E.87 – SPECIAL: AI Will Replace Most Jobs – Here's The Executive Survival Playbook (Part 2)

We don't really know what the world is going to look like in the influence of AI particularly with most of our audience are in go to market. When we talk about people wanting to pivot, what comes to your mind?

I recognize that oftentimes we're scared to make a pivot because we can't go from making several hundred thousand dollars a year to maybe not at all. Let's focus on what we can control, and our mindset is a big part of that. The number one question I can ask clients is, what would your life look like with Les? They're already living a life of opulence, and they're afraid of losing it, but they're typically afraid of how they're going to be perceived by others in comparison. Is the thief of joy.

The original title that we discussed was this whole big perception that, you know, basically people lied to us about job security and that we're headed for an employment crisis. What would you say for our listeners?

Don't leave your life into anyone else's hands but your own.

Welcome back to what makes you tick. Jacob, thank you so much for being with us again.

Happy to be here for part two.

Part two, Part two. Rich, what did we talk about last time?

We talked about a lot. I'm sure a lot of people will have just watched part one, and now they're coming on to part two. If you've not watched part one, go and watch it now and then come. Come back to this version. But what we talked about is the employment crisis. And there's certainly a perception in the world that we're in an employment crisis. And the data is that many, many hundreds of millions of jobs will be lost through A.I. you know, there's tariffs, there's all these macroeconomic conditions. The rhetoric is that the future is bleak. And we reframed a lot of those things. And we talked about how maybe the perception that job security even existed in the first place maybe is a myth and what might be a different path. We also gave some very interesting initial ideas around how people can think differently and what they can go and do. And what I would love to do, and luckily Jacob said that he's up for this one, is like really getting into the detail of some of Jacob's frameworks around how he actually coaches and supports executives to take control of their career. To think of their career in terms of being the locust of control. These are things that we're going to go and influence, and we're not going to let the situation affect our outcome. We're going to let our attitude and what we do influence the outcome. So what I'd really love to know is if we talk about all this topic, Jacob and I know it's been about a couple of weeks now since we did the last recording. What's been running through your mind since we last spoke about this topic, of people's perception that we're in a employment crisis and that they're. The market is incredibly tough right now for executives.

I'll be honest, I haven't been putting that much thought into it because my approach hasn't changed in the slightest. Now I will hear from my clients, they'll constantly have this negative self talk and what about the market and what about this? Or I'm disappointed or I should accept less or there's all this. I know how it's going to go out, even though I haven't seen how anything's played out yet. They know how it's going to be, even though they haven't put the effort forward yet. And so my approach hasn't really changed in the last 10 years on that, which you alluded to earlier on. You know, if you're going to pretend you're a victim in all this, you're going to get those types of results naturally. Now, it's not to be overly naive. And sometimes I'll get pushback on this, too, because I look relatively young. And sometimes, like I had a client said, that's just your youthful naivety thinking.

Right.

That's not the real world that you're living in. And I just have to ignore it because I don't want to live in a world where I'm going to be a victim and I don't want to live in a world where these things aren't going to work out. And I'm not going to live in a world where my family relies on me and I don't rely on my own self to help us get there. Right. So in terms of, like, how we thought about it, I've seen some changes in the market. They don't surprise me. I've had a lot of folks texting me about, hey, what do you think about Trump's negotiation plan and how this is playing out, what we're doing and how we're rallying around that. So I've answered some interesting political questions. But in the scheme of things, so much of this is out of your control. What are you going to influence about it? Right. And the people listening to this podcast, I seriously doubt that anyone listening to this podcast has the influence to control the way the world's going to be. Right. There's only a handful of people that can do that. Right. And the ones that are controlling the ones we can see, we don't know who they are. Right. They're like the big corporations and things that are, that are shifting this. So you could try your hardest to read the tea leaves and you'll probably be wrong most of the time. Instead, let's focus on what we can control, and our mindset is a big part of that.

Right.

And you had brought some things up in the green room about, you know, how do we make pivots and how do we change course, and I think that's wise. It's pretty obvious that AI is going to be very disruptive. If it's not obvious to you, you should probably pull your head out of the sand and stop being scared of it and start embracing it to some degree if you want to have a semblance of job security. Right? Or at least skill match that people are looking for in the future. Like, I've heard more and more from clients and like, there are a lot of talking heads on AI that are just kind of scratching the surface. And there are companies that are really trying to transform everything they're doing with AI. I mean, was it Shopify said, don't even hire anybody unless AI can't do the job kind of thing? Like those commentary pieces are coming out, which is, by the way, not surprising with how capitalism works, right? It's, oh, can someone cheaper do this? Can we outsource this to another country? Oh, it's expensive to outsource it now because we're getting our asses tariffed off, right? Other countries are saying, hey, what if we took advantage of a country that lets us employ slave labor and then transfer all of our stuff in to drop costs? Right now we're being punished for that. Go figure, right? So AI is really no different than what's been happening in the past, but you might as well align with some of those skill sets if you want to be considered the one that rises through it versus the one that gets replaced through it.

When you're thinking about people reinventing themselves in this pivot, and you quite rightly say that most people are going to have to pivot because we don't really know what the world is going to look like in the influence of AI, particularly with most of our audience are in go to market, that will be massively disruptive from everything from the way that businesses charge to the way that people Consume technology to the way that they like to buy. Fundamentals will stay the same. But there's going to be a big shift. So unless people are already thinking about I'm going to need to be ready to pivot and I shouldn't be scared of it. They're probably already behind, but some people are just going, look, I'm not really happy with what I've been doing for the last 20 odd years. You know, I'm good at it, I've made a career from it, but, but I don't have the love for it anymore. And I'd quite like to pivot. I'd like to go and follow my passions a bit more, but I'm really scared about taking a big drop in salary. You know, I don't know if I'm going to be accepted, you know, will I even get that opportunity? So when we talk about people wanting to pivot, what comes to your mind.

