The AI Habit That Will 10X Your Business Growth!

Imagine if every week, every business area did a five minute demo. Each employee in a business area did a five minute demo on something they used any AI tool for, and they had to show one thing they use ChatGPT for every week. That alone would catapult our company. The thing that I've been thinking a lot about is AI. And I know that we're all kind of hitting it and getting talked about it and trying it internally. So I'd love to get some, a little bit of discussion around that today, but I was at a conference in Dubai and one of the other speakers was speaking about AI. And I guess at any of these events these days, AI tends to be a bit of a topic of discussion. And in my presentation I said to the group that AI is not going to replace employees inside of companies as much as employees using AI is going to replace employees inside of companies. So what I really mean by that is AI is a tool. And it's a tool that virtually all of us need to get much better at because our roles are at risk and our companies are at risk to people who actually can leverage it more than we can. Two of my friends, Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan, wrote a book called who not how and it's now about knowing who can solve it for us versus how to do it. You don't have to know how to do those things. What you have to do is make a list of all the stuff that you guys do, make a list of how much time you do that, make lists of all the stuff that are repetitive actions, right? Even if they're small little things, but you're doing them often, and then give that list to somebody with AI experience. Some 22 year old who can come in with, you know, zapier or can come in with Lindy is like, is like zapier for, for AI only. But if you can get a Lindy expert, somebody off of upwork or somebody that you network into can come into your office and say, here's all this that we do. They can then automate all that stuff for you and set you guys up and show you where the biggest savings are. So that's an opportunity. This iPhone is a great tool, but most of us have no idea all the features and functionality that are on it. Give you one that blew my mind. We learned this about a year and a half ago. You know when you're trying to type something and you can never, you have to like put that. Got to move your finger to get the cursor to go somewhere because you can't get the cursor in the right place. Do you know if you actually press the space bar and then move your hand while your finger is on the phone, while you're just pressing, you press this. The space bar is your cursor. When you press the space bar and go like this, the mouse goes exactly to the letter that you want it at in seconds. I didn't know that. That's just a simple tool that saves us so much time. Right? Or the chat, like the, the autocorrect features. You know, when you type something in and it can autocorrect, that's been something that's been available on every computer for 24 years for free. So there's all of these tools that are time saving things that most people never even touch on. That's a really good starting point, is starting where we already use stuff and then, you know, have them give us the kind of insights around there. I use Grammarly. Grammarly is one that just, you know, saves me forever but also makes me not look like an idiot. So yeah, I think that's a smart starting point is going with the tools that we have. It can be very dangerous and overwhelming when we have consultants coming in showing us all the things that can get very kind of big and very kind of scary and, and very expensive. We have to actually use and trust a little bit of our entrepreneurialness and kind of bring them back in to say, let's just do the critical stuff right now. Let's work on that and let's not get into the weeds on everything else. Work on the critical few things versus the important many things. I think we have an opportunity that we could automate everything. But what's the point? Remember years ago at, when I was the COO at 1-800-got junk. We did a, an audit of all of the threats and risks that the company was facing. And we ended up with about 15 different potential threats that the company was facing. So what we decided to do is look at the threats as a percentage chance that they could happen. And then what was the cost to the company or the cost to the employees or the cost to our customers if it happened? One example was that if there was an earthquake, you know, if there was an earthquake in Vancouver, could it shut down the company? I was like, yeah, it totally could. Holy. That's crazy. What could we do, right? And, and they wanted us to put in place an earthquake proof, vibration proof floor in our server room. So our IT guy was spending some time talking about it. I'm like, wait a second. The chance of there actually being an earthquake is very, very low. And we run a garbage company. Let's just take a look at how much it's going to cost us. It was $78,000 to put in this floor and it was going to be like a week of his time doing it. We're like, you know what? Kill it. Like, it's just not worth. We're not a billion dollar company. I'm not going to spend $78,000 on this stupid project just because it could happen one day in the next thousand years. And even if, like, so I think we have to be careful with these AI consultants coming in and showing us the gazillion things we could be working on. Because the reality is we have a business to run and if we can just automate some of the critical things