The Awakened Entrepreneur Podcast

About The Awakened Entrepreneur Podcast

You didn't start your business to become a prisoner of it. For established entrepreneurs who have built something real — and lost themselves in the process. Hosted by Valérie Demont, strategist, mentor, and author of Being Is the New Doing. demontvalerie.substack.com (https://demontvalerie.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Valerie Demont

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Dec 2024

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

39 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Stop Buying AI Bootcamps Until You've Answered This One Question

   A live room, almost seven thousand little squares, and a chat running so fast that every message is gone before you finish reading it. Somewhere in that river, someone types a real question about her own business. A few seconds later, it has scrolled away. I was in that room a few days ago, and that moment has stayed with me ever since. So I sat down with my microphone and recorded this episode of Being Is the New Doing, The Show. Furthermore, this bootcamp is the perfect example of why I wrote several weeks ago that the business model you liked might have reached its end. (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/p/the-business-model-youre-so-proud?r=2t5zyu) Drowned in the room I didn’t go to learn how to build an AI employee. I have been building my own team since April, and I have been automating my business since the days my blog sent its newsletter out by RSS (yes, that long ago). Today I have 8 autonomous AI employees and 20 AI employees trained on my business. I went to listen. I wanted to hear, from the inside, what entrepreneurs are living with AI right now, at the end of a long day, in their bodies. And to be fair, the demos were brilliant. The person leading that bootcamp is very good at what she does. On day one, though, it felt like drinking from a fire hose. One participant put it beautifully: she loved the fire hose, and then she had to regulate the flow herself to make any of it useful. By the second evening, the same sentences kept coming back in the community, in a hundred different words: * My brain is full. * don’t know where to start. * Which tool first, which employee first, in what order? * I have watched everyone else build amazing things, and I still don’t know what to build for me. And underneath, much quieter, a sentence that nobody typed: Nobody sees me here. You can sit in the biggest room you have ever been in and never feel so alone with your question. So we do what feels natural. We buy the next thing: the upgrade, the next program, the next bootcamp, hoping this one will finally save us. That reflex carries precious information, my dear. It tells you that what you are missing is a direction and someone who sees you, far more than one more tool. The end of the crowd What struck me most in that community was the scepticism. People wondering out loud whether a session was really a training or a sales pitch, whether the enthusiastic comments came from affiliates, what the real cost would be once everything was added up. And honestly? I understand them (check my post on AI real costs (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/p/the-real-cost-of-ai-employees?r=2t5zyu)). When AI makes content infinite, attention becomes the rarest thing we have, and being seen becomes the most valuable one. People want to be recognised. They want someone to know their name and their business. I don’t see how you can sell your work to someone you have never seen. I believe we are living the end of many models at once: the funnel that runs without you, the launch with the doors that slam, the room of ten thousand. My new business model A fire hose is built to put a fire out. I chose a campfire. A small circle, real warmth, and everyone at the right distance. I know this choice from the inside. In 2017, my blog was one of the first B2B blogs in French-speaking Switzerland, with around thirty thousand visitors a month, and I let it go. I chose the quality of my relationships over the size of my audience. Back then it looked like a strange choice. Today it looks like the future. And for you, sitting with your next purchase in your basket, here is the good news: the answer you are trying to buy is very often already in you. Look inward first, and the right next step becomes much easier to see. What your business needs first Let me tell you about Annick. When she came to me, she was holding all the AI tools in her hands: the subscriptions, the courses, the templates, and a plan for an automation so complex it would have needed a team just to maintain it. Things she had been told she should build. She was submerged, with no idea which end to start from. So we put almost everything aside, and I asked her one question: What does your business need first? Her answer came slowly, and it was beautifully simple. Clients. Time to serve them well. Work she is proud to deliver. The big automation can wait, and it will be much easier to build later, because by then she will know what it is for. When I called Valérie for help, I was