Transcript of Why Most Companies Get Product Wrong (and How to Fix It) | Chandler Bolt

You've got to build a business that runs without you. Most people can't do that. Most people just have jobs and they think they have businesses.

How do you remove the ego aspect of no one can do this the way that I do it?

It's a lie. I mean, it's a lie that you're telling yourself. It's a lie that you've bought into. It's hard, don't get me wrong.

I honestly believe that most people at their heart of hearts don't actually want to scale their business.

This is the greatest time in human history to do this, to get out of the weeds in your business because AI exists.

I'm so excited to have you back on. Like, it's gotta be 4 or 5 years. I should have gone back and looked. It's been forever since you were on the show. Um, dude, I followed along like from the outside with your journey. Every once in a while we'll, we'll connect on socials or whatever, but dude, it has been incredible watching you go from kind of, and I don't want to make this sound small, but like, Selfpublishing.com was like your only thing. It was the thing. It was kind of just coming up. You were having some early success and awesome interview, guys. If you're interested in self-publishing, go back, listen to that episode. It's phenomenal. I'll have it in the show notes if you're interested, especially if you're thinking about self-publishing, go back and listen to that episode. That was like the core of what that episode was about. Dude, today, man, freaking pure entrepreneur blowing up all over the place. I see you on all kinds of shows. Um, you know, like 30 Under 30, which screw you for being so frigging young. Um, you know what I mean? Like, dude, it's awesome. I'm just so, I'm happy to have you back on the show and I'm just excited for all the success you've had between our last conversation and this one.

Really happy to be back. Thanks for having me.

So dude, so many people struggle to scale and this is really where I'd like to start our conversations because your story and what I love about your story is that as it evolved from like, and again, I don't mean this to be trite, like self-publishing guy, right? To now you're entrepreneur guy and right, talking about bigger topics. You've scaled that business, you're scaling others, like you're helping other people. Like, so when you, when you look at that, how do you make that transition? How did you make that transition from I am the operator of selfpublishing.com to I am an entrepreneur leader who is now taking over, uh, uh, and, and kind of maturing into a larger role in a, in a larger business. What does that look like? And I, and the reason I'm— I will end the context here. The reason I asked this question first is because this is one of the number one struggles that I get feedback on from this show right now is I'm too in the business. And I'm struggling to make that jump from in the business to on the business.

Well, first, I'd rather be known for something than known for nothing. And so, so many people, they don't get known because they're worried about being known for something. And that something is maybe what they don't want it to be forever or whatever else. It's kind of like we get, get the advice we give our authors is, hey, be known for something. And it can be super niche. For me, I'm the book guy, right? Okay. Because then once you are known for something, You, it's very easy to piggyback that off of that or to transition from that into something else. What's really hard is being known for some broad thing from scratch. So I, so I just went all in on being the book guy and it just so happened. I think this is, I stumbled into this, this wasn't intentional, but then it became intentional is I think if you have a business where you can help people with a very specific problem that the most successful and wealthiest people on the planet have, well then you've got an automatic inroad into network with those people. And so for me, all the smartest, most successful people publish books, and I know how to do that at a really high level.

And so I can solve a problem for them. So now I'm valuable to them, so I can get into those rooms and I can get into those conversations. And so first off, be known for something. I'd rather be known for something than known for nothing. And then you ask the question of working on the business versus working in the business. I think Then you've gotta graduate out of the weeds. How do you do that? And the last, last part is 2 pillars of transitioning from working on the business, or sorry, working in the business to working on the business. And I think this is where most people get stuck because it's hard. So you need what we call a safe, bigger profit bridge. So you obviously, you need paying customers, then you need product market fit. If you don't have product market fit, you can't scale. Therefore, you can't scale beyond you. You just have a job. Most people just have jobs and they think they have businesses. It's nothing wrong with that, but you just have a high-paying self-employed job. So don't call it a business. Now, for it to become a business, you need those 2 things.

Then you need profits. You got to be profitable. You got to have margin. You need good process and you need good people. That's what it takes, in my opinion, to scale to 8 figures and to create a business that runs without you. But then you got to figure out what your time's worth. So many people, they treat their time just like it's worthless. It's insane to me. Take the amount of money that you earned over the last 12 months divided by 2,000. It's roughly 2,000 hours that a normal person works in a year. That's your hourly rate. Then audit your calendar, figure out what are you doing that you could pay someone else less than that hourly rate to do. And if you're spending time on that, well then yeah, of course you're always going to be in the business. You're not going to be on the business. Um, because you're just doing jobs that you should be paying other people to do.

How do you remove the ego aspect of no one can do this the way that I do it? No one understands. Uh, my team won't be as passionate or care as much as I will. So therefore I always have to know what they're doing, when they're doing it, et cetera.

It's a lie. I mean, it's a lie that you're telling yourself. It's a lie that you've bought into. It's hard. Don't get me wrong. I struggle with this as probably as much, if not more than the next person. But most people on your— well, first off, people on your team, if they're in the trenches doing the thing, they're better at it than you. And if they're not better at it than you, well then you probably don't have good process or good training, or you suck at hiring. And so get better at those things and then a lot of your problems will be removed. But Dan Martell has this rule, or is this mantra, 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. Like, if you can just get somebody else to do it, Most of the way as good as you, that's great. That's good enough. And you buy back that hour. Like, what's worse? Just take the pure math of it. Say an hour is worth $400 for you. What's worse? Spending time on $50 an hour tasks and doing it 5% better than somebody who could do it? I mean, what is that worth to your business?

