Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: 15% of the working world is using ai, but almost nobody is using it in a way that will actually build a 2030 business.
[00:00:10] Ken: Most founders and consultants are treating AI like a polite version of Google.
[00:00:17] Ken: They're throwing $500 at $50,000 a month problems.
[00:00:22] Ken: and before we go any further, let me be really clear about this.
[00:00:27] Ken: Today is not a use ai, more conversation. It's actually a wake up call because today you are drowning in and numbing yourself with ai.
[00:00:37] Ken: Most out there are using AI in every direction except the one that actually scales. I
[00:00:43] Ken: What I want you to take away is that we are entering into the specialist era of ai. And the gap between the general users, the ones using it like a Google search box, and the specialist builders? That's the entire story of the next [00:01:00] decade.
[00:01:00] Ken: Let me paint this picture a little more clearly. Most people use ai. To get quick answers or fix tasks, write a thing, summarize a thing, marketing ideas for a thing.
[00:01:12] Ken: But the founders who are pulling away,
[00:01:14] Ken: they're not asking AI to solve tasks. They're integrating AI into systems. They're not using a single assistant.
[00:01:23] Ken: They're creating an ecosystem trained on their business, their clients, their workflows, their patterns.
[00:01:31] Ken: Now I would argue that episode 12 are you a 2030 company is my most important. Conversation and episode to date, at least at the time of this recording and talking about these specialized systems and these specialized GPTs is simply an explosion of, or an evolution of the ideas in that episode. So highly recommend that you double back to it,
[00:01:56] Ken: something that I mentioned in that conversation. Was the [00:02:00] need to move away from learning to swing the hammer to designing the hammer.
[00:02:06] Ken: This is the next layer point. 1% of founders aren't just designing hammers, they're designing the entire toolbox Filled with specialized instruments built on first party data.
[00:02:19] Ken: And I can tell you this firsthand because that is the same path that I followed this year.
[00:02:24] Ken: I've built 17 systems.
[00:02:27] Ken: Using this same framework and philosophy, and I went back and looked through some of my own data and I can tell you that my offers GPT has generated six figures this year.
[00:02:38] Ken: That's something that I built myself based on my data,
[00:02:42] Ken: and it's something that I go back to regularly when I look at. Bringing a new offer to the market, which we should be doing regularly, especially in today's market.
[00:02:49] Ken: But here's the difference of what I'm doing and what I'm trying to help you do. We should not be using generalized purpose assistants for everything
[00:02:59] Ken: when [00:03:00] I wanna write an app script. I turn to Claude Code, not ChatGPT
[00:03:05] Ken: When I finish a sales call, I don't download the transcript and then push it into one of the generalized AI assistants instead. Fathom gives me specialized gpt for processing the sales call transcripts right in its interface using two or three different well-known sales methodologies.
[00:03:23] Ken: It's also why I am a limited partner investor in Magic Post, which uses millions of posts to create standout LinkedIn content 10 times faster.
[00:03:33] Ken: None of that is prompt magic. It's specialization.
[00:03:38] Ken: So here's the pattern that I have to correct constantly, and I'm not gonna go back through my entire history, but I am a technologist. I am someone who studied computer science when it was a new discipline. I've built apps featured by Apple and systems that scale to millions of users.
[00:03:56] Ken: So a lot of what I'm seeing today is informed [00:04:00] by that history.
[00:04:01] Ken: So I don't blame you that you are excited about AI and it is exciting, but my clients, and most likely you are excited in all the wrong places.
[00:04:12] Ken: They chase novelty, they build clever prompt stacks.
[00:04:16] Ken: They obsess over which AI assistant is better They optimize for a hundred dollars problems with a thousand dollars worth of effort when they want to be a $500,000 or a million dollar year business.
[00:04:29] Ken: But the one system, the one, not the 27, that would erase the problem entirely is the one that they never build.
[00:04:38] Ken: I had a client show me a beautifully engineered AI set up recently, Gorgeous, right? Truly smart work. And it was built to optimize a part of their business that did not matter.
[00:04:51] Ken: They had lovingly built a Ferrari engine to power a golf cart.
[00:04:56] Ken: And here's where I do believe I have an advantage. I [00:05:00] have managed, hired dozens and hundreds of people really over the years,
[00:05:05] Ken: and I can see that a lot of the ways that AI works today is much like the engineers that I've hired for decades. They can solve any problem with their brilliance. And you know what? On the other side of it, they shouldn't solve any problem with their brilliance. They also have the Ferrari engine to power a golf cart
[00:05:25] Ken: When they need the specific engine that is tuned for that job.
