Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Every new technology creates a short-lived first mover advantage. I can tell you, having made millions from building around the latest tech, going back to the first websites, the first apps, that is real. But I can also tell you this, that advantage doesn't last and it rarely turns into long-term leverage.
[00:00:22] Ken: Or helps you grow without hiring.
[00:00:25] Ken: Today is no different right now. Most people are approaching AI in one of two ways. They either open a chat, ask a question, get an answer, and close that tab, or they go in the opposite direction and they over-engineer the mess out of it.
[00:00:41] Ken: See if this sounds familiar, long prompts, clever prompts, elaborate setups meant to show how advanced they are. Ooh, look how long this is. It's 17 pages. Neither approach creates leverage. Neither approach helps you grow without hiring, [00:01:00] and they both miss the same thing.
[00:01:02] Ken: They're treating AI as a series of sessions instead of infrastructure. No, not a series of tubes, which we learned about in 2006. If you know, you know,
[00:01:14] Ken: when you treat something as a session. You're doing this, you're constantly interacting with it. You're tinkering with it, you're thinking about it. When something is instead infrastructure, it fades into the background. It's just there and it's just doing its job. And that is the kind of tech that I've built over decades.
[00:01:36] Ken: Here's what I mean. Guess what? We don't do anymore? We don't talk about browsers. We don't talk about always on internet. We don't talk about how you have a more powerful computer in your pocket compared to the early spaceships, and we don't even talk about the cloud. But back when those things came out, they were transformational.
[00:01:57] Ken: And then they became [00:02:00] table stakes.
[00:02:00] Ken: Here's the part that I want to hit home for you today. AI is still in its novelty phase and novelty is pulling people like you in the wrong direction. You can see it every time there is a viral. AI demo, like OpenClaw, AKA Clawbot, aka Moltbot. It takes over the conversation, a new bot, a new tool, a new quote unquote system.
[00:02:28] Ken: It's a new claim that someone is now running the equivalent of 20 employees. Probably saw that in your feed today on LinkedIn.
[00:02:36] Ken: Even people who should be focused on their business, end up writing about ai. Instead, end up talking about AI writing a post, doing a video. Now curiosity is fine. Again, I'm a technologist. I'm an innovator by trade, but this isn't getting distracted.
[00:02:55] Ken: What I can tell you having built really interesting cutting edge things [00:03:00] is that all of what you see out there are not production level. That means they don't offer you leverage the, they don't survive real world usage. on paper. And on a quick little video demo, they look impressive, but they don't actually make your business easier to run, and that's all that matters.
[00:03:20] Ken: In fact, I would actually argue this, they add cognitive load. which means that your brain's busy thinking about things that shouldn't be, and fomo. Oh my goodness. So-and-so is trying Insert latest tech. I'm so behind
[00:03:35] Ken: you. Feel bad and you feel like you're falling behind. And guess what? You are and you should be when it comes to new shiny.
[00:03:45] Ken: I have seen this pattern enough times to be cautious about it. And if you've been listening to these conversations, you've heard me talk about it, that yes, I was around when the internet didn't exist and I built the first websites. I [00:04:00] then helped build the first blogs. I watched the web become social. I wrote a book.
[00:04:05] Ken: On apps that sold over 10,000 copies and was used in college classrooms, Nope. Doesn't make me special. It just gives me perspective. During the app, boom, this is one that comes to my mind. I watched people abandon perfectly viable businesses to chase the next thing.
[00:04:26] Ken: When Google Glass came out, they pivoted seemingly overnight, and I remember seeing this and thinking it was crazy. We're a Google Glass company now. How did that end?
[00:04:35] Ken: You don't have to have gone to business school to understand the idea of a first mover, but if you compare that with the iPhone, which was not, because there were so many other popular smartphones on the market that were dominant, the iPhone didn't show up first. It showed up later. It didn't have a first mover advantage.
[00:04:54] Ken: It had a best mover advantage. And then it changed how people thought about an entire [00:05:00] category
[00:05:00] Ken: and that leverage, which I understand you're not Apple, but it didn't come because of novelty or newness alone. It came from their precision timing and execution. and that's how I think about ai and it is what makes AI a system versus a tool.
[00:05:20] Ken: and this is part of what also makes you a 2030 company. As I discussed in episode 12. It gives you the opportunity to do algorithm proof marketing like we discussed last week, and I'll link up both of those in the show notes.
[00:05:36] Ken: The key is that even as a technologist and someone that's built apps that have been used by millions of people, I don't use AI everywhere in my business. There are plenty of things that shouldn't be automated and don't need AI at all. In fact, years ago I kept telling people, it's not time to use AI yet.