That that opens the door to a big psychological question in a lot of ways. So one question I ask clients that are feeling that way is it. I recognize that oftentimes we're scared to make a pivot because we can't go from making several hundred thousand dollars a year to maybe not at all and being at high risk, taking that step back with the lifestyle creep that we've had and especially with how we have this global consumerism taking off primarily in the United States, like feeding that perpetual, like gotta buy, gotta have, gotta do more. So this is a psychological shift where the number one question I can ask clients is what would your life look like with less? Just to see if they're scared of it right now. I don't know if this is the perfect approach. I did this for myself because there was a period in my twenties where I was homeless and I really didn't know what I was going to do. And this was 10 years ago. This wasn't like 20 years ago. It was not that long ago. It's still relatively fresh in my memory of the pain and, and not knowing if you had enough money on your charge card to fill your gas tank kind of thing. Right. You're only filling it up a little bit, driving a little bit, trying to make some money and then filling it back up kind of thing. And finances kind of dominate everything at that stage. But I was, I was homeless for a period and I was in this, this relatively, I'd say the geographic climate was relatively mild. So it wasn't frustrating to be homeless there. It was in California, in Northern California, in Sacramento, and I lived in this park for a while, and I remember being happy with that, which sounds kind of crazy. And I don't want to dismiss, like, what homelessness means for folks, right? I would say I was a privileged homeless person, right? Where it was more out of pride and choice of couldn't afford, like, standard things. I didn't want to be the bum on my friend's couches kind of thing. So I just tried to support myself and I found that this is okay. And again, this isn't to dismiss the greater challenges of homelessness, but I was like, I'm okay with nothing. In fact, I like having nothing because driving around, like, when I got a vehicle later and not having a bunch of crap in it, not having to move like a bed and all that, albeit a pain in the ass, those are nice luxuries to have. Like, being able to up and leave is very liberating and free. Now, for most of my clients, they would have to screw up year after year after year after year to go from their multimillion dollar house to a $500,000 house and having to move from a big tech city like San Francisco to, you know, outside of Salt Lake City or something, right? So to a flyover state or Ohio or something where it's not considered as successful or sexy as the big kind of coastal towns in the United States. So when you ask them, like, hey, what does your life look like with less, they're like, oh, I would have more time to be with my kids. And then they find joy in that, right? And then, oh, I wouldn't have this big mortgage over my head or these three car payments or this guest house in the Rocky Mountains or whatever. Like, they're already living a life of opulence and they're afraid of losing it, but they're typically afraid of how they're going to be perceived by others. And comparison is the thief of joy, right? Like, when you're trying to compare, you're like, what's the point? There's nobody really out there that you're never gonna win. It's not a game you can win. At the end of the day, we all end up in the same place, right? Wherever that is. And you might as well just give it your all and do the things that you really love. So this does open a psychological. I know we wanted to get tactical. That's not tactical at all. Like, oh, now I'm having this existential crisis because of Jacob, right? But when I ask people, what does your life look like with less? Sometimes it Means the hardest part is a difficult conversation with your husband or your wife, right? Oh, are they going to love me if I make half as much money? Right? And with my wife, she'd be like, hell yes, please work less. Like, we want more time with you. I don't need to have this nice car, right? I don't need to have these things. I want you to. And so that in itself, if you can ask those questions and you have people to talk to around you and you can build that support, most people that you're working with in your circle will say, man, I want that for you. Oh, I'm jealous. I wish I can do less, right? And then you start to build that confidence in, okay, now I can take a chance and even if I fail, I'm okay, right? So that's just a mindset thing. Now, I'm not suggesting that when you make it transition that you go from a quarter million a year to 50,000 a year, right? That doesn't necessarily need to be the case. It's just to give you the confidence that if that did happen and you found the need to move into that position, your life would still be okay. That starts to unlock a different type of thinking. So that's more of a, again, more psychological than I intended on getting here. But it's this. I had that risk profile baked into me because if I lost everything, I still felt like I was doing well and it was still better than the situation I grew up in where it was traumatic and dangerous. So one of the reasons I don't mind negotiating with top CEOs is because the worst thing that's going to happen is a lawsuit. Like, they're not going to fight you. You're not in any physical danger. So any fight or flight you're feeling is absolute. Like, what's somebody going to do? And like, you're going to get them in a gotcha moment, you're going to have a lawsuit. And like that's going to be the trickiest thing. Boo hoo. Like you're not in any physical danger, like it might make your life inconvenient, but that's not that bad in the scheme of things. So you can, once you get the kind of confidence that you can survive with much less or your family or the things that matter to you most are always there for you. I had an article on this a while ago and I took it down. I probably need to rewrite it, but I used to have my own hierarchy of needs all jacked up. My top priority was health and then it was like sex, and then it was like friends, and then it was like, maybe family after that. And then like stuff like physical things. And now it's faith is like number one and health is number two. Because without health, I can't even be there for my family or friends, right? And then it's my family, which sounds weird. Everyone says family first and like, family's third on my list. You have faith, health, family. If those two things aren't there before, I can't be there for my family meaningfully. Then it's friends, then career's like five or six now. And then stuff isn't even on that list, right? So, like, sometimes it's about reprioritizing. And this quote that you probably hear this come up all the time is, everyone says they would die for their family, but would you live for them? And that one always is tricky. Like, you're always willing to, like, I'll die, but I won't eat healthy for them and I won't run for them and I won't get a job that doesn't kill me and. Or that has me so stressed out that when I see my, my kids, they're strangers. A friend of mine, like, I kind of pushed this on her a little bit because, like, that's something I, like, always see a lot of potential in people. And she went from $50,000 a year in a community manager role to a chief marketing officer role, making a quarter million a year. But what I didn't see happen in between is her spouse now expected her to make that money. She no longer saw her kids as frequently as she wanted. She uses the language. It became a luxury to put my kids to bed at night. And so did I actually help her make her life better? And did she make her life better by grinding and becoming a C suite executive? Look, it's not for everyone, and that's okay. And so maybe we need to reprioritize our ambition and why we're thinking about that it that way. Like, I always thought, like, CEO is the cream of the crop. Like, oh, I'm going to be a CEO someday. Then I did it and it sucked. So now when I hear somebody say, I want to be a CEO, I don't think they're qualified because if you want to do it, you're not qualified. If you have to do it for your vision and your purpose, then you probably are qualified because there's so much pain that you have to endure. And if you think you're the top dog or whatever, when you're the CEO. You're wrong because you're typically under the boots of the investors. Right. Or the. Who controls the investors too? And then politicians and like. So no matter how you picture your ladder in your life, just recognize you're always under somebody. And so you might as well make a life that's more fulfilling for you, naturally. So that was totally off topic, but here we go. There we are.

But I think it's such an interesting duality because you being willing to let everything go is part of how you got everything that you wanted. You know, it's that thing of, like, if you try and hold it too tight, you're actually going to lose it. Once you let it go, those things actually kind of come to you because you're in the right headspace to actually be able to, like, I can negotiate and not care because I know I'm not going to die at the end, you know, so it's this really interesting duality.

That's a. That's a rubber band effect.

Yeah.

You know, the. It's a rubber band effect. And it's also a negotiation principle that if, you know, it starts with no or no is when the negotiation starts to happen. Like, you have unlimited leverage when you can say no in a job search. When you're interviewing, we were talking a little bit about a challenger sales environment. How I like to challenge, especially in executive roles. You should be challenging the process and challenging the people you're working with to see if there's alignment. You don't challenge something that you absolutely want, like if you're needy for it. So when you challenge and you push back. Hiring managers aren't typically used to that. Like, usually everyone's kissing my ass and groveling and trying to getting the job. I always picture Oliver Twist, which is probably not politically correct, but he's begging, like, can you give me some more, please? And I feel like that's how most people enter interviews. Like, oh, my God, I need to fit into this box and I need to be this person for them. They put a mask on and they forget who they are versus the ones that are who they are and can communicate that well. And challenge like, hey, oh, do we have alignment here? I don't necessarily agree with what you've done. When I've seen that play out in the past, that hasn't worked. People, if you say it in the right way, people aren't offended. They've respected and they're valued. Hey, I'm learning something from this person. And it's an attractant so when you're pushing back, people are attracting to you. It's the same with dating. It's like the last thing you want is someone that's like, oh my God, what are you doing on Friday? What are you doing? Oh, you can't do Friday. What about Saturday? Oh, can I buy you a drink? Can I do like, whoa, Like, I don't need that. I don't care how attractive you are or how attractive you think I am or whatever. Like, that is a turn off. And everyone knows that from the dating circle, I would assume, right? So dating and job search is not that different. The person that plays a little hard to get authentically, like not as a game, but like, comes across as that is more attracting. Oh, that's the one that I need to work a little harder. I need to, you know, be on my toes with and really articulate my thoughts and that's more attractive. Love it.

