# How to Build an AI First Business

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5B-akVebyc

[00:00] The biggest shift in how we organize our companies and our teams is happening right now as a result of AI.
[00:04] And if you are not surfing this wave, you are going to get dumped by it.
[00:09] I want to share with you in this video how I used to set up my organization and how that's changed and what's working for me right now.
[00:14] So, this is how I used to set up my businesses and this is how most companies used to set up their business.
[00:19] But I've leveraged this all chart time and time again to achieve seven and even eight-figure revenue.
[00:25] Of course, we used to have the key person of influence whose job was to be the face of the business and to be the leader of the business.
[00:31] Then I'd have a general manager who would run the business.
[00:33] I would have head of marketing, head of sales.
[00:38] I would have head of product and customer success.
[00:44] We would have finance and IT.
[00:47] And those were the main eight roles that I would put together to build a business.
[00:50] If I was doing seven or eight-figure revenue, those were essentially the central roles that everything would revolve around.
[00:57] Now, of course, we would have other providers and contractors.
[01:00] but essentially these were the main roles internally that my company would hire first.
[01:04] So, at the center of our organization is the AI capability.
[01:06] I like to call it the AI cake because it has a few layers to it.
[01:10] The first layer is the security layer.
[01:12] The security layer's job is to make sure that everything is locked down, that people have access to only the information that they're allowed to have access to, and no one outside of the organization can easily get in.
[01:23] The next layer of the cake is the models.
[01:25] This is the large language models or the generative models.
[01:29] This is the trained technology, the AI technology that is running the entire AI capability.
[01:33] So, for example, you might want to plug in Claude or ChatGPT, or you may even want to download some of the models that are available on Hugging Face.
[01:41] And then the third layer is called context and skills.
[01:43] Now, context and skills is all the information about your business or my business that makes us completely unique.
[01:49] So, in our context layer, we've got all sorts of stuff.
[01:51] We've We've all of my books, we've got every video that I've ever produced.
[01:57] We've got all of our sales calls that have been transcribed.
[02:01] We've got all of our Slack conversations that we have in the Slack channel.
[02:04] We've got our financials.
[02:07] All of that gets piled in to this central AI layer.
[02:10] By building this AI cake, it means that with all of this stuff combined, anyone on the team can ask all sorts of questions and get answers.
[02:18] The AI can give us advice.
[02:20] It can give us strategic direction.
[02:22] It can answer any questions about, you know, data or information that we need at any given time.
[02:26] It can produce documents.
[02:29] It can spit out slide decks.
[02:30] It can come up with marketing ideas.
[02:33] All of that can happen because of these three layers.
[02:34] So, think about it like this.
[02:36] The center of the business is the business brain, and the business brain is a well-set up AI system that is secure, that has the latest frontier models, and it has context and skills that make it unique to your business.
[02:48] Okay, I want to interrupt this video so that I can tell you about a game plan session.
[02:51] These are one-to-one sessions where you can talk to my team.
[02:55] You can talk about the strategy of becoming a key person of influence.
[02:58] In that session, we're going to ask you questions about your intellectual capital, your ideal customer persona,
[03:03] your monetization strategy, and your personal brand as the founder.
[03:06] We're going to bring all of that together under one umbrella called becoming a key person of influence.
[03:09] We position you as a go-to person whose name comes up in conversation, who gets high-quality attention,
[03:16] [music]
[03:16] and who knows how to monetize it.
[03:18] It's not something we've recently discovered.
[03:20] It's something we've been talking about for 15 years.
[03:21] My team are world-class at having powerful conversations about how to execute this strategy.
[03:26] I want you to book a one-on-one session called a game plan session
[03:30] [music]
[03:31] so that you can start to implement the ideas that you're seeing in this channel.
[03:33] Okay, now let's get back to the video.
[03:35] Sitting around the AI cake is four major roles.
[03:40] The first one is the key person of influence, right?
[03:42] Once again, this is our person who is the face of the business.
[03:46] They're the attention seeker of the business.
[03:47] They're the leader of the business,
[03:49] typically the originator of some of the core content, the core intellectual property or intellectual capital comes from that key person of influence.
[03:55] Their job is to be the front person for the business.
[03:58] Their job is to become known, liked, and trusted, to endorse the business, to put their reputation on the
[04:03] line for the business.
[04:05] All of that is that key person of influence.
[04:07] The next person is head of growth.
[04:09] The head of growth is all things about new customers.
[04:11] This is speed to market.
[04:13] It's about telling your story.
[04:15] It's about generating leads.
[04:17] It's about channeling attention.
