I’ve never been more excited...

Things that used to require capital, lots of people, and expensive tech are literally a 30-minute conversation with AI away.

You’ve probably read a lot of articles written in awe and amazement at this brave new world we’re living in.

This isn’t that.

It’s time to move beyond wonder and to execution.

Today, I want to share what we’ve been doing to rebuild the company from the ground up.

This isn’t about AI, though AI is the enabler.

This is all about the problems we’ve uncovered, how we’re building the company differently than we were six months ago.

I’ve identified 3 problems in our business, and I’m convinced they are universal.

#1. DRIFT

The natural order of organizations is to drift.

The founder has a vision.

He or she communicates it.

The team hears it (usually not often enough).

Off they go based on their interpretation.

At first, they’re only off by a little. The founder looks at the progress and thinks...

“This is great. They get it! And I have all this time, and attention freed up for other things!”

Months (or years) later...

The same founder looks at the business and says...

“Why are you doing it that way? That’s not my vision!!”

Frustrating for everyone.

Drift is extremely common in client-service businesses. The founder builds a set of procedures to replicate what he or she is good at so that less experienced people can deliver the same result.

The world changes, and processes must adapt.

This is blindingly obvious.

And we still had drift.

#2. DUCT-TAPE

The second (and frankly bigger) problem I found in the last few months is duct-tape.

And, throw in a little chicken wire and chewing gum...

We have a great team, and they are motivated problem solvers.

We’re moving fast.

So, sometimes solving a problem quickly means patching it up with some duct-tape, chicken wire, and chewing gum.

That works here and there.

Do it long enough and you’re going Mach 2 in a plane with more duct tape than steel.

Two weeks ago our marketing tech person left to start an MBA program.

I took the opportunity to pop the hood and see how things were running.

Man... the amount of duct tape holding things together is a sight to behold.

That’s usually a result of moving fast...but it’s a big problem.

#3. DEAD WEIGHT

The third problem is dead weight.

That thing you tried last year that didn’t work the way you’d hoped...

But the files are still sitting in the shared drive... The automations you created are still live... The funnel is still there... The half-done SOP is sitting in the system...

It’s all dead weight.

No one wants to delete it.

It was a lot of effort to create.

And we might need it someday.

So, you keep it all around.

Now compound that across dozens of experiments every year, across all the years you’ve been in business.

And you’re carrying a metric ton of dead weight.

I know we are.

In the past, these were all difficult to solve in a fast-moving company.

Not anymore.

Here’s how we’re rebuilding the business, eliminating these problems for good, and freeing up space for growth...

How we’re rebuilding the business with 3D THINKING

DELETE

The first thing we’re doing is aggressively deleting.

Deleting the duct tape and dead weight.

But we’re not doing it alone.

We’re letting AI do the heavy lifting.

It started with cleaning up our files... 16 years of dead weight cleaned up in a weekend.

That would have taken a human weeks to do it well.

That duct tape in our marketing systems... I had a conversation with Grok Bot on the way home from the coffee shop in my Tesla and gave it the outcome.

It analyzed all the systems and built a plan to fix every one of them. And is executing the plan as I write this newsletter.

Again... weeks of work for a person. Done in a couple of days.

That’s the low-hanging fruit.

We’re now analyzing everything we do for clients. Each piece of the process is on trial for its life.

If it moves the needle for a client, it stays. If not...deleted.

It’s addition by subtraction.

None of this is groundbreaking. It’s obvious.

And it was always hard to do. It’s not hard anymore.

DESIGN

We’re now designing the business as if it were software.

We’re writing “code” for how (and why) we do everything.

That “code” comes in four forms...

1. The ground-truth of the business.

2. The skills, plugins, and literal computer code for our AI (or SI) teammates to execute.

3. The checklists and procedures our people use to do their work.

4. The evaluations that both AI and people use to determine of the work product meets our standards.

So, why do I call it code?

Like computer code, it’s the input, instructions, and checks we run to operate the business every day.

I’ve started approaching every function in the business as if I’m designing software.

I have an advantage... I have a technical background. I’ve built software before.

But you don’t need to be technical. It’s a mindset.

It’s designing the permanent and elegant solution on the first go, instead of patching and fooling yourself into thinking you’ll fix it later.

AI makes the permanent, elegant solution just as fast as the patch.

DOCUMENT

Document is the last and critical piece if you want to own a Freedom Firm.

It’s the thing we all hated to do before.

We’re documenting differently now because of AI.

We divided our “documentation” into three buckets:

1. Slow information

2. Fast information

3. Workflows

Slow information is the stuff that doesn’t change often. Your brand spec, your pricing, your offers, the team, your ideal client profile, etc., etc.

We had this stuff all over the place. Some of it, embarrassingly, still in my head.

We got it all together, organized, reviewed, and then we put it in a version-controlled repository (we use GitHub if you’re curious).

Everyone on the team can propose changes to it. When they do, three people on the team are alerted and must approve the change.

When they do, everyone on the team (bots and people) has it instantly.

This one single change has 10X’d the quality of our AI results.

Fast information is the stuff that changes all the time. Think metrics, communication strings, project and work status.

For that, we’ve built databases that gather it from the various sources that create it, organize it, and make it available so we can ask questions like...

“What are the top objections we heard on sales calls last week?”

“Based on client questions this month, where can we proactively improve systems to eliminate the questions?”

And instantly we have the answer.

Workflows are the steps that create outcomes. Like most businesses, we had some documented and some lived in the company lore.

AI is a fantastic forcing function...

To get AI to help you, you have to get it out of your head. Show it, speak it... It will handle the documentation drudgery from there.

Our workflows live inside AI skills (73 and counting) and SOPs.

All versioned and accessible. Like our slow information, anyone can propose a change to a workflow.

Most of the time, someone on the team works with AI to write up the change and submit it.

Every change is reviewed, and if approved is instantly applied.

We’re in the very early days of this, but I’m beginning to see fewer patches and more permanent solutions.

If you want freedom, that’s the key.

The patches keep you trapped. As the team begins consistently building permanent solutions and develops that muscle, you can stop being the firefighter-in-chief.

Steve “3D thinking” Gordon

P.P.S. When you’re ready, we can help you in four ways…

1. Turn you into a bestselling author in 90 days >> We’ll write, publish, and promote your book…100% your ideas + our proven process. Click here to learn more.

2. Be everywhere your prospects look >> Our Be Everywhere Now™ program takes one 90-minute interview with you and turns it into client-getting content on all the places your clients are paying attention. Book a call with me.

3. Make clients an offer so good they’d feel foolish saying no… Our Sales Accelerator™ program gives you a unique Irresistible Offer and a high-converting sales process. Talk to the team to learn more.

4. Install AI Employees in your business… We’ve transformed our business (and cut our costs by 30% in 90 days) by installing a team of AI employees to augment our people. We’ve got the blueprint. Click here to schedule a time to chat with me and learn more.

How’d you feel?

Confused, excited, a little unsure?

The first time I experienced it, I was a year out of college.

The little 10-person firm I was working for was selected over five 1,000+-person national firms for the largest GIS property mapping project in the country at the time.

My boss and mentor thought 24-year-old Steve should be the project lead.

I still question his wisdom, but I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Three years later, as I’m home after the birth of our first daughter, I get a call...

Same boss and mentor, asking me to become the new CEO of the now-bigger firm. I was 28.

Gulp.

It’s happened so many times over the last 30 years that until I sat down to write this, I’d forgotten most of the opportunities.

With every opportunity, I stared at it thinking...

I have no idea how I’m going to do this.

And, if I’m honest with myself... I was scared to death every time.

Looking back, that was healthy fear.

Kind of like the fear that comes over you when the bear comes running down the trail at you...

It had better move you to do something.

Because inaction is certain death.

After working with hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, I’ve learned to tell...

Who gets motivated (excited) by the fear of the big opportunity...

And who hides from it.

I’ve also learned that neither type of person is prepared for the opportunity.

Looking back, I wasn’t prepared for any of them.

But you have a choice...

Stand tall, face it, and figure it out...

Or, stay small.

This week I was reminded that the choice never gets any easier.

The internal conversation (the one no one ever wants to admit to) never changes...

“This isn’t going to be easy...” “Am I up for it...” “Do I really have to do this again...”

And the dangerous one when you’re already successful...

“Can I pull this off with everything else that’s going on?”

All of those thoughts are traps to keep you small.

When the world is in chaos, playing small is...

Business death.

Right now, the people in your market are looking for 3 things...

1. Clarity

2. Relationship

3. Confidence

CLARITY: What does reality look like now?

Delivering clarity to your market requires you to stand tall, plant a flag in the ground and tell the world “this is what I believe.”

Today, this is the single biggest opportunity in every market.

It takes courage to proclaim what you believe reality looks like.

After all, you might be wrong.

You’ll certainly be challenged.

It feels like you’re putting everything on the line.

I see this play out with our entrepreneur-authors every day.

They have a vision of reality. They believe in it.

As an outside observer, I can confidently say their view is accurate.

Yet, as we approach the day the book will be published, fear sweeps in.

Confidence erodes.

The temptation to play small...
To be a follower, not a leader...
To shrink from serving...

Creeps in.

And they’re forced to face the opportunity decision again.

“Am I big enough for this new opportunity?”

RELATIONSHIP: Can I trust you?

The market craves relationship right now.

Relationship answers the question: “Can I trust you?”

Here’s the equation for creating relationship:

Frequency x Insight = Relationship

If you show up in my life frequently (consistently), bringing new insights (clarity), I begin to trust you.

I perceive that you’re in my corner. You’re out for my best interest.

And you demonstrate it over time.

In the old days (like the 90s), frequency usually meant seeing people in person.

Too many business owners still limit themselves to that.

But we live in the most amazing time in history.

Because you can create frequency with leverage.

And reach many more people.

This newsletter is an example.

I show up every Saturday with a new insight.

It moves the relationship needle.

CONFIDENCE: Can I act in the face of chaos?

The last and most valuable thing the market looks for in times of chaos is confidence.

Confidence is all about action.

Can I take action, or am I too confused or scared?

There is a confidence crisis right now.

I keep hearing from business owners that prospects are delaying buying decisions.

That’s a sign of low confidence in the future.

It’s also why creating confidence is the most important thing you can do right now.

Confidence comes from proof.

Have you taken people just like your future client to where they want to go?

Do you have a proven system to do it?

Do they believe it?

In last month’s State of the Industry Town Hall, I said we’ve entered The Age of Proof.

Now more than ever, you need to prove that your methods work.

Every part of your selling and delivery system should be focused on creating confidence.

The businesses that create confidence will win.

Back to standing tall in the face of big opportunities...

This is your big opportunity.

The chaos in the world is just a distraction.

Are you going to stand up, take the risk, plant your flag and create clarity?

Are you going to commit to showing up week after week with new insights that create relationship?

Are you going to master your craft, so that, you become a proof-machine that multiplies confidence?

Are you going to say yes to the opportunity to be the leader...

what we call “The Only Name” your market looks to...?

Steve “face the bear” Gordon

P.S. I’m looking for 3 entrepreneurs who are excited to embrace the opportunity and want a proven system to do it. We’ll start by planting your flag in the ground with a book that creates clarity. We’ll spread the message with media that drives relationship. And we’ll give you a system of selling that multiplies confidence. Interested? Let’s chat.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, we can help you in four ways…

1. Turn you into a bestselling author in 90 days >> We’ll write, publish, and promote your book…100% your ideas + our proven process. Click here to learn more.

2. Be everywhere your prospects look >> Our Be Everywhere Now™ program takes one 90-minute interview with you and turns it into client-getting content on all the places your clients are paying attention. Book a call with me.

3. Make clients an offer so good they’d feel foolish saying no… Our Sales Accelerator™ program gives you a unique Irresistible Offer and a high-converting sales process. Talk to the team to learn more.

4. Install AI Employees in your business… We’ve transformed our business (and cut our costs by 30% in 90 days) by installing a team of AI employees to augment our people. We’ve got the blueprint. Click here to schedule a time to chat with me and learn more.

This has been one of the most difficult articles I’ve written in the last year...

And I think it’s one of the most important...

It started last Thursday.

