Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: The year is 2030 and you've just woken up and are getting ready for work. Now I have some news for you. You're back in a nine to five job. Your coworkers mostly not human. I have a silver lining. You're a director in a global 1000 company. But now you oversee a team of LLMs AI agents and a few vibe coders who skipped college back in 2025.
[00:00:28] Ken: Your role, less manager, a bit more brain donor. You provide logic, checks, pattern recognition, and industry memory. You tell your quote unquote team. Why their outputs are technically not correct and in certain cases just completely wrong. Another pro, you probably do about one to two hours of actual work a day.
[00:00:53] Ken: Maybe a little bit like office space, which is a bit funny because your calendar says back to back to [00:01:00] back until Thursday. Now you remember the days of entrepreneurship in the early 2020s. Remote work took off. You left your corporate job at that point because you got tired of politics, ice cream, socials, and the return to office mandates that added two to four hours of commuting each day.
[00:01:22] Ken: At first, it just worked. You posted on LinkedIn that you were open for business and you landed one to two clients almost overnight. The money was good, silly even,You'd invoice on a Friday, and then you'd wonder if someone sent too many zeroes. But then this shift started. Startups laid off. Whole teams, contractors were cut. Hiring had to be justified that AI couldn't do the same thing.
[00:01:55] Ken: Companies began using phrases like roles AI can't [00:02:00] do, which again. Funny enough, or maybe not that funny, turned out to be fewer and fewer. Suddenly the market was flooded. Everybody with 10 plus years experience was a fractional something or other. What used to be 20 K month retainers turned into RFPs and bidding rounds, maybe even agency style bakeoffs for basic fractional contract roles.
[00:02:28] Ken: Then the algorithms changed. Social media became flooded with memes, influencer content, and day in the life. Videos, viral giveaways. More confusion than clarity. A feed full of fluff and auto-generated noise. The world by the end of 2025. Yeah. It felt a little bit like a mashup of Wally Idiocracy and iRobot Craft [00:03:00] was replaced with prompt jockeys, artistry with convenience, deep thinking with dopamine hits.
[00:03:08] Ken: Yeah, I get it. You were using ChatGPT You were on LinkedIn, but it was all moving so fast. You stopped being able to separate signal from noise, and then it was all gone.
[00:03:24] Ken: Now this isn't all doom and gloom. It's a vignette that can be truer and probably is more true than you realize. But here's the good news in our conversation today.
[00:03:37] Ken: There's still time. This actually hasn't happened yet, but please don't assume that this is an exaggeration because you've heard me allude to it. Many consultants, agencies, founders, and independent professionals aren't going to make it to 2030.
[00:03:55] Ken: They're going to zero, and you might have already felt this a [00:04:00] bit in 2025, and I have data that supports it because the first half of this year was not a good year. The overwhelming majority, haven't hit their revenue targets.
[00:04:10] Ken: I've lived through four to five of these cycles, real ones. The rise of the internet itself, social apps, and I called every single one. That's part of my superpower, and I can tell you that this one feels different. It feels different because it is different. The rate of change is no longer annual. It's weekly, it's daily.
[00:04:33] Ken: Just a point of reference, Microsoft used to ship Windows updates. Upwards of five years, apple moved it to annual cycles, and now open AI is releasing new models every few months, sometimes faster. So if you are not obsessed with making it to 2030, you won't be there.
[00:04:55] Ken: And I mean that literally, I'm in this every single day [00:05:00] testing, building, modeling for my clients and myself. And I wanna be clear again, it's not just about ai. It's AI plus changing buying behavior plus global competition, plus remote work, plus macro policy shifts. Plus a rise in skepticism. Each of those could be a five year shift on their own.
[00:05:25] Ken: Now they're happening all at once. Just yesterday, I was working with two different LLMs simultaneously like I would with my team members when I ran my $5 million a year agency. Except this time I was sitting on a bench in a town center on a laptop using a hotspot. Sweating under the midday sun and I stopped.
[00:05:48] Ken: I caught myself and I was thinking, this is incredible and a little terrifying. So where does that leave us and what are we supposed to actually do in all of [00:06:00] this? This is where, as usual, I wanna get practical and maybe even a little personal because I have been reworking my own systems. Rethinking how I serve clients, and yes, thinking about whether all of this still makes sense, let's get into it.
