Grow Without Hiring

:00:00] Ken: This might seem odd based on the name of this podcast, but Growing without Hiring is not just about working alone. One of the earlier episodes was focused on what is a solopreneur. Highly recommend you go back to it because I made an argument that solopreneurs can actually even have contractors or employees.
[00:00:22] Ken: Based on how they set up the business. It's not just a fancy term for a sole proprietor, but it is about how we want to decide how to grow the business, which is not always with more people, more clients, more people, more clients. And so growing without hiring is not just about working alone. In fact, that's the fastest way to not grow.
[00:00:43] Ken: I want to get into this today and again, usually I look at kind of a few different elements within your business to try to paint the picture of this, so to speak. But I know that I stunted my growth for years because of these problems. I see that [00:01:00] this mindset, Is something that absolutely impacts people before they come work with me. And I have to undo a lot of this thinking because of this first point that I want to get into. And I'm gonna fluff your feathers up a little bit, but only because you deserve it.
[00:01:17] Ken: You're a pretty smart person.
[00:01:19] Ken: You are someone who actually has more confidence in yourself than you realize.
[00:01:24] Ken: Because if you have taken the leap to become an entrepreneur, not many people do that. And further, not many people last doing it. And I understand again, some of you are not yet in that position, or maybe you have been in that position in the past, but you're not now, but you are a full stack. Entrepreneur who touches marketing, sales, and client delivery, in some different capacity.
[00:01:48] Ken: So the first problem that you have is yourself. You are too smart. I have clients who have PhDs. I have clients who have higher ed degrees. I personally [00:02:00] have an Ivy League degree.
[00:02:01] Ken: No one cares today. Go figure. Worked hard for it, by the way, but it's just not what a lot of society values today.
[00:02:08] Ken: Putting that aside, we are smart people and I have actually done assessments of myself using not kind of your off the shelf generic personality tests.
[00:02:19] Ken: But things that really help you with how the world sees you and love it. I'm actually a really big fan of it called The Fascination Assessment or the Fascination Advantage from Sally Hog's Head. I actually got to hang out with her at some point, not trying to name drop, just saying she's an awesome person this shows you how the world sees you and what I'm really good at and what you're also really good at, because I have the data, having had a lot of my clients actually use.
[00:02:44] Ken: Some of these different assessments is that we do things to a high level of excellence, but then you decide, and you might really be into what we're talking about here, like you want to grow without hiring, and you think that means that you have to take on all the things yourself [00:03:00] and become an expert on 27 different things.
[00:03:02] Ken: You know this as a point of reference, I was someone who grew up playing music, played in a bunch of different things throughout. The school year. I actually played into college as just a more kind of recreational thing, but that was challenging on a lot of levels and I always sort of had this desire to want to become someone who understood how to play piano.
[00:03:23] Ken: We don't have to get super geeky, but I was a band geek for sure. And I kind of always felt bad that I didn't learn how to play piano. And then even as an adult through my twenties, I kept saying, oh, why don't I learn how to play this?
[00:03:36] Ken: Why aren't I doing this? Ironically, eventually married someone who literally was a music major in college and is amazing at piano, and through that experience actually is my point. I learned to just enjoy. Listening to that music,I learned how to just appreciate someone who is an expert at that.
[00:03:56] Ken: And it wasn't because I failed at becoming [00:04:00] a. Person who played the piano. It was more of a realization that I've already done a bunch of things related to music. I enjoy music and I don't have to become an expert at everything related to music. So because you're a smart person and you say like, especially if you do have a higher education degree and you've put in a lot of work to earn those things, or you've worked at a big corporate job with a fancy name and a fancy logo that people respect.
[00:04:26] Ken: That doesn't mean that you are a failure if you don't figure out all of these different parts of your business. If you don't figure out how to generate leads, if you don't figure out yourself how to generate sales, if you don't figure out for yourself how you become someone who has a personal brand on social networks, you kind of get the picture right.
[00:04:46] Ken: You kind of get where I'm going with this.
[00:04:47] Ken: Don't do it all yourself. Don't try to take on all the burdens. That doesn't also mean run to low cost labor. It also doesn't mean to overinvest into things that [00:05:00] clearly aren't gonna give you ROI. I meet people almost every single day who have invested in a lot of things that gave them zero ROI.