I was on a call with a client at 2 pm.

This client asked me about our team.

He wanted to know how I’d found our people.

He said, “Everyone is so polite, thoughtful, and they know their stuff. How did you find them all?”

It’s great to hear. And I’m proud to say, I’ve been hearing it a lot lately.

For those who know me, you know, saying that out loud is hard for me.

As much as I’m out front in the business, I’d rather be the behind-the-scenes guy.

But I believe what I share below is important, and I believe it will help you.

I don’t want the credit, and I don’t need the credit.

Going back to that client, he asked the wrong question.

He asked, “Your team is so good...How did you find such great people?”

And I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times this year.

It’s the wrong question...

The better question is “How do you create a culture where everyone cares?”

Last I checked, there are people everywhere.

Like 8 billion +.

Finding people isn’t the challenge.

Getting people to buy into serving and making that your culture is the hard part.

And I’m not naive or falsely humble... I know that it starts with me. And in your firm, it starts with you. That’s just the job.

You tend to attract who you are. Both team and clients.

One thing we’ve done a little differently is to be intentional about living out a few principles.

That’s the “secret” behind our culture, and it’s why clients ask me how we built our team.

So here’s the blueprint...

In my younger (more foolish) days, I’d take a few leaders off-site for a couple of days in a nice hotel. We’d rent a conference room and come up with values, a mission, and a BHAG, à la Jim Collins.

And it was all a complete waste of time.

We don’t do any of that now.

We run the company on 3.5 guiding principles.

Principles that I developed (no off-site...no committee).

I believe this is more important NOW than it’s ever been before.

Principles > Values

Why principles and not values?

Isn’t it just semantics??

Let’s define the terms (according to the Dictionary app on my Mac...)

Principle. a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

Values. one’s judgment of what is important in life.

When you search the difference, you find that principles are fundamental external truths, while values are internal, subjective beliefs.

So, why is this important in a culture?

Because in my foolish youth, we came up with values like “integrity,” “innovation,” and some other nonsense words.

And if you asked 10 of our employees at the time what they meant, you’d get 11 definitions.

What’s different about our principles?

1. They’re more than just a word. They’re a story. A story about how we behave under stress.

2. They are a standard, not an idea. “Integrity” is an idea. (It should also be table stakes.) We both know it’s not about the word; it’s about how you live it out.

Here are our 3.5 guiding principles (I’ll explain the .5 in a moment...):

1. Above all else, apply the Golden Rule: to team members, to our partners, and to our member-clients. Treat others as you would want to be treated in the same situation.

2. All Progress Starts by Telling the Truth: Clear, candid, and honest communication is vital to our success. We have an environment where delivering the plain truth, even when it’s difficult, is embraced and respected. We never shoot the messenger.

3. Make the Complex Look Easy: We work hard backstage to guarantee that out on the front stage, the audience (clients) are amazed at how effortless we make everything appear.

Each one of those principles has a story behind it. And I tell that story to every employee during the interview process, and again on their first day on the job.

Here’s the story I tell for “All Progress Starts by Telling the Truth.”

Early in my career, a colleague and I made a significant error on a project. The Senior VP from the client company called us and asked what happened and who was responsible. We were in our early 20s and shaking on that call. We replied, “We are responsible. We made the mistake. We’re sorry.” Then we proposed a solution to remedy the situation. The Senior VP responded, “I just wanted to see if you would own up to it. We can live with this one, but don’t make the same mistake again. And, because you were honest and took responsibility, I now know I can trust you.”

I usually go on to explain that the Senior VP was feared by just about every consultant that worked with that company, because he was so tough.

But after that call, every time we saw him, it was like a reunion of old friends. He loved us, trusted us, and leaned on us when he had a hard problem to solve.

That’s living out “All Progress Starts by Telling the Truth” (BTW, all credit for that phrase goes to Dan Sullivan. It’s his. We borrowed it... I’m never above borrowing wisdom from the best.)

We have similar stories for each principle.

And I know they work, because our people repeat them.

They invoke the principles in team meetings and conversations.

Not because the principles are particularly inspired.

I don’t think you need incredibly inspired principles, but you do need good stories.

The principles describe how you and your team behave...especially when the $*&%!# hits the fan.

The stories reveal how you’ve done it before, so it goes from theory to reality.

Why you need a principle-driven company now...

We’re living in the most chaotic time of our lives.

With so much changing so fast, you and your people need an anchor that keeps you moored to what matters.

Those principles have allowed us to take good people (we don’t have a bunch of Silicon Valley geniuses... me included) and turn them into a team with great culture and a level of caring for our clients that isn’t present everywhere.

Can we do better? Of course. Always and every day.

We’re a work in progress.

And that’s where that .5 extra principle comes in.

It’s not part of our “official” 3 guiding principles... It’s one of my personal principles that I make sure sets the tone inside the team.

Principle 3.5 is WINNING.

I love winning. I’m quite competitive. I hate losing. I tell our team that for us, winning means...

• The team wins

• Our clients win

• Our clients’ clients win

We should always be thinking about how to create that triple-win. Because...

Winning is FUN!
Winning demands CREATIVITY!
Winning is CONTAGIOUS!

If you have your principles written down and stories behind them, you’re way ahead. And, like me, you probably have clients asking you how you found such great people.

If you have principles you live by, but haven’t written them down, do it now. Your team needs a foundation now more than ever.

And if you don’t have anything yet (not likely), steal ours, steal someone else’s, make them yours, tell your story behind each.

Within a year, you’ll be blown away by what happens to your team.

Steve “winning” Gordon

P.S. Being out front isn’t natural for me, so I built a team that does it for me...and they’ll do it for you, too. One 90-minute conversation a month, and Be Everywhere Now puts your ideas in front of your buyers every week. Worth exploring? Book a call with me

P.P.S. When you’re ready, we can help you in four ways…

1. Turn you into a bestselling author in 90 days >> We’ll write, publish, and promote your book…100% your ideas + our proven process. Click here to learn more

2. Make clients an offer so good they’d feel foolish saying no… Our Sales Accelerator™ program gives you a unique Irresistible Offer and a high-converting sales process. Schedule a time with our team to find out how it works…

4. Install AI Employees in your business… We’ve transformed our business (and cut our costs by 30% in 90 days) by installing a team of AI employees to augment our people. We’ve got the blueprint. Click here to schedule a time to chat with me and learn more.

Game day...

I’ll be watching my beloved Florida Gators “welcome” Ole Miss to the Swamp.

In case you’ve not been following Florida football, we have a new coach--Jon Sumrall--this year.

And he said something recently that I’ve been repeating to myself, and to the team...

He said...

Last week in our march to VICTORY on the plains of Auburn, Alabama, our Heisman-candidate running back misplayed a pass...

Tipped it in the air for an interception... on our own 9-yard line.

Not good.

Sumrall said he pulled the player aside when he came off the field and told him... “When something bad happens, we say ‘GOOD!’ Now you have an opportunity to turn a bad thing into a good thing.”

The player ended up rushing for 162 yards in the game.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because I think this is the single most important mindset in business.

And we don’t teach it to our teams enough.

Too often, we’re critical of what goes wrong.

But every bit of progress comes from the things that go wrong.

That’s where the growth lives.

I’ve made so many bad calls in my 35 years in business; I’ve lost count.

In my first business...

• I made bad hires (a lot before I figured it out).

• I once missed a regulatory filing deadline on a client project. I had to go hat in hand to the client and my boss and mentor at the time.

• I took bad clients.

• I misquoted projects and lost money.

• Invested $50k in a 12-month print ad run that produced 0 leads.

• And in 2007 I had a business built on residential development in Florida, and government contracts 100% funded by municipal bonds. Not a good combo in hindsight.

But I learned...

How to hire and build a great team and culture. Clients tell me almost weekly how much they appreciate the team we’ve built. That doesn’t happen without the mistakes along the way.

That $50k ad investment I made turned me into a student, then an expert in marketing and sales. I vowed to never again be uneducated on marketing and sales. Without it, I wouldn’t have built this business, written 5 books, and published close to 400 books for our clients. That one mistake turned into at least $10M in added revenue.

In this business...

• I launched offers nobody wanted.

• Invested in agencies and vendors that didn’t produce.

• Fewer bad hires, but still some.

• Invested $100k in a series of nationwide events looking for a 5x-10x return, and got a 1.5x return.

But I learned...

→ How to build a machine that turns an event sponsorship into 60 booked sales appointments.

→ How to build a winning and fully remote team culture.

→ How to create offers so good people feel foolish not buying.

And more...

And I know there will be more learning for me.

And there will be more for you too...

Business is just a string of events like that missed pass...

“When something bad happens, we say ‘GOOD!’ Now you have an opportunity to turn a bad thing into a good thing.”

That’s the game.

You have to have a short memory of the bad, and a long memory of the lesson.

And your teams need that too.

We’re in a time of rapid change.

The tendency when the world is chaotic and changing is to sit and wait to see what happens.

That’s usually the losing path.

Fortune favors the bold.

But bold action does not mean foolish action.

You and your team have built decades of learnings.

Now is the time to mine those.

To seek what is unchanging.

And to act boldly to expand on those things.

NOW is the time to make growth moves.

Everyone else is sitting back, playing wait-and-see.

The playing field is yours; take it.

Steve “We say GOOD!” Gordon

P.P.S. When you’re ready, we can help you in four ways…

1. Turn you into a bestselling author in 90 days >> We’ll write, publish, and promote your book…100% your ideas + our proven process. Click here to learn more

2. Be everywhere your prospects look >> Our Be Everywhere Now™ program takes one 90-minute interview with you and turns it into client-getting content on all the places your clients are paying attention. Click here to learn more about Be Everywhere Now™

3. Make clients an offer so good they’d feel foolish saying no… Our Sales Accelerator™ program gives you a unique Irresistible Offer and a high-converting sales process. Schedule a Time with our team

4. Install AI Employees in your business… We’ve transformed our business (and cut our costs by 30% in 90 days) by installing a team of AI employees to augment our people. We’ve got the blueprint. Click here to schedule a time to chat with me and learn more.

Here’s what the first 2 hours and 45 minutes of my day looked like with AI...

Up at 4:45 (ugh...)

In the gym before 5:30.

Four intervals of sprints... a few minutes of recovery and off to Starbucks.

The sun’s still not up.

I love the early mornings. They are by far my most productive few hours.

For the last hour and a half, I checked on a client’s bestseller launch... he hit #1 overnight.

I grabbed a screenshot and texted him (I hope he’s got notifications off... it’s early!)

Sent a few messages to the team to get things moving.

And assigned a project to Claude to sort out.

Last week I shared a behind the scenes look at BookFlow, our production management app.

We’re a week later, and the team has now been 100% running on BookFlow for 4 weeks.

We just shut down the legacy system (saving $10k per year).

That’s cool, but today, I want to show you the real gains we’re experiencing from AI, so that you can see how to get these gains for yourself.

The AI Acceleration Phenomenon

In June, we did what I believe will be some of the most important work the company will ever do.

We stopped tinkering with AI for a month and we sorted out our data.

Like most businesses that have been around for 16+ years, we had a tangled mess of information.

Client files were well organized, but in almost every other area of the business we had...

• old stuff mixed with current stuff

• folder systems that drifted over time

• file naming conventions that were inconsistently applied (the bane of my existence!)

Our 5 shared Google Drives functioned, but they were a bit like that closet you keep meaning to clean out, while continuing to pile stuff in it.

So in June we said, time to clean house.

We reorganized every shared drive.

We built databases for frequently used and updated information (testimonials, social media content, events, and a few other things).

It was a pain in the rear, but we now have very clear context to give to AI.

And we’re seeing the acceleration that is possible as a result.

Before, we’d have an AI idea, then need to stop, and find all of the context to give it before it could work.

No longer.

Now, we have an idea, and we get AI involved.

It can find things easily on its own.

And it’s not just easier for AI (and us) to find things...

The AI can now be confident that what it finds is current and useful.

Before, it might find the right thing, but it would also find old versions of docs or spreadsheets, and need us to sort it out.

That’s been eliminated.

BookFlow is one example of what we’ve done since June.