because then we also have to spend time keeping it all up to date forever. Right? That's the danger. Foreign I was talking to a CEO the other day on a coaching call and the CEO said, what are some really good interviewing questions that I could ask somebody about tenacity? And in the old days I had to keep these things memorized in my head. And now I'm like, well, let's open up Chat GPT and just say, what are some questions that we can ask candidates about tenacity if they're in a leadership role? And it pops out some questions. And then he goes, wow, that's amazing. I'm like, but do you know what to do with those questions? And he goes, no. I said, so then I go, how would you probe around each of those questions? So then it goes even deeper. So just ask the tool as if it's a, an employee who has a lot of skills. You know, if you had the world expert on interviewing sitting in front of you and you were getting to ask them questions for a half an hour, pretend that they're chatgpt. Just keep asking CHAT GPT follow up questions. Follow what you're asking and the information gets richer. Could. Could you turn that into an SOP for us? Could you make that a form for me? Could you turn it into a checklist for us? Could you create some graphical images for like, it's amazing to watch Chat GPT create images for stuff that you're thinking of working on. I was coaching another CEO the other day and he runs huge kind of conferences and kind of boat trips, I guess would be the best way to describe it. And so as we're sitting talking, he's organizing something called the Peace Cruise right now over in Japan. And we were talking about it and I'm like, what are the dates? And he's like, he gave me the dates and I said, you know, you should just start running ads right now on Facebook and Instagram to a WhatsApp list and just at least are getting all the people interested so that when you launch the website you can pre sell everything right away. So as I was talking to him, I put in the Chat GPT. Can you create five images about a boat cruise called the Disc Cruise, use the Peace logo and some Japan images and here are the dates and it's done by a group called Insider Expeditions. Boom, it did it. And when it did it, the actual work that it gave was pretty unbelievable. So I'll show you what it came up with. Those are all pretty good enough to drop onto Instagram to build it a WhatsApp page. And those were designed by me who has zero creative skills whatsoever. Literally as I was talking to him, it blew his mind. So this is the kind of stuff that I don't know if it can do it, but if you just ask it if it can do it, you'd be amazed at what it can do. The Chat GPT side and Gro Perplexity, just use these as if it's an expert sitting in front of you and keep asking it follow up questions for anything. And I think that's what we have to get our employees doing is every day get your employees to use ChatGPT4 to just ask it questions. Hey, I do this every day. How could I do it faster? Teach me more, show me, create the sop, whatever. Imagine if every week every business area did a five minute demo. Each employee in a business area did a five minute demo on something they used any AI tool for and they had to show one thing they use Chat GPT for every week. That alone would catapult our company. Right? Even if it's I wrote an email. Cool, that's great. Somebody, you know, did it to, I don't know, write a follow up sequence. That's even better, right? What are we using it for? Just sharing what we. Because right now nobody knows. It's like we all walk around with this going, going, hey, this is cool. But we don't use any of the functionality that's in here. I've always believed that there's not a single problem inside of our company that writing a check can't solve. So if we have money, if we have gross margin, we can make all the problems go away. So I tend to hire people on the sales and marketing side first because they can actually grow revenue. So the easiest way to get profitability is to grow revenue. The second way that you can grow revenue is by decreasing your cost of goods sold and then by reducing some of your overhead. I was just playing with these for fun last night. I want to show you something, and it's really kind of scary and crazy at the same time. Let's say that scenario A is that you have $5 million in revenue with 80% cost of goods sold. That might include, like, your sales and marketing costs, you know, your cost of the product or whatever. So you have a gross margin of a million dollars left, right? You start with 5, 80% cost goods. All you got a million dollars in gross margin. You got a million dollars in overhead, so Your profit is zero. Most CEOs are out there saying, we need to grow our revenue, we need to grow our revenue. Let's get our revenue up to 6 million bucks, right? That's going to help us. Well, now scenario B is you get your revenue up to 6 million bucks, but your cost of goods stalled, have stayed the same. So now you've only got $1.2 million in gross margin. So now your overhead hasn't changed. You got a million dollars in overhead still, and now you've only made 2, 200 grand. So the CEO has pushed so hard to get our revenue up by, you know, whatever that is. 15% up to 6, 6 million, and we're still not making any money. So really, then what are they going to do next year? We got to get to 7 million. We got to get to 8 million. Okay, maybe, or maybe what we should do is, is get our scenario C, maybe let's get our cost of goods sold from 80 down to 70. That drops 1.5 million into gross