There's so many things that come to my mind and there's like a million questions I could ask, but I would just try and stick to where we wanted to go because otherwise I could just talk about. Exactly. Now I know we've got listeners here going, get to the blooming tactical stuff. I need to go get a blooming job. So, so, so let's talk about that. Because really when we're talking about pivoting, it's about, well, you actually go, well, what do you actually want? And a lot of the time, like you say what people do is they, they're taught and like they program. And you talked about in the last episode that people go back to like default. They go back to, oh, well, last time I interviewed 10 years ago, this is the way I approached it. And it's like you're playing the game that's been designed for you to lose, where you are a candidate trying to get accepted for a job. But, but you've, you've got different ways of thinking about this. And I just wonder like, if you've turned that into a system where people can go, right from thinking about even what do I even want in the first place to actually going and getting it. What does that look like in the world?

Okay, so let's get tactical. We talk a little bit about go to market strategy, which again, I assume most listeners will understand. Right. So first thing you need to realize is that you're a product and you're selling a professional services deal, right? You're selling probably 40 to 60 hours a week, maybe more. If you're, you know, in top executive Jobs, you have to bundle this product up and you need to see who are the buyers, right? You can do that for companies, but can you do that for yourself? And when you don't know what to do and like, there's a lot of sales folks here, what do you send your bdrs out to do? They go talk to people and they go, hey, do you have this problem? And they say, no, get out of my inbox. Right? And then they do it again and again and again. And the beautiful thing about having an outbound sales team is that you can get more data than you can just kind of on your own. Like, people will make jump snap decisions. Hey, I interviewed for three companies. They all didn't like my ideas, therefore I'm stupid and need to change. No, you just only talk to three people, right? Maybe you need to talk to more people. So if I'm trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my life, even if I'm just trying to find another job and I know what I want to do with my life, the key isn't my Resume or my LinkedIn or the messaging that's on a website. Like, by the time you write your website copy, it's too late. The beautiful thing about sales and BDR work is you can change it on the fly based off who you're talking to. So the number one area when someone's making a transition that I want them to monitor is the number of conversations they have. So the KPI is number of conversations you can have in a week. And if we can scale that number up, whatever the original, I think I could talk to five new people. The mindset we want to be in is okay, but what if you add a zero to that? What would it take to talk to 50 new people? Now, it's not that I want you to talk to 50 people flippantly. It's I want you to go through the thought process on what it would require of you to talk to 50 people. And typically they say, oh man, I would have to. I'd have to call Rich and I'd have to call Tolu and I'd have to ask them for like five people that they can introduce me to. And I'd have to ask those people how to introduce me, and I'd have to. I'd have to convince them to introduce me to people. And then now we're in the right mindset of what you need to be doing. But with five people, like, I can get five people. That's fine, right? I Can do outbound. Like, that's probably not going to work over time because you have to do so much. But I want to get in that mindset. I want you to talk to a certain number of people. I usually let my clients pick that number if that number is very large. What also happens is your time becomes more scarce. As your time becomes more scarce, you get more picky. When you get more picky, you get more clarity. I don't want to talk to that person because I don't want to. Oh, shit. I don't want to do that. Clarity. I want to talk to more people like this because now I'm bogging my calendar down with people that aren't going to do any, oh, I need to talk to more people like this. Now our targeting improves. So this is similar to testing messaging when you're bringing in a product to market. Like, oh, I thought the chief operating officer was the decision maker. It turns out it's a decision bought through committee by the sales leader, the CEO, the investor, and this, right? I need to build connections with the salesperson, the CEO, like all of these. And now it starts to improve your targeting when you measure your conversations. Right now, this doesn't answer the what do you want to do with your life? Question, but I don't think you need to have the answer to that in order to have great conversations. So great conversation could be, you know, rich, you know me better than probably most of the people in my network. Now. I'm thinking about making a change, but to be honest, I don't know how to talk about it yet. But I would value your perspective because you've been in talent for so long. Like, does this path sound crazy? What do you think? Then I might say, if you were in my shoes, what would you be looking at? Now? If I ask 50 different executives that have all, let's say, been more successful than me, this is also part of, you need to put yourself in the room, right? You're the culmination of the five smartest people around you kind of thing. Like, and you kind of behave like them. And if those people are all dumb, like, you probably are in the wrong room kind of deal. It's kind of like that. So I want to ask like 50 people or 100 people or 200 people, like, if you were in my shoes, what would you do? And I'm going to start to collect data, right? And so that data is relatively anecdotal and small scale. So we need to be mindful of that. Just because 200 people say you're dumb doesn't mean you're dumb. Right. So it could just be that you're barking up the wrong tree with those people. Right. And so I think this helps start the process. Don't be plastering your messaging on LinkedIn if you don't know what you want to do yet. Talk to people first. Like, just as you would, I'm bringing a product to market. I have my sales team practicing messaging. I have my AES having conversations with potential buyers. They're telling me they're not interested, but they're telling me that another part of their company may be. So there's some data points there. As I talk to those people, I've noticed that these are the talk tracks that start to resonate with them. Now I'm going to put that on my resume or on my LinkedIn as something I'm interested in. Right. So there's this whole process where oftentimes you don't even need to get to the resume or LinkedIn. You just start talking to people and they say, rich comes to me. You say, jacob, I got somebody you need to talk to right away. You should talk to Tolu. I'll go say, you know, I'll make the warm intro for you kind of deal. And then that conversation goes, tolu hires me and we're good to go. We don't even have to go through the other processes. So, like, through the challenge of trying to find out who you are, you'll likely close deals. And the cool thing about going to market with yourself versus going to market with a product is that with yourself, you just need one right now. Ideally, we can talk about having all your eggs in one basket. Ideally, what's going to happen is you'll have three or four interested people, and then you have to decide which do you like more? Why? And if you can ask why five times, like, why do you like this? Why is that important to you? Why is that thing important to you? And so on. You're going to get to the core of clarity. This is important to me. This company is 200 million. It's on the rise. It's going to IPO. It's going to be a unicorn. It's really compelling. The culture fit was great. This one was a bigger company, but it sounded like there was a little mismatch. And maybe you're. You're now discussing these different opportunities you have. This also creates leverage for your negotiation because you have a choice. And you might say, I'm kind of interested in this. Maybe I don't need to work for them full time. Maybe I can consult for them 10 hours a week, 10 hours a month, get a little side cash, use that learning and take this job full time. So I did that a bit with my career too. Where most of my initial consulting deals started as W2 offers that I negotiated into 1099s because I didn't actually believe in the company that much and I wanted to test the waters first. And I have a client who's chief revenue officer and had a multi billion dollar exit with the company, made tens of millions personally, obviously has a lot of leverage, still wants to work for some reason. I'm not going to give him a hard time for that. So more intellectual stimulation than the need for money. And he has a rule that while he's interviewing for other CRO rules, I won't work for a company unless we consult for three months first. And then he's consulting for two or three companies at a time and deciding which team he thinks has the best potential to grow. Now this is obviously a great first world problem to have, but the point that I'm making is that you can. It's not always all or nothing. So you could man, I'm in this tech job that I hate and I'm in a spreadsheet all day. I'm doing Dreamforce or Salesforce admin work.

Right?