How we deliver marketing strategy for our book writing clients is the latest.

Marketing for most small businesses is hard. They don’t have the expertise or the team to do it most of the time.

Kind of ironic since, as Druker famously said, there are only two profit centers in a business: marketing and innovation. Everything else is cost.

But it is true.

So, we’ve worked very hard to build marketing systems that our clients can actually implement.

Even then, it can be challenging for them.

I’ve been working on simplified versions of our marketing systems for clients since January. We tested a few approaches, but I didn’t think it moved the needle enough to roll them out.

This week, I pointed AI at the problem.

In one day, I was able to work with AI to take every marketing strategy we teach, and build a system that tailors it to every client.

The result is paint-by-numbers checklist we can hand to a client and their team.

Custom for them, calibrated to their goals, their current capabilities, and their team size.

In a day, we went from one-size-fits-all to a clear, bespoke marketing approach for every client.

But wait there’s more...

In true Billy Mays fashion, there is more...

We work with great business owners as clients. And many of them come in with little or no existing marketing.

Websites that are sales prevention departments.

Social media profiles that haven’t been updated in years.

Feeds that they started, posted once, and left as a ghost town.

In the past, we’d tell clients they should update these things, but we couldn’t get detailed.

Now, in a day, we created a deep-dive analysis tool for a client’s website, and every social profile they have. All based on our own internal analysis criteria, built from 30+ years of marketing expertise.

We’re able to give them a detailed diagnosis and action plan for what’s up-to-par and what needs work. Here’s an example…

Maybe you’re saying “Great Steve, AI can already do a marketing report.”

Sure, generic AI can do that.

But what we created in a day, building on our accumulated context (our enterprise wisdom) is richer, and more specifically tuned to our clients than anything I’ve seen out of generic AI.

Hang onto that idea for a moment...

(This is an excerpt from a real client analysis. Client-identifying details redacted.)

Not only did we increase the value we’re able to deliver to a client, we did something important for the business...

We laid out a roadmap for other services the client might need that we can offer.

We give them the plan, and they can do one of four things with it...

1. Do nothing.

2. Do it themselves.

3. Get another firm to do it.

4. Work with our team to implement it.

In one workday, we not only created a system that serves the client better and delivers significantly more value to clients than we delivered on Monday...

We also opened up the opportunity to extend our engagement with the client and solve some real problems for them.

Everyone wins.

Are you using AI to increase client value or answer your emails?

Your AI Acceleration Opportunity

Now let’s focus on you...

If you’re still using AI like it’s 2025, you’re falling behind.

The acceleration is real and increasing.

You have years, maybe decades of accumulated wisdom inside your business.

That’s why people have hired you.

Before it was often hard and manual to translate that into client value.

You had to do the analysis, write the report, design the client implementation, build the team that could take it off of you...

All of that friction is gone.

But there is foundation work to do to ride the AI acceleration.

Value has shifted from labor to outcome.

That requires new ways of storing, accessing, and activating company wisdom.

It requires recognizing that you have unique company wisdom. (You do.)

It requires new workflows... new team structures... new offerings.

Are you investing the time, energy, and money in reimagining your business that’s required in this moment?

Steve “accelerated” Gordon

P.S. I’ve opened up time to work with 2 clients this month to help you turn AI into real, bankable results. Interested? Email me and let’s chat: steve@milliondollarauthor.io

I’m going to take you behind the scenes on how we’re changing the business because of (and with) AI.

I don’t know about you, but I’m burned out on watching YouTube demonstrations that stop short of the good stuff...

And the product announcements from the AI companies that sound revolutionary, but your team is still using AI as a glorified secretary.

You’re not alone in feeling that:

• 58% of small businesses say they use AI.

• But, 64% of users say they use it primarily for personal productivity.

• 41% say they’re unclear how or why AI is relevant to their role.

• Just 6% of small business AI users are using it to automate workflows.

• And only 6% of businesses report AI causing a 5% or greater impact on the bottom line.

So...we’re using and paying for “intelligence” and getting nowhere.

Yes, some individuals on the team might be more productive, but you and I as owners want to see more dollars on the bottom line.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, today, I’m going to show you what we’re doing differently...

How it’s changed our thinking on our work...

How it’s changing the structure of the business...

How it’s going to shift our hiring...

And how we’re beginning to drop dollars to the bottom line...

The 90-day book creation process we run at Million Dollar Author takes ideas from a client’s head and produces a bestselling book in 90 days.

If you’ve ever tried to write a book, you know that’s a heavy lift.

There are 102 discrete steps in the process. And each one has a definition of done and a 3-10-step checklist.

Part of the process must run in parallel to meet the 90-day timeline and other parts simply cannot run in parallel.

Here’s our master process map:

To make things more complex, we usually have 50-75 projects in-flight on any given day.

There are four ways projects can get stalled...

#1 Communication: I call this “squeaky wheel crashes the car.”

In most businesses, the loudest client gets the attention.

And the loudest client usually isn’t the most important client.

It’s human nature for your team to focus on the person that’s blowing up their inbox or acting unhappy.

You want them to be responsive to client needs.

And you need them focused on the right priorities.

When you get over 20 or 30 clients, it’s easy for the team to get sucked into firefighting the loudest and forgetting about the quiet clients.

In the past, we added some automations and manual manager checks to keep things from slipping.

#2 “Hide and Seek”: This one drives me up a wall. It sounds like this…

“Did you get the doc I sent?” “No, where is it?”

Then the game is on… let’s go find the doc, or the message, or the spreadsheet.

We have seven major systems that hold communication, project status, and work product…

• HelpScout (client communication)

• Slack (internal communication)

• Voxer (leadership team comms)

• Airtable (project state)

• Google Drive (work product)

• Notion (one-off projects)

• CRM (texts from clients come here)

I’m embarrassed as I read that list. And I know from talking to peers that we’re not alone.

Almost every company has this kind of software sprawl.

We’re working on it… I think there’s a 12-step program ;-)

Over the last year, it’s gotten worse with AI. Now I’m hearing…

“Oh, it’s in Cowork on my laptop…let me send it to you.”

“I did that in Notion AI. Here’s the link.”

And my favorite…

“I got your Claude share link, but they never open for me. Can you send me a PDF?”

It’s only a slight upgrade from the sneaker net we had in my first business… IN 1995!

#3 Bottlenecks: If you’re doing any volume of work, there’s always some part of the process that’s backed up.

Right now, for us it’s audiobook engineering (editing and making a client sound great on Audible).

We’re running a 3-week backlog and working overtime to clear it.

You’re probably thinking of your own bottleneck as you read this.

Bottlenecks stress me out.

Because the solutions are usually never immediate. You have to work through it.

And, while you’re working through it, clients can, rightly, get a little frustrated.

That’s one of the reasons I try to have grace and patience sitting in barely moving the Chick-fil-A drive-thru at 5 pm on a Friday. Every business has bottlenecks… and no business owner likes them.

#4 Client Overwhelm: We only work with business owners. Every one of our clients is incredibly busy.

And we’re inviting them into a 90-day process to complete something that most normal people take 2-5 years to do (and over half of those who start writing a book on their own quit).

Your clients come to you because, in their eyes, what you do is complicated and outside their expertise.

In any large, complex project, client overwhelm is a significant risk.

Perceived overwhelm is a top pre-sale objection. And post-sale overwhelm can cause clients to give up. Both are really bad outcomes.

In our case, we have to present this crazy 102-step, 90-day sprint to clients in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them...

...because overwhelmed clients tend to stall until they get clarity.

Own it…

We have to OWN all four failure modes and build systems to overcome them.

I’ll bet you have at least one of these four in your business...

For years, the solution to each of these was more people.

Usually, more manager-types.

In my experience... Expensive, with hit-or-miss success.

So how are we attacking these now?

Project Status >> The MDA Way

Take a look at that process map I shared above.

For every box on that chart, there’s another process map with every step in each sub-process.

I’m a recovering engineer... I love a good flow chart.

Before AI, we built the entire process around the Theory of Constraints (read Goldratt’s Rules of Flow by Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag... it will change the way you view your business.)

But then we bought all the project management tools...

We tried Basecamp, Asana, Monday, Basecamp again, ClickUp, Trello, and...and...and!

Over 15 years, we tried them all.

They’re all built for that company’s vision of what work looks like, not for how we actually do our work.

So last year (sadly, a couple of months before vibe-coding took off), I invested about $30k to build our own system.

We hired a great consultant who took our process and built a custom Airtable database system.

It was a BIG step forward.

The team saw immediate gains. Great!

But it was only about 60%-70% of what we ultimately needed.

It still had some limitations that the tool (Airtable) forced on us.

Last week, I shared that Agos Lupi, our head of ops, started experimenting with Claude Code and coded a new internal app we call BookFlow.

No limitations. Anything we want.

The tool conforms to our workflow, not the other way around.

In early testing, we’re already seeing bigger gains.

(I’ll share how we’re turning those into money in a minute...)

We now have ONE definitive source of truth for the status of every one of the 102 steps in every project.

And, even better, we can ask AI questions like...

• What stage has the biggest backlog right now?

• Can you run a weekly analysis to identify the current production constraint...and recommend 3 solutions?

When information was scattered, this was impossible.

The 1990s Communication System That Never Fails

In big, complex projects, with multiple team members, communication is always a challenge.

Keeping everyone in the loop on the latest message from the client used to mean the Client Success lead would get the message and send it to the team members who needed to know.

Then, when the client lead was out sick or on vacation, knowledge of that client communication might be “lost” until they were back.

Not good.

Back in the 90s (yes, I’m invoking my ‘old man on the porch posture for a moment’)...

In my first business, we ran multi-year, large-scale land development projects with a super-simple communication system we called...

Notes to the file.

It’s so basic, but it works.

When something significant happens... a client approval, a client need, a status change, anything important...

We’d write a literal note (sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed and formal) and we’d...

wait for it...

Put the note in the file!

If you were new to the project, getting up to speed took less than an hour.

You grabbed the file, opened it on your desk, and read the notes.

They were always newest on top.

We’ve brought that back in BookFlow.

And with AI it’s about to get a huge upgrade.

In the 90s, we had to build a culture that created that documentation. It was truly difficult.

In our next release of BookFlow, in addition to the notes the team adds to the “file”, AI will scan

• client communication in HelpScout

• internal communication in Slack

• and all the other tools...

It will find things that should become notes to the file.

Then, it will propose them daily for the client lead to approve.

Here’s what it looks like (not a real client record).

Here’s what it looks like (not a real client record).

This is a massive win for clear, consistent communication.

And, we kill system scatter at the same time.

Everything important for a project is on one screen for humans, and in one system for AI to use.

Killing Client Overwhelm Two Ways...

This is the big one. We view what we sell as ease.

One of our 3 guiding principles for the business is “We Make the Complex Look Easy.”

We invest a lot of time teaching team members what this means, and what it looks like to do it well.

And, it’s hard to do when you’re doing complicated work for clients.

I know you understand.

By building our own tool for production last year, we noticed two things...

1. Client leads had a much clearer signal when we were stalled waiting on client feedback...

2. Client leads were spending less time tool switching...

The results...

Client leads knew WHO to focus some extra TLC on, and they had time to do it.

This solves that “noisy client” problem, and keeps the quiet clients (who are usually the best clients) front and center.

BookFlow is already multiplying both impacts in our early testing.

As we add more AI support in the app in the coming weeks, here’s the payoff...

1. Client leads will be freed from 70-80% of the admin work they used to do.

2. That time will go directly into much more hands-on work with clients to eliminate roadblocks to deliver projects with even more speed, and higher quality.

Those are incredible outcomes. We’ll have even happier clients.

Everybody wins.

But how does that hit the bottom line?

This is I think the biggest takeaway for you...

The more time your team spends with clients...

Advising them.
Learning about their business.
Building relationship and trust.
Seeing other ways they are stuck.
(beyond the current engagement)

...the more opportunity they will find.

This has profound implications for who you hire.

A lot of admin work is going away. The people who can elevate to find new ways to deliver value to clients…and bring in new revenue will be prized and paid more in the Age of AI.

That’s why you should be driving AI into your business.

Yes, you. The CEO.