Not much. And so, but so many people, they're just, they're pennywise and pound foolish. They're tripping over pennies or they're tripping over quarters to pick up nickels, right? It's just like, yeah, they're, they're just running on a hamster wheel in their business. And so you just gotta get out of it.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and he's in this phase and he's really struggling with it. And he's like, man, he's like, you know, we lost this account the other day. And I was like, well, Like in the grand scheme of things, like how big was the account? And he's like, well, you know, like he explains to me that the size and scale of it. I'm like, so really it didn't mean much. Like you're still, everyone's, you're still paying your people. The lights are still on. Like it's not that big a deal. Like they lost a client. Yes. Okay. I said, all right, well, why not just learn from the mistakes so that they don't do it again? And he's like, well, I can't have this happening. And I'm like, dude, dude, you just told me that the account that was lost. Was like this small account that really in the grand scheme of things had no impact. I go, do you lose accounts ever? Well, yeah, occasionally we lose. I'm like, so, okay. So, so you do on a monthly basis occasionally lose some accounts and you, you know, cause you're growing, you're putting more on.

That's a standard kind of business. That's the way most things work. And, but because you weren't involved and it was lost somehow, now you need to come all the way back down to like the foot soldier level of your business. Like, That makes zero sense to me. And it was like this idea that if he lost an account, then there was like nothing else that could be done, you know? But because his teammate lost the account, it was like, oh, well, he just wasn't trying that hard. And I'm like, but like, you have, to your point, I think this idea of 80% of someone else's work is, is good enough for 100, you know, versus 100% of yours. That is such a hard concept for people because they get like their personality, their self-worth is attached to the business. So as someone who was known for this thing, right? You're the self-publishing guy. Like, you know how to help people write books, you know how to— and now all of a sudden you need to ascend to this more like founder CEO level position. How did you detach from that? How were you able to like emotionally say, I'm okay giving up just the book guy and becoming this bigger thing?

Like, how did you do that?

So let me answer that in 2 parts. I think first entrepreneurs have this fallacy about people and AI, and I would say people in general have this fallacy about people and AI, and they assume that they can do things better Then AI does it, and then people do it, and they don't look at the actual math. And so if you think about it and look at the stats about, you know, wrecks per 1,000 miles driven by FSD, full self-driving, or self-driving capability versus humans already today, so AI self-driving is better than humans, but there's this weird fringe kind of outlier effect that causes people to stop that innovation or prevent delegation. In the case of people, they say, oh, No, no, no, no. But what if one AI driver kills someone? It's like, well, no, daily thousands, millions of, like, who knows how many people are dying because of human drivers? But it's just this weird thing where if we feel like we can't control it, or it's almost like a weird impulse that's not grounded in reality. And so I think whether it comes to delegating to people, whether it comes to delegating to AI, they likely can and will do it better than you.

And the biggest thing that's holding you back is A, looking at the math and B, just detaching from that long enough to try it. What's the worst thing that could happen?

Yeah.

It's usually, to your point, what you're talking about with losing the account, it's usually not that consequential, but we're just so terrified of these worst-case scenarios that are unlikely. And so first, I think there's just this mentality of, hey, you've got to just try it for a month. Default to, hey, this AI can do it, or this person on my team can do it. Just be a default yes for a month. And see what happens. I promise your business won't fall apart. I promise there's not gonna be detrimental, irreversible things that happen. Almost everything's reversible. So almost just like that mantra and then trying that, I think is what most people should do. Now, secondly, to directly answer your question, how did I get outta the weeds? Early, early on, I was coaching authors. Like, um, we sold the thing, we started coaching authors, and within about 6 months to a year, I knew I've gotta get out of coaching authors ASAP, 'cause as long as I'm stuck in fulfillment, this business is not gonna grow. And most people listening to this, watching this, probably are familiar with the sales fulfillment yo-yo. You sell, sell, sell.

Oh crap, I gotta fulfill, fulfill, fulfill, fulfill. Oh crap, there's no sales in the pipeline. Sell, sell, sell. And so you're just constantly yo-yoing back and forth between sales, fulfillment, sales, fulfillment, sales, fulfillment, and your business ends up flat. Well, that's because both aren't happening at the same time. So then you gotta figure out how do I get out of one or both and replicate myself in one or both as soon as possible? Obviously you gotta do this early in the entrepreneur journey, but you gotta keep doing this as you scale. It just might look a little bit different. And so early on I said, oh, the fulfillment piece, I'm really good at sales and marketing. This fulfillment piece is easier to delegate. So then I hired coaches that were successful authors that I had already coached. So I said, all right, cool. They can do it. They can do it for less than my hourly rate and they can do it better than me because they just recently did the thing. And it's been 2 years since I published a book. It's been 2 months since they published one. So they are going to be better in the trenches.

And so then I immediately gained back 10, 20 hours a week in that thing. And then I just kind of, as we've scaled, I've kept applying that same methodology. But I would say that's the practical thing that every founder needs to ask is, hey, where are you stuck right now? And look at your calendar. What's eating your time that can be done by someone else? Delegate it and then move to the stuff that you do best to grow the business faster.