margin. And if we could actually find $100,000 in waste inside of our company some, because there is waste everywhere that get rid of some of that overhead. Now we've got a net profit of 600 grand. So all of a sudden, we've got three times the amount of EBITDA and we did the same amount of revenue. So I'm like, well, what if we actually did less revenue? What if we only did 4 million in revenue? What if we fired some of our bad people? We fired some of our bad custom customers. We got rid of the customers that cost us so much. We only did, you know, dealt with referrals. We got rid of, like, some of our marketing and sales spend whatever it was going to be you do 4 million at 60 gross margin, you got 1.6 million in gross margin. You get your overhead down because you fired a couple of the bad people, you fired a couple of toxic people. Now all of a sudden you got $800,000 in profit with doing less revenue. I think often we end up focusing on hiring the wrong people. Every mid level manager's solution to every problem tends to be hire more people. If you take any junior manager, any first time manager, their solution to every problem is we need to hire more. And all that does is build out the actual overhead inside of the company. My starting point is first hire more of the sales and marketing to drive revenue. Second, give your management team the skill set to do more with less people faster. And then third, try to hire some of the people that are able to get more done with less people. But I try to avoid more overhead. More overhead, more overhead. The second part of it is giving your management team the skills to actually do interviews. I don't like HR department as a department to do recruiting and interviewing. That's just more overhead that you know. If you're only hiring three people a year, what do you need overhead to have three people? What you need to do is have the base layer skills so the CEO and the people that are running the business know how to do interviews, know how to do job postings. Maybe you know which recruiting firms to use. Maybe you use recruiting firms that are looking for fractional or overseas people. So you've cut your overhead. Like I hired a full stack marketing manager who in the United States if I showed you their job description as they'd be like a junior VP or a senior director, they'd be about 150, 160,000 a year U.S. i've got a full time and they're based in Argentina and they're $55,000 a year. So I've decreased my overhead by 70%, 65%. Getting the same level of talent by getting an executive recruiting agency that's based in Europe that only hires Latin American talent. We've got two cold callers that are starting this week. One that is just doing outbound on all of our social media. So contacting any of the new followers, any people that comment basically like a and they're literally following a script. So there will be no phone calls, it's going to be copying, pasting all the messaging. We're giving them the script and the kind of the decision tree of what to send. So it's a very kind of entry Level almost data entry ish kind of role. We've got somebody who has done sales for three years, super high cultural fit. They're two, $2,000 a month all in. That's 24 grand a year for a full time salesperson. So for me it's how do I hire people that are sales and marketing, how do I get them offshore, how do I save a bunch of that additional overhead? And then once I know I've got that gross margin and revenue coming in, then I can put the better mousetrap in place. Second, the third part is, is the skill set around interviewing. Right? We didn't have an HR department at 1-800-got junk until we got to about a hundred employees at our head office. We had someone in finance who managed the payroll and their benefits and their sick days and policies and procedures and make sure we had the employment contracts all signed and dotted. That was a finance role that managed that. But we trained everybody how to do a job posting. Now we train them how to run a job posting through ChatGPT. We trained them where to post them, we trained them on how to do interviews. We, we would, I would literally video people doing a job interview and then I would give them feedback and critique on how to improve. We made them read books, we brought in teachers around. So it was a core skill that we made sure that everyone got really good at. Whenever you learn something, then go and practice it, try it, do it, then go back and learn it again, right? Then practice it, try it, do it, then go back and read it again. So the going through that invest the interviewing module of investing your leaders four or five times over the course of a year while you're doing interviews, that's where the real power comes in. Read the book who work on it for a year, then go back and read it again. A leader's core job is to grow people, not to do work. Your core role is to grow the skills, the confidence and the connections of all of the people that report to you and of all their team. That's your job, your to do list. Every single human that I've ever met writes to do list and then they make their list. It doesn't have our name on it. So our job is to delegate all of those things on our list and then we end up going, well, nobody can do it. Cool. Pick someone, delegate it to someone and then spend your time giving them the skills and the confidence and the connection so they can keep doing that. So if you are worried that they're not going to be Able to do it perfectly, then train them to do it perfectly. Even if