Pareto 20, No. 1: Lilach Bullock, for marketing a one-person business can actually run

Two decades of marketing, a solo consultancy, and a habit of naming what she pays for and what she stopped paying for. The top seat on the list, with a disclosure you should read.

Seat 1 on The Pareto 20 is Lilach Bullock, and it is the seat for the question most solo operators actually have: which of these tools will bring in customers, and which are expensive noise.

Who she is

Bullock is a British marketer based in Israel who describes 21 years in the field. Her LinkedIn history shows two agencies before the current work, Socialable (2006 to 2016) and Lilach Bullock Limited (2016 to December 2025); she now operates alone as an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO. In her own words, "probably half the people I work with" are solopreneurs, and "small business owners who do everything themselves are the people AI changes the most." That is the reader this list is built for, and she writes to that reader on purpose.

What to read her for

Task-by-task tool choices, not a stack. Which AI Tools Are Best for Different Business Tasks (August 31, 2026) maps tools to jobs: which model for long writing, Perplexity for sourced research, Otter against Fireflies for meetings. It also carries the kind of warning this list rewards: "do not use ChatGPT or Claude to do your actual bookkeeping categorisation or tax calculations," backed by a client whose £4,200 expense was mislabelled at tax time.

What she pays, in pounds. The Best AI Tools for Small Business Owners (What I Pay For) (July 20, 2026) lists her subscriptions with prices and argues that most small businesses do not need another tool, they need to use the AI already inside software they pay for. Her example is a booking system that cut client no-shows from 18% to 9% at zero extra spend.

Three categories she dropped. In the tools she uses every day (June 28, 2026) she rules out AI social schedulers after trying three ("The content quality was uniformly poor and it sounded nothing like me"), one-click SEO tools after a three-month test ("The results were indistinguishable"), and customer-service chatbots for small sites. Each verdict names a category and a test, which is rarer than it should be.

The wrapper problem, named. On Jasper, Copy.ai and Writesonic (June 21, 2026): "Most of these are just ChatGPT with a prettier interface. You are paying for branding and templates, not better AI."

Start here

What I Pay For. It shows the method in one page: exact costs, a genuinely unglamorous recommendation, and a client case with a number attached.

What she sells, and what that means for you

This is the disclosure that matters most on her seat. Her primary business is consulting and done-for-you implementation. She also sells sponsored articles, link insertions and newsletter mentions to brands, priced from several hundred to several thousand pounds, and her posts carry affiliate links, which she says she discloses in the opening paragraphs. Sponsored placements are marked with a sponsored link attribute per UK and US rules. Two things follow. First, read the disclosure line at the top of any post before you act on a recommendation in it. Second, there is a tension worth knowing about: an August 18, 2026 post describes most "must-have AI stack" content as affiliate link padding, and her site sells exactly that kind of placement. The posts we cite above are her own what-I-pay-for pieces, where the verdicts run against paid tools as often as for them, but the tension is real and we would rather you saw it here than found it later.

Not for you if

You run a marketing team rather than being one, or you want deep technical automation. Her strength is the one-operator version of marketing: what to pay for, what to switch off, and how to get the tool you already own to do the job.

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Part of The Pareto 20, twenty creators who get a solo operator most of the way on AI decisions. How we chose them. Facts above were checked against the creator's own pages on September 12, 2026.