Forrest Zeisler<\/a>, co-founder and CTO of Jobber\u2014the platform powering Chorney\u2019s AI receptionist \u2014 told Fortune that he sees Chorney as emblematic of a larger shift. \u201cNo one\u2019s going to benefit more than the small blue-collar businesses from AI,\u201d Zeisler told Fortune. \u201cFor them, time is literally money. They\u2019re out and about in the field, not sitting at a computer.\u201d<\/p>\nChorney\u2019s story maps precisely onto the phenomenon Slok is describing: a first-generation entrepreneur, without institutional resources or formal training, using AI to compress what would once have taken years of costly trial and error.<\/p>\n
![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Unknown-3.png\"\/)
Rick Chorney said he started off making $14 an hour.<\/p>\n
courtesy of Echo Janitorial<\/p>\n
The Kid Who Wanted a House<\/p>\n
Chorney grew up without much of a safety net. Adopted at 5, he relocated from Ontario to British Columbia as a child. As a teenager, he fell into substance abuse, passed through a group home, and wound up on a provincial youth agreement\u2014a government program that covered his rent while he aged out of the child welfare system. That support was set to evaporate at 19. \u201cIt got pretty ugly and I was getting arrested a lot,\u201d he said, explaining that he wasn\u2019t violent, just misguided, and he\u2019s on good terms with his parents now.<\/p>\n
But financially, and in terms of what school was giving him, he told Fortune, he was practically in a very tight spot. \u201cI got put into a group home and I didn\u2019t do so well in the group home. So the ministry decided to start paying my rent for me.\u201d He explained that the ministry\u2019s financial support was due to end and he was facing a hard stop. \u201cThere was a deadline hanging over me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chorney assessed his circumstances and didn\u2019t see school as an option. He was in grade 11, doing grade 10 courses, when he started applying for jobs, including the day he walked into a Greyhound office. His future boss was mortified, heavily encouraging him not to drop out, \u201cbut he offered me the job anyways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within two years, Chorney had rented the three-bedroom townhouse he\u2019d been working toward.<\/p>\n
From there, he spent years doing door-to-door sales for Vivint, a smart home company, moving to a new city every four months, knocking on strangers\u2019 doors every day. Vivint was, in its own way, a graduate program. The company sent him to Tony Robbins seminars, introduced him to the leadership canon\u2014Simon Sinek, Brian Tracy,\u00a0Leaders Eat Last\u2014and gave him a visceral education in resilience and sales. His first cleaning business, started around COVID, didn\u2019t scale the way he\u2019d hoped. When he moved to Abbotsford in 2022, he was ready to try again.<\/p>\n
Using AI to remove overhead<\/p>\n
Echo Janitorial Services launched in 2023, and the early months were brutal. Echo was subcontracting, which meant long hours for thin margins. Chorney was cleaning construction sites and offices across the Lower Mainland, managing client relationships, handling every email, phone call, and quote himself. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere came a day,\u201d he said, \u201cwhere I was just done.\u201d<\/p>\n
That day, instead of opening another quote or answering another email, he sat down and spent four hours researching how AI tools could take work off his hands. He automated his customer intake form so that new inquiries flowed directly into his job management platform. He installed an AI receptionist. He set up automatic acknowledgment messages for new clients. It took half a day.<\/p>\n
![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Unknown-2.png\"\/)
Rick Chorney named the company after a beloved dog.<\/p>\n
Rick Chorney<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized I don\u2019t have to be doing all the things I\u2019m doing,\u201d he said. It gave him the time to take his first vacation ever. <\/p>\n
Within weeks, he and a business partner drove across Canada to Montreal, caught a UFC event, and slowly worked their way back home across the country. They were gone a month and a half.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a pattern that Zeisler said he has watched play out across thousands of Jobber customers. \u201cNone of them got into business for business,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were great at a trade\u2014they had a craft, they had a skill, and they wanted to bring that skill to the world. But they end up spending so much of their time on all the administrative burdens and overhead. That\u2019s just a tax on the productivity of these businesses. That\u2019s not the stuff that pays the bills.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s only one downside that Chorney admitted to: \u201cas far as how much information these companies have about each of us individually, maybe that\u2019s a little scary. But unfortunately, we live in a world where that can\u2019t be prevented.\u201d The companies that have enabled these AI tools have \u201call of our information \u2026 available in some database somewhere,\u201d but this is just the price of doing business.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to give AI my information because it makes doing business easier.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Stack That Changed Everything<\/p>\n
Chorney started with ChatGPT\u2014using it the way most first-time adopters do, to polish emails and format documents. His early motivation was almost embarrassingly practical. \u201cI can make as many typos, I can swear, I can be as direct as I want to be\u2014and it\u2019ll polish it all up and make it what I want,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But the tool he talks about with wide-eyed appreciation is Claude, which he describes less as a productivity app and more as a business advisor. \u201cIt just starts asking me questions until it\u2019s got this perfect response,\u201d he said. For instance, he uses it to navigate BC labor law when HR situations get complicated, to build client-facing case studies on the fly, and to document company operations for what he eventually hopes will become a national franchise.<\/p>\n