[00:05:06] Ken: So first point here, foundation is stop trying to be. The expert at all things. We'll talk more about what the alternative should be in a minute, but I want to get that one outta the way. And I guess this second point really is directly related to it, which is you go off in search of solution because of problem.
[00:05:28] Ken: I am gonna go use chat t to teach me how to write LinkedIn content. I'm gonna go use Claude to write my newsletter. I'm gonna go use LinkedIn Sales Navigator because I heard that's where I can build a list. And to become an expert at those things and actually use them proficiently is not unlike. The person who became a piano player and it took them 10, 15, 20 years to become that expert.
[00:05:56] Ken: Is it gonna take you 20 years to learn sales navigator [00:06:00] or to actually truly use AI in a way that's gonna be impactful for your business? No, but I see every single day people using those things very poorly. And the alternative here is to how we look at getting someone who can help you. Close those gaps quickly in your business.
[00:06:18] Ken: I tried to do this a lot for myself when I was an agency owner, and again, if you listen through some of the other conversations, you know, I went from zero to seven figures without having anyone on, payroll, mostly with contractors, and then at some point had people on payroll and then at some point was spending six figures a month on payroll, so on and so forth.
[00:06:37] Ken: And through that time I have made some of the mistakes, right? That's why I'm here talking to you. That I'm talking about today, which is that I became an expert in way too many things. things that we won't even get into because you don't really want to hear about how to manage people in a conversation about how to grow without hiring.
[00:06:54] Ken: But I became this expert in a lot of things, and I tried to find this help. I tried to hire [00:07:00] consultants, I tried to hire coaches. I tried to hire bestselling authors who told me I was their best client of all time. And almost universally, I didn't get any assistance. I didn't get any ROI. You could say. I got assistance, but it didn't produce results in the business.
[00:07:17] Ken: And so today there is a strong bias starting with yours truly towards looking to someone else to get help. Because we are saying to ourselves, I've tried that program before, or I've worked with this kind of person, or I've tried the course, I've read the book, I've done all the things, Ken, and it just doesn't help.
[00:07:37] Ken: Or going back to the first point, if you don't fall into that bucket, I dealt with a few people like this recently, and I'm not salty about it, just instructive for the conversation, but I see this often. It just happened to be something that I saw a couple times this week of people who were saying. Yeah, I'm kind of happy with the direction of my business and I'm kind of doing already what you're suggesting, so I don't really [00:08:00] need help, or something along the lines of a story I had recently was someone that kept telling me, they're not ready yet.
[00:08:07] Ken: I'm not ready yet to get help because I have to go work on some things. This is a sort of progression relative to the person that thinks they've. Already arrived or evolved, and they don't need any help because they are so quote unquote brilliant. But when you find someone who actually has done that thing before and done it at scale, please don't close yourself off to listening and learning.
[00:08:29] Ken: And I apply this to myself today still because I have people in my life who have already effectively retired very early. Probably in certain cases around where I am in life, or they've built another thing and they've built it to an even larger scale.
[00:08:44] Ken: So if we close ourselves off to mentorship, to subject matter experts that actually are legitimately the number one or the top in their category for something that you're just struggling through. That is a [00:09:00] very quick way to get stuck not growing. There's also fractional help, and a lot of you probably are not at the stage,where it would make sense for you to go get fractional help because it's quite a bit more expensive.
[00:09:11] Ken: It,
[00:09:12] Ken: as a point of reference, when I started this thing up, and I hadn't done a business quite like this before, I definitely invested into myself in a few different ways.
[00:09:22] Ken: And some of those things really didn't work still just like in the past. And that was on me learning how to calibrate for this particular business and market. But there were times where I spent an extraordinary amount of money with someone after kind of testing them out in some kind of capacity. To show me things that I have never done before because they had proof of work and they felt like a me in their market and that investment of 10, 20, or 30 K, whatever it might, look like.
[00:09:51] Ken: Heads paid itself times and times and times over again because essentially I installed their brain and their DNA into my business and I also absorbed a lot of that. [00:10:00] Some of my favorite client testimonials are not the people that just say, Hey, Ken got me to X number per month. I have people that have said that for hundreds of thousands of dollars, 50 KA month, all numbers everywhere in between.