But wait, Chandler, people buy for you, right? That, that's the reason they buy. They buy for you, the CEO, that they want to work with you only because you're the best and it's your business and you're the one they're buying for. So like, I can't pass off a customer to one of my teammates because I'm the face of the business.

It's a sales problem. I think if people were buying just because of you, you got a sales problem. And the problem is that you don't have a sales process and you don't have a product worth buying. You just, you have a job. So if that's what you want to do, great. You're selling your time. That's called being self-employed at best, or just, it's a lawyer, it's a doctor, it's whatever. You're selling your time. Now you might be selling it for a really high rate. That's amazing. 99.9% of people aren't able to do that. So congratulate, like, that's a beautiful thing. I don't want to belittle that, but if you want to scale, if you want to create a real sustainable business and a business that can run without you, well, you can't keep doing that. And so you got a sales problem, you need to fix it. And the way that you fix it is you sell the process, not the person. We deal with this even today because we've got incredible coaches. Like our coaches are insane. And so sometimes In the sales process, our sales reps are tempted to sell the coach. Like, oh my gosh, yeah, you gotta work with Scott, or you gotta work with Kurt.

Like, he's so good. And that, what I, the way I always look at it is that should be the gravy, not the main dish, is we have a process that gets results. This process, look at it. Look, there's a result of the process. There's another, here's a testimony. Here's, it's like, that's all because of the process. So you teach the process, you sell the process, everything points back to the process. And then, oh, by the way, yeah. You're gonna love this person that you're working with. Oh, that, that doesn't work for you those times? Yeah. Well, you're gonna love this other coach because they're great too. So you're not selling the person, you're selling the process. And now you fix your sales process, which means you can get out of the one-on-one fulfillment.

You know what's funny? And you've probably seen this in your own business is you can tell when you're selling someone whether they believe in what you just described or not by the way they buy, you know, like whether their business is actually set up where they're working on it or in it by the way they buy, like if, if they, Have to work with you or keep asking, well, Chandler, well, how much is it to work with you? Or why can't I work with you? Or how, you mean, you can tell that's how they think about their own business is they can't get out of their own business because they won't buy into, well, if you just work this process with this individual that I have trained, that I vouch for, who works on my team, who has done this previously and has results, like, don't you want the outcome, right? No, no, no. I want to work with you. And you're like, you can tell immediately. by the way someone buys, how they actually operate their business as well. It's, it's obvious.

Yeah. I'll give you 2 examples of this and how this is working for us. One is on the sales and marketing side of things. We speak 50 to 70 times a year at, at events. So we show up, we give a talk, people love it, and, uh, they're inspired to action and writing their book and all that stuff. It's, it'll be maybe a $6 or $7 million channel. That largely runs without me and channeling the business. And I will speak at maybe 10 or 15 of those. That is the ultimate version of something someone would say, you can't do that. Like, it has to be the founder that negotiates all those deals, has to be for sure the founder that speaks at all of those events. You know, it's just like they would just opt out of, that is not possible. And I said, well, what if the opposite were true? What if this could fully run without me? Well, then you would need a really good, great head of partnerships. That's what we did. That's, we developed, we hired for that role. We developed someone on the team. Okay, then you would need good speakers because I don't want to be speaking all the time, but I do want to speak at the big events, the 6-figure events.

So, okay, well then we would need a speaking team. Well, what would have to be true for that? Well, we would need to have a really good process of how we train our speakers. And so we could have them for small opportunities and kind of work their way up and earn their way into opportunities. Okay, so then you just end up reverse engineering where if your limiting belief stopped you from thinking that that was possible, you would not ask all the questions that made it possible. And so that's where one of my favorite questions is, what would have to be true? Because I'm not saying it's possible. I'm not saying it is true or it's possible or whatever, but what would have to be true for that to be possible? And that's how we built a, you know, $6, $7 million channel that largely runs without me. I'll say one more is on the ghostwriting side of the business. So many people, to your point, you watch the way they buy and then tell you their belief on this is when they hire a ghostwriter, they look for a specialized individual, which I think is, you know, generally smart and you want someone to, hey, what books have they written and have they written big books and are they good at it and all that stuff?

But we kind of flipped that on its head because I don't like that as a customer. I don't like that as a business owner. I don't want to have one crazy creative and talented ghostwriter because then they leave, I'm screwed. And also if they can, they get a, if they have a baby, they're out sick, whatever, I want my customers to be making progress on their books and have help there. So then we said, okay, well we need to build a process which will actually be better for customer outcomes and have the best ghostwriting process that exists to write great books to grow your business. Okay, well what would have to be true for that? Well, we would need good intake. We would need like, you start breaking apart the process. And then we say, yes, okay. And we want to add really frigging talented ghostwriters to that and ghostwriters that have written New York Times bestsellers and all that. And that is what we've created on the ghostwriting arm of the business. So hopefully those illustrations for people listening or watching who are yourself opting out of this stuff, stop doing that. It's costing you massive growth.

It's driving you crazy. It's running you into the ground. Change your thinking and you'll change your outcomes in your business.