Your job is to innovate and find opportunity.

This is the biggest (and easiest to capture) opportunity in front of virtually every business right now.

But if AI stays a productivity parlor trick, you’ll miss it.

Steve “opportunity explorer” Gordon

Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the Boston airport with my partner Bill.

We’d been at an event all week.

And during event breaks and in the evenings we were going back and forth with a team member who we’d asked to take the lead on an underperforming marketing channel.

For three weeks, we’d been asking for his assessment and plan for turning it around.

The night before, we’d received an AI report from this person.

It was 11+ pages long.

Bill and I read it that night.

It had more holes than Swiss cheese.

Bad assumptions, incomplete thinking, and what seemed to me to be the wrong conclusions.

We gave feedback and asked for an update before our afternoon flights the next day.

So we’re sitting there in Boston-Logan Airport when the update arrived.

Another dozen or so AI pages to wade through.

Better, but the action plan made no sense to me.

Admittedly, I was pissed (which doesn’t happen often).

“We’d waited three weeks for this?”

We all knew this was a top priority in the business.

Bill left for his flight and I took 30 minutes before mine boarded to take all the data and start my own analysis with the help of AI.

I boarded, we took off, and I jumped on the WiFi (thank you Delta).

By the time we’d landed I’d done three rounds of analysis and had some meaningful and actionable conclusions.

Three weeks of asking. About two hours of doing.

I realized in that process that the bar just got raised for everyone on our team...and everyone in every company.

It’s easy to get impressive-looking analysis now.

But looks don’t move the needle.

We came to the realization that the team member no longer fit the capabilities we needed.

I hate firing people. With. A. Passion.

I view it as a failure.

First, my failure.

Because I failed in fit, training, expectations, accountability, or leadership.

And, yes, usually the team member had failures to own, too.

But I can’t control what other people do.

All the learnings are inside the actions I can control.

So, I’ve reflected on it over the last two weeks.

My conclusion...

This was our first AI casualty.

But not in the way you’d think.

AI didn’t replace this person’s job. It can’t.

It raised the bar for the person in the role. And those two hours on the plane made the gap painfully clear.

I’m not happy about or proud of any of this. But I am committed to understanding it and learning.

And learn I did...

Out of it, I discovered a framework for hiring, evaluating, elevating, and leading your team in The Age of AI.

What I’m calling The S.C.A.L.E. Loop...

The loop runs in this order: STANDARDS -> CURIOSITY -> EXECUTION -> LEARNING and back around, over and over.

AMBITION sits in the middle. It’s the byproduct you get when you run the loop >> expanding ambition.

S -> STANDARDS

Standards are knowing what “great” looks like AND defining it clearly enough to hand it to someone on the team (human or AI) so they can evaluate an output.

Every leader owes this to the team, and every team member must own sussing out the standard if it’s not been given.

Work can’t start until the standard is set. Both leader and team member must independently take ownership for establishing the standard before the work begins.

I’ve noticed that this discipline of standard-setting is harder than ever now that AI is on the scene. Because it’s easier than ever to get going and to get an output.

Ease is making us all a little sloppy.

C -> CURIOSITY

Curiosity runs in two directions at the same time...

First, it must run backward at the answer. AI creates something, and the team member must have skeptical curiosity about the output.

• Where are the holes?

• What are the assumptions? Are they valid?

• Was the input data complete? Did the AI understand its meaning?

• Do the conclusions make sense?

• Are the recommended actions logical?

Second, curiosity must run forward, toward the frontier. Being super-curious about what’s possible now that wasn’t possible last month, because AI moved...

• Where can time be compressed?

• What can we do with the time we gain?

• What questions did we skip because the effort was too great before?

• Which assumptions that we hold today no longer make sense?

• What was resource-constrained before that we can tackle now?

Skepticism towards output and openness towards what’s newly possible are the same mental muscle... asking great questions and being comfortable exploring down the rabbit hole until you get to truth and real possibility.

E -> EXECUTION

Decisive tests, run fast is the order of the day. Experiment and iterate...in hours and days, not weeks or months. The bias in every person on the team should be towards finding out over analyzing further. That’s executing.

AI has collapsed the cost of executing on an experiment in almost every part of your business. Most teams haven’t adapted to the new pace.

L -> LEARNING

Learning is what you get from Execution.

Every test you run produces:

• A result

• An explanation

Most companies take the result and throw away the explanation.

The campaign worked! The offer bombed!

Six months later, no one can remember why.

A year later, you hit the same problem again and maybe pull those old lessons forward (if you’re lucky).

Now, AI can capture, organize, and recall those learnings...ready when you need them.

Not just the output, the logic and reasoning you used.

And it survives changes within the team and the frailty of human memory.

Each new experiment now becomes the foundation for the next.

You get smarter as a company... daily.

In a documented and concrete way.

Practically, this is simple...

Write up what you did, what happened, what you now believe as a result, and what you decided to do.

And it’s easy... AI becomes the documenter, librarian, and retriever. Humans control the judgment of what learnings matter.

A -> AMBITION

Ambition sits in the middle of the framework, and it’s the result you get when you run the loop with a HUMAN+AI team.

You want the humans on your team to live expanding ambition...

The more they run the loop, the better they get at setting standards and asking great questions; the more capability they gain with AI; the more they learn from execution; the more possibilities they see...

Their ambition expands daily... and that drives the business forward.

This framework didn’t just emerge from the firing experience.

At the same time, I was watching our head of ops, Agos Lupi, run this loop before I had words for it.

Agos has a psychology degree...she’ll tell you she’s not technical.

But when she took over ops, we had some challenges.

We’d invested $30k in a custom database system to run our book production process. It helped, but the firm we hired really only built 60% of the solution we needed.

I showed Agos how to set up Claude Code, and she started playing with it.

After looking at what it would cost to hire outside help to get the custom database to 100%, I wondered what we could do on our own with AI.

When I shared that thought with Agos, she ran with it.

She set the standard for what she wanted from the app... the way the team would use it; how it would free them from admin to be more personal and proactive with clients.

She got curious... what can it do? Can I just talk to it and get anything good?

Then she executed...

And in a week had a working app to run our production.

What we now call BookFlow.

This week, she moved the entire team onto it. It’s now our single source of truth.

And she’s running the loop...

Meeting with team members, learning what’s working, what’s not, what would eliminate routine and time-consuming work...

And those learnings go back into the standard... she pokes and prods to validate them, executes another iteration cycle, and on and on.

As she’s done that, I’ve watched her ambition around the project expand...daily.

One day she pinged me to show me something she’d developed...

We jumped on Zoom, and she revealed a new, beautifully designed, client-facing version. We went from having a backstage management tool to a tool to clearly communicate to every client where their project stands and what (if anything) we need from them now.

We’ll launch it in a few weeks. And it solves the #1 challenge we hear from clients...that they’re overwhelmed.

On the side, she’s built and launched (and got some paying customers for) a personal finance app specifically for young adults in Argentina, her home country.

That’s expanding ambition... and the loop applied.

That’s what you’re looking for, and that’s what you want to be coaching and leading your team towards.

The people who do it are about to rocket past those who don’t.

I see my job as a leader, now, to get as many people running the loop as possible.

Because this is how talent gets judged going forward. Output is no longer the metric because output is now cheap. The new metric is how well they question, how fast they find out, and how big their ambition grows.

What I got wrong for years...

I can look at a document and in four seconds know it missed the standard. I’ll bet you can, too. We earned that over years and decades.

And that means the standard has been in my head the whole time. Yet, more times than I want to admit, I’ve never written it down, or even articulated it.

Because learning the loop and applying it to real work is so important, I built an AI skill to walk my team through the SCALE Loop.

And, I’m giving it away to subscribers to my Substack.

Subscribe now

Subscribe, then refresh the page, and you’ll see the download link here.

It works in Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI tool you already use.

It will ask 4 questions:

What does “good” look like for this work?
What assumptions are you using and what would prove them wrong?
What’s the smallest test you can run this week?
What do you expect to happen?

It’ll write a 1-page brief based on your answers.

When the work is done, give it that 1-pager and it will interview you to capture your learning.

Give it to your team and let them run it.

You’ve probably felt it.

It’s not your imagination.

I’ve been sitting on this newsletter for a week. I had the feeling, but I wanted the numbers to back it up.

My wife’s on a girls’ weekend, which left me and Blue, our slightly hyper GSP, holding down the fort.

He chased squirrels. I chased data.

Late into the night…

And the numbers prove it out.

In fact, they show something almost no one has noticed...

B2B deal win rates are down 18% year over year.

Sales cycles longer by 38% since 2021.

40-60% of deals now die with no-decision made.

And if you just look at those numbers you might think things are getting pretty bad.

But the averages are hiding a boogyman.

Here’s how my partner Bill Baren put it to me today...

“If you are there in the middle, in the middle of pricing, in the middle of some crowded marketplace, the odds of success are pretty low... I’ve been thinking about this for years... And they’re getting lower.”

And Bill’s not the only one feeling it.

More and more this year, I’m hearing from business owners who are doing “ok” but confess that everything’s getting harder.

We’re not in a recession; last quarter we grew at 1.5%.

Not lighting the world on fire, but still growing.

It’s a lumpy, friction-filled, slow expansion.

And all those averages I mentioned don’t reveal the real news:

The top 17% of salespeople produce 81% of revenue.

(Ok, you’re thinking that’s simple 80/20 at work.)

But the gap between the top performers and the average ones used to be 6x. (Meaning the top salespeople did 6-times better than average.)

That gap has grown to 8.9x, then to 11x in just three years.

The trend is that those who have get more. And they’re getting more, faster than ever.

But it’s not just at the macro level of business.

In professional services...

Top firms now grow 4x faster than average.

And, they’re 30% more profitable.

Visible experts (authors, speakers, recognized industry leaders) are capturing 13x the fees of equally skilled, less visible professionals.

These gaps have always existed. That’s not the news.

The news is that they are growing and accelerating.

It’s never been more dangerous to be “in the middle”.

And it’s fractal (like those stacking Russian dolls)...

The same pattern is playing out at all levels of the economy.

Broad: The middle class in the US has gone from 61% to 51% of the population, and their share of income has gone from 62% to 43% (the acceleration).

Market-level: Over the last 5 years, mid-tier retail is up 2%. Premium retail is up 81%.

Micro-level: For the first time in history Delta’s premium cabin revenue exceeds its coach-class revenue.

And it’s not just in dollars...

The top position on Google gets about 10x the clicks of position 10.

At every level, the economy is going through labor pains associated with the final stages of birthing the micro-chip revolution that started in the 70s...

AI is the accelerant.

And it’s pushing everything to the ends.

The top is going exponential.

Everything else is settling to the bottom.

The reorganization is happening at every scale in the economy... all the way down to your market, your business.

There is no more “comfortable middle.”

It has never been harder to be ordinary...

And it’s never been better to be the only one.

Now, do I think you’re going out of business if you’re stuck in the middle?

The data doesn’t support that.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that business survival rates have been flat for 30 years.

So, I’m not here to give you the “you’re going to die tomorrow” fear nonsense that so many are spreading...

But, that doesn’t mean there’s not a BIG problem.

You probably won’t go out of business, but if you don’t get out of the middle of your market and get to the top, business is going to be hard...and increasingly harder.

Get Out of the Pile

Years ago I read Jack Welch’s book “Straight from the Gut.” One line in the book stuck with me.

Welch was describing his early days at GE when he realized that the most important thing he had to do was “get out of the pile.”

That needs to become your prime directive...

Get Out Of The Pile...

Easy for me to say... hard for you to do.

I know.

(I have some ideas for you, that I’m sharing Thursday)

It doesn’t help that so much of the advice that is out there on how to grow is focused on the wrong thing.

I call it The Motion Trap.

It’s the hustle culture of just “do more.”

Post more.

Pitch more.

More marketing... more, more, more.

More of average is still average.

It’s a faster ride to the bottom.

More isn’t the right strategy, now.

“The ONLY”

Is your only way out (pun intended).

You’ve got to reposition your business from “one in the crowd”...

To “The Only Name”

As in... “the only name you need”.

That’s what you want your prospects saying to each other.