Far from the dream. No offense, Salesforce. Right, but you're doing admin work and you're like man, this is miserable and I want to be doing marketing instead of this admin work. For sake of discussion, let's just start talking to people about marketing. Is that a crazy path for me? Start finding mentors. They start hiring you. Like what are some of the things I could take off your plate? They start hiring you for five hours. Maybe you just start with five hours to build your experience and then pivot, right? And then so at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel of your miserable job. It doesn't always need to be all or nothing. It doesn't need to wait for the layoff. Although the way the layoff is usually a great awakening for folks. That's why we saw this resurgence over Covid of this like great resignation in realignment of the workforce. Like that was a big eye opening moment for folks. And then of course seeing people working on the beach making a million dollars a year probably doesn't help, right? Like how come they can do that? What do I need to do? I guess I need to buy a podcast Set up and start to look like, I'm an influencer, right? But they. You can see this like little bits at a time. Sometimes your hand is forced. But if you can create a light at the end of the tunnel for yourself, that can get your mindset in the right space versus just being trapped. So tacticals, your KPI should be number of conversations you can have in a week in order to build your conversation number and get that metric up. When you have a conversation with anyone in your network, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Two thirds of that conversation should be focused on them. So if it's a 30 minute conversation, I like 22, I want to go a little overkill. 22 minutes should be about them. Then they go, man, we've been talking about me and how you can help me this whole time. Like, what about you? This is the power of reciprocity, is a reciprocity imbalance. So people are more likely to help you. Now, ideally, if we really want to trigger the reciprocity piece, as I'm talking to Rich and I'm learning about, hey, what are some people I can introduce you to? Or some things, I'm going to come up with ideas and ideally be able to make introductions to you while we're still talking. So we're on the phone like, hey, Rich, I got to introduce you to Tolu. Let me send a text real quick. Are you open to it? Now this does a couple things too. I get your phone number now for you scumbag bdrs out there, do not abuse that. I'm gonna say you use this for good and not evil. But so the one, the one time I say, hey, Rich, I'm gonna introduce you to Tolu, I make a text, Tolu and Rich get introduced. Now, I'm the one that's top of mind when that happens, as the value is created there. And then as they talk, I'm remembered again. So I stay top of mind. Now, Rich has a reciprocity imbalance because I've made value for him, but he hasn't made value for me. And so as we continue, We're 22 minutes into the conversation, he says, well, what can I do for you? And I might say, you know, I'm really curious about this path in my career. Do you happen to know two or three other people that I can talk to? Right? And ideally, because I just sent you something on the phone, you're like, hey, I don't want you to have to think about this after the call. Maybe there's some folks you can text right now. And then I'm creating value for Rich too because he's going to stay top of mind with these people as I continue to provide that value. So I know that's long winded, but the two thirds piece is important because if I instead made that conversation mostly about me, Rich wouldn't share his contacts because it would make him look bad because I'm selfish. But if all I did was provide value and provide value and provide value, Rich could make that con like that introduction because it's also going to make him look good. So there's the reciprocity imbalance, but it's also about creating win wins for everyone here and just essentially letting Rich know I'm not a scumbag and I'm not going to burn your friends out. The other piece that's important here is having someone's phone number is pretty important. And again, this isn't for abuse purposes. Let's talk to your go to market marketers out there. What's your open rate on a text message send versus an email send? Right. It's like five to one difference. Like a text gets read like 90% of the time versus an email, it's like 20. Right. So if I want to stay top of mind, I want to vibrate your pocket at the right time. Right. That attention is very valuable. And so the other thing that I love about a text message versus an email is that in an email people treat it too formally, they go way too deep and they kiss your ass. And Rich probably knows this better than anyone else. Rich, I want to thank you for the conversation we have. You know, it reminds me about these three experiences that I've had in the past about how I grew XYZ company from 20 million to 30 million and I grew this company. And I bet that I would be a great candidate for you. What's the next step? And it's this long monologue. The first sentence you read, you go, I know what this is about and you ignore it. But the beautiful thing about a text message is like I get to say, hey, Rich had a few other ideas open to chat. I have to keep it tight. And then it has to be more provocative because of that, it's got a few more ideas. I wonder what those ideas are. Right now I have an opportunity to get more value from Jacob. I'm going to want to talk to him versus a long ass email about your credentials. Absolutely wrong. So people are always focused that I've noticed. They're too focused on Being impressive. And they're not focused on alignment. So they're impressing in that email. And even if you do send an email, it's something like, hey, thanks for the chat. I'm going to put some thought into it. I'm going to. I'll let Tolu know what we talked about too. Just to reinforce the name and build reputation. I'll get back to you with what I learned. That's it. Two, three sentences. That's how you write a thank you email to recruiters, right? I'll let you know how it goes when I talk to those folks. Then I'm also setting the expectation that I'm going to talk to you again so I get to control the pace of the conversations we have. If I flake on you because I'm not interested, well, there's your answer. You know, there was an alignment fine. Right? But at least I have control. Instead of, when do you want to follow up? Hell, I don't know when I want to follow up. Like, you tell me when you have value, when you have something of value to share with me, let's talk. Right? So you're not going to get a response when you say that. So tactical pieces increase your conversations. Spend two thirds of the conversation on the other person, not yourself. The easiest way to remember that's two ears, one mouth for a reason. You have to ask really smart questions to get them talking so you can get the information necessary. That's going to trigger a reciprocity imbalance. That's going to make them more likely to introduce you to somebody. When you get that introduction, I would lean towards a text versus an email specifically because it's going to increase your likelihood of getting a response. Then I would respond with short messages from there only when you have value to provide. And sometimes that value is as simple as, hey, Rich, I talked to Tolu. What a great dude. Thanks for the intro. And that's it. And Rich could choose to ghost me, like, duly noted. Yeah, Tolu's fine, right? Or you could say, yeah, Tolu is a great guy.

Right?

And then I get to follow up and say, did Tolu happen to talk to you about that project he's working on? Provocative question. He's a no. What is that? Now we're building rapport? Now we're going back and forth in text. It's fine. It's not. When do you want to talk again about that job opportunity?

Right.

So that's the flow that I like to see because it's not what you know, it's who you know. And this needs to be a habit whether you have a job or not. So the thing I love about the conversations, KPI, when you're super urgent, you've been out of work for six months, you don't know how you're going to pay the bills. That number should be 40 or 50 calls a week, right? Not 40 or 50 application, 40 or 50 calls. Communities like Pavilion or CMO Huddles or Chief or whatever communities you're in can help perpetuate that because you already have something in common. They're not going to do the work for you. But you could say, hey, I've been talking to some other folks in Chief, here's some value that I've given them. Are you open to chat? Ideally, that can help perpetuate some conversations. Again, you should temper your expectations because if you call 100 people, 100 people aren't going to be awesome. Your success rates may be 5%, which is still stronger than an outbound application. So what we're modifying, we're optimizing for is a percentage of improvement here so that I can decrease the time to you landing a job and getting paid again. Because for me, if I can knock one month off of an executive's job search time, I've made them $50,000. Now all of a sudden, my fees aren't that bad, right? And it compounds over time. And I can shorten a job search four weeks, no problem, right? Six weeks, eight weeks. I actually want to shorten job searches so I can extend the negotiation so I can drive their compensation up. But we could talk about that at another time. But that's the flow. Then when you're in a position and you're working your ass off, just throttle down your KPI of conversations to like two. Like, I can take one coffee chat, and I could take one random introduction and let me see, can I give back to someone on my team? Can I give back to a mentor? Can I give back to someone who showed up for me in some way? And you don't necessarily need to have like a complex CRM to remind you of this, right? There are triggers that I've set for myself. I do a lot of travel, and as I travel, I don't expect other people to think this way. But when I drive through Sacramento, I think about the guy who took me in when I was homeless and let me live in his garage. And so when I drive through Sacramento, I have a bias for action to contact that guy. And I just say, hey, Eric, how's It going. I was thinking about you just drove through. Reminded me of that time, right? And then I drive through Davis, and I used to live in Davis for a little bit and commute down into San Francisco. And I think about the people I lived with in Davis or the people that I was partners with. My first mentor, Aaron Glinsky, lived there. Now he lives in Detroit. And I say, hey, how are you and your wife Dina doing? It's just this, like, bias for action. Not because a CRM told me check in. It was, I drove past the thing. It reminded me of you. People love to have that feeling, too. One gal bought me a Chipotle burrito when I was fired and kind of helped me. It was the day I got laid off. She bought me this Chipotle burrito, and I never forgot that. And then, like five or six years later, I helped her land a $300,000 a year job, just. And I didn't charge her or anything. I just remembered the kindness she gave me. And now whenever I go to Chipotle, I think of Patricia and I don't know why. It's just, like, ingrained in my head. This is probably some psychosis, but I'm hoping this is an actionable tip for folks like, oh, I remember my time back at Salesforce. Here are some people I actually enjoyed during that time. And then I can catch up and have conversations. And again, most people aren't going to respond. We're all busy. You should set that expectation. So it's. I guess this would be step two of this plan. Bias for action plus surrender the outcome. You do the thing that needs to happen. If they don't get back to you, don't cry about it. Right? Doesn't stop you from doing it again. There are people in my phone. I have over 3,000, 3,500 or 4,000 executives in my phone. I get counted, done a lot of texting, and I can think back. I'll look through threads with some of them and I'll have texted them five times with no response. And then every once in a while, I'll get, hey, Jacob, I was thinking about you. You just ignored the last five messages over the last year and a half. You ass. Like, why now? I'm actually gonna meet with someone a little later today who's done that to me. He's like, hey, Jacob, we need coffee. And I said, you know what? You have to come to me. That was the rule. And he's like, sure, see you on Thursday. So. But he didn't. Because when you do the reach out. If you're trying to help somebody, it's not annoying. So sometimes I'll send a message. Hey, I've seen some changes in the market. I've seen that CROs are making this now. Here's a couple examples of some landings that happened. Right. Just wanted you to know. No expectation of a response. I don't need to start a conversation. I'm just creating content. I guess this is similar to creating content on LinkedIn, I guess, or creating content on YouTube or podcasts. You're creating value and you're putting it out there and when the timing is right, it comes back to you. So you're marketing yourself in that so you can market through text message and through your relationships. People that are already likely going to have a stronger open rate than doing it cold.