I'm interested in your take on this, but I honestly believe that most people at their heart of hearts don't actually want to scale their business. I think they say it. I think it sounds great when you're at a conference. It's fun to listen to people who have scaled and fantasize about what your business would be or life would be if it did. But like, at the end of the day, I think, I think a lot of people, most people in fact, They're just, they're never going to be willing to give up control. And ultimately, I don't think they want that life because it's a different life, right? I mean, you, even though you've gone from, you know, chief book consultant slash ghostwriter slash salesperson, now you're head founder CEO, right? That's still work and is still a role and is still, and it's, and it comes with different responsibilities and different ways of thinking. And I honestly think the vast majority of, of entrepreneurs, especially in the, in the smaller scale, not, not people who have actually gotten there, they, and, and even some of the larger businesses, they actually love the life of being in it every day.

Have you like ever thought about the idea or do you know anyone or recommendation around like a flip side where you say as an entrepreneur, I actually wanna do the book consulting. I love that. I love working with authors. That's where I wanna be. And now you, you put, um, a COO or a president or someone in, instead of you becoming that day-to-day person who's, who's running the, the, the organization as a whole, you might still be chairman. You might still be maybe even still CEO, but you're in the business and someone else is running it. Uh, have you seen that scenario? Have you thought about that at all? Or? Um, 'cause I've actually seen that play out quite a few times. It's a big leap and a big ask, but I've seen it play out successfully quite a few times.

Uh, I have seen it. I would say kind of what you're describing is the, the visionary or the creative, the individual contributor. You want to do one thing well, and it's the, actually maybe a better word is, is the craftsman. Yeah. It's the, I want to create the thing. I want to deliver the thing. I don't want to be bothered with running this business. And so I think if that's you, you've got 2 options. You've got option one, which is just don't scale, and that's totally fine. And well, I guess I would say there's, there's 3 options. Option one is don't scale, keep it small, super high margins, have a great lifestyle business, and don't let anybody tell you that that's the wrong path.

Yeah.

So many people, they're, they're, they're building their business and they're looking to their left and, and they're cheating off of their friends' tests. So they kind of, or what I would do in school, 'cause it wasn't that smart. It's like, I'm looking at, I'm looking to my right and I'm looking at the smart girl in class and I'm just like, Copying those answers because that's how I'm going to get a good grade. Now, that worked for me in school. That doesn't work in business because you're copying somebody else's answers to their test and it's not your answers. And so don't feel pressure to scale to 8 figures, to even scale to 7 figures. Shoot, be a craftsman, have a ridiculous margin, a ton of flexibility, simple life, not a ton of employees. That rocks. That's amazing. And don't let anybody— Make you feel bad otherwise. That's option 1, right? Option 2, this is, I think the hard mode. Most people would think this is the easier of the final 2 options. I think it's the hard mode is you've got to find someone, head of ops. So most people are looking for a COO or an integrator or whatever else.

First off, you need a good assistant. If you don't have a good assistant, you are the assistant. So most people, they think that they need this fancy title. When really your business isn't big enough to support it. And so to find someone good, you're probably paying them 6 figures and your business might not be able to afford that. So get the infrastructure around it, hire a really good assistant, maybe a really good head of ops or head of fulfillment or whatever the thing is that's sucking up a bunch of your time. Get those boxes checked first. And that might actually be the ticket to where they do all the logistics and details that you don't like to do. You keep focused on the main thing that you do that makes it rain, makes the business grow. That's the second route. That's the hard route. I think it's way harder to find someone to run your— people, they want the easy button. They think, oh yeah, I just need the integrator. So let me just hire 'em. We're gonna be all good. But you suck as a manager and you suck as a leader. And so they flame out and they don't work.

And I've seen that happen so many times. And all my buddies come to me for this because they know I'm kind of the operations guy. They're like, hey, how do I do this? And that's where the third option I think comes into play, which is you can just get better and get better at the operations, get better at the— Elon calls it doing your chores. It's like if you're running a— there's just chores that you gotta do. They suck. You don't want to do 'em. They're not particularly fun. But if you're a manager, if you're a leader, especially if you're an entrepreneur, you gotta do your chores. Because if you don't do your chores, they're going to start stacking up and then you are just so buried and overwhelmed. And so I think the third option is actually the best for most people who actually want to scale is learn the skills required. You can always decide that you don't want to do it once you learn this, but start by learning the skills. Because then if you choose to hire someone else to run the day-to-day, if you have enough capital to do that, well then you're going to know what to look for.

You're going to know how to hold them accountable, and then you're exponentially more likely to actually make that happen. Yeah.

And today with AI, So much of that stuff can actually be automated and you just come in for like the decisions.

Oh my gosh. Yes.

It's, it's incredible. Yeah. I, um, I started this little sports card business with my son. Um, he wanted to start a business. This is like 4 or 5 months ago. And, you know, he had a bunch of ideas and ultimately, you know, cause he's a kid and he had sports cards, we settled on sports cards and we said, okay, well, how, what are we going to do? Well, let's do Whatnot. Okay, great. So we do some Whatnot shows and it's, it's fun and all that. Well, just over the course of the last few months, we've accumulated like fairly large number of sports cards in the house, which is like driving me a little crazy because it's like, I don't need extra stuff in my house, but, and nor do I need another job. However, I do, I'm very committed to kind of helping my son learn about starting a business, running a business.

Okay.