[00:10:13] Ken: People have literally left multiple jobs and got to a fairly high number, especially relative to what they were making in a full-time job. The point being here, my favorite testimonials are not about that. They are just the people that say, being close to Ken and seeing how he operates and seeing how he runs his business was the most valuable thing, and that is really independent of you ever talking to me.
[00:10:40] Ken: That is really the separation between mentorship and a quote unquote coach. Is someone who actually has done it at scale and done it clearly in a business like yours in the way that you want to grow.
[00:10:53] Ken: So again, the fastest way to not grow is to turn yourself off to that help to either [00:11:00] get the wrong kind of help. We're bringing in a really low cost labor option, and assuming that that's gonna go to plan. And assuming that they're gonna do better than you without context, without any systems in place, or we're going to presume that we're smart enough or smarter than a person who has built your business to 10, 20, 30, 50 x what you're doing and thinking that you kind of got it handled and got it covered, or thinking that again, you're not ready yet, or this person only helps people who are.
[00:11:30] Ken: Established, and this person only helps people who arrived in their business. If you're healthy, you don't need the doctor mean obviously, it's always good to have your checkups right, but you get the point of the metaphor and the illustration. The people that need assistance with a cold, they broke something.
[00:11:50] Ken: They are having. Sleeplessness, they need the doctor, and that's also who needs mentorship. It doesn't mean that if you are perfectly healthy that you can't improve something [00:12:00] still, but the glaring issues are there in your business.
[00:12:04] Ken: Guarantee it. There are still glaring issues in my business, which is why I'm always trying to stay sharp. And I'm getting outside perspectives, and I have that, what I call community of expert peers, which includes some of these different roles that I'm talking about for mentors, fractional help, subject matter experts, and so forth.
[00:12:21] Ken: Okay, so let's talk about the last one here. Let, and it's very top of mind for me because I've been doing some things with AI that I guarantee you very few people are doing because of my background as a technologist. I am seeing if I could push AI in ways that I know others aren't because I'm working with it sometimes five to seven hours on a specific task, and probably asking it to do things that it has not yet done.
[00:12:45] Ken: But I'm increasingly hearing across my client base when they're working on their lead gen or they're working on their offers or thinking about how to scale the back end of the business and hearing things like, well, I worked with. Chat GBT on this, or I worked on [00:13:00] Claude with this, or I worked on Zapier's new MCP, or whatever it might be.
[00:13:04] Ken: Some of those are more elaborate, extensive. You don't know what an MCP is yet. Don't worry about it.
[00:13:09] Ken: But garbage in, garbage out and I can tell you having worked with people and managed people for decades. That a lot of, I think the success with AI is gonna come in actually understanding how to delegate and how to help, in this case an entity, but how to help solve problems without getting stuck in, I'm gonna go solve this with brute force.
[00:13:35] Ken: 'cause I'm super intelligent
[00:13:36] Ken: when I talk about this. I'm not meaning to slight any particular profession, but. It's the nature of the work that software developers and engineers would attack problems from what I saw with their brilliance and trying to come up with elaborate solutions or algorithms or really fancy ways of solving problems.
[00:13:56] Ken: When I would look at it and say, have you thought about just [00:14:00] approaching it this way? Did I always come up with a better solution? Did that always help? Unlock them. Not necessarily, but it did more often than not. And so AI is still young. If you think about it as sort of where it is in its lifecycle and it's, it's almost like this child that is a prodigy, but also that doesn't have a certain level of maturity, and it also doesn't have the ability to step back and understand,
[00:14:26] Ken: yes, I can solve this with a Python script and I can run it through three different processing engines, but should I actually do that? And a lot of times I have to instruct it and make it realize that the suggestion is just about strength versus scalpel precision.
[00:14:44] Ken: At some point, I know AI will be different than what I'm describing here. And again, I enjoy it. I like having a thought partner. I'm not suggesting that you should eliminate it from your business, but you need to understand that it's only gonna give you the results [00:15:00] based on the kind of context and data.
[00:15:01] Ken: And I'm not even talking about needing to do these elaborate prompts anymore because that already is sort of becoming a thing of the past. A couple years ago, everyone wanted to become a prompt engineer and a prompting expert, and it's just not something that is as important today because of how fast AI is advancing.
