Five things I'd build at MIC in the first 90 days.

ASBAS pillar: AI & emerging technologies

Problem. Owners are AI-curious but stuck. Most arrive having heard "you should be using AI" with no path from there to one tool actually running in their business. Generic AI workshops widen the gap because they show possibilities, not next steps.

Approach. A repeatable 1:1 format (with a workshop variant for cohort delivery):

1. Half-hour intake. What does this owner do day-to-day, what costs them time, what would they happily delegate to "a fast intern who's also a confident liar"?
2. Pick one or two tools that fit the actual workflow — booking + customer enquiries, AI-assisted email and content prep, doc summarisation via NotebookLM, lightweight automation via n8n / Zapier / Make.
3. One-page action plan, same week. What to install, the first prompt to run, failure modes to expect, a check-back date.
4. 30-day follow-up. Is it actually running, did it save the time we thought, what's next.

Why I'm well placed. Not a marketing-background advisor learning AI; an engineer who built AI in production. At Silvatron I trained a cross-functional team to 3–5x efficiency with AI workflows. The "brilliant fast intern who's a confident liar" framing is mine — it does the demystification job in one line and tends to be repeated by the room.

ASBAS pillars: AI & emerging tech + Cybersecurity

Problem. SME owners are pasting customer data, draft contracts and pricing into chatbots without knowing where the data goes. The cyber pillar and the AI pillar currently live in separate sessions. Owners need them as one conversation.

Approach. A 90-minute workshop — "What to use, what not to paste, where your data goes" — with concrete decisions, not theory:

1. Which tools meet basic privacy obligations for an Australian SME.
2. What data should never go into a hosted LLM.
3. Where Australian-hosted alternatives sit, and when they're worth it.
4. The MFA / backup / scam-awareness baseline that has to be in place first.

Why I'm well placed. My Monash IT major is Computer Network Security — the same pillar MIC already runs, not a topic I'd be learning on the job. I've built systems where data residency mattered (a Victorian Government agency engagement under Silvatron Pty Ltd; solved with AWS Bedrock in Melbourne). For this workshop the framing is "what an SME needs to know," not the architecture.

ASBAS pillar: Social media, digital marketing, selling online

Problem. Most marketing advice SMEs receive is generic — "post more", "do SEO", "build a funnel". What owners actually need is a teardown of their site, their ad account, their funnel, with a prioritised three-item list to act on this week.

Approach. 60-minute 1:1 teardown sessions with a fixed structure:

1. Landing-page review — does the offer match the ad?
2. Ad-spend mix and creative review — is the money going where it should?
3. Email / follow-up — what happens between interest and purchase?
4. Output: three-item, ranked action list for this owner.

Why I'm well placed. Real e-commerce P&L work. At Fujian Footwear (Australia) I drove +20% e-commerce revenue in-house: Meta Ads, SEO, GA4, Looker Studio, four brand sites (ishoes.com.au, justbee.com.au, pandaslippers.com.au, fujianfootwear.com.au), plus managing the outsourced agencies and keeping them honest. Not slideware — actual revenue.

Internal · MIC operations

Problem. High-volume 1:1 advisory plus Round 3 outcome reporting is a lot to manage by hand. Advisors lose hours per week to admin, and outcome data ends up reconstructed after the fact. Round 3 reporting will get more rigorous, not less.

Approach. A small intake-to-reporting pipe — the same shape we'd advise an SME client to adopt:

1. Public intake form (Tally or Airtable) capturing the basics plus the advisory area requested.
2. Airtable (or HubSpot, if MIC's already there) as the lightweight CRM / tracking layer.
3. Cal.com or similar for scheduling, with automated confirm / reminder / follow-up emails.
4. A simple outcome-tagging field per session so funder reporting is a saved view, not a quarterly assembly.

Built incrementally on what MIC already runs (Asana for hiring, Webflow site, Humanitix for events). The goal is not a new platform; it's removing the manual seams.

Why I'm well placed. I've built the same shape of pipeline for myself and for clients (n8n + CRM + automated comms + dashboards). The judgement here is mostly what not to add — keeping the seams visible so a real human can intervene where the human moments matter.

Internal · MIC marketing

Problem. MIC's blog is already AI-focused, but content production is currently per-piece. There's more value left in a structured pipeline that turns one good post into three or four pieces of channel-ready material — without losing voice.

Approach. A four-step workflow:

1. Research brief — one page: question + audience + angle. ~10 minutes per piece.
2. AI-assisted draft — from credible sources via NotebookLM or equivalent, with citations.
3. Human edit pass — voice, accuracy, "does an owner actually want to read this," banned-phrase scrub. Non-negotiable. This is where the trust is.
4. Repurpose — LinkedIn post, email summary, workshop-slide bullet, newsletter line, all from the same source.

This roughly doubles output without doubling effort, keeps voice consistent, and gives me a live demo I can show in workshops: "this is the exact workflow I'd teach you, and yes we use it ourselves."