completely disillusioned. Like many people, I had imagined that AI would be some kind of magic wand. I was going to download THE right prompt, the one they sell us on social media as THE solution for running your business, and boom, my whole admin system would set itself up almost on its own. Well. Spoiler alert: not at all. Admin is really not my thing. I tried anyway. I moved forward with Claude, I created things, tested, tweaked… except the further I went, the more I felt it was sending me in completely opposite directions. That’s when I called Valérie. What I needed, in the end, was not one more prompt. I needed a foundation. A solid structure I could build on, something that truly fits my business and the way I work. And that is exactly what she gave me. Before that, it felt a bit like being dropped in the middle of Everest with a single instruction: “Here’s your gear, now climb.” Except I didn’t know how to use the ice axe or the harness, let alone which route to take. So I started, step by step. I got to know AI. I learned how it works. I sometimes even used one AI to explain how to use another, which is rather comical when you think about it. It was real work. Long at times, tedious often, with an enormous number of questions. Because to build a system that holds up, you need to understand where you want to go and see the whole picture. Luckily, I’m good at anticipating. But even so, there comes a moment when, on your own, you hit your limits. That’s where Valérie’s support was precious. She kept me from throwing it all out the window, helped me regain confidence and, above all, find a direction again. She gave me a base and a plan. Then it was up to me to build. Today, when I look at the path I’ve travelled, the results are there. Managing my emails, my client files, my follow-ups, creating and tracking my projects, even creating invoices: all of it already works. I still have a lot left to set up. But there’s a fundamental difference from the beginning: now I know how to do it, and I’ve understood something essential: There is no magic prompt! There is no miracle! AI can become an incredibly powerful tool for your business, but behind it, you have to build, think, test, correct and learn. It takes a lot of time. It takes work, but when the foundations are right (thank you, Valérie), you move forward. This isn’t the first time I’ve called on Valérie, and it certainly won’t be the last. In my view, Valérie has something extra: she’s always ahead of her time. It’s quite amazing how she sees changes coming, understands them quickly and, above all, knows how to turn them into something concrete and useful. I will keep calling on her, without hesitation, to go even further in my expertise. And of course, I recommend her with my eyes closed! Thank you so much, Valérie, for being in my world 😍 Annick Think of it like hiring. You would never hire twelve employees on the first day of your company, before you even have a client to serve. With AI employees, we do exactly that, all the time. AI amplifies what is already there. When you know what your business needs, it amplifies your clarity. When you don’t, it amplifies the noise, very fast and very well. And finding clients can start much simpler than the market makes you believe. [ton exemple très simple pour commencer, le même que dans le script] If you are wondering what an AI team really costs once it runs, I opened my whole ledger, numbers included, in What My AI Team Really Costs Me (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/p/the-real-cost-of-ai-employees?r=2t5zyu). Questions to sit with Before your next purchase, take ten quiet minutes with these. Write the answers by hand, or say them out loud on a walk. * What does my business need first, this month? * Which tool, course or program did I buy hoping it would save me, and what was I really looking for? * Where do I feel seen in my work, and where am I one more square in a crowd? * Which of the things I am trying to build were my own idea, and which ones was I told to build? * What would I start with tomorrow if I trusted what I already know? You may be surprised by how much is already there. Listen and go deeper If you want to explore why being comes before doing, especially now, my book Being Is the New Doing (https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct) is on Amazon. And if you would rather sit by the fire with me, one to one, my Power Week (https://valeriedemont.ch/en/powerweek/) is exactly that. Five sessions in one week, one person per week, three weeks this quarter: starting October 19, November 2 and December 7. We point it where you need it most, toward your 2027 strategy or your first AI employees, and you leave knowing what your business needs first, built from your own centre. The week is USD 3,500, and the Monday Guarantee refunds you in full if our first session doesn’t feel right (once the pre-work is done). If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who is still drowning in their tabs. It might be the first time someone really sees them this week. Take care of your good vibes, Valérie 💚 Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   31 May 2026