So I've, basically now set up GrokBot where it does everything. All I literally have to do is take the cards out of the packs or whatever, put them into hard top loader sleeves and run them through a scanner. And it does everything else. It sorts the cards.

It's cool.

It names the cards. It puts them in the inventory thing. It pushes 'em out to all these things. It prices them. It does all this stuff. And it's like, oh, well, yeah. Was this kind of annoying, you know, over a weekend to have to spend like 5 or 6 hours setting all this up? Yeah, but now this thing that I have with my kid isn't like this extra job that I have. You know, for the most part, we just get to do the fun parts of the business and the AI takes care of all the nonsense stuff. And like, you know, so, so this is where I wanna go with this question. I wanna pivot a little bit more to, to some tactical stuff because you have built these teams, you have set up these systems, and you have made the ascension from working in the business to working on the business.

Yeah.

Like, what is, if someone's sitting here and they are bought in and they do have the willingness and wherewithal to actually make this move, but they haven't yet, how do you go about starting to make this transition? Like, where, where, what's like day one, I have to start documenting or whatever, right? To get this process going. Like, where do I begin this? And frankly, how long does this take?

So this is a perfect jumping off point. This is the greatest time in human history to do this, to get outta the weeds in your business because AI exists. And I know there's a lot of hyperbole, there's a lot of hoopla around it, but AI solves all these problems that quite frankly, I've been trying to solve for a decade. And as someone who is very operations-minded, which I would assume most people listening to this or watching this are not, uh, I have skills and abilities that most people don't. Those skills and abilities, let's just be frank, are not really worth that much. They're pretty rote, repeated things. It's all things that AI can do. And so that's what I love about the era that we're in is the first question I would do, or the first thing I would do is I would ask AI. I would go into your AI of choice. And if you don't have one, what are you doing? You are insane if you are not using AI on a daily basis. And I'm not talking about as a chatbot. I'm talking about to do things in your business. You are an insane person.

That would be like someone coming along and saying, you know, the internet is a great correlation, but let's just use cars. They'd say, hey, you've got a 20-minute commute every day. We've got this thing called cars that exists. And you say, no, I'm good. I'll walk. It's just insane. No one would do that today because it's just insane. And yet people are doing that daily by not utilizing AI the way that they should. So I love that you're using GrokBot. I haven't messed around with it much. That's kind of next on my list and it's always changing, but the best tool is the one that you use. So don't worry, don't tool hop, don't chase around. Claude, I love Claude. It's not the most advanced now. I think GPT-6 just came out and passed it. I think GrokBot is doing a lot of stuff. By the time somebody's watching this, there will probably be 7 other iterations that are better than it, but it is the tool that I use and it's good enough for now. And I'm using it to get a bunch of work done in the business. And so First prompt is ask it, hey, what am I spending?

Audit my calendar. Go through my calendar for the last 12 weeks. Go through my notes on meetings. Go through my emails. Go through whatever. And then tell me the things that I need to get off my plate. And so those would be kind of how I would come to that. But then when I talk about that whole process bucket, every process in your business, every SOP, I mean, SOPs are skills now. And to use Claude language. But I mean, it's just, it's all transferable. And the best thing is AI, for the most part, doesn't forget, doesn't skip stuff. Like, you train it once, and if you build the infrastructure around it, right, the skills and the memory and whatever, you gotta set it up right. You gotta have your connectors really dialed in. So spend a day and just dial all that stuff in. And if you're like, well, I don't even know what to dial in, ask AI. Hey, what connectors do I need? How do I optimize my— I give it my goals, Say, hey, here's the goals for my goals for the year. Here's the business's goals. Here's all this other context.

Give me a list of how you can help me achieve these goals. And better yet, start doing some of those things. Start building some of those things. What are all the things that I'm missing? Give me a report on how I'm doing so far. Like, and just have it just poke around and use it. And every day I'm discovering new use cases. So that would be, I don't know if that's as tactical as you're wanting, but it would be starting with that and just saying, all right, how do I chip away at these operational tasks by having AI do it first. And then obviously you got, if you want to scale beyond yourself, you got to have builders on your team. I mean, I've, we're doing so much crazy stuff with AI right now. It's absolutely insane. I've done videos on this on my channel about how I think it's reinventing the org chart. It's going to change your whole org chart. So you got to have builders on your team that are building this stuff. And it's going to be an upfront investment. It's probably not going to make you money for, for a few months, but then you get 3 months, 6 months down the road, your labor costs have dropped, your efficiencies are up, your revenue's growing faster.

So that's kind of how I would think about it.

Yeah, I, I, um, I, I obviously agree with everything you said about the power of AI and it's, um, it's funny, you know, So prompt engineer was like a, it's like a job for like a quick minute, right? And everything was about prompts, prompts, prompts. That's right. Yeah. And, and what's funny is the, the importance of how you communicate with the AI, even though like the prompt engineer and these like 7-page-long prompts that you would give AI and stuff that people would like sell you for $29.99 if you wanted to do whatever. Like that day has kind of come to its end. However, how you, there's like a new way of communicating when you communicate with AI. And I found the best way is like talk to text. And I, it seems like the people who are not getting enough out, it's like, and you kind of explained it here, like they're not putting enough in. It's like, it's like, what email service do you use? What accounting service do you use? What marketing tools do you use? What's your website built like? Like the more you can barf into this thing, the more you get out of it.