I love that thing about having no expectation because I think that's where so many people get tripped up because they're like, oh, but I text and they didn't text me back. I caught. But it's like, it's okay, like do the things that you're meant to do and the right things for happen. One thing I wanted to ask you about though, is that you talked about giving value, right? And I think that for a lot of people, they don't necessarily know how to identify what would be valuable to someone else. So especially if I'm dealing with someone who is, you know, an exec, like a CEO, what do I, who might be quite junior, have that could be valuable to that person? So how would you help someone to identify the value that they can give to someone?

So oftentimes the value that you can provide to others isn't your value, but others value that you've heard too. So the lazy way of doing this is, hey, Rich, I saw an article that you should read and I send that to you, which still can be very effective. Like, Rich sent me some podcasts that I've watched with Daniel Priestley and a couple others, and I found them very valuable and it was great that he was thinking about me in that. Right? But as this becomes a habit, it compounds. That's why I'm very clear that habit and discipline are very important for this. So if it's 50 when you're out of work and still two when you're in work, you have to have the habit. Because what happens is as you talk to these new people and sometimes your gateway is, hey, I happen to know Tolu. Want to talk about how tall this guy is, right? Sometimes it can be soft and just have a casual conversation. Right. But as you talk to more people, you become a vessel of what you're learning from them. Right. Especially if you're spending two thirds of the time speaking. So the reason I framed it the way I did about conversations, about listening more and providing value in that is because it makes the rest of it inevitable. You will naturally become more valuable as you learn from other people. As you naturally learn. And this happens in interview processes too. Even if you go through an interview, let's say you're interviewing for a top job that you probably didn't have a shot at, but you got through the process. The CEO at Stripe was talking to you. Right. And I have clients like this all the time. CEO of a Stripe. Or we, we had a conversation with Zuckerberg the other day and Sam Altman. And like, we've had conversations with these top executives. Even if they don't get the job, I get to say, hey, Rich, I was talking to Sam Altman the other day and his focus was this. Now Rich is learning through what I learned from Sam, and he's got the inside track on what's happening at ChatGPT. So I don't even have the value, but do I? I learned the lesson. But that also, not that we just want to name drop into perpetuity. I don't want you to all become Tony Robbins. Right. We're just name dropping everyone and distracting the point. Right. But it's, hey, I learned this thing about this, this talent recruiter that was in the sales space that I thought would be interesting to you. Do you want to talk about it? Right. Or I saw this post and eventually that knowledge flows through you. It's like I'm strong at negotiation, not because I'm a master at negotiation, not because I've got some PhD. I'm not Chris Voss. Like, I don't have this 30 year tenure doing negotiations for a living. I'm strong at negotiations because I've been the source of thousands of executive conversations. So I've seen it and built that. So I've become a vessel of that information. And then I know we're going to talk about AI a little bit later too. But that's what makes training of AI unique. It's the specialty knowledge that you put into it, not just using it blankly. Right. So maybe that's a segue for us. Or we're going into more tactics. So I don't know where you want to head this conversation.

No, no, let's talk about. Yeah, 100%. Let's talk about AI, I think it'd be fast because everyone's using it, right? I saw a post the other day from a friend of mine, he's a sales coach, and he was like, I've got 50 AI problems. Type prompt if you want it. He's got like 1600 people have asked for it. So everyone's using it. Most people are using it badly. But it's an incredible tool. It's like getting into a computer game and getting this ultimate weapon.

So much fun.

They get to like, you know, like level 50 if you know how to use it. So let's talk about how you're utilizing AI to level up.