That’s “out of the pile”.

We’ll cover all of the trends we’ve uncovered and what we think the action plan should be for you in a first-time-ever “State of the Industry” Town Hall.

Thursday, Sep 3rd at 3pm ET
Register: https://milliondollarauthor.io/ageofproof

I’ve been doing research for months now.

As you’ve seen from what I’ve shared the last two weeks there are real, foundational shifts happening in the “expertise” and advice-selling industries.

AI is accelerating the changes, so time is short.

On Thursday, we’ll do a deep dive into the trends, what we believe they mean, and what you can do about it, in your business right away.

See you there...

Steve “out of the pile” Gordon

P.S. One question before Thursday: in the market you serve, who’s the #1 name? If you hesitated, that seat is still open on Thursday…

…effective noon the next day.

After the “smoking gun” tape tied him to the Watergate cover-up.

We’ve been on a trust slide for 52 years since.

Iran-Contra.

The S&L Crisis.

Clinton-Lewinsky.

Enron.

Bear Stearns.

Media bias (in all directions).

COVID health deception.

Cancel culture.

And... and... and...

We’re now at the bottom of the 52-year trust collapse.

You may be perfectly trustworthy, but we’re all so impacted by the trust collapse around us that we apply ever-increasing skepticism to everyone and every business we interact with.

That’s a problem (and your opportunity...more on that later).

That’s trend #1 >> THE TRUST COLLAPSE.

That’s bad enough, by itself, but there are two more trends shaping our world right now.

Subscribe now

Trend #2 is what I’m calling THE RISE OF UNCERTAINTY

It parallels the Trust Collapse.

Since 1992, we’ve been living in an increasingly uncertain world. It started with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The worldwide structures built during the 50 years following WWII…which kept the world mostly stable…ceased to be necessary.

The changes started slowly, as you would expect when dismantling a 50-year-old worldwide system.

Then they accelerated and became more dangerous.

The Dot-com Bust.

The 9/11 attacks.

The Internet Revolution.

The Great Recession.

Continually contested elections.

The COVID Pandemic.

The Culture Wars.

And now... AI.

Uncertainty went from an every-now-and-then thing to “Tuesday”.

Every year, then every quarter, then every month, then every week, now every day brings an acceleration of uncertainty.

Is your head spinning yet??

Mine is.

The problem with uncertainty is that we risk-averse humans tend to sit on our hands when we’re not sure which way the wind is blowing.

We delay decisions.

We put off purchases.

We take less risk.

Because we can’t process current conditions to predict what’s likely to happen tomorrow.

That’s a problem for you, too.

So, we have buyers who trust you less and can’t make sense of what’s happening in the world, so they won’t pull the trigger.

Not a good combo.

That brings me to trend #3: THE CONTENT EXPLOSION

AI just threw gasoline on the trust-and-uncertainty fire.

First, the AI doomsayers (many of whom are trying to sell you AI…)

Aside: I’ve yet to figure out the marketing strategy behind saying “Hey, I have this cool thing. It’s going to take your job and probably kill us all...want to buy it?”

They’re overhyping the doom.

And the “AI will unlock infinite productivity and abundance” cheerleaders are overhyping in the other direction.

Both are impacting your buyers. But what’s more important for you is The AI Content Explosion.

We’ve seen a steady rise in the volume of information published each year since Gutenberg and his little printing press invention.

And, yes, that accelerated through the 20th century.

It appeared to go exponential when the Internet gave us all the ability to publish to the world from the couch.

Then the robots joined the game.

And our exponential has now gone exponential.

I’m sure you’ve noticed…AI-generated content is everywhere. An analysis of 3,368 LinkedIn posts by Originality.ai found that 53.75% were “likely AI-generated.” A similar analysis by Pangram found that 40% of the tested content on LinkedIn was AI-generated.

It’s showing up everywhere, and it’s making it harder than ever to tell “is it real or Memorex?”

The Vermont “Ah-ha”

Last week, I was deep in Vermont Farm country at a mastermind led by Ryan Levesque (the Ask Method guy).

There were 20 entrepreneurs from different industries and different parts of the country. We spent two full days digging into these trends.

At one point in the discussion, Bill (my business partner) said something profound...

“Everyone’s walking around thinking, ‘With everything going on in the world...What’s going to happen to me?’”

And it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The three mega-trends...

The Trust Crisis

The Rise of Uncertainty

The Content Explosion

Have combined to create a perfect storm.

People can no longer find the signal in the noise.

And as bad as all of that sounds, I’m more excited and encouraged than I’ve been in a long time.

Where there is crisis, there is opportunity.

We’re entering…

THE AGE OF PROOF™.

The opportunity is to amplify your signal in the noise. To show receipts. To bring overwhelming proof.

Proof is the foundation for trust. Proof is the unmoving reality during uncertainty. Proof is the antidote to AI noise.

Until AI hit the scene, looking real was hard.

It took years of work, experience, and expertise to look and sound like (and become) an expert.

AI makes expertise look instant.

That colleague who couldn’t string three coherent sentences together can now publish polished LinkedIn posts 3 times a day.

Anyone... and I mean anyone, can wear the “I’m an expert” costume now.

And for the most part, nobody can tell the difference.

People are wising up.

Since they can’t tell by looking at the usual signs, they’re asking for proof.

Looking real is free. Being provable is rare.

Now, if you think any of this is new, it’s not. Yet another win for “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

King Edward I established gold and silver “hallmarking” in 1300.

In 1854, the gold karat system was instituted in Britain.

Underwriters’ Laboratory introduced the UL® Labeling system for electrical products in 1906.

Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act in 1990, establishing the USDA organic foods seal.

In 1992, the EPA launched the ENERGY STAR seal.

We’ve progressed through levels of proof...

Assay marks >> “Is this physically what it claims to be?”

Safety marks >> “Will this product hurt me?”

Process and provenance marks >> “Was this made according to a specified system?”

Performance marks >> “Does this achieve a defined measurable outcome?”

Whenever we experience a collapse of trust, we respond with trusted, third-party certification.

The formula is...standard + independent testing + a durable visible mark + penalties for counterfeiting.

And it’s coming to the content you use to get clients.

LinkedIn just rolled out the ability for users to mark content as “AI slop” (there are all kinds of problems with this, but it shows where we’re heading).

Substack integrated with Pangram, an AI writing detection tool, to allow users to click a button and get an “is it AI or is it real” analysis.

These are early attempts at helping separate the signal from the noise.

We even launched our own way back in 2023 with our Written By Human™ certification and mark for the books we publish for clients.

The question is: what should you do next to capture the growing opportunity in The Age of Proof?

I have some ideas.

I’ll be sharing them in a first-ever “State of the Industry” event on August 3rd.

I’ll be sharing:

• The three moves to make now to get in a leadership position in The Age of Proof.

• The #1 defense against AI commoditizing your business.

• A new 9-part framework for standing out in the noisiest time in human history.

• How to leverage human connection in interesting and fun ways in your business.

• How to escape from the mind-virus caused by the Trust Collapse+Rise of Uncertainty+Content Explosion combination (and lead your clients out of it, too).

It’s happening September 3rd (Thursday) at 3pm ET. There WILL NOT be a recording.

Register here: https://milliondollarauthor.io/ageofproof

Steve “keeping it real since 1971” Gordon

I’ve shared before how great it was to leave for two weeks, have no contact with the business (I literally took all the business apps off my phone)...

And come back to find we were on track for one of our biggest months.

Everything clicked >> sales, client success, finance.

Leading up to that trip, I worked to pull things off of my plate and empower the team.

It worked.

Almost too well.

When I got back from Italy, I found that I didn’t have that much to do.

There was blank space on my calendar.

That’s what I’d been building for for years. I’d finally made it happen.

And, with every success, a new problem is created...

The universe, seeing that open, unused space, conspired against me to fill it.

Soon, I found myself “tinkering with AI.”

Because, it is the tech of our time, and likely to impact the business (for better or worse) more than anything else.

I quickly justified filling my time building AI systems as a “good use of time as the CEO.”

I should be on the leading edge.

Our clients will be looking for leaders in this time of chaos...

We should be the leader.

And I should dig in and understand it.

All of that is strong logic, and solid reasoning.

And...

NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM.

Soon, I was working MORE building AI systems, experimenting, seeing what worked (and seeing a lot of what didn’t).

At one point, my partner Bill and I texted each other at 10pm on a Tuesday half joking that we were working more now that we had AI than we did before.

Except the joke isn’t funny.

It’s not just true for Bill and I...

I’m hearing that from almost every business owner who’s gone beyond basic ChatGPT queries.

Last Saturday, I was traveling home from an event, and sitting in the Delta lounge staring at the rain in Atlanta, reflecting on this shift from an open schedule to an overloaded schedule in a few months.

Here’s what stood out...

The Delegation Fallacy is still alive

I consider myself a pretty good delegator. We’ve got a great team and they really handle things.

Yet, when I started building AI agents, I held onto them, going back to the flawed logic of “I can do it better/faster with AI”. So I became the orchestrator of some really cool and very effective AI workflows.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I beginning to believe Dan Sullivan’s wisdom when he says he puts a smart person between himself and technology.

Fractured CEO Attention is Financial Liability

The predominant AI workflow since last year for those on the leading edge has been to run multiple Claude Code processes in parallel.

At one point, I was running 4 to 7 major parallel tasks all day long.

My attention was divided across all of those tasks. I’d start an agent on building an ad campaign and let it run while I moved to another agent that was helping me rewrite and strealine our client training.

Start it and jump to the next...

An agent that was recreating our website...

And then to one that was building BookFlow, our internal project app.

And... and... and...

At the end of each day, I was mentally exhausted.

And my ability to solve problems, think strategically, and lead the business was impacted.

In hindsight, fractured attention may have cost us $100k.

Cool ≠ Value

I’m an 8 Quick Start and 2 Implementer on the Kolbe® assessment, which means I never run short of new ideas, and the minute I hold the idea in my mind, it’s as real as if I could touch it.

That combined with AI is a dangerous mix if you’re the leader.

I stopped and did an inventory of the AI systems I’d built since January that were 70% or 80% complete, but needed that last 20%-30% to cash in on the value.

I’m embarrassed to say that the list was long.

Including a number of game-changer ideas...

A complete project management system that consolidates client project status and every client and team communication in one place, and has AI built-in to automate much of the admin work we do back stage.

It was stalled at 70%.

While I was building that, I also built an ad management system that eliminates all the “middle work”--pulling and crunching metrics from 5 sources, writing hooks based on the data, creating images, uploading ads back to the platforms--it saves 4-6 hours a week easily.

And another 5 big AI projects...

And none of them got to 100%, launched and delivering value.

(See fractured attention above...)

This is a trap I’m hearing from too many business owners right now. They’re doing things themselves with AI. It’s all cool and impressive, but it’s not freeing them up or leading to value within the team.

So I started handing off those projects to the team.

Three weeks later, we launched our internal project management app.

It was better than what I planned, and includes a client portal so clients can see from their phone the exact status of their project and what (if anything) we need from them.

Ditto on the other projects.

In the process... I’m clearing up my calendar again.

This time with some earned wisdom.

Every “free” hour will have a plan I call T.I.G.E.R...

Thinking
Insight
Golf
Empower
Relationship

Each of those creates value in the business and must be protected...

Thinking >> that’s my #1 job

Insight >> Reading smart people and processing ideas

Golf >> Because thinking, insight, and creativity rarely happen at a desk

Empower >> Lead and empower the team to own outcomes

Relationship >> the anti-AI moat

The only way to keep out the chaos is to be intentional about filling open calendar slots before the world fills it for you.

Steve “T.I.G.E.R.” Gordon

P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

For the last nine months, I’ve experimented with AI writing this weekly newsletter.

In this issue, I’m going to breakdown what I’ve learned, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m doing going forward.

If you’re at all interested in how AI will impact your business, I promise this will be valuable.

We launched this newsletter at the end of September of last year.

For the first month and a half, I wrote every issue the old fashioned way... fingers on keyboard.

Then, in November of last year, I started experimenting with Claude Code for help with non-programming work.

Mostly marketing ops.