[00:05:30] Ken: This is the same trap I talked about in episode six. The fastest way to not grow.
[00:05:35] Ken: People don't struggle because they're not smart enough. They struggle because they're not focused enough.
[00:05:41] Ken: It is not about using more tools, more tech, more ai. It's about the discipline. And please listen to this next part, to not use it
[00:05:51] Ken: And only implement AI where it accelerates or compounds within your business.
[00:05:56] Ken: And interestingly enough, this is where the investors are [00:06:00] also now aligned. I was listening to a Y Combinator conversation recently, some of the top investors in AI in the world, and they said something that literally made me pull my car over to the side of the road.
[00:06:13] Ken: They said that prompts aren't the crown jewels of their companies.
[00:06:17] Ken: The data is the real world context, the workflow knowledge.
[00:06:22] Ken: They gave this example of literally sitting next to a tractor sales manager in Nebraska watching exactly how they work, what they care about, and how did that person get promoted, And then they translate that into insanely specific evaluation data that makes sense only for that role,
[00:06:42] Ken: and that they said is the founder skill of the next decade deep, obsessive customer understanding,
[00:06:49] Ken: codified into systems that software can consume and use.
[00:06:54] Ken: And this hit me between the eyes because of all the noise out [00:07:00] there about clever prompting, gimmicks, and a whole bunch of nonsense. That doesn't matter.
[00:07:06] Ken: This is how you win over the next five years. Context. Data specialization. That's the competitive moat
[00:07:14] Ken: we're leaving. The era of solopreneurs can hit a million dollars.
[00:07:20] Ken: I did cover that in episode 14, by the way.
[00:07:23] Ken: We're entering the time of small teams that are worth a billion dollars with AI and agents, which I also talked about in those conversations. I
[00:07:32] Ken: now, I've been covering this for quite some time, but investors now are starting to call these micro businesses and one of my favorite tools. An AI presentation startup called Gamma recently announced their $2.1 billion valuation with a lean team of about 52 employees. But here's the deal, they were worth a billion dollars with less than 20.
[00:07:53] Ken: The point is that I've seen this for myself firsthand. I'm now seeing it for venture scale businesses. And all of [00:08:00] them will agree that the specialist era of AI is not about how fast you can write code.
[00:08:07] Ken: Instead, it's about how specifically can AI understand your domain,
[00:08:13] Ken: where one specialized system could replace 20 tasks. You've been wrestling with for the last year or for the last decade in your business? I've referred to this in the past of having a fleet of me, and again, without ai, I've been able to get to seven figures in this business, and only in this year itself have I taken it and implemented it and actually begun to build true systems.
[00:08:37] Ken: So, no, not by prompting, not by hiring, not by VAs or all the other things that people have told you for the last decade and for really all of your life in terms of how you grow, but instead by codifying their expertise, your expertise into systems that can run with and without you.
[00:08:57] Ken: So if you take nothing else from today's [00:09:00] conversation, please let this sink deep into your soul.
[00:09:03] Ken: You don't need AI to fix $500 problems, and your generalized AI approach is holding you back.
[00:09:12] Ken: You need the discipline to stop throwing AI at everything. Start focusing on specialized GPTs. Start focusing more on data. Start focusing on context. Begin to architect specialized systems that run without you, that compound for you. That's the specialist era. That's how you grow without hiring.
[00:09:35] Ken: And the question that I will ask you to sit with and to struggle with is simple.
[00:09:40] Ken: What's the one system in your business that if it ran without you would 10 x everything.
[00:09:45] Ken: So that is gonna be where we end it for today. I'm gonna link up a number of the tools that I mentioned in this episode down in the show notes, but I always keep the show notes very tight for you, and I don't do an elaborate ending. I don't do mid-roll [00:10:00] CTAs, but if you are finding value, if you've learned one thing in this conversation, please take a moment to rate or review.
[00:10:06] Ken: This podcast because it helps me know that I'm doing a good job and it tells me what you want to hear more of in the future.
[00:10:13] Ken: If you wanna go deeper on this, please do get on my weekly briefing. I also highly recommend that you connect with me on LinkedIn. If you haven't already, send me a DM with the Word podcast so that I know that you're listening and that we can connect more quickly. and I also do share breakdowns and tactical information on LinkedIn regularly. I always appreciate your time and attention. I love these conversations and I can't wait to have another one on how to help you grow without hiring.