So I'm using AI in a lot of ways, which is. And I. I've talked about this with my head of AI quite a bit, which is that AI is really only unique when you can train it to get away from the medium. Like, AI is very good at getting you to the 50th percentile, right? Because it's scanning what everything's out there and it's basically benchmarking you. So if you're just copy and pasting from. From AI, you're probably going to be mediocre. And for some of us, that's an improvement. For others, for executives, that makes us look poorly. No, I mean, we. The thing is, like, all of my clients think they're the top 99th percentile. Somebody's gotta be wrong, right? Like, somebody's gotta be wrong. Like, I'm sure you get the. Everyone thinks they're the best candidate in the world. Somebody's wrong, right? So, you know, for some of us, that increases. Like, if you're not creating content at all, it's probably better to be creating than just consuming. So that's a level up for those not leveraging AI at all. Even playing with it at a base level significantly improves your knowledge base. Right. And I was resistant to it for a while, just in general. Like, I really don't want to have to rely on this, but it changes your thinking in ways that open up new categories that you didn't have before. So I'd rather you be playing with it even though you know that it's going to look different three months and it's going to look again different in six months. Because I'd rather you have the front of the pain if experiencing it than trying to play catch up later. So I like AI from that perspective now, where I found AI to be effective. And this is what we've built into some of our tools, like with our LinkedIn tool. I trained it in a contrarian way that I based off of my subject matter expertise. And that's why people like it. They're not getting more of the same. It's not a bunch of fluffy crap. So I found some value. We've built that through, like, we've used Zapier and Make and a little bit of Vertex in Gemini. We've used Perplexity for, for some additional research. We've used a lot of my custom training. When it comes to my content, I custom train it. And then I also say, like, some of my influences are like Aristotle's principles of rhetoric. Some of my influences are influenced by Robert Cialdini, some stoicism principles from Seneca and others. Maybe Ryan Holiday, some life coaching and pieces from Mel Robbins. Right. As an example, like, so you can take influences that are well documented and improve your content that way. Right. Ideally, what I like to use this for is learning more than trying to be impressive. So it helps me learn, which helps me educate my clients more. What I don't want you to use it for is to be someone that you're not to try to trick Rich into hiring you because he'll see through it in a conversation. He'll know whether or not you, you know your stuff or not. But from a learning perspective, that can help. It's helped, like, open up a lot of the menial tasks. Like totally, you pushed me to get on YouTube and I. I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good. So I just put some videos out there. I'm not wild about them. Even the last one I published is awesome content, but the audio is a little off because I had the shotgun mic in the wrong spot. But I am, because I have the confidence that I have the editorial tools and the systems to build it. I can just go and get better and better. And I actually have creator contracts coming my way to be on retainer to create courses and stories and things that I never thought was possible even nine months ago because of that. So it's like created different problems to work on and it's created some focus there. So from a job shirts perspective, like, one of the things that we do in our interview tool is we align the job that you're going for with the people that you're interviewing with in addition to your resume. And we're connecting the dots. And then I've trained it with my psychological background on it as well as my sales background and go to market background to help you come up with the right questions for an interview as an example. And so if I were to try to train this on my own, like I think our interview prep tool is like 20 bucks. It's not expensive, right? And it spits out 40 page report on. Here's what your interviewers like, here's the questions you should answer, here's how to do a challenger sale, here's how to do a closer approach to your interview process. Here's what you should focus on, here's what you shouldn't. Here's likely the challenges that company's facing in the market, which, that's where we've, we've seen big gains because that's what I do as a coach. Like if you're interviewing for meta and say like they're having an AI war with Microsoft and with, you know, all these different tools, here's how you step up your interview to have an opinion about that. And then that comes out in the report. So you have to plan this out. Like as you're, you, you kind of want to treat AI like a coach and if it's not giving you the answers you want, ask it to uplevel it. Now one thing that I found that's really helpful is when you're an executive leader and you're asking AI to do executive things, it's going to give you a lot of jargon and bullshit because all of the examples are jargon and bullshit. So after like this, I guess we're giving them prompts. You know, for the 1600 people that want the prompt, it's something like, can you up level this to a senior executive audience? Great. Oh, look at all these buzzwords. That's awesome. Now can you make the language more accessible and clear as if it was written for someone maybe in college or in high school? Right. And so what happens is then the language dumbs down and becomes way more accessible to a larger audience. And then it also makes it easier for you to understand. So instead of saying, I did this transformation optimization at scale and the ROI was 10x, it just gets so buzzword and soup that you don't really know what that means. It's like, I changed the company, we grew much more. This was the outcome. So you have to train it through that, right? And ask it up, level it, then make it simple, follow this process. So if there are coaches out there that have processes or frameworks that you like, and I guess this is happening to me right now, but people will take one of my blog posts down, they'll feed the blog post into, they're like, Making Jacob twins, like digital twins, they'll feed it content and say, what would Jacob say about this? Right? And then they tweak it to their own thing. So you don't even have to hire me to get value, right? Same with other coaches. There may be other things. Like, hey, I like Jacob's approach on this, but I think he's an asshole when it comes to this. So let's omit that. I like what Rich is saying with his matrix framework here. How do I be a multiplier in this way? I really want to be considered this multiplier piece. So I want to combine these two frameworks. But I also want you to take my influence from my resume and see, like, what are some areas that I can work on. So you treat it, treat it to like do deep research for you. That's gonna take a lot of time out. And what's naturally happening is you're getting smarter as well. Cause you're saying, I like this multiplier element from Rich, I like this closer framework from Alex Hormozi, I like this, this mindset from Mel Robbins, and I like this framework from Jacob. What would that look like in my career given my background? You send it that information, you're going to get way stronger analysis on yourself. And you'll likely get. Then I might take that and say, okay, now imagine I'm interviewing for Google. What questions do you think I should ask the hiring manager based off of this approach? And then they'll fill out a bunch of ideas for you. Especially if you scrape my content because there's so much tactical examples, it will be able to pull that. And that's why I write it that way too, because I know people are going to use it for that. But if you're a coach and you're stealing it to be a better coach, just give me a high five because I know that's happening too.

That's amazing.

What's really interesting, you can't be afraid of it.

I wonder if you've done this. So what I've noticed about AI and I use it a lot, and particularly for taking the long form versions of content and boiling it down to article ideas and you know, for nuance really, rather than for ideation. But it always blooming agrees with me, right? So if so if I, if I.

Make up stats for you, hey, Rich, did you know that 9, 10 of people feel this way and you're like, cool, where'd you get that number? It's like, I just made that up. Don't use It.

Exactly. I've got, I've got. I've got a. A few GPTs that I've trained. I've got like a chief sales officer. And I thought, if I'm in a negotiation, I'll ask it some questions. And it's like, that's a great idea. And I'm like, how do. These are not all good ideas. So how have you. Have you, have you fixed the fact that it always agrees with you when obviously not every idea you have is going to get you the outcome?

Well, you take it with a grain of salt, first of all. And you know that if everything's agreeing with you, it's probably kissing your ass. Right. And then you'll notice that it's doing that because it's taking information from everyone else. That always agrees with everybody. Hmm, that's interesting. Right? That also informs you that being contrarian is actually what helps you stand out. Right. So being the. I like to say use zig when everyone else zags kind of thing, like when I know, like for our LinkedIn tools, an example, it doesn't give you a ton of content, it gives you very little content. That's by design. Because when you hire a copywriter, they think that the most value they could provide for your profile is the number of words, because obviously more is more, but that's not what's more valuable. Especially when you're targeting people with very short, I wouldn't say necessarily short attention spans, because they do pay a lot of attention to the things that are important. They have a lot of distractions. So you have to get the point across very, very quickly. And so that's why you see executive profiles that share less and they know that by oversharing they actually hurt their negotiation to work against the grain. And so if you asked your chatGPT, your typical chatGPT to write content for you, I have a 2000 character limit on LinkedIn. It's going to write a 2000 character limit for you. But that's not valuable once you get to a certain stage. I don't even think it's valuable at middle stages either. I just am speaking from the highest stage there. Like, once there's that if you know, you know, perception, if you have a VP title at a top company or even a C suite title or whatever, sometimes you don't need to say what you did. The only time you need to say what you did is if nobody knows who the hell the company is. Right. And then it's still better to be vague in that. So that you can take control of the narrative on the phone, which you'll be really good at if you're paying attention to conversations being your KPI, right? Because that's the fastest learning you can get. And even as you're learning those, this is a cool thing. If most people are pretty okay with having like a Fireflies or replacement quarter in the room, getting transcripts, we feed those transcripts right into AI to help come up with content ideas and strip out all the confidential information. Or you can look at and this, this conversation will be a bad example because it'll say Jacob spoke 80% of the time. Right?

But that's why you're here.

Look at. Yeah, that's why you're here.

Sorry.

Fireflies will tell you, hey, you spoke 78% of the conversation and they only spoke this. It's kind of like gone, right? For those sales folks out there, I think that's pretty helpful to understand scraping down those transcripts, what could I do better? And asking it of which you have to ask, like you have to train it. Be really hard on me, be cutthroat. Like you have to use prompts like play devil's advocate that it will fight against your ideas and then you can see where the gaps are. So long winded way of saying like train it not to love you.

I saw, I saw a post on LinkedIn where this guy was like chat GPT lied to me. And he then went through like a reasoning with ChatGPT and it was like, well, I've been created to please people, right? So it's actually been programmed to.

Of course it is. What's going to make more money?

