing both for years without calling it a skill.
“My business is too small for this.”
Small is the condition this was built for. A company of two hundred has a department for writing things down. A business of six has you. The programs that do not fit a business your size are the ones designed around a team with capacity to spare.
“My business is too specific. No template fits us.”
Correct, and no template is handed to you. Every build in every session runs on your own documents and your own live work. The specificity is the input, not the obstacle.
“We handle sensitive information.”
Then the third bonus is the reason to be here rather than the reason to stay away. Twenty-four years of implementing systems for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers sits behind the answers you get about what can go into a workspace, what cannot, and where the approval gate belongs. And if your organization restricts uploads entirely, you build on the neutral demo business and the method transfers unchanged.
“What if I fall behind?”
Office hours sit in Weeks 2, 3, and 5, which are the three weeks where it usually happens. Every build session is recorded. A bad week means you arrive at the next session with what you have and it gets sorted in the room.
“I already use AI.”
Then Week 1 will move faster for you than for most of the room, and you will feel it. Using a chat window for occasional tasks and building a configured employee that holds your standards are different activities. Most owners who say they use AI have only ever seen the first one.
“What if it does not work for us?”
You have seven days from purchase to change your mind, whichever week you buy in. That includes the first session, so nobody is committing $3,997 to a room they have not sat in.
Every enrollment is followed by a call with Merilyn to review your Capacity Audit and set your first build. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.
Questions
How much time does it really take?
Two hours every Thursday, plus sixty minutes of office hours in Weeks 2, 3, and 5. Outside the sessions, plan on one to two hours. Two required builds a week, with optional stretch work if you have room.
What are the dates?
Six Thursdays, 2:00 to 4:00 PM Eastern, October 1 through November 5, 2026. Week 0 pre-work goes out September 24. Adoption check-in December 10, results review January 14, 2027.
Are the sessions recorded?
Build sessions, yes, and the recordings are yours to give your team. Office hours are not recorded on purpose. People talk more honestly about a business when nothing is being captured.
Can my team come?
Three seats come with every enrollment. Bring the person who handles follow-up and the person who knows how the work actually gets done. They tend to build faster than the owner does, and they are the ones who keep it running after Week 6.
What do I need before Week 1?
A paid Claude plan. Projects are not available on free tiers, and you will be building in one from Week 1. The AI Freedom Engine™ Method itself is platform-independent, so everything you build transfers if your organization later standardizes elsewhere.
What if we are on Microsoft or Google?
This course is built on Claude, and a paid plan is required. The AI Freedom Engine™ Method is not tied to it. If your organization later moves to another platform, the build sequence transfers because it is a method rather than a product feature.
Do I need to be technical?
No, and there is no code in the program.
What happens right after I enroll?
You receive your Capacity Audit and a link to book your Week 0 call with Merilyn. That call reviews your audit and settles which employee gets built first.
Can I speak to someone before I buy?
Yes. Book a call. Most people do not need it, and it is there for the ones who do.
Is the founding rate going to be extended?
No. It closes Tuesday, September 29, on that date rather than on a number of seats. From Cohort 2 the rate is $4,997.
Am I required to give a testimonial?
No. We hope for one at the sixty-day review if the program worked for you, and it is not a condition of enrollment or of the rate.
When does Cohort 2 run?
The date is not set yet.
What happens after Week 6?
The adoption check-in in December, the results review in January, Build Your Fifth Employee on November 12, and your cohort channel for ninety days. If a larger buildout is the right next step, it is discussed at the results review and not before.
Founding cohort · six Thursdays · begins October 1, 2026
Six Thursdays from now, one of two things will be true.
Either it is the first week of November and the week looks exactly like this one did. The lead from Tuesday still waiting. The same questions from the same people. Nothing posted since Thursday. The eleven o’clock laptop.
Or it is the first week of November, the follow-up went out the same afternoon, the content is drafted, onboarding runs while you are somewhere else, and Monday started from a plan you edited instead of one you built from memory.
Two hours a Thursday is what sits between those.
Founding rate closes Tuesday, September 29. Seven days from purchase to change your mind.