[00:06:17] Ken: If you wanna make it to 2030, the first foundational principle that we need to get into is how you build authority, personal brand. And have what I call trust-based networks. This was a nice to have before. Now it's a must have, and I'll tell you what, I have struggled through the years with the word or phrase personal brand, and I still don't even love it to some extent, but it is just the best way to describe
[00:06:47] Ken: you having the authority, the go-to expert opinion about a particular topic.
[00:06:53] Ken: And this does not mean just to hit this right out of the gate, that you have to go build. [00:07:00] A massive audience. I'm not asking you to become one of the guru personal branding influencers I mentioned before where all of the young, beautiful people can get viral audiences, and now we have these AI influencers getting posted online and having more followers than actual real humans.
[00:07:22] Ken: So that's not about this. I'm not about that. If you've been listening for more than a minute, Kevin Kelly once wrote about a thousand true fans, and there's a lot of truth to that within this world that we're coming into.
[00:07:35] Ken: It's the right audience and in a channel where you know your best clients, your lighthouse clients are. And for me personally, I've done the work on this. I don't even need a thousand true fans to hit my fairly significant revenue goals.
[00:07:52] Ken: In the past, it might have been fine for you to once in a while, get a referral dropped in your lap or to know [00:08:00] someone that knew. Someone that knew someone, and somehow you want up. With a lead, but in this age of authority, personal brand, and these trust-based networks, we have to have those three elements first as this first foundation.
[00:08:14] Ken: And that looks much differently than just I'm on LinkedIn. You need to be on LinkedIn. In episode nine, I talk about the unusual case for LinkedIn and how it has. The strongest signals available in the world if you want to do B2B period, but LinkedIn itself is not entirely a trust-based network. Social media is something that is very loose affiliation.
[00:08:42] Ken: You may talk to someone on there, but they aren't at the level of being in your address book. They aren't at the level of someone that you might personally message. So trust-based networks, this particular part of it is outside of the public [00:09:00] social media. These aren't also just slack groups full of unengaged accounts or people trying to sell you.
[00:09:06] Ken: It is the curated behind the velvet ropes places people go to ask. Who do you know that does X and transparently? This is why almost three years ago, I set out to build a virtual country club of high-end consultants, founders, coaches, and others in professional services. I saw ahead of this a little bit, and I was not just trying to build another quote unquote community.
[00:09:33] Ken: I was not trying to build that slack group I just mentioned. Instead, it's super vetted, just like you would expect at an actual country club where you're known personally. You're actually paying a significant amount to be part of that. And you know the others there are exactly like you. They truly are peers and they care about keeping the place nice and they care about investing to one another and they do business together.
[00:09:58] Ken: So it doesn't mean tomorrow [00:10:00] that you need to go from having less than 5,000 people on a social network like LinkedIn to try to get to 10,000 or 20,000, as I mentioned in the little vignette, large audiences today in a lot of ways don't even matter anymore because social feeds prioritize. The for you versus actually people that you follow, but having the ability to, to be the person, to be the only person that someone considers when they're looking for that thing and having the social proof, having the trust based networks that work for you and that bring people to you is the first foundation.
[00:10:39] Ken: To become this 2030 company.
[00:10:41] Ken: This is also going to be as we move on the age of growth without headcount, speed to market. And iterating to win. People often think about even just having one employee, or VAs or some subcontractors as an unlock to do a [00:11:00] lot more work. I've talked about this in other conversations, but often you become a person who has to always check in with another person, even with just one person on payroll.
[00:11:10] Ken: Or one full-time contractor and at an extreme, as I've gone into other conversations, you become that people manager I've talked about in the past, managing a bunch of employees and a bunch of clients versus what you initially set out to do, which is to be the person who's the best at that thing, which actually really supports the first foundation.
[00:11:31] Ken: The more you become a person who has to manage others, the less you are. Building up your own authority and your own personal brand.
[00:11:40] Ken: In episode four I talked about why hiring isn't a badge of honor. But what we didn't touch on entirely in that conversation is the point about being able to go just a lot faster. Here's an example. Even when I had a team that is smaller by many standards under 30 people, but much bigger than what, a lot [00:12:00] of you will have today, even small changes required me to ensure multiple people were kept in the loop.