[00:05:56] Ken: It still was an experiment.
[00:05:58] Ken: Even with the models [00:06:00] available today, here's what surprises a lot of people I talk with.
[00:06:04] Ken: There are plenty of places in your business where AI shouldn't be involved at all. Not even because of the advancements, but rather that it doesn't serve you well. It doesn't offer that leverage.
[00:06:15] Ken: Not everything benefits from automation, and not everything should be systematized.
[00:06:20] Ken: Last week I had a conversation with a client who wanted to rebuild their systems. And I'm not saying that AI was top of mind for them, but often people are now saying, oh, I need to add AI to this or that. And I said, your system works as is simply iterate on it. That's enough.
[00:06:37] Ken: And what you need to hear is that not every decision, every part of the business gets better when you add another layer of tooling to it. This is something you might have heard, and if not, you need to hear it. Some things just need more judgment.
[00:06:52] Ken: Some things need more taste and some things need friction.
[00:06:57] Ken: When you treat AI as the [00:07:00] default, you end up automating the wrong things too soon and too early,
[00:07:04] Ken: and then you optimize for the wrong thing. It's optimized for immediacy instead of clarity. If you don't really understand who the best client is, you shouldn't build automation around how to get your best clients.
[00:07:20] Ken: And what this ultimately does is replace thinking with output.
[00:07:25] Ken: It introduces confusion and complexity where none was needed,
[00:07:30] Ken: so that is why I have dedicated an entire conversation around this topic. Because I am very intentional about where AI shows up and where it doesn't, and you should be the same.
[00:07:42] Ken: There are many parts of your business that desire this slowness, friction constraints.
[00:07:50] Ken: It's that space for work worth keeping. As we covered in episode 32, and I want those decisions to stay human for you because the cost of getting them [00:08:00] wrong is higher than the cost of doing them manually.
[00:08:02] Ken: This is also why treating AI like an answer bot creates problems over time. It trains you to outsource your thinking instead of accelerating it. There's actually studies around this, so I won't go deep into it, but I will say that once that habit sets in, it's hard to even notice that you've crossed that line.
[00:08:19] Ken: You want the real talk, that's why you're here. And that's ultimately not leverage. That's dependency.
[00:08:25] Ken: that's why I shut things down regularly. I have not even, for example, played with some of the latest tech because if something is overly complex or doesn't clearly give me leverage, I need it to go away.
[00:08:39] Ken: I need it to be outta my mind
[00:08:40] Ken: and while I'm not building these elaborate systems for my clients anymore. I do ensure that they have a tight tech stack and ultimately comes down to fewer tools. I want less tools, less workflows, and less of almost everything.
[00:08:58] Ken: you know, this 'cause it's the lens that you get [00:09:00] here, but it's about more discipline, more context. Less noise.
[00:09:05] Ken: Oh, you're on your soapbox here. No, I want you to understand that this is what you underestimate. The more you chase shiny new things, the more you get pulled away from solving real problems. And the less runway you have to actually build leverage in the business.
[00:09:21] Ken: I use really simple framing for this, and I do this so it stays in your brain. I want you to be a frontier dweller, and this was a guiding principle in my $5 million a year agency. If you get there too early. You get eaten by the bears. If you get there too late, you're sold maps to gold mines that don't exist.
[00:09:42] Ken: In both cases, you lose big
[00:09:44] Ken: AI's infrastructure means systems, not sessions, leverage. Not tools and context, not clever prompts, and I covered more about context, especially in the specialist era of ai, [00:10:00] which is another episode I will link up in the show notes.
[00:10:03] Ken: Here's how obsessive I am about this. I've even built working agreements with my own GPTs and AI assistance. To check these bad habits,
[00:10:12] Ken: and it helps me ensure that I have moved on from treating AI like an answer bot instead of part of a system.
[00:10:20] Ken: And you're likely doing this more than you realize because it is a subtle drift. So before you do anything next, I want you to pick a place you're using AI right now and ask yourself a simple question, if this disappeared tomorrow, would my business actually break?
[00:10:37] Ken: Or instead, would I just feel annoyed
[00:10:39] Ken: if it wouldn't break? Sorry to tell you, it's a session not infrastructure, and that's most likely where you are over investing.
[00:10:49] Ken: AI doesn't help you by doing more things. It helps when it fades into the background and supports the parts of the business that actually matter. And [00:11:00] that is the difference between AI as a tool and AI as a system.
[00:11:05] Ken: As always, appreciate these conversations and I look forward to continue to help you to grow. without hiring.