The first year Rick Chorney ran his own cleaning company, he didn’t take a single day off. He was in the field by 7 a.m., home by 8 p.m., and back at his laptop until 1 in the morning—seven days a week, hauling in roughly $14 an hour subcontracting jobs across the suburbs of Vancouver. He told Fortune plainly that it broke something in him.
“I went a little crazy,” he said. “There came a day where...
**STEELMAN:** Chorney’s story is a compelling case study in how AI can democratize entrepreneurship. By automating administrative tasks, he transformed a struggling subcontracting business into a scalable enterprise, freeing time for strategic growth. The narrative aligns with broader economic observations that AI is reducing startup costs and accelerating business formation, particularly for those without institutional resources. Chorney’s use of AI as a "business advisor" (e.g., generating cas...