[04:19] It's about getting customers to make commitment to come and join the business.
[04:23] It's about making sure people know about the big ideas, about the great products, about the great results that you can get.
[04:29] It's about making sure people know this is the company to come to if you want these outcomes, if you want to solve these problems.
[04:34] So, head of growth is essentially marketing and sales all wrapped into one to grow the top line of the business.
[04:39] The head of growth is creating content to get attention, to tell the stories, channeling that into leads and appointments, answering questions like a salesperson would, right?
[04:49] And all of this is enabled by AI tools that they're using as well.
[04:51] And they may also even bring some humans in if that helps, too.
[04:56] Once we've won the business, we go over to head of delight.
[04:58] This person over here is making sure that people are thrilled and delighted that they are client of this business.
[05:02] They're going to do all the things that lead towards a customer feeling a sense of delight that they're working with this business.
[05:04] to do everything from making sure that the product is world-class, that the service is delivered above and beyond, that the customer success journey is nice and clear.
[05:18] Now, the head of delight might also do special things like special events or community or amazing experiences.
[05:25] Everything that takes you above and beyond and makes people say, "You know what? I love being a customer of this business, and I would happily recommend it."
[05:32] Now, this fourth role is a role that I like to call the Swiss Army knife.
[05:36] The Swiss Army knife is the high agency generalist.
[05:37] This person is solid at so many different things, right?
[05:39] They can do a bit of IT, they can do a bit of media, they understand a little bit about finance and governance.
[05:47] Anything that keeps the business on the rails, this person kind of knows how to do it.
[05:50] This is typically thought of as like a general manager.
[05:52] They can do a little bit of everything and they can do everything well enough.
[05:57] Especially when this person is armed with AI, they can get all sorts of things solved and sorted.
[06:00] Think of this person as the person who is keeping the
[06:04] business running.
[06:06] Now, this is such a small, lean, flat team that you can get things done so fast.
[06:10] The business can be running smoothly, the head of growth could have an idea about some new content and the key person of influence could create that content, then it generates some leads, they spin up a landing page, they collect some new data, make some new sales, clients go over here to the client delight, they get a special customized product or service, it goes above and beyond, they get invited to an experience.
[06:32] All of this can happen with a very small, lean, dynamic team.
[06:34] These four roles can work so well together.
[06:37] I want to share with you what each role is kind of benchmarked against and what they're trying to achieve.
[06:41] So, the key person of influence is trying to achieve high-quality attention.
[06:47] High-quality attention means the right ideal customer persona is engaged with this business.
[06:51] They're following along, they're watching, they're learning, they're listening, they're being educated and entertained, and every single week there's new attention coming into the business.
[06:58] The key person of influence is the narrator, the storyteller, the person who explains why the business is valuable.
[07:05] The trusted face of the business.
[07:07] Their name and their reputation are synonymous with this business.
[07:11] The more high-quality attention this person can get, bigger and better this business is going to become.
[07:15] The head of growth lives and dies by a metric called CAC to LTV, the cost to acquire a customer relative to the lifetime value of the customer.
[07:25] And for most businesses that have a decent margin, you essentially want this to be three to one.
[07:29] So, for every $1 that you spend acquiring a customer, you want it to be at least $3, which is the lifetime value of a customer.
[07:35] So, if you spend $1,000 acquiring a customer, you'd better hope that they spend $3,000 with the business.
[07:41] You could spend $1,000 acquiring a customer who spends $10,000, but it tends to be that it all collapses down if it goes under 1 to 3.
[07:47] The head of delight is focused on net promoter score.
[07:50] Net promoter score means how many of the customers are going to make a recommendation or a referral to somebody else in their shoes to come and do business with this company.
[08:00] A high net promoter score means people felt that they got what they paid for and then some.
[08:03] So, you literally discover this
[08:06] score by asking your customers on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?
[08:12] Now, if someone says a 9 or a 10, they're a promoter.
[08:15] If someone says they're a 7 or an 8, they're neutral.
[08:18] Under a 7 and they're a detractor.
[08:19] And there is a formula that you can look up in your own time which tells you how to calculate the net promoter score.
[08:26] A simplified version of this is just the experience score.
[08:29] So, the experience score is on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your experience with us?
[08:33] Anything above an 8 is a positive experience.
[08:35] Anything below an 8, and you're getting into the territory where people did not have a positive experience working with your business.
[08:39] Ultimately, we're looking for high scores that indicated people were delighted with what they got from the business.
[08:45] The Swiss Army knife, we are looking for rule of 40.