And it seems like so many people just want to be like, I need a marketing campaign, go. And then it's like, what business are we in? Like, you know, what are we even talking about? And then they go, ah, this thing sucks. It's too much work. I got to get rid of it. And like, you almost have to go all the way down to like, like Very basic day one stuff. But if you're willing to take that time, I think people would be shocked at how much you can take, you can take out of your day. Or at least like, like for me, I have it set up where when I log in in the morning, I have like 3 potential LinkedIn topics and premise kind of built out waiting for me. And it's like, okay, based on the 3 things you like to talk about, here's kind of stories. You know, my initial thought on a hook could be this. Okay, great. Well, I don't really like that. Here's how I would spin it, blah, blah, blah. All right, let's build this part out. You know, go into my Obsidian vault and grab a story, put that in there.

All right, now we got something. Post, right?

Boom.

Now it's, and then right from the AI, it'll post to LinkedIn. And you're like, this used to take me the first hour of my day was like, cuz LinkedIn's a big channel for me personally. So like, it would take me an hour to, what do I wanna write about today? You know, what, what, what's a good graphic? And now it's like 7 to 10 minutes. And I'd say the quality is even better because instead of all the nonsense kind of low-value filler, to your point, I'm just focused on what is the message I want to get across? What am I trying to convey? What value am I adding? And then it squares up all the other circles and off it goes. And I'm not worried about copy paste, you know, all this kind of stuff. And okay, so I got 50 minutes of my day back. Like, think about that. But for freaking every process in your business, if maybe you still have to be 10 minutes or a half hour involved in that process, but it used to take an hour or 2 hours or more, well, now you're getting a full week's worth of work done in a day.

And you have people who are literally on the internet going, well, the problem is our politicians are, have lost their frigging minds and are like, So are telling this anti-AI story that I feel is, it's like, I just, I feel bad for the people that are buying into this anti-AI narrative. Not that there shouldn't be guardrails or whatever on this stuff to a certain extent, but like all this negative, negative kind of doomer AI stuff is just killing so many people's productivity. But for those that are taking it on, man, It's another world. Like, you just, you just, you can almost see like a, and I don't know if you've seen this in some of your friends and stuff or clients, but like, I literally see like people who would start to adopt this stuff 3, 6 months in, like their wrinkles are like, you're not as old as I, so most of your friends probably don't have wrinkles, but like, you know, their wrinkles are less, you know, like their shoulders are kind of down. Like they don't seem as stressed. And I'm like, what's going on? Well, you know, I set up my, ChatGPT to manage my inbox, and now I only look at 5 emails a day instead of 400.

And you're like, dude, like, congratulations, man. I'm so happy for you.

It's insane. I think if people aren't using it, uh, you're just, you're going to get left in the dust. And whether you're an employee, whether you're a leader, whether you're an entrepreneur, use it to make the output better, not to make slop, to make the output better. And exactly what you said, I think, is how I would approach it. as an entrepreneur, and it's how we've approached it, is max out your context on the front, the front end. So your connectors, your context window. And if you don't have those things, like we were very fortunate, we got a lot of SOPs, we got a lot of documentation. Now some of it's outdated, some of it's, you know, whatever, but we just, we, we built those into the tools and skills and context and branding guides and all the things. And as a result, I mean, it was just, it's insanely helpful. And we've built out, I mean, dude, if I showed you some of the stuff we built out, it's this whole training hub where every sales call is reviewed and scored and feedback given. And it goes to the sales rep, it goes to the manager.

It's, I mean, we built a whole internal training hub for our team. And so our team is getting better, they're making more money as a result. It's solving problems. I mean, this is, it's pretty incredible. And, but you gotta maximize the context window. You gotta maximize your setup on the front end, and then the fruit on the back end starts getting better and better and better.

And for you guys that might be new who are listening, like, uh, when Chandler says your connectors, that would be like connecting your Gmail and your calendar or any other tools so that it can move in and out of those systems. And Um, one of the things I just wanted to, to just define, um, was, uh, you talked about turning, say, an SOP into a skill. And essentially, guys, for, uh, if you're, if you're unaware of this, in an AI system, a skill is essentially like a .md file. Think of it as like a nerdy text file, um, that essentially tells the AI what to do for a process. So like, let's say, uh, just using the kind of example in, uh, my son's card business. Right? We scan a card. There is a skill that we have developed on how that particular AI agent goes out and figures out what the card is, how to title it. Is it numbered? Is it an auto? Is it a refractor or whatever they call these things? I'm literally drinking from the fire hose on this stuff. Like, but like, that's a skill file. So then if that AI were to blow up, or if there was a better tool for some reason, I could take that skill out.

I could put it into another system and we're rocking and rolling immediately. And that skill can be updated over time as it gets more accurate, or there's a pathway or an additional system or workflow that you want it to have. And that skill essentially becomes the thing that the AI references to do the task. It's like an SOP for an AI agent, just to kind of clear that up. I wanted to move from, obviously we talked about using AI to, to kind of figure out how to start and how to scale this. A big part of it, as you've mentioned, is hiring. So just for you, especially in this age of AI, especially when you're in a scaling phase of your business, how do you think about hiring? How do you bring on the right people to fit the business that you are trying to build?