And... like seemingly everyone else using AI in business, I thought, “this could make creating marketing content way faster.”

TL;DR... it did.

By December, I was starting to get the time to write a newsletter down from two hours to 30 minutes.

I’ll take 90 minutes back. WIN!

It was a game changer as I prepped to go incommunicado in Italy with my wife for two weeks.

I was able to get all the content for this newsletter and my LinkedIn feed done a couple of weeks before I left.

It was super freeing.

Even better, clients were commenting on how much they liked the content. WIN 2!

In fact, I had a client tell me that it was my emails that caused them to say “yes” to working with us. WIN 3!

Through the spring and early summer, I found the process got better. I was using AI to bat ideas around for issues. To ask me questions, to go do research for me.

I’d built a 5 stage process all orchestrated by an agent (first in Claude Code, then in Notion)...

• Interview me to mine for ideas.

• Push back on my assertions and find data to back them up.

• Build an outline.

• Write the first draft.

• Rewrite based on my dictated feedback, until we got to something I was happy with.

There’s this scene in “The Crown” where Churchill is in the bathtub, sipping a scotch, and smoking a cigar... dictating his correspondence to a secretary...

That’s what my workflow felt like. My AI assistant (I call him “Andy”...I don’t know why) would sit and dutifully make notes and changes while I sat with my feet propped on the desk (only occasionally sipping an Eagle Rare).

It was awesome.

Until it wasn’t.

I started noticing something about the newsletters we were putting out.

They were “good”.

Decently written...

But they lacked “life.”

They lacked novelty.

They became a formula, because, AI is probabilistic.

It cannot do random novelty (this is actually how the newer tool that detect AI content are able to find it).

Human on the other hand are consistently inconsistent.

We often choose a word or phrase or paragraph that would be “improbable” from the perspective of AI.

So, why am I telling you all of this?

Because I’ve gone further down the road of AI writing/content marketing than most.

Here’s what I discovered...

As the founder/CEO of a small company, the single biggest advantage I have in the marketplace is my own OPINIONATED WORLDVIEW.

There are certain things I believe to be true about the challenges our clients face, and that is my company’s secret weapon.

And AI (because it’s trained on all of published human thought) tends to pull everything back to the average.

There’s no edge.

It turns real opinions and beliefs into blunt instruments, not razors to cut the market into two groups:

Those show are attracted by what you believe.

And those who are repelled by it.

When marketing fails to create that divide, it fails.

But wait, there’s more...

The AI TRUST TRAP

There are two other important trends you need to know about...

First, AI is reaching the masses.

I’ve been traveling the country this year speaking to audiences of entrepreneurs (at this point I’ve spoken to over 1000 business owners).

And they’re all talking about how they’re using AI.

A year ago, they were all wondering how AI would impact them.

And, the #1 use case I hear (drum roll please)...

“I use it to write my LinkedIn/FB/IG posts and emails.”

I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that, no judgement.

I am saying the trend is important.

We’ve already seen a surge of poorly done AI content...and we’re about to get hit by the tsunami.

When I was 28 and had just been promoted to CEO in my first business, I was given a recording of Earl Nightingale. And I’ll never forget this line...

“If you don’t have a good model for success, just look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite.”

Your audience is savvy. They can tell.

And, the platforms are going to help them.

Last month Substack integrated with Pangram to allow users to detect AI written content. And, wisely, they allow writers to add a “How this was created” note.

While I think it’s perfectly legitimate to use AI to create marketing content (again, I’m not a luddite, and there is no judgement here), I am seeing consumers of content ignore anything they think is AI generated.

People want real.

And that’s the opportunity that’s about to open up.

Most people will take the fast and easy route and use AI in their content marketing.

Which will open a huge opportunity for the minority of founders who leverage their #1 asset: their unique and opinionated worldview.

Does that mean we’re not using AI in the business? Absolutely not. We’re accelerating it’s use, and I’ll be sharing our experience here.

What it does mean is that if you read this, you can be confident I actually wrote it.

Not because AI can’t get close, but because I hate being pulled down to “average.”

Steve “fingers on keyboard” Gordon

P.S. We certify every book we produce for our clients with our “Written By Human” seal and have for three years. Current trends are proving that our original hypothesis is accurate >> in a world of AI and human content, people will look for ways to tell the difference. Not because they never want AI content, but because they want to know the source.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

I’ve done a lot of these events over the past year with all types of professionals, and the conversation is always some version of the same one.

Someone tells me their pricing. I run the number against what I know their competitors charge for comparable work…

…and the gap is usually bigger than they think, sometimes a third of the going rate, sometimes a tenth.

I tell them. Gently. The good news…they could easily be charging more.

And almost every time, they push back.

Not with numbers. With a kind of quiet resistance, like accepting it would mean admitting they’ve been leaving money on the table for years…

And that’s harder to accept than just staying where they are.

I’ve started calling this the Underpriced Expert.

You know one. Based on my informal research, there’s a decent chance you are one.

The Underpriced Expert usually isn’t bad at the work, that’s what makes it maddening to watch.

I’ve sat with financial advisors, consultants, lawyers, coaches, who are genuinely sharper than the person down the road charging three or four times what they charge.

Confidence plays into it.
So does lead flow…or the lack of it.

Because if you don’t know where your next client is coming from, you’re not going to risk quoting a bigger number to the one in front of you today. But the more of these conversations I have, the more I realize how often it comes down to the offer itself.

Most Underpriced Experts describe what they do the exact same way as everyone else in their industry.

“I do financial planning.”
“I do consulting.”
”I’m a lawyer.”

That’s not really an offer. It’s a category, and categories get shopped on price whether you like it or not.

Here’s what actually separates the two.

A premium offer describes a specific transformation, with a unique name, clear enough that a prospect can picture the outcome before they talk to you. A commodity offer just describes a service.

“I do consulting” tells a prospect what category to compare you in. A named, specific offer tells them what changes.

I know this because I lived it.

Over the last four and a half years we raised our own prices 400 percent. We didn’t change what we delivered. We changed the offer, how it was built and how it was shown. Conversion went up anyway.

I saw the same thing play out on a sales call not that long ago.

A prospect came in skeptical, arms crossed, already burned by a competitor’s program. Nothing I said was landing.

What finally moved him was seeing the offer and the process laid out visually.

He could immediately see how and why we differed from what he’d experienced with that competitor. He literally said, “Wow, I see how different this is from what I did before.”

He signed that day. His book’s published now. He’s a bestselling author.

Why did I share these two stories?

Simple… If you’re sitting there right now thinking this is a confidence problem, I’d gently push back the way I did at the conference.

Confidence isn’t the starting point.

A sharper offer and a pipeline you actually trust, those come first.

Confidence follows.

Getting that order backward has a real cost, and it’s simple to see.

Take the gap between what you charge now and what your best-priced competitor charges for the same work. Multiply that by every client you’ll take on this year. Most Underpriced Experts never actually sit down and do the math.

I didn’t either, until I met Bill Baren.

Bill built a coaching and consulting business in the early 2000s and scaled it to eight figures before he sold it. He built the whole thing on a system he created for himself first, because he didn’t like selling either, and needed a way to do it that didn’t feel like selling.

Turned out a lot of his clients had the same problem. By the time he exited, he’d helped over 6,000 coaches and consultants build a better offer and a sales conversation that didn’t make them cringe.

He helped redesign ours.
Within six months, I was out of the sales role entirely.
Not because I’d mastered some new closing technique.

The old model only worked if the prospect connected with me personally, which meant the business was capped by my calendar. The new offer and the structured conversation did the convincing on their own, so someone else on our team could run that exact same conversation and still close the deal.

That’s the difference between a practice that’s capped by its founder and a business that isn’t. It’s the same shift that moved our prices 400 percent.

If part of you already suspects you’re the Underpriced Expert in your market, I have a solution >> here...

If you’re like most professionals I talk to you’re doing great work.

But, your offer is worth a second look.

Steve “Underpriced No More” Gordon

P.S. I’ve got a theory about why the Underpriced Expert fights the diagnosis even with proof sitting right in front of them. More on that next week.

Where to find me: If this is the first issue of mine you’ve read, welcome aboard. Every Saturday I send a new roadmap for building a business that doesn’t need you personally to keep running. If someone forwarded you this one, grab the next one here.

They certify and serve 9800 Certified Exit Planning Advisors across the U.S.

And I’m giving them one idea, that is also important for you…

Being excellent isn’t the problem.

Being trusted is.

In our world, book is what turns an excellent but invisible advisor into the name a business owner trusts.

Now… if you’ve been around me for five minutes, you already know I believe that.

But before your brain goes, “Oh great, Steve’s about to pitch books again,” let me make this crystal clear:

This isn’t a “write a book” sales letter.

This is a marketing reality check for the age of AI.

Because the lie floating around right now sounds like this:

“Just learn Claude Code.”

“Download these skill files.”

“Spin up an AI marketing team.”

“Put out 10x the content.”

“Marketing solved.”

That’s possible.

It’s important.

It’s also not sufficient.

AI can multiply your activity.

It can multiply what looks like visibility.

What it cannot do is manufacture the one thing your buyers are silently hunting for more than ever…

Credibility.

The only framework you need right now

If you want to grow a professional services business, you still need three things:

Visibility. Do the right people know you exist?

Credibility. When they find you, do they believe you’re the best choice?

Sellability. Does that turn into clients — predictably and at premium prices — without everything running through you?

That’s the VCS Framework: Visibility, Credibility, Sellability.

In the pre-AI world, a lot of firms were constrained by visibility.

They were good… but unknown.

Then AI showed up and changed one thing dramatically:

It made visibility cheap.

And that sounds like good news until you realize what cheap visibility does to the market:

It floods it.

When everyone can “be everywhere,” buyers start assuming a lot of what they’re seeing is noise.

They start assuming it’s automated.

They start assuming it’s borrowed.

And the buyer’s question shifts from:

“Can I find someone for this?”

To:

“Who can I trust for this?”

In other words…

AI didn’t reduce the importance of credibility.

It made credibility the constraint.

Credibility is the base

Here’s how I think about it now:

Credibility is the foundation.

Visibility and sellability sit on top of it.

Without a strong base, the other two don’t hold.

And this is where people get trapped… because they build two out of three and wonder why the thing won’t grow.

Trap #1: Visibility + Sellability (but no credibility)

This is the modern AI trap.

You’re posting. You’re shipping. You’re “active.”

You’re even getting attention.

But buyers feel something is off.

They can’t tell what’s real.

They don’t know if you’ve actually done the work.

So what you get is attention without trust.

Low conversions.

Endless follow-up.

“Great content, Steve.”

No money.

Trap #2: Credibility + Sellability (but no visibility)

This one is brutal because you can deliver.

You’ve got results. You’ve got depth. You’ve got a real offer.

But nobody knows you exist.

Your pipeline is a coin flip.

And you’re constantly thinking, “If more of the right people knew what I do… this would take off.”

Trap #3: Visibility + Credibility (but no sellability)

People trust you.

They respect you.

They even refer you.

But the business doesn’t convert predictably.

The offer isn’t packaged.

The sales process is mushy.

Everything runs through you.

And you end up “famous” without being profitable.

The shift buyers are making (and most firms are missing)

Buyers are catching on.

They’re starting to recognize “activity visibility.”

The constant posting.

The endless threads.

The perfect-looking carousels.

And they’re gravitating toward credibility signals that feel:

Real.

Tangible.

Human-created.

Because those signals reduce risk.

And when a business owner is about to bet their company, their money, or their future on you…

Risk is the whole game.

Why a book is such a powerful credibility signal (and when it isn’t)

A book is not magic.

A book doesn’t automatically make you good.

A book is just a credibility asset.

But it’s one of the most powerful credibility assets an expert can create, because it does three things at once:

1. It lets the market experience your thinking before they hire you.

They get to “try you on” without committing.

2. It proves depth.

Not in a “look at my framework” way… in a “this person has done the work and can explain it clearly” way.

3. It compresses trust-building time.

In high-trust services, trust normally takes time, referrals, and proximity. A book shortens the cycle.

A book isn’t the goal.

The goal is credibility.

The book is a tool that moves credibility faster than almost anything else.