[00:12:06] Ken: And that means that a small change to a homepage might actually be a multi-week effort, but overhauling the entire website. That is a multiple month. If not a much more significant project. Even if you have a smaller team
[00:12:23] Ken: and relative to what was outlined in the opener and how fast things change today, the amount of coordination and collaboration that you have to do is a huge disadvantage. Even if you have an agency or a team or business that is under 10 people. I don't want to digress, but I really do believe that a new work structure is required.
[00:12:44] Ken: In general, if you decide to have employees or if you already have employees, the more significant point is being able to move quickly and iterate at the same speed as these AI companies themselves, like open ai, anthropic, [00:13:00] perplexity, and so forth.
[00:13:00] Ken: I don't want you to be a yacht or a giant oil tanker that takes miles to turn the speed that you might have as a solo practitioner, a solo consultant, or just really anyone that does not have to manage people.
[00:13:16] Ken: I'm seeing how fast some of these folks who are in vibe coding or moving. Especially if they build tooling around it. In the old days, I'll say the old days now, it sounds weird to say that, of trying to do continuous deployments to to production if you're not a technologist, just the idea is basically how fast can we get the code to production was a big thing.
[00:13:39] Ken: And now we're talking about major feature releases that are happening weekly. Again, things that might take months or years.
[00:13:47] Ken: Recently I spent some time reflecting on this and doing an honest assessment with my own AI assistant, because I want to go just a lot faster and I move fast. I've shared [00:14:00] in the past that people will say, Ky, you had an idea. And we talked about this and you already got it done, and maybe it was in a week or two, but we are idea people.
[00:14:09] Ken: And so the more ideas you have and the less you are disciplined on not pursuing those ideas or pursuing it at a high level of excellence, which I also believe is important, you get into this world of perfection, being the enemy of the good. It. So I basically had a conversation around how I can stop going slower than I want to go, even though it's faster than a lot of others, because speed and iteration and iterating to win is going to be an unlock.
[00:14:40] Ken: I've done this a lot with offers. I'm well known for offers. We've talked a little bit about offers. We'll talk more about offers. But part of why I'm really good at building offers, it wasn't unlike building applications and having a process where I got 20 plus featured applications and applying that iterative approach to building offers, shipping offers, if [00:15:00] I can describe it that way, getting them out, letting the ones that have no resonance die quickly has been a competitive advantage for me.
[00:15:07] Ken: But now I wanna do that across my business, whether it's internal tooling. Whether it's something for my clients that I know will serve them better, whether it's about getting content like this out faster. I have a lot of different GPTs that help me across my podcast. My newsletter, I don't really need it as much on social content, but I am using things there as well to be able to produce the same amount of content, if not more than when I had an entire team.
[00:15:36] Ken: So taking those signals, talked about go to market Signals 2.0 a bit in some past conversations and being able to iterate fast, get faster across marketing, sales, and client delivery to three big systems in the business and growing without headcount. I still at the revenue level that I am, have very little to no help and the few people that I have helping me in the business [00:16:00] today.
[00:16:00] Ken: Are actually helping me build some of the things that I want to build that still focuses on AI systems in different parts of the business. Talk about that more in the future, but typically they're not just crossing t's and dotting i's or doing admin type help.
[00:16:15] Ken: So how can you be lean, go faster. Iterate faster. This is the second foundation in becoming that 2030 company andthriving towards 2030 versus just surviving the next few years.
[00:16:30] Ken: And as we think about this third foundation, just frame it up here first, that I've watched hundreds and if not thousands, and I've been doing this for a long time of entrepreneurs. Who just follow the status quo or they'll do things the hard way because it was easier. Listen up on this to get it done the hard way.
[00:16:52] Ken: Then spend more time to approach it from a systems standpoint. Oh, well, I've sold this deal and then I [00:17:00] sold it again, and I kind of kept doing it that way. I don't really feel like I have a system, but I kind of get through the process. Or I'm gonna outsource my email to a VA and have a process with them to triage my inbox because you don't take the time to think about what you really need.
[00:17:19] Ken: Actually have a system like I did when I was a multimillion dollar agency owner, who at $5 million a year never had. An admin never relied on an EA or a VA
[00:17:29] Ken: or maybe something that you do frequently. That's there's a lot of lift in it. Instead of designing a repeatable template or just yesterday, I had to do something in my business that I could do manually and it probably would take me, I don't know, 30 to 45 minutes to do that manually, but it was worth spending a few hours.