[08:51] Rule of 40 means that the combined growth and profitability of the business adds up to 40 or more.
[08:57] So, if you grew by 20% and your bottom line was 20%, that would be rule of 40.
[09:02] If you grew by 30% and your bottom line was 10%, that would be rule of 40.
[09:06] If you had 10% profit and 30% growth, also rule of 40.
[09:09] If you had 40% growth and no profit, also rule of 40.
[09:13] So, essentially, anything where the growth and the profit adds up to a number more than 40.
[09:17] That is a great way to take into consideration how fast is the business growing and how profitable is the business.
[09:21] Slow growth business with high margins, absolutely fine.
[09:26] A fast growth business with low margins, also fine, provided those numbers add up to more than 40, we're in the ballpark.
[09:32] So, there we have it.
[09:34] Simple metrics, simple team, all connected to AI.
[09:37] Every conversation that you want to have, you want to make sure goes into the AI cake.
[09:40] You want to make sure that you're having conversations on a platform like Slack that is automatically updating the AI.
[09:46] You want to almost treat this AI cake as part of the team.
[09:50] So that all the information is constantly going in there.
[09:52] New financial data, put it in the cake.
[09:57] New conversational data, put it in the cake.
[09:59] New sales conversations, transcribe them, put them in the cake.
[10:01] Having meetings, do them on Zoom, have them recorded and transcribed into the cake they go.
[10:07] The more information you throw into this AI cake, the more it can help you if you set it up right from the
[10:10] Beginning.
[10:11] Now, you're going to have to look into how to do this.
[10:13] There are videos that explain how to set this up in technical ways, but I wanted you to have the framework.
[10:16] This is the thinking.
[10:17] This is the framework as to how you should think about your organization in a post-AI world.
[10:20] Now, of course, you won't just stay as four people.
[10:23] You'll probably have under the growth team, you'll have some sales people, you might have some specialists at marketing.
[10:26] Under the light, you'll probably have some product developers and some customer success agents.
[10:30] Uh you might have a head of events or community.
[10:34] You can add people to this structure, but this is a great place to start.
[10:37] This is where you want to begin your thinking as the central nucleus of your organization if you're a startup.
[10:43] Now, the reason that founders are going to succeed if they adopt this model is because they're going to be leaner, flatter, faster.
[10:45] They're going to be more nimble, more dynamic, they're going to evolve quicker.
[10:48] They're going to leverage AI more effectively.
[10:49] And in their DNA, in their bones, they're going to be adopting a strategy that is AI first.
[10:53] Now, I genuinely believe now that we're living in a post-AI world, if your business is not AI first, it's a little bit like running a marathon when other
[11:11] people are driving cars.
[11:13] All right?
[11:13] You will never get humans who can keep up with a human in a car.
[11:16] And you will never get traditional businesses going forward that can keep up with an AI first business.
[11:20] So, as soon as possible, you want to be thinking AI first.
[11:22] Okay, so if you enjoyed this, I want you to start thinking about how you're going to play this role of key person of influence cuz it's an incredibly powerful role.
[11:30] To help you do this, I want you to attend a game plan session with my team.
[11:34] It's like a coaching session.
[11:35] It's completely free, but I want you to think of it like you paid for it.
[11:37] What we're going to do is ask you some questions to figure out whether you've got what it takes to really play this role of key person of influence.
[11:46] In every AI first business, we need to have someone who is the human face of the business.
[11:48] It's a go-to-market strategy that's working so much better than a business brand or a faceless business.
[11:55] Having a person who is a key person of influence, a founder brand, is making such a profound impact that even Facebook or Meta said that founder branded ads perform 2.2 times better than ads that don't have the founder.
[12:08] So, across all the data points, this is your role.
[12:11] This is the most important role.
[12:13] If you're watching a video like this, this is something where you know you should be doing more of this.
[12:17] So, I want you to book in a game plan session and talk to my team about how you can play the role of key person of influence.
[12:23] I want your name to come up in conversations.
[12:24] When people are talking about a particular outcome or solving a particular problem, I want people to naturally say that you are the person to talk to.
[12:32] I want you to earn more money and have more inbound inquiries because you're positioned as a key person of influence.
[12:38] I want you to get more attention onto your business as a key person of influence.
[12:42] I want you to attract amazing people into these other roles because you're a key person of influence.
[12:47] So, all of that starts by having a game plan with my team so we can really talk you through the strategy.
[12:52] There'll be a link below.
[12:53] Click the link, book a game plan session, and I look forward to the opportunity to find out how you go about positioning yourself as a key person of influence in the year ahead.
[12:59] All the best.