   C'est quoi un employé IA ? (Et pourquoi je refuse de dire « agent »)

   I'm so sorry! I made a mistake and uploaded this podcast to the wrong publication. Anyway, I am grateful to everyone who has listened to this french episode so far, so I am going to leave it here. My apologies to all my English-speaking audience! Un agent IA, c’est un outil. Un employé IA, c’est une présence. Cet épisode, je le voulais court. 11 minutes. Le temps d’un café. Pour te raconter pourquoi je refuse de dire « agent » et pourquoi je dis « employé ». Un outil, on l’utilise. Une présence, on l’entraîne. Tu lui donnes du contexte. Tu lui donnes ta voix. Tu lui donnes tes décisions passées, tes lignes rouges, ta méthode, tes clients. Tu le briefes comme tu briefes une humaine qui débute chez toi. Et au bout de quelques semaines, on ne voit plus que ce n’est pas toi. Dans mon entreprise, j’ai cinq catégories d’employés IA. Les agents de flux. Les créateurs de contenu. Les passeurs. Les sentinelles. Les gardiens de mission. Tu vas découvrir ce que chacun fait dans mon entreprise. Et surtout, dans quel ordre les recruter quand toi tu commences. Chacune de ces recrues, elle peut être à 4 niveaux d’autonomie. Du freelance ponctuel au directeur qui tourne tout seul, en passant par l’employée interne et l’employée avec les clés. La règle : le but n’est jamais de monter jusqu’au 4. Le but est de choisir le bon niveau pour la bonne tâche. Et la chose que personne ne te raconte quand on te vend « automatise ta vie en 30 jours » : Pour entraîner un employé qui te ressemble, il faut savoir à quoi toi tu ressembles. C’est précisément pour ça que le 19 juin existe. Deux heures en Zoom. Une démo live d’un employé IA. Et surtout, on regarde par où toi tu commences. 🎯 Momentum du 19 juin · valeriedemont.ch/momentum (https://valeriedemont.ch/momentum) Et après ça, on pourra creuser ensemble cet été. Pour aujourd’hui, écoute l’épisode. 11 minutes pour comprendre ce qui change quand on passe d’agent à employé. Prends bien soin de tes good vibes, Valérie Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   10 May 2026

   The Most Underrated Skill in the AI Age

   You know the kind. A migraine that arrives at four in the afternoon and feels like someone strapped a bag of sand to your forehead. Shoulders that creep up to your ears between two meetings and refuse to come back down. A knot in the stomach the morning of the launch. A jaw locked at three a.m. for no reason your brain can name. We have all had one. Probably this week. And what most of us do, with that signal, is reach for an ibuprofen. Or a coffee. Or a deeper breath we forget two minutes later. Last Friday, my client had a migraine. Not one of her usual ones. This one had weight on it. A lead helmet on her head. A bar across her eyes. Fog in her brain. Brief due. Three calls. Inbox that would not quit. She closed the laptop at four thirty. Saturday morning at seven, she called me. Clear. Light. Recalibrated. And she said something I have not stopped thinking about: I think my body did the work I was refusing to do, I’ve been recalibrated. I know that sentence. I have lived it. I still live it, occasionally, on the weeks where I miss the whisper. The shoulders climb. The jaw locks. The stomach turns at a meal I love. And every single time, when I trace it back, the same thing is true. Something I said yes to was not aligned. A collaboration that did not smell right. A direction I took because the logic was clean, even though the body was already saying no. Here is why this matters more than ever right now. In 2026, most of us are no longer working only with humans. We are collaborating with AI employees. With agents. With LLMs that produce a draft, a structure, a strategy in thirty seconds. And the question we have to ask, every single time, is not just is this good? The brain can answer that one. Pros and cons, sharp and fast. The real question is the one only the body can answer: Does this sound like me? Is this actually mine? Is this aligned for my company, for my voice, for the work I am here to do? You will feel it as a small expansion in the chest, or a small contraction in the gut. You will feel it before you can put words on it. And learning to hear that, early, before the migraine, before the contract you will regret, before the launch that drains you, that is the most underrated business skill of 2026. Not prompt engineering. Not productivity stacks. The body, in conversation with the work. It is a skill, in the real sense. Something to tame, to hear, to respect. Something that gets sharper with practice and dulls when ignored. In this episode, I share what my client said on Saturday morning, why this listening matters more than ever in the AI age, and one small invitation for your week ahead. 📚 Order Being Is the New Doing on Amazon → https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct (https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct) 🌿 Save the date: Tuesday June 23, 2026. I am opening Momentum, the English version. My first ever group offering in English. Two hours, once a month, for conscious entrepreneurs who want to keep training that listening in real time. DM me, or subscribe to be on the list when registration opens (https://valeriedemont.ch/en/momentum-circle/). Take care of your good vibes, Valérie Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe (https://demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Podcast Authority Score: 14 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

28

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0