[00:17:48] Ken: To build a little system that I now can use forever, and I will tell you what, it was actually kind of painful. I, I worked with a couple different GPTs on it and it made some [00:18:00] common mistakes. Again, I'm learning and iterating on how to work with these AI assistants and GPTs and LLMs, but I did learn through that process as well, what to do and not to do.
[00:18:11] Ken: But now I have something that will take seconds, literally seconds, and save me a ton of time. That I could use forever because of this last bucket, led by example, the age of systems thinking with AI mentors and the community of expert peers. And again, I am a technologist by trade. If you've come just directly into this episode, you may not know that.
[00:18:35] Ken: But I wasn't just a sales guy, I wasn't just a marketing guy. I was a technologist who happened to know what I was talking about. And then I could sell things and learn how to sell, but I wasn't the seller who just sold the thing. I was the practitioner like you who learned how to do marketing and sales.
[00:18:50] Ken: And as a result of being a technologist. I am trying to re exercise those technology chops. I digressed there for a minute [00:19:00] in the world of ai, and I've actually gotten really good at ai. if essentially been put into the top 1% of users of tools like Claude and ChatGPT, and I have clients who are.
[00:19:10] Ken: Ahead of that, but that's pretty good. Considering that I'm not a quote unquote practicing technologist in the sense that people are paying me for technology still. Here's what I'm doing, just as a point of reference and what I'm trying to drive into. As someone who has a technology background, I've recently set aside some time for personal development, which some people are like, what's that?
[00:19:30] Ken: I don't have time for that. That's why you need to have the systems thinking. And I basically developed a five hour sprint on AI fluency. I asked AI to help me to develop this tutorial of sorts, this deep dive, not because I wasn't an advanced user, but because my ability to use it is more experiential than actually conceptually understanding what's happening under the covers.
[00:19:52] Ken: So understanding the way that AI actually works, having been a computer science major as undergrad [00:20:00] way longer ago than I'd like to admit. Now, let's put it this way, object oriented programming. Java was new at that time. Okay? If you don't know what that is, it's old. It's old relative to modern technology practices.
[00:20:12] Ken: And I spent this time going through and understanding things like rag, understanding some things like three shot prompts. If you're an ai, you know what some of these things mean, and you don't really have to know at this level. I'm just saying I am investing myself in how to understand this because I want you to do this independent of you getting to a deep level of academic understanding.
[00:20:33] Ken: Or the experiential level like I have. Just because you're using ChatGPT doesn't mean anything transparently. You need to move out of understanding how to swing the hammer to designing the hammer. This was part of Agency 3.0 mentioned in episode seven when we think about these systems and systems thinking, but we're going at a different level here today.
[00:20:58] Ken: I need you to go [00:21:00] from being a superficial user of Claude or ChatGPT and using it almost like a glorified Google search engine to someone who can understand how AI can dramatically advance your business for you and your clients.
[00:21:14] Ken: And within this, it's not just about ai, as I've said, the systems thinking across ai. But also looking to have deeper relationships with actual people who have been there, done that, and your exact business as opposed to all the people you're following as quote unquote influencers on social networks who have never built a business like yours.
[00:21:35] Ken: Now, I wanna spend a minute here on the community of expert peers, again, have mentioned this in other conversations in the past. If you go back to episode six on the fastest way to Not Grow, we talked about this concept, but this does dovetail nicely into trust-based networks and sort of a parallel path to them if you want to do it that way as well.
[00:21:58] Ken: But you need to have your [00:22:00] own community of expert peers that can either work inside your business, help fill in gaps when you're going after certain kinds of deals. And or help you with your client work directly.
[00:22:13] Ken: But an agency 3.0 model may be you, your LLMs and AI GPT and systems. Another person who has certain expertise. And maybe even someone in-house that might be a little skiff team that can get a lot of work done. The work of, you know, five to 10 or 20 people.
[00:22:32] Ken: But installing that person's brain inside your business or inside your client's business or inside an LLM
[00:22:40] Ken: is exactly what I kind of described. In a lot of ways in the opening vignette.
[00:22:45] Ken: Now, I know you may be listening to this and maybe you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed, especially if you are not someone who's a technologist and saying, that's great for you. I'm glad that you understood some of these concepts and ai. [00:23:00] I'm barely using some of the tools you mentioned. I don't even understand some of these other tools that have.