that's setting up a screen capture so that you can do it. ChatGPT actually can create SOPs. You can literally get it to watch a video of you and create an sop of the video of you doing the work. And then it can put it like, so we have to get better is how do we grow people? How do we delegate more? How do we grow people? Yes, hire people. But she might be the kind of person that if you just took for coffee and said, I love you, I really want you to be here forever. I'm worried that you're hitting your glass ceiling because you're so scared of technology, nervous of technology. So we either have to help you get there or I have to help you get a job somewhere else. And I really don't want it to be somewhere else. But that really is where we are. Can I walk you through this? Can I teach you? Can I show you? Can I coach you? Can we help you? Right, but she needs to have that discussion with you that she's safe and she needs to decide if she's going to grow or if she's going to go. If our core job is to grow people and it's to grow the skills, confidence and connections of people. Do we want to spend time with our underperformers, bottom performers, or do we want to spend time with our A's? What we end up doing is saying, he's so good, he's so amazing, I don't need to spend time with him. So what you do is you need to spend time with your underperformer. Do you know the best golfers, the best volleyball players all have coaches. Every person that goes to the Olympics has a mindset coach, a nutrition coach, a fitness coach, a skills coach, they're all getting coached at the highest level. And what you're doing is you're coaching somebody who you're worried about should probably be leaving. What if you could spend time with him? What if you could grow his skills? What if you could grow his interviewing skills? What if he could grow his delegation skills? What if he could grow. If you spent more time with your A's, he could take way more stuff off your plate. Where do we spend our time is skill up. The leaders and managers hire the revenue producing people, try to get stuff off our plate that becomes kind of the, the grinding stuff that drains us of energy, that is minimum wage job. And then stop with the excuses that we all give ourselves that I don't have anyone who can do it. Cool if I put a gun to your head and said take 18 things that are on your to do list today and you have to delegate to somebody and you're allowed to train them for 15 minutes per task, you could all get it done. What we end up don't doing is we end up working harder and we're like the fly trying to bang our head on the the window. And if we work harder and longer hours, we're going to end up dead on the windowsill. You got to trust your spider senses that that intuition that you have. I think women tend to trust it more than men do or women certainly have it more than men have it. Women need to trust it more and not think that there's something wrong. So when your intuition is telling you something, it's right. You just need to trust that. So you need to sit down and talk about kind of almost putting in place a personal development plan and just saying. And the way that coaching works best is showing the person the goals that you have for them or what they're supposed to be focusing on and then asking them what areas do you think you're doing really well in that you should continue doing and let them talk. And then, and you can do this over coffee, you can do it over a walk. It doesn't have to be a formal PDP process. And then you can just say to them, where do you think you need to improve? And get them to give you the areas they need to improve. And then you show them areas that you feel they should continue and then you hit them with the areas they need to improve. That's the starting point. The second step of it is do you agree? And if they agree and they buy into it, do you want to get better at those? And then you got to get the buy in around that. And then the last part is what do you need from me to help you get there and what are you going to do differently to help you get there? But you need to get on the same page with where, where you need them to go and what they're doing well. The reason you start with what you're doing well is it gives them a baseline of trust and feeling secure and safe to then know that they have areas to work on even can be helpful by you going. By the way, I at something like here's something I'm working on. I really struggle with this which makes them feel safe that oh, even my boss is working on getting better at something too. But then they have to buy in and agree that they want to get better at it. If they don't agree with what they have to do differently, that's a big flag. If they don't want to get better at it, like, they're just fine with where they are. That's a big flag. And if they're not willing to do any of the work, that's another big flag. So we were sitting down with the head of our call center years ago and she had about 50 direct reports at the time. And four of her direct reports had come to us saying that she needed to change or they were potentially quitting. And we're like, wow, this is serious. Like, we need to sit down with Shirley. So we sat down with Shirley, we told her what was going on with the team. She was super defensive. So we gave her two books to read over the weekend. One was the five dysfunctions of a Team and one was Leadership and Self Deception. And we said, we need you to read these over the weekend. Take tomorrow off, which is Friday. We'll pay you for