Exactly.

Let's not forget the source of this. Let's not forget the source of where there are billions and billions of dollars programmed into this tool. Right? There are billions and billions of dollars programmed into that McDonald's hamburger to make it addictive. There are billions of dollars poured into Doritos so that it's soft. Pringles.

Yeah, Pringles.

It's crunchy, but it's soft. It's crunchy, but it's soft. Because soft tricks the body into thinking you're hungrier because you're chewing less. So if you're chewing less, you're hungrier. You're going to consume more. And it's addictive. And the salt is there to make it addictive and the sugar is there to make you addict. It gets all programmed to do that. So AI is also programmed to make you feel good. Right. This is why I have a Hard time, because I like to blast companies quite a bit. I don't blast the individuals, but I blast the business models. I really am not that impressed. If you made a fortune selling an addiction to somebody, you made a fortune selling caffeine. Tough one. Fricking tough one. My job, I have to convince the smartest people in the world that they're not that smart about thing. That's really hard, right? But if I'm gonna sell, like, sex to teenage boys, look at all the clicks I got. All I had to do was put this woman on the front like this and tell her to take her clothes off. Like, tough one, tough one. You exploited that woman and you exploited those boys and you exploited that whole platform, right? I'm not impressed with your business model. So I'm not impressed with a lot of social media platforms. I'm not impressed with with most of big pharma and big tech and like all of this. And you can see it's all designed like that intentionally for the shareholder. So you should just. I have an article coming out in a couple of weeks. It's the seven toxic traits of Tech companies. And I had to tone it down a little bit because it was pretty abrasive. But the number one prescription is that you should question everything. So if Rich says you're an asshole, question him. If Tolu says you're awesome and the best thing since sliced bread, question his judgment, too. Question what GPTs are telling you. Question what the sales leaders are telling you. Like, you don't need everyone to love you. You don't need about a thousand. I saw this thing. This. I just wanted to share this thing. It was this comedian. He was talking about being a conspiracy theorist. And he's like, I don't want everyone to think that I'm a conspiracy theorist. But you have to believe in some of them, right? Because there's no way the government's batting a thousand.

No.

Right. You have to believe in some of them, especially when they turn out to be true six months later, right? The difference between a conspiracy and fact is usually six months, right? So AI is going to be similar, right? You're going to see those things change. One thing that AI does with me is it makes up client case studies. So it'll be like one time I was working with this chief financial officer and he was sweating.

I got the same word.

And I'm like, I got the same word. Yeah, you'll get that. But then I'll actually use those and I'll say, okay, let me replace it. With a real client story. And then I'll tell it. Here's what actually happened. And it was actually a woman and it wasn't a cfo, but it's a similar story. And then I'll share a real story and then it'll help me write it in a provocative way, which I like. So I'll take its lies and I'll fix it. And if it comes up with data that I don't like, I'll go to Perplexity. I'll say, hey, can you find me the academic sources that can show me the power of, let's say, anchoring higher in a negotiation versus lower? And it will say, yeah, 72% according to this book and this study. Right? And then I can go fact check it, and then I can improve my content so it creates like when you, when you really get good at. And this is what I think is really good. I think there are engineers out there that are much better than me. Right? There are folks that are only dedicated to AI that are going to be much stronger than me. But what I've noticed, things really start to take off. And this is why I work with Justin Parnell on my team, who's my head of AI. We put big processes into make. Whereas, like, here's my idea. Here's a prompt, here's how you fact check that prompt, here's how you format that prompt. Now here's how you bring it back to Claude for this. Now Claude's going to write it in this way. And then it's going to go to Gemini, because that has a larger context window and compare against all these things. It's going to spit out a PDF, Then it's going to format that PDF for us, and then it's going to align it to this. So it's like a lot of chunking processes and processing power. And that's why we have to charge for some of our tools. Like our, our LinkedIn tool only costs us like, I want to say it costs us like 15 cents to run, right? So I, I'm fine giving that away for free because it's a lot of good value. But the interview one I think costs several dollars to run because there's so much processing power and psychology we've put into it. So we have to put a charge on that just so my American Express doesn't blow up, because if that happens, the hidden drivers that my wife will leave me, I won't be able to see my kids, and that will stress me out. And then I will be back on the park bench.

So, yeah, let's not. Let's not make that happen. So let's just. If we talk about job search strategy, I know you have a framework for this, and I'd love to talk about it. One of the. Just an interesting anecdote, which is, I will always ask people, what's your job search strategy? And you'd be amazed. We probably wouldn't be amazed, but people should be amazed that most people haven't.

Really thought about it.

They're going, well, I'm just reaching out to some recruiters and I'm just speaking to my network. And it literally, it's not strategy. It's like, I've got a few activities that I'm going to try. There's no, like, system. There's no process. There's no measurement. It's literally just, I'm gonna go and try a bunch of stuff. And they've never even thought about, like, what do I actually even want? Like, what is my ICP of this? What's that framework that you utilize to help people to go and actually turn their thinking into strategy?