Chorney reeled off his army of AI colleagues, marveling at how much time it\u2019s freed up for him to scale up his business. \u201cOne deals with all your social media. One deals with all your customer inquiries. It will respond to emails, answer text messages and phone calls.\u201d Another will go through your bank statements and help you make cashflow projections.<\/p>\n
![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Unknown-1.png\"\/)
Rick Chorney says he\u2019s getting his life back, thanks to AI tools.<\/p>\n
courtesy of Rick Chorney<\/p>\n
The high-school dropout CEO said he\u2019s a widespread adopter of AI tools, noting that he uses Perplexity for research, Grok for content creation, and is currently piloting Synthesia\u2014an AI video platform that generates training videos using a digital likeness of Chorney himself, walking new employees through cleaning procedures without him entering a room.<\/p>\n
For phone traffic, Jobber\u2019s AI receptionist fields up to 15 calls per hour\u2014fielding job inquiries, vendor pitches, the occasional invitation to a training seminar in Costa Rica\u2014and escalates only what matters. A human doing the same job would cost roughly $4,000 a month in wages and payroll taxes. Chorney pays $99. For email, a tool called Fixer AI pre-sorts his inbox each morning into four buckets\u2014action required, drafted reply, likely spam, confirmed spam\u2014and texts him a daily briefing. He claimed that he spends 20 minutes a day on email.<\/p>\n
Jobber\u2019s numbers suggest that Chorney\u2019s approach is the right one. \u201cOur best adopters\u2014the people who are using all our AI products\u2014they\u2019re growing 90% faster than those who aren\u2019t,\u201d Zeisler said. \u201cThey go all in. They use all the tools, and they see the impact on the bottom line.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is precisely what Slok had in mind when he described AI as a growth engine for new business formation. \u201cWe can go together on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and we can ask for a business plan and it can spit it out literally in seconds,\u201d Slok said. \u201cAnd we can even use the large language models as part of our business.\u201d The consequence, he argued, won\u2019t just be more companies\u2014it\u2019ll be more jobs. \u201cThe number of new businesses is at the highest level in decades because people have become much more entrepreneurial. The consequence of this must be that we are going to generate a lot more jobs associated with people\u2019s ideas now coming to life a lot faster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thinking Bigger<\/p>\n
With his days reclaimed\u2014down from 19-hour slogs to a manageable eight hours\u2014Chorney is channeling freed-up time into expansion. He calls it Project Echo: a comprehensive operational playbook, built with AI assistance, that he believes will serve as the blueprint for a national franchise. Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary are the first targets. A friend has raised his hand for Arizona and Delaware.<\/p>\n
\u201cClaude is going to bring me to be a national franchise brand within the next two years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Zeisler predicted that many more entrepreneurs like Chorney will have similar ambitions going forward. \u201cThe next generation of millionaires\u2014there are going to be a lot of blue-collar millionaires,\u201d he said. The businesses that are starting now don\u2019t have decades of legacy systems and approaches ingrained in them, he added. \u201cThose businesses are AI-first from day one.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1550246600944.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Chorney said he has grown as an entrepreneur to the point that he\u2019s investing in the people around him. His first employee, Kai\u2014they met at a pool party, hired the day after Chorney let someone else go\u2014worked with such singular commitment that Chorney and Adrian gave him a 10% equity stake and the company co-signed his car loan. Employees who want leadership roles at Echo must read at least one book from a curated list of 15 to 20 titles.\u00a0Leaders Eat Last\u00a0sits at the top.<\/p>\n
When the conversation turned to education\u2014specifically, whether a system that didn\u2019t work for him could ever evolve\u2014Chorney didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cSchools are so focused on repetitive behavior instead of preparing you for the world,\u201d he said. \u201cKids aren\u2019t learning how compound interest works. They\u2019re learning how to be at school at 8:30 so that when they\u2019re adults, they\u2019ll get up, go to work, and pay taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slok framed the same dynamic in macroeconomic terms: AI doesn\u2019t just help established businesses run more efficiently\u2014it lowers the barriers to entry so dramatically that people who previously couldn\u2019t afford to start a business, professionally or financially, now can. In that sense, Chorney isn\u2019t an outlier. He\u2019s a leading indicator.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you can learn what AI is capable of,\u201d Chorney said, \u201cand use it how it was intended to be used \u2026 it\u2019s the way of the world now. It\u2019s not really an option.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first year Rick Chorney ran his own cleaning company, he didn\u2019t take a single day off. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,835,191,2945,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-370021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-education","12":"tag-entrepreneurship","13":"tag-gen-z","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Unknown.png\"\/)
Rick Chorney is expected to clear $1.3 million in sales this year.<\/p>\n