(And yes, you still need visibility and sellability. A book is not a substitute for those. It’s a foundation for them.)

The future (12–18 months)

The firms that win won’t be the ones who post the most.

They’ll be the ones who can be trusted the fastest.

AI is going to keep pushing the market in one direction:

More volume.

More sameness.

More “content.”

Which means the firms that stand out will do the opposite:

More proof.

More depth.

More credibility.

And the more AI floods the zone…

The more credibility becomes the only filter buyers use.

The move

Stop asking, “How do I make more content?”

Start asking, “What is the constraint in my growth right now — visibility, credibility, or sellability?”

Because the first move is not the same for every firm.

But if you start in the wrong place, you add effort without leverage.

And you don’t have time for that.

Steve “Credibility Is the Constraint” Gordon

P.S. If you want to find your constraint in five minutes, take the VCS Assessment. It will show you whether Visibility, Credibility, or Sellability is holding you back — and what to fix first: https://milliondollarauthor.io/the-visibility-lie

I’m early for my flight, which is exactly how I like it after a meeting like this.

I was with 50 business owners…most of them running seven and eight figure companies.

They are not AI skeptics.

These are not people ignoring what’s happening.

Three months ago, a lot of them would have looked like they were on the “leading edge” of AI for small business.

We were going around the room sharing what we were doing with AI.

And honestly… I didn’t think our firm was especially advanced.

Then I described what we’ve built.

We call it our “FIRM^AI” system.

Eyes got wide.

One owner said, “I thought we were ahead. Now I feel way behind… I don’t even know how to do what you just described.”

I had some version of that conversation five times.

So I decided to write this.

Because if you’re a professional services firm owner, this is the race you’re in now.

Not a race to “use AI.”

Everyone uses AI.

It’s a race to become faster and more effective… and more human at the same time.

The shift the leaders already made

Here’s the simplest way I can say it:

The market hasn’t moved yet.

But the leaders have.

The difference is not whether your team uses AI.

The difference is whether your firm has built AI into shared knowledge and shared workflows… or whether it’s still stuck in private chats.

If AI only lives in private chat windows on each employee’s laptop, your firm isn’t getting an advantage.

Your people are getting a trick.

That gives you linear gains.

And it creates random quality.

Because every person is playing their own game.

Their own prompts.

Their own context.

Their own “system.”

And it keeps you stuck in the same place you’ve been stuck for years:

You still act like the human traffic cop.

The one connecting people, systems, decisions, and context.

Meanwhile… the firms that turn AI into shared systems are compounding…FAST.

And once compounding starts, catch-up gets ugly.

What you’re actually racing for

This isn’t just about productivity.

Productivity matters.

But the real risk is bigger:

If your firm doesn’t make this jump, you lose the true advantage of AI.

Which is not “more output.”

It’s freeing up your people to do what humans do best:

Leadership.

Creativity.

Insight.

Experience.

Imagination.

The stuff that creates new client value.

And if you stop creating value at the pace the market demands…

you lose.

What Multiplayer AI looks like in the real world

Multiplayer AI is when your firm has created shared intelligence between the human team and the AI team.

It looks like:

• Company knowledge is shared and findable (and organized).

• Workflows are named and owned.

• AI outputs land in real systems (not just chat windows).

• Humans keep control points for judgment and commitments.

• Learning compounds across the whole team.

This is when AI stops being a personal productivity hack and starts being part of how the firm runs.

And once you’ve built it, you start doing things you used to say “no” to… because they weren’t worth the time.

Here are a few examples from our own business.

Example 1: “We would have said no”

Last week a client asked for help finding speaking engagements.

In the past, we probably would have said no.

Not because it wasn’t valuable.

But because it’s the kind of request that quietly eats days.

So instead, we asked our internal speaking-gig research agent (one we built to find me stages) to run a search for the client.

In less than 24 hours, we had a list of ~150 target events.

Client was thrilled.

Value created where we simply could not have created it before.

Example 2: “Hours became 30 minutes”

I have an agent that analyzes the performance of our ad campaigns weekly.

It recommends which ads to kill.

Which to replicate.

It creates the new ads.

It creates the new images.

Then it presents everything to me for approval.

Because human-in-the-loop at the right spot matters.

Once I say “approved,” it pushes the updated ads to Meta.

No jockeying across 5 spreadsheets and our CRM…
No mindless point-click-upload-copy-paste…

Hours of manual work became 30 minutes.

Example 3: Website + SEO + AEO in a day

We redesigned and relaunched our website fully SEO and AEO optimized in a day.

And we didn’t stop there.

We have a bi-weekly, data-driven SEO/AEO update rhythm run by an agent and supervised by a team member.

Example 4: Ops visibility without app-switching

Our ops team is building tools so they stop needing to switch between four different tools to get up-to-the-minute status on client projects.

They just ask.

Or they get a proactive update sent to them.

And on and on.

This is what “the leaders” have done.

Not because they bought better tools…

But because they built a company capability.

The unsexy part nobody wants to talk about

The cool stuff I just described comes last.

The first step is slowing down to speed up.

Because most of us have a shared drive or server that looks like Grandma’s junk drawer (she had everything in there…).

You know the five versions of the “FINAL-FINAL” file…

You have to get organized enough for AI to actually work.

You need a clear source of truth.

Documented workflows.

Ownership.

And control points.

That’s the part nobody brags about on LinkedIn.

But it’s the part that makes all the “magic” possible.

The first step (do this before you buy another tool)

Pick one recurring workflow that matters and make it multiplayer.

Here’s the checklist:

1. Name the workflow.

2. Assign an owner.

3. Define the output (what “done” means).

4. Define the feedback loop (how it gets better).

Then build the AI path around that.

Not “prompts.”

A workflow.

With ownership.

That compounds.

If the leaders in your space are making the jump, and you’re not…

you’re already behind.

And you won’t catch up by “using AI more.”

You catch up by turning AI into a company capability.

Become faster and more effective.

And at the same time, become more human.

Steve “make it multiplayer” Gordon

P.S. I’ve had so many questions about this that I’m going to help a few firms who are already using AI—but haven’t made the leap to Multiplayer AI—build their roadmap. If you want to be one of them, comment to this post and tell me what you’re doing with AI today, and where you want to go next.

“Real or AI?”

I answered without thinking…AI: He did, too.

We laughed. Then went quiet for a second.

That question is the question we’re all asking when we see your LinkedIn post, or X thread, or email. And most content is answering the wrong way.

The tools are not the problem. Most firms just skipped a step.

A study published earlier this year tracked 65,000 articles online. More than half were AI-generated.

LinkedIn engagement dropped 50% year over year across 1.8 million posts. AI-detectable content gets 45% less engagement than human-written posts.

The market did not gradually grow numb to AI content. It is already there.

And firms are responding the way you’d expect.

More posts.

More articles.

More emails.

The tools are fast, the cost is low, the output is high.

That’s The Efficiency Trap.

Chasing AI’s speed before you have anything distinctive worth saying puts you on the fast-train the ‘meh’.

Efficiency without effectiveness.

At scale, it doesn’t build an audience.

It trains people to scroll past you.

The firms that win over the next 18-24 months are not necessarily better at their work than those that don’t. They are better known for their worldview.

That’s always been true, but you could get away with it before… now things are changing, fast.

Bain published research earlier this year on how B2B buyers actually make decisions. 85% of them purchase from vendors they had in mind before they started searching. Before the Google search. Before the ChatGPT query. Before anyone knew they were in the market.

That list forms over time.

Through one thing: opinionated content.

The kind that can only come from a person with enough experience to take a position and mean it. And the guts to stand up and be a leader.

The referral game is changing, too.

Firms I talk to are still getting referrals. That has not changed.

What has changed is what happens after. The referred contact now vets the referral before they call. 29% of B2B buyers start their research in ChatGPT, not Google. What they find either confirms the referral or softens it.

For a firm with consistent, opinionated content: confirmation.

For a firm with AI-generated volume: doubt.

For a firm with no findable content: invisibility.

Content’s job now is to be the evidence that confirms what the referral promised.

The Edelman-LinkedIn research, a seven-year study of nearly 2,000 buyers, puts a specific number on this. 95% of buyers who are not yet ready to purchase are more receptive to vendors with consistent thought leadership.

Not ads.

Not outreach.

Thought leadership.

There are two wrong answers to this problem.

The first: “AI is ruining content, I won’t use it.” That hands speed and reach to competitors who figure out the right approach.

The second: “AI handles everything.” That scales mediocrity faster than any previous tool in history.

The middle way is not complicated. Just uncommon.

Develop the worldview first.

This is the step AI cannot do. It requires a person with a history, a set of experiences, and a willingness to take positions. What do you believe about your industry that most of your peers would push back on? What are you seeing now that your clients will not understand for two more years? That is the raw material. No AI can generate it, because it does not exist yet until you decide what you think.

Capture it in a form your AI can learn from.

A book does this most completely. Not because a book is a marketing asset, though it is. Because writing one forces you to externalize your worldview in a form that is trainable. Your AI then works from that foundation, not from a blank notepad every session.

A newsletter works too. When I started, the process was simple: brief AI on the thinking, let it write. The output was competent. But it wasn’t really mine.

What we built over time looks different. The thinking comes first. AI pushes on it, questions the logic, helps make the idea sharper before any writing starts. The structure itself was deliberately refined over many issues: the life texture opener, the named problem, the future-telling angle. When the thinking is solid and the structure understood, the writing reflects it.

I still edit by hand at the end. It is a collaboration at every stage, not a delegation at the last one.

Amplify efficiently.

Once the worldview is captured, the efficiency tools earn their place. AI that knows your positions, your voice, your examples, and the way you think can extend your reach without diluting what makes you…you.

Be everywhere they are.

Everywhere for the specific audience that matters to your firm. Wherever they gather, search, and vet referrals. The goal is not merely reach. It is to be unavoidable to the right people.

You do not need to be better.

You need to be known.

And the window to build that, before the noise gets any louder, is shorter than most people think.

Steve “known beats better” Gordon

P.S. The hardest part of this is not the AI. It’s sitting down and deciding what you actually believe. Most firms avoid that step because it requires taking positions, which means you might be wrong. That discomfort is the work. The AI is easy. The worldview is not.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Where’s Steve:

• July 15-16 - Strategic Coach 10X Ambition - Chicago

• July 30-Aug 1 - Garrett Planning Network Annual Retreat - Minneapolis

If you’re at any of those events, come see me.

Everyone had developed their own workflows.

Their own prompts.

Their own tools.

We were getting real results. But those results weren’t spreading across the team. One person figured something out, but it stayed with them. The next person solved the same problem from scratch two weeks later.

We were using AI. We just weren’t using it as a team.

The labs almost guarantee this.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini are all designed as personal tools.

One conversation.

One session.

One user.

You can’t fault the individual for using the tool the way it was built. But the result, at the company level, is a collection of solo players.

No shared learning.

No compounding.

Every session starting from zero.

And, I think we’re pretty advanced in our “solo” use. We’re using Claude Code, Codex, and some pretty cool techniques. But there was no way to compound that work.

When we stopped and tried to build something cohesive… something that worked at the company level, not just the individual level… we hit the context wall immediately.

The data we needed to make AI work for us as a team was everywhere and nowhere. Spread across systems. Different formats. Hard to access. Harder for AI to actually use.

So we had to slow down to speed up.

Intelligence is no longer the scarce resource.

This is the insight that changed how I’m thinking about AI for professional services firms.

In the old world, intelligence was scarce. You hired experts who had it. You hired professionals, usually with some sort of certification in their domain.

Now AI provides intelligence cheaply. The bottleneck has shifted. The real constraint now is context. And context lives in your data and in your experience.

The companies that will win with AI are not necessarily using better tools or the newest model. They’re building a better data layer. They’re treating data the way they’ve always treated talent: as a strategic asset that needs to be organized, maintained, and made accessible.

We spent the last month doing exactly that.

My team mapped the data we actually need on a regular basis — marketing and sales performance, conversion metrics, project throughput, quality measures.

Then we built tools (with AI) to extract that data from our various systems every day. Consolidate it. Clean it. Make it usable.

Here’s just one thing we found when we did (and we’re just getting started).