Most entrepreneurs think about hiring the completely wrong way. They shortcut it. And they save hours of their time, or they try to, so they just shortcut the hiring process. They want to get to speed to hire as fast as possible because they don't have time to hire. And what ends up happening? They spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours working with people who suck. And it's because they tried to save time upfront. So we take the total opposite approach. We spend a bunch of time upfront on hiring. So we've got interviews, we've got assessments, we, we call it our A-player hiring process. I've got videos on the, on the process on the channel. I mean, it's intense and we've got our methodology and it works, uh, when we follow it and when people follow it. And so, uh, my philosophy has always been spend the upfront time and then you end up working with Great people, and that's a lot more fun. I love working with great people. I hate, I hate working with B and C players, so let's just not hire 'em. So that's kind of our methodology. There's the 4 S's of hiring.

You need a scorecard. You need to define what the role is. Most people skip that step and then they wonder why they keep mis-hiring. You need to source great candidates. For us, that's 100+ applicants for every role that we hire for. I know that sounds like a lot. It's really important. This is garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have good applicants or enough, well then you have no choices. And if you, if you don't have context, like if you just interview one person and hire them, you don't know if they're good because you have no comparison. You have no point of reference. So then you need to, so obviously source great candidates, select the best ones through a rigorous, you know, hiring process, assessment, whatever, and then sell them on working for you. Because if they're good, They probably don't need to come work with you. And why would they? Why wouldn't they take some other job or stay working where they're currently working? And so those are the 4 S's of hiring from a book called Who. It's one of my favorite hiring books. That's our methodology. And then you can layer AI on top of that.

And, you know, I've just as recently as literally this weekend have done that and using AI to go filter applicants, figure out who's good, who's not, reach out to people who have applied for all similar roles like this with us in the past, email them, say, hey, We've got a new role that we're hiring for that seems like it's a fit for you. You should apply. Going through, you know, optimizing job listings, maximizing quality and quantity of applicants, like you can just use it to then layer on all kinds of stuff. And we got dozens of applications just over the weekend from that and using AI as a recruiter and as someone on the hiring team.

What I love about what you just said is That you don't just turn it on and turn it off when you need someone for a position. Because that to me is one of the things that I think destroys good companies is like, we got a couple good base people. Maybe I knew them previously or had worked with them previously. So I brought them in and we're at 5 or 6 people. Now we're gonna start bringing people we don't know. And it's like, we did nothing with recruiting, hiring, et cetera. Now we're just gonna like Turn it on, hire somebody, and then turn it off. And it's like, no wonder why you're telling, you're telling everyone, well, I can't find good people, or there's no good people out there. That has always been like the biggest, um, canary in the coal mine for your business actually doesn't operate the way you like to say that it operates, because otherwise you would always have your radar out to bring in amazing people into this culture that you built, and you would defend that culture. like you would your own home. Yet it's just, we need a new salesperson.

Turn, turn recruiting on. Bam. Okay. We got 3 candidates. Pick the best one. Okay, ma'am. Oh, that guy didn't work. Everyone sucks. No one's good. You know, there's only crappy people. No one works hard anymore. You're like, you, you literally turn market, turn recruiting on for like 3 weeks and hire one of the first 3 people that you interviewed and you're wondering why you didn't get a great candidate.

It's crazy. I've got a controversial take on hiring. And I think people aren't going to like this. We are constantly recruiting. We have open job listings for every role in the company, and we're constantly building a talent bench. Now, the majority of the time, we're not hiring for any of these, those roles, but we have a backlog of candidates if and when we need to. Now, when I first rolled this out in the company, I think it created a little bit of a stir. People would be like, hold up, my job's on the site. What's going on here? Like, are you, am I about to get fired? What's— but then I think once we just universally did it, everyone understood, hey, we're gonna be super clear with you on whether you're succeeding or not succeeding in your role. And we're gonna always have applicant applications open for every role in the company. And we're gonna be building talent bench. And that's just smart business. And I think you can, 2 of those things can be true. I think sometimes people think, hey, that's maybe a ruthless way to run a business, or what are you just like axing boat, Will?

No, you can be both building a talent bench at all times and treat your people with dignity and respect and be clear in communication. And it's, I think it's better for everyone because what most people don't think about is if you lose a key person and you struggle to replace them, it impacts every other person in the company. And they actually might be out of a job because that key person that's responsible for the sales or the fulfillment or whatever else, now you don't have them. And so now everybody else this job and the performance of the company is less. And so you're actually being selfish. You're, by not doing that, you're sacrificing and jeopardizing the roles of everybody else in the company. That's really stupid.

Yeah. This is the difference between like branding your company a business and this branding your company a family. And I, I, I just like, look, Again, if you're, uh, you know, my, my industry, primary industry is insurance, right? And there's a lot of family, we're a family stuff that goes on. And look, that's great if you're 12 people and 3 of them are family members and you're, you only really write insurance 25-mile radius of wherever your location is. And okay, maybe you are really a family and you can put up with the fact that, you know, Sally probably operates at 40% because she's been here for all this time and never really, you know, And, and you can eat it because it's just the way you like to run a business. Okay, I'll buy that. But these businesses that are trying to grow, trying to scale, will talk to you as if they're a real business, but then everything is, we're a family, we're a family, we're a family. That to me is more of a manipulation tactic to keep people there than it is you doing what's right or adding value to your people because If like, there's so many scenarios where, uh, and I actually love what you're, what you're doing with having everyone's job out there.