So a more tactical framework. We call it pace. And I think most people start at ace, they forget the P. So the P is planning, like, in that preparation piece. And that also leans into your clarity of vision and those things. And what's tricky is that you could technically, like the traditional approach of just going to talk to people and figuring out not that far off from what you need to do. Right? So we don't necessarily want to bog someone down with a big, extensive framework that they're going to have to monitor every time. Because job search is already like chewing glass. The last thing we want to do is hand them another pane of glass. Right? That makes it even slower. It should feel more natural. But the planning phase is important as stopping to understand. Like, have I. Or am I positioned for the right value segment? Right. Am I positioning myself as high as I want to? Right. So, like, are you a big fish in a small pond? Like, we see a lot of this with the folks, especially in these startup communities. They're too much horsepower for these startup communities, right? Or they're too much horsepower for a startup at a $200 million company. Why go back to a 10 and then also expect to make as much as you were? You can't. Because you can't pump more money out of that. Right? So there's. Are you positioning yourself for the right piece? Like, if it's going to be a startup, it has to be an AI and it has to be well funded and has to be this great. Like we have to answer some of those questions. So the first part of our framework is to plan that out, right? Where, where are you valuable? How are you communicating that value that moves us to the A, which is attractive. How are we attracting opportunities around that? Now the trick here is that most people focus on inbound attraction instead of outbound, right? Or they use outbound poorly. So when I say inbound, I mean I'm tweaking my resume, I'm tweaking my LinkedIn profile. I'm hoping that my LinkedIn profile is going to attract a recruiter. It's not. There's too many out there. It's very unlikely that unless you have a sexy brand name front and center, right. Then you'll attract, you'll be in the right bubbles. Right. But it's Also the way LinkedIn profiles are designed is it gives you more of the same, as you probably understand better than most rich about how recruiter works, right? You change your industry, you're in an entirely different group of professionals. All you have to do is tick one box industry from information software to retail. And now all of a sudden you're showing up with different people, right? If. Now this is really complicated. As we were assessing this, we had a client that worked at Walmart Labs, like the E commerce side of Walmart, but they put Walmart on their profile. So they were only showing up with executives from Home Depot and Target and all these retail companies. But he was a tech guy, right? So we moved to Walmart Labs, which LinkedIn recognized as tech. And all of a sudden it changed. Now I don't expect most people to know the inner workings of LinkedIn Recruiter and all of those things, right? And if you try to figure it out, even if you follow those smartest coaches in the world, you're still, it's going to take some time to learn, right? So I prefer my clients focus more on an outbound approach, which is that conversations approach we talked about earlier, to attract the right opportunities. And if you are triggering reciprocity, you're going to be more attractive. It's going to improve that piece. So we move from planning our ideas. Testing those ideas in the market is akin to building a beta product going to messaging, right? Then when you have interested people that you've attracted through messaging, how are we closing them? The C is close. The close is the interview and the negotiation piece, that's closing. It's just like closing a sales deal. So how am I performing in those interviews. And then in our closed process, we have interview guidance and tips and all that on how to go through that. And then our interview prep tools really help with that as well. And then the negotiation piece is important. Mostly I want people to not talk about money too soon, especially with my clients. And that's why I want them to realize that an interview is a negotiation right from the get go. Because if I can keep their mouth shut on compensation, then when we move to the E, which is elevate, this is about elevating that position to the full alignment that you discovered in the plan piece. So it's more of a flywheel than it is a framework. Because you're going to learn by going through that process and then you're going to do it again and improve. Right. And that's a habit. So you're not just elevating yourself, but you're also working to elevate those on your team and showing up for them. So that's how our framework works, where we're dinking around with the planning and your clarity. We're learning how to attract the right talent. We're teaching you how to close the deals and then have some optionality with that. Because ideally the best cases is when you have multiple opportunities. And multiple opportunities could be one job opportunity and the ability to walk away. That's two. Right. That gives you unlimited leverage. And then we can move to elevate and drive your compensation up or create changes in the job description or the role or the title that are stronger aligned to your future career trajectory, that if you didn't spend the time in the planning phase to understand, you wouldn't be able to do effectively. So a lot of this is like, yes, there's a lot of tactics involved, but there's two strategic caps to it. There's the clarity cap and then there's the how you negotiate a cap that kind of bookend both sides of all the tactics. And if you're, if you don't have that preparation up front, the rest of it, it can kind of go any direction. Like it will follow the path of least resistance naturally. And that's not how the strongest careers are made. And then you won't be able to elevate it because you are accommodating to someone else instead of being aligned and centered to what you valued previously. And so we talked about that rubber band effect. If you're not clear about what you have an opinion on, how are you going to push back? You'll be just like AI saying Yeah, Rich, that sounds good, right? You're in an interview process and they say, hey, we want to go to market like this. Yeah, that sounds good. But instead you're saying, no, I've seen that play out before and I don't agree with you. What do you mean you don't agree with me? Well, I've seen these three things. Have you tried those? Oh, we haven't tried those. Wow. Maybe I should hire you then. It's more attractive in that piece, too. So that's a little bit about the framework we have. Executive pace.com is that. Course, I'm about to lower the cost on that. So if It's. If it's still 497, don't buy it yet. Email me instead. But we're working on that. And then our interview Prep tool of InterviewReports.com is about to launch as well. That's in beta. And that's where you tell somebody, I'm hiring with Rich. And we scrape Rich's information. You provide some of it, we look at your information and we combine it. And do you remember, did you ever see a tool called Crystal Knows? Do you remember that tool?

Yeah, I loved it. Loved it all the time.

I built some of those principles into. With Justin. We built some of those principles into this because we want to know the psychology about what people like.

For those who don't know what it.

Is, Rich, I want you to talk about it.

Yeah. So it's a plugin for Google where it basically pulls a disk profile for people that you're going to go and speak with from their. Just from their LinkedIn. It's incredible. And you can, even if you pay for the paid version, say, I'm going to have a meeting with these two people or three people, and it will tell you what they're likely to say, what you could say, what would resonate, what might piss them off, what role you can play. It's basically like a strategic coach around how to interact with people based on disk profiling. Really clever stuff.

Yeah, we built that into our interview reports based off of my analysis of what people are interested in at specific levels and specific company sizes. So it's not just here's a bunch of AI crap, it's here's how we see you based off of Jacob's principles and my training. And here's the. Here's a way to go about asking questions that follow the closer framework, which we adapted from Alex Hormozi and he adapted from someone else. I don't know where that came from. And then you mentioned you were going to interview the Challenger sales guy. Like brilliant. So we talk about here's how you challenge and follow a Challenger approach. Especially because we work with a lot of go to market executives. We want to pay owed to those people that we like. We're not like ripping off their ideas. We're saying, hey, for more information, go to Challenger and read more about this. Here's a deep dive on it, but here's how you can structure your interview and here's how you flow. Oh, and by the way, here's some deep dive articles you can go to and here's some video content. So it's like I feel like this is going to be a stronger way for people to learn than courses.

Right.

Whereas your situation.

Right. And like here Jacob's the super villain sitting in his dark lair teaching a course and his hands are doing this. His hands are doing this. And for 20 minutes he talked at me and I absorbed a little bit of that and I got some great workbooks out of that. But let's apply this more specifically to my use case. Like that's where I can take a course and then I can supercharge and personalize it to an individual based off of very specific elements that they've provided me and then the training that we've provided. So it takes a lot longer to train the tools and get it right and testing. But I'm so excited about it. I should be sleeping more, especially since we're about to have a child, right? Totally. You should probably be sleeping more too. I can see personalized AI workflows replacing courses and master's programs because you can apply it directly. You could say this is my dream, these are my influences. Here's where I'm at. Here's a process to get there. What are the steps I need to take? And we can program those steps and measure success through that. And we can collect a lot of data on that too.

Some limitless stuff isn't.

Is very limitless.

I wonder how many very clever, astute people obviously like this. Because this is my idea, this is how I'm labeling people. Jacob. But they could totally utilize your tool for sales, right? If it's the principle is you're going to be speaking to a bunch of people.

Oh, absolutely.

You're basically going to go and do discovery. Your tool could 100% be used by sales people when they're going to go into a new discovery situation.

It's very, very similar. And we have talked about building a little nuanced path for that too, to help folks in that. Again, it's not, it's not hyper proprietary information. Right the way. But my head of AI and I are looking at it, Justin. We're looking at it as it's a race to the bottom. Right. These tools are going to be useful. The difference makers are the way they're trained behind the scenes. Is Jacob's knowledge contrarian enough and different enough to help me stand out versus, you know, Rich's knowledge in this? We're gonna have different takes and it's gonna get you to a different outcome versus if it's just a Y Combinator AI project that popped up with someone that doesn't have subject matter expertise, it will still get you somewhere. But we think right now that that's going to be the medium of the pack piece. Because what's making AI unique is the subject matter expertise behind it. That's helping it. It's helping narrow its focus to what we know works for certain people in certain ways. And then that we think will be more effective than. And that's also why we see companies like LinkedIn almost be a little behind on it because it has to be more generic because of how broad their audience is. Right. So we can build these like specialized microservices to impact certain people. And that in itself is a race to the bottom. I doubt it's a billion dollar idea or anything like that. Right. I guess one company can raise a boatload of money and race ahead as like, this brand. Like, the brand will mean more than the product. I think I can see that shift happening too, which is kind of the opposite of how it's been lately. If all products become equal, the brand is what will set it apart. So people will say, do I like Jacob or do I think he's a little too clean cut right now? Or like, is he too much of a super villain? I like Rich. Like, look at the purple. Look at all that purple. Look at that big smile. He's someone I can relate more with, so I'll use his tools. Yes. Yeah.

Amazing. I. What I think of you, a bit of Jacob is, is a bit of a philosopher. You definitely have that kind of vibe. And I know you talked about wisdom, and I believe the definition of wisdom is the love of philosophy. And you're helping to like, make people think differently about things. And for me, it's the greatest power that humans will have in the AI world is that we have wisdom. We have the ability to go, that's a really bad idea. Or that doesn't stack up or this person is not worth listening to or this.