[00:15:18] Ken: But what is really gonna be helpful and useful for you is ensuring that you direct AI as your thought partner, as your collaborator, to do things in a way that has proper context, that has the right data. That has access to your personal knowledge graph that you understand which kind of GPT solves problems in different ways.
[00:15:42] Ken: Better possibly even not just the model that's being used, which is also a thing that's increasingly important, but possibly just saying, well, for this particular task, why am I gonna try to use chat GPT or Claude when I really should rely on the GPT that's built into my AI note taker. And actually [00:16:00] let that work be done there.
[00:16:01] Ken: But if you're just running to it all the time and not actually using systems thinking to direct it, that is gonna cause you to run in circles.
[00:16:10] Ken: This week I worked with a couple different people with their offers, trying to make it more scalable, trying to move them out of being a doer to more of an advisor.
[00:16:18] Ken: And we had some really good scaffolding in place and felt really good about what that offer would look like going forward. And in a few instances They wound up going back to one of these different GPTs and throwing a bunch of information at it.
[00:16:32] Ken: And what came out on the other side was super complex, not easy to digest, and really would confuse prospects in the sales process. Not only does it confus prospects and make them not win deals, it makes them have a higher, more sophisticated and complex delivery because AI doesn't have the context necessarily that this needs to be built in a way that doesn't make you just close deals or that matches resources and materials you might have provided [00:17:00] it.
[00:17:00] Ken: It also is about ensuring on the back end that you aren't stuck all day doing deliverables. That you aren't being forced to work within milestone based payments, that you aren't doing projects, that you aren't doing hourly rate and so on and so forth.
[00:17:14] Ken: you know, this particular conversation, maybe it doesn't age well. Maybe in three months. It's better. It will be better in three months. But I do see a lot of parallels in what I used to do in managing a team with the world that's coming quickly as it relates to ai.
[00:17:31] Ken: And I've talked about this especially in trying to make yourself a 2030 company, which is how are you managing your ai? How are you managing your agents? There are some conversations this week from some of the Google founders saying that they actually have AI managers, but in this case, talking about more of you being the manager of your new quote unquote team that doesn't actually have any humans in certain cases.
[00:17:54] Ken: And relative to all of this, in terms of some of the frameworks and systems that I shared [00:18:00] before, that we also don't just say, Hey, well AI can solve all of these administrative tasks. Because you sometimes can get stuck into a situation where if you would've given the same task to a human, they would've solved that in five minutes.
[00:18:13] Ken: So recapping really what this is about today. Number one, trying to do it all yourself. Trying to be the person that's the hero.
[00:18:23] Ken: Number two. Not being ready to get that mentor, to not get that fractional help, to not pay a true high-end subject matter expert. Some of my clients over time have gotten really good at this. Maybe they learned it from me, but also they just understand when they see they get the right person. That gives ROI, why not find more people like that?
[00:18:41] Ken: It does mean along the way that you maybe spend some things that don't give you ROI, and that's just is the nature of the game of entrepreneurship. And finally, number three, not overly turning to AI or not overly relying on ai without proper guidance, without proper context, without data, without [00:19:00] understanding that you can go down, not just a rabbit hole, but a rabbit hole, a stake hole, and a dark tunnel, and never to be seen again and just get frustrated and say, well, that was a waste of four or five hours.
[00:19:12] Ken: So please don't allow any of these different items here to drive you to the point of no growth. The fastest way to not grow. Because ultimately this will lead you to saying, I have to go hire someone full time before you actually are ready to do that. And that's what we talked about in other conversations.
[00:19:32] Ken: So you can double back to when you should. Or should not hire. And we also talked about what that quote unquote hiring means. In certain cases, hiring a system, hiring a tool, or hiring AI is okay within the lens of what we just talked about today. So that's gonna be where we leave this conversation. If you learn something today, if you got a nugget, it doesn't have to transform your life, but if you learned one thing, ratings reviews are super helpful.
[00:19:58] Ken: Show me that I'm doing a good [00:20:00] job and keeping me motivated to coming back to have these conversations. You can always send in a note to me. I read every single thing that you send in. Now, there's lots of different ways to contact me. I'm also very active on LinkedIn and I have a newsletter, which you can easily get access to in the show notes, but that's gonna be where we leave it today.
[00:20:17] Ken: Excited as always to have these conversations and help you grow without hiring.