[00:23:06] Ken: Been newer in the last few years, and that is actually the point of having the community of expert peers. So if you're feeling anxiety, if you're feeling stress, the whole point here is you don't have to become the expert on all things. I happen to get good at a lot of things, but that also was not a positive thing in a lot of ways, and I've mentioned that in the past.
[00:23:27] Ken: I got good at too many things. So today you don't have to pay the $300,000 a month that I paid for my team, where I had a full marketing team. Obviously, all the people helping on the client side, the delivery side, some leadership, and so forth. But it may be worth finding your own community of extra peers, your own mentors, and investing into becoming this systems thinker so that you don't become.
[00:23:54] Ken: A person spending, I don't know, months, years to try to get up to speed on some of this stuff. [00:24:00] That is one of the reasons why outside of the 2030 company, people come to work with me. They just know that I've been doing this for decades. They see the style of business that I run. They want not just the results, which I am known for, making people money, simplifying things.
[00:24:17] Ken: I have all the testimonials that said, Ken made me more and I work less. But equally important is the way that I think and the DNA that I can install into them, and truly making it about life work integration as opposed to work life balance, which never existed.
[00:24:36] Ken: So don't stress out of becoming the expert on. Authority, the expert on personal branding, the expert on systems, the expert on ai, or even having the ability to iterate, to win and get to market faster. I was talking to a client this week and they were prepared to make a significant, and I would say [00:25:00] significant investment back into their business, which I appreciate that my clients.
[00:25:03] Ken: Are willing to do that. Obviously they do that with me in certain cases, but I looked across all of it and it wasn't going to impact them the way that they hoped, and especially not in the way they sequenced it. This is why I have my own level of trust and I have built up that authority so that someone would be willing to get that kind of expertise from me.
[00:25:23] Ken: The point here being it's not always about how much money you throw at it. It's actually about how you do it, how you approach it, how you sequence it, and to become the 2030 company. I promise you that you won't make it there. If you try to solve all three foundations at the same time, you'll burn yourself out and you'll more quickly find yourself back into that nine to five job that I mentioned at the top of the conversation.
[00:25:50] Ken: And if you did feel a bit uneasy, if you felt a bit stressed by the sort of story, the narrative that I [00:26:00] led with, I'm doing that to help inspire you.
[00:26:03] Ken: I'm doing that to help challenge you. I'm doing that to help you understand that even if you are having an okay year, even if you're having a banner year, it can go away much faster than you thought talking with a client about their industry. I have a creative background. My agency did design work. And this particular person is still in that world running a creative agency.
[00:26:30] Ken: And just the amount that is changing there that people who are getting hired because they are the best prompt engineers, not because they necessarily have the best design chops. And I can feel a little bit dejected about that. I can feel a little bit frustrated about that as someone who did that work.
[00:26:48] Ken: But the reality is at some point there were artists. And then there was this thing called Photoshop, and at some point we all rode around on horses and then there was this motorized [00:27:00] vehicle. And at some point you never could get me in your ears, in your head while maybe you're on a walk, you're at the gym or in the car.
[00:27:11] Ken: I'd have to write you a letter and actually personally know you. Or maybe I could write a pamphlet that might just happen to get you months or years later. We always have to adapt. We always have to iterate. We're just doing it at a different speed and we have to do it in the proper sequence.
[00:27:28] Ken: We have to work on these foundations, or we will not make it to 2030.
[00:27:33] Ken: So that is gonna be where we end for today. I always appreciate you listening. I appreciate your feedback. If you learn something today, if you were inspired, if you were challenged, a rating or review would mean a lot, and it helps me know that you're enjoying the conversations and lets me know what you wanna hear more of.
[00:27:51] Ken: You could also always get in touch with me. Via the links in the show notes, you can follow me on LinkedIn, which is where I'm most active, or you can get on my weekly briefing where [00:28:00] I go into these conversations in a different way, in a deeper level, if you prefer writing or if you like both, highly encourage you to do it.
[00:28:08] Ken: One more thing today before we wrap up is if you wanna read a sort of manifesto on a 2030 company, I have a very fun way for you to do that. Just go to 2030 dot. Company that's an actual URL and read my manifesto on what it means to be a 2030 company. Some of what we covered today, but it'll give you another spin, another take on it beyond that.
[00:28:33] Ken: Really appreciate you taking the time to have these conversations. I do think about it as a conversation. I do think about it as something that we're growing together on, and I can't wait to help you further learn how to grow without hiring.