tomorrow. Just spend the. Spend the weekend reading through these books. Come in Monday and tell us what you need from us and where you're going to start changing because this needs to change. She came back Monday and she's like, guys, them, I'm not changing. I built this place. If they can't line up behind me, we're done. I'll fire them and replace them. And we're like, you're done. That was it. Shirley Quinn got fired that day. And Shirley was the reason the call center got to where it was. She started it from nothing, built it, systemized it, but she couldn't change. And she wasn't willing to change. Even though she knew she was strong, she knew that we loved her. She knew that she had our backs. She wasn't willing to change, didn't want to change, so we changed her. If I talk about meetings, some of the meetings, when you're an early stage, like a 10 person company, 5 person, 20 person company, you don't have to have them in the way they're prescribed, but they need to be something that you as a leader do. So you as a leader need to think about your annual planning meeting. So, like when I do mine, I don't go off site. I don't take the whole team off site. But I literally sit down and come up with my goals for the year. I come up with my plan to hit each of those goals. I revisit my vivid vision, and then I sit down with my goals and my Plan and my vivid vision. And I'm doing it this week with my team, where they're actually getting briefed on, here's all the goals, here's where we're going, here's how we're getting there. All this kind of stuff, right? We're revisiting it again. So my quarterly is the same thing. I sit down, I revisit. But if you have a management team or a leadership team, then you start putting those structures in place. But those, those meetings are there as your company starts to scale. The key is if they do the book report, if they do the book report, you know that they were paying attention, you know that they learned something, and that's all we're trying to do is move the needle, right? We're not looking for perfect. Book the meeting for half the time. You first think about booking it for. So when you're, when you're thinking about, let's book for, for an hour. No, book it for 30 minutes or let's get together for a day, book it for half a day. So always book for the quickie time, right? A little bit less. Finish every meeting and finish every phone call five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. So here's some stuff around financials. Every month for the next three or four or five months, have your leadership team go through the general ledger and look at every single expense in every single business area. I mean, look at every single expense and have them find some areas that maybe are potential waste. Twice a year, do a tech stack audit and go through a list of all the software licenses that your company has and how many seats you've signed up for in all those and who you can actually delete or reduce or can we get rid of them? It's incredible how much cost just kind of builds up there. I have a CEO that I'm coaching right now that is canceling every credit card their company has, setting up all new credit card accounts so that the, the old numbers don't get transferred over automatically to the new number by Amex and Visa to force himself to manually sign up for stuff again. He's like, the only way I can get off of everything we're we're sending on auto is just to literally change all the numbers. Not a bad way to look at that one, too. The next one is to sit down and think about your numbers. I was talking to somebody at Mind Valley in Dubai about this and I said he was a professional volleyball players. I said, if you and one of your buddies played me with five of My best friends from college. How often would you win? He goes, all of them. Like, we would always beat you. We would beat you every game. I'm like, So I have two A players that maybe I pay $200,000 a year, or I have six B players that I pay a hundred thousand dollars a year. Now I got six people that are costing me 600 grand. I got two A's that are costing me 400 grand. I could fire four people just to hire two of the better people. There's another data point that the square root of your number of employees, so roughly the square root of 50 is 7, right? Seven people in your company produce 50% of your company's output. The other 43 people produce 50% of your company's output. There's a lot of potential time and waste and energy and around stuff. So there's often doing the activity inventory. Like, what are people working on? Why are we working on it? There's some danger in automating everything. The first step is, can we stop it? Like, forget about automating it. Do we even need to do it? Like, do we even need to do those things and fill out those things and ask those things? Then can we optimize it, right? Can we do it faster or better or leaner? Then can we automate it? And then worst case, can we outsource it to like a freelancer? Last case is hiring anybody in North America to do the work. Often an early stage manager walks in and goes, we need to hire Bob. We need to hire more people. No, do we even need to do that work anymore? Can we optimize the work? Can we automate the work? Can we outsource it to the Philippines or Brazil or somewhere else? Then can we hire full time here or can we hire part time in North America? So I think if you do a review across your business systematically around that stuff, those are really, really helpful because it isn't get more revenue all the time.