Again, not from the standpoint of if you screw up, you're gone and someone else is in, but like someone could come in and offer that high performer double what they're making. You could not be able to match that. And now you're happy for them, right? They were a high performer. They did great work for you. They're moving on to the next stage. That's great. But if you have a 3 to 6 month gap between that person leaving and the person that fills their role, Your business is suffering. And what, you didn't want to, you didn't want to offend them. So you didn't have people like on the hook or at least in your backlog that you could reach out to, to come in and take that position. Like, that's just not being a good steward of your business in my perspective. And so many leaders want to, and I firmly believe this, this, they think they act like this, our brand is family thing is about the team members, but really it's about them manipulating the team members. to stay in this family environment where, when they really just don't want to lead them.

I agree. It's a team. It's not a family.

Yeah, it's always got to be a team. All right, dude, I want to, I want to finish off our conversation. We're going to come all the way back to your bread and butter. So books, so much of what's on the internet right now in terms of talking head guru is like, oh, everything is slop and everyone's getting lazy. And no, where, where are you on AI writing, using AI to write? Like, what is too much AI in your language? Like, I don't know if you saw, there was this huge to-do because, um, uh, uh, Stan Druckenmiller wrote this, um, op-ed about the rate, about the Fed chair's position on rates, and they ran it through some AI thing and it came back at like 90% AI. And he was like, I hit publish on it because it's exactly what I believe. Who cares if AI pumped the words out? So like, where, where do you fall on that spectrum? And, and maybe, maybe even by genre, like obviously social media might be a little different than a book, or, or maybe it's not.

Use AI to make the book better. That's it. The best books are gonna win. I don't care whether you use AI or not. Make the best book. Now, I think there's a lot of cases for why AI can make books better and do make books better. And I'm not, so I'm not on team write crappy books, but I've never been on that team. I wasn't on that team when it was cheap ghostwriters from, you know, third world countries. I'm not on that team now when it's AI slop. Write great books, the best books on a long enough timeline, the best books will win. The best product will win. So use it to make the book better. And sure, if you can make it faster as well, great. Do that. Uh, but don't use it to just create crap.

Dude, I'm so glad you said that because where I fall on this is if I hit publish on something that I am saying, this is what I believe. Who cares who wrote it, right? There are CEOs who have, who have entire social media accounts who haven't opened, who don't even have the freaking app on their phone. Right? But, but we listen to what they say and we, and we act like it's amazing. And because what, their assistant used to write it, right? We, we were okay with it. But now if that same CEO is using AI to do that, now somehow those thoughts aren't real. Like, like, in my opinion, when you hit publish on something, whether AI wrote it, your assistant wrote it, a ghostwriter wrote it, or you wrote it verbatim, like, that's your thoughts. Like, it's like you said, it's either good or it's not good. And I hate this conversation. Where, and again, there's so many trolls who are just looking to bash people who like immediately take something, run it through some AI checker and go, oh, look, look, look, like that came back some percentage that I think is too much.

And therefore those aren't your real thoughts. And it's like, I hit publish on it. Like it's, those are my thoughts. Like I hit publish. I'm held accountable for what's in that tweet or LinkedIn post or book because I hit publish. And why is that? Like, do you think this is just kind of that natural purist versus kind of, um, modern spin kind of friction that normally happens? Or do you think there are people who, who honestly believe and, or do you think there's a movement against like AI writing and there'll be a counter swing to like a sticker on your book that says like, you know, 100% hand-typed book or whatever?

I think people are obsessed with the wrong thing. They're obsessed with AI usage and not with the quality of the product or the quality of the output. that's being generated. Makes no sense. It, it, well, just focus on the quality of the thing that's being created and let that be the judge and judge it on the quality of what's actually being created, not judge it on, was it used? Was it not used? How was it used? Whatever. I, I just think it's the wrong focus.

Chandler Bolt, my friends. I love it, man. This has been a tremendous conversation. We're going to have all the links in the show notes, whether you're watching on YouTube, listening wherever you listen to the podcast, scroll down. We'll have the YouTube channel up. Where else should people go to get into your world, learn more about what you're doing and your content in general?

Yeah. So if you're thinking about writing a book, check out our content. Our YouTube channel's blowing up right now. selfpublishing.com, Instagram's kind of popping off as well. So that's all things book publishing, and you can go to selfpublishing.com/findingpeak. So selfpublishing.com/findingpeak, that's a link that'll take you, you can book a call with my team. If you got a book that you're working on, we'll create a custom strategy. We'll talk through your goals, challenges, all that stuff, map out a plan, see if we can help. And then if you're trying to scale a business, um, we've got a bunch of just free content over on the Chandler Bolt side of things. There's no real business over there. Um, that's just helping entrepreneurs scale. And so that's Chandler Bolt YouTube channel. Uh, and I finally got an Instagram, so now I'm on Instagram as well.

I love it, dude. I'm so glad to have you back on the show. Uh, just so much for your success. It's, it's amazing. And I look forward to the next time you come on.

Thanks for having me.