We have significantly more leads this year. The sales team is fully booked. On the surface: a good problem.

Except. Our conversion rate is down.

When we let AI look for correlations across the consolidated data, it found something I wouldn’t have found on my own.

The average time between a lead’s first conversation with us and their second had shifted. Not collapsed. Shifted.

From 7 days to 11 days.

Four extra days. Leads sitting. Getting colder.

Conversion rate dropped 5%.

Without the data layer, we’d have done what most firms do: told the sales team to follow up faster. Close harder. Get better.

But the root cause wasn’t the sales team. It was a capacity problem… more leads than our scheduling could handle at the same pace.

The fix was structural, not behavioral.

We would have blamed the wrong thing.

We would have fixed the wrong thing.

Multiply that kind of insight across every part of your business.

Here’s what I think is coming:

In 18 months, the firms that have built a data layer will have a structural advantage over those that haven’t. Not because they’ll have access to better AI, everyone has access to the same models. But because their AI will know their business. Deeply. Across time.

The firm without a data layer gives their AI a blank notepad at the start of every session. Whatever context exists lives in one person’s head, and it resets when the session ends.

The firm with a data layer hands their AI a full history: every campaign result, every conversion rate, every bottleneck, every pattern across months and years. Their AI finds correlations that no individual would catch manually.

Same tools. Very different results.

That gap is already opening. And once it’s open, it’s hard to close.

Two firms.

One is a collection of solo players.

Good people.

Skilled.

Each getting results individually.

Nobody building on what the person next to them learned last week.

The other is a data company.

Context shared.

Learning compounding.

Insights appearing that would never surface from individual effort alone.

The solo players aren’t failing. They just hit a ceiling they can’t see.

Are you past it?

Steve “abundant intelligence” Gordon

P.S. The hardest part of building the data layer isn’t the tools. It’s stopping long enough to decide what data you actually need. Most firms skip that step — and then wonder why their AI keeps giving them generic answers. That decision is the whole step.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in four ways:

Become a Published Author — We’re taking 7 entrepreneurs who want a book published before Fall. We’ll extract your expertise into a book in 90 days and help you launch it to land clients within weeks. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Where’s Steve:

• July 9-10 - Ed Slott’s 2-Day IRA Workshop - New York City

• July 15-16 - Strategic Coach 10X Ambition - Chicago

• July 30-Aug 1 - Garrett Planning Network Annual Retreat - Minneapolis

If you’re at any of those events, come see me.

Apparently that’s how it works.

Dads cook their own dinner.

As I was standing staring into the fire reflecting on my week in San Diego, the big takeaway is that humans want human experiences.

We were not designed to process information.

AI does that faster and better than any of us ever will.

What we were designed for is experience.

Meaning. Connection.

That’s what I kept thinking about when Tim Ferriss published something this week that a lot of people in your world are going to misread.

His piece is called “Has AI Already Killed Nonfiction?”

His data is real.

How-to, prescriptive nonfiction is down 46 to 57 percent. AI handles “what is X” and “how do I do Y” faster and cheaper than any book ever written.

A lot of experts are going to read that and put down the idea of writing a book.

That’s the wrong move.

And here’s why.

The Wrong Obituary

Ferriss is writing the obituary for a specific kind of book.

The information book. The lookup table. The “here’s how to do X in 10 steps” kind.

That category is dying. AI is eating it alive and won’t stop.

But here’s what most people miss when they read that article: your book—the one you wrote to grow your business—was never in that category.

When you read “AI killed nonfiction,” you’re attending the funeral for a book you were never writing.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of nonfiction books.

The first teaches you what to know.

It’s comprehensive, neutral, and packed with useful information.

Its job is to inform.

It competes with AI, and it loses.

The second takes a stand. It shows your prospect a path they didn’t know existed. It challenges a belief they didn’t know they had. Its job is to transform.

That book requires a guide.

AI can generate information.

It cannot be a guide (because guides provide meaning and experience).

Ferriss himself says it: the books that survive AI are the ones built on voice, belief, and lived experience.

Transformation.

Narrative.

Not merely information.

That’s the book professionals like you write.

What a Transformation Book Actually Does

Ryan Schmierer launched his book.

Less than an hour after it went live on Amazon, a former colleague reached out. Someone from a Fortune 100 tech company. A connection that had been quiet for 15 years.

He wanted to know if Ryan would come speak at their corporate events.

Here’s the part that matters most.

That colleague didn’t read Ryan’s book. Not a single page.

The book’s job wasn’t to deliver information.

It was to signal one thing to everyone who saw it: Ryan is at the top of his field.

That perception traveled through a 15-year-dormant connection the moment the book existed.

Ryan’s words: “I didn’t believe the MDA formula would work until I saw it myself today.”

An information book only creates value when someone reads it. A transformation book creates credibility the moment it’s published.

That’s not something AI can replicate. AI can write an information book.

It cannot build a career, take a stand on what a market needs to hear, and put that story into the world in a way that moves people to act.

Only you can do that.

What’s Coming

Every corner of the internet is filling with free, competent, generic content.

The expert who writes an information book (or publishes info-content) disappears into that flood.

The guide, the one who takes a stand and shows prospects a path no one else is showing them, becomes rarer with every passing month.

More valuable with every passing month.

The window isn’t closing on books.

It’s closing on information books.

The transformation book has never had a better moment than right now.

The Ferriss piece is worth reading. His data is solid. He’s right that one category of nonfiction is in serious trouble.

He’s just writing the wrong obituary for your business.

The book that transforms, the one that takes a stand and leads your prospect somewhere they couldn’t get to on their own, that book doesn’t compete with AI.

It gets stronger because of it.

Steve “be the guide” Gordon

P.S. Ryan’s result didn’t come from the information in his book (which is excellent, by the way). It came from the positioning. The proof. The signal that he belongs on a stage in front of the people who need what he knows. Next week, we’ll talk about what it actually takes to build the kind of positioning that thrives in the Age of AI.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Where’s Steve:

• July 9-10 - Ed Slott’s 2-Day IRA Workshop - New York City

• July 15-16 - Strategic Coach 10X Ambition - Chicago

• July 30-Aug 1 - Garrett Planning Network Annual Retreat - Minneapolis

If you’re at any of those events, come see me.

Old fashioned on the table. Overlooking Torrey Pines golf course and the Pacific.

I just spent two days in a room with 150 financial advisors and exit planning consultants.

All good at what they do.

Most of them are stuck in the same way.

And I keep turning over one conversation.

A guy I’ll call Jay.

Jay has a solid practice. Clients who trust him. A referral pipeline that works like most.

He told me he gets some referrals from clients and a few from COIs -- CPAs and lawyers who know him well enough to send people his way.

He wanted more of the COI referrals.

But he’d made his peace with them coming in slowly and unpredictably.

I asked why he didn’t go direct to the business owners he actually wanted to reach.

He looked at me like the question had an obvious answer.

He posts on LinkedIn occasionally.

Doesn’t want to cold call.

Speaks to a group now and then.

Nothing consistent.

And when he does get a lead from one of those efforts, it’s always a long courtship.

Months of follow-up.

Lots of nurturing.

A slow walk toward a yes that might never come.

He was resigned to it.

I told him I understood.

I see it all the time.

And I let the conversation end there.

What I didn’t say was this.

Jay doesn’t have a pipeline problem.

He has a credibility dependency.

When you rely on referrals, the referrer is doing something invisible on your behalf.

They’re lending you their credibility.

The prospect trusts you because they trust the person who sent them.

That trust is real.

But it belongs to the relationship, not to you.

Remove the referrer, and you start from zero.

That’s Borrowed Credibility.

Jay’s long courtship with non-referred leads is what zero looks like.

Every prospect who didn’t come through someone he knows requires him to build trust from scratch.

No signals.

No proof.

Just words coming out of his mouth.

The prospect has nothing to anchor to.

They take their time.

He thinks he can’t generate enough leads.

He’s right.

But the reason isn’t what he thinks.

The reason is that most of his authority isn’t his.

I noticed something about the event.

Every speaker had a book.

Several had more than one.

Not one of them was borrowing credibility from someone else’s relationship.

They’d built something they owned.

A published point of view.

Proof that lives outside of any single relationship and travels with them wherever they go.

Into every room.

In front of every prospect.

Referred or cold, warm or stranger, it didn’t matter.

The difference between the stage and the seats at that event wasn’t expertise.

Most of the advisors in the audience are as capable as the people who spoke.

Some of them more so.

The difference was what they owned.

There are two kinds of credibility.

Borrowed credibility travels through people. It works beautifully inside a referral network. The referrer carries it for you.

Step outside that network, and it stops.

No referrer, no trust.

You rebuild it manually, from scratch, with every non-referred lead.

Owned credibility travels with you.

A book.

A named method.

A published argument for why your approach is the right one.

Proof that exists independently of any relationship.

It shows up before you do.

By the time a prospect gets on a call with you, they’ve already decided you know what you’re doing.

That changes the selling entirely.

Before I had a credibility asset I owned, most of my non-referred leads were long courtships. Same as Jay. When I built one, the calls changed.

Our close rate on non-referred leads went to 30 to 40 percent. Consistently.

The sales cycle went from months of chasing to closed deals same day (or same week).

I was able to hand selling off to my team within six months.

They hit the same close rates.

I freed up 10 to 20 hours a week from sales conversations.

$600k to $2.4M in revenue in two years.

And something I didn’t expect when I started down this road: making money while I’m skiing. While I’m in Europe. While I’m not in the office and not on a call.

The credibility asset works when you’re not in the room.

AI is flooding every market with content.

Posts, short videos, articles.

Infinite volume.

Almost zero cost to produce.

Generic signals of expertise are getting cheaper by the week.

The scarcity in 18 months is owned credibility.

A book.

A named method.

A specific point of view…

One that can’t be replicated because it came from your experience, your clients, your results.

The advisors who understand this and act now won’t be in the seats at the next event.

They’ll be on the stage.

The ones who wait will have more competition for fewer COI referrals and longer courtships on every lead they generate themselves.

Jay is back home now.

Same practice.

Same ceiling.

Same slow walk toward a yes with every lead that didn’t come through someone who already knows him.

The ceiling doesn’t announce itself.

It just shows up as another month where the COI referrals came in at two instead of six.

As another long call with a prospect who still wants to think about it.

You don’t have to wait for it.

Steve “own your credibility” Gordon

P.S. Every speaker at that event had a book. None of them started on that stage. There’s a moment before the book where the decision actually happens. It’s smaller than you’d expect. And most people miss it until the ceiling gets loud enough to force the question. More next week.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in four ways:

Become a Published Author — We’re taking 7 entrepreneurs who want a book published before Fall. We’ll extract your expertise into a book in 90 days and help you launch it to land clients within weeks. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Where’s Steve:

• June 25 — Small Business Expo - San Francisco (speaking)

• July 9-10 - Ed Slott’s 2-Day IRA Workshop - New York City

• July 15-16 - Strategic Coach 10X Ambition - Chicago

• July 30-Aug 1 - Garrett Planning Network Annual Retreat - Minneapolis

If you’re at any of those events, come see me.

Thirty years of building two companies.

A lot of mistakes.

Some patterns.

The kind of clarity that only comes from being wrong enough times to finally see the shape of things.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

There is always exactly one constraint in a business.

Not five. Not a list.

One.

And it’s not always obvious. You have to look for it.

The only path to consistent growth is to identify that one constraint and focus 100% of your energy on solving it… until it’s solved. Then find the next one.

I wasted years early on jumping from thing to thing. I thought I was solving problems. I was just moving around them.

The second pattern is related.

You always have a system.

You might not know what it is.

It might be terrible.

But you have one… it’s just the collection of habits and behaviors that produced last year’s results.

The question is whether you make it intentional.

The third pattern is the hardest one.

Most entrepreneurs, especially in professional services, believe the lie that they are essential.

I kept proving myself wrong.

I thought I was the only one who could do sales. Then I replaced myself.

I thought I was the only one who could run operations. I was wrong.

I thought clients would only trust me with strategy. Humbling how wrong I was about that one.

Yesterday, I got on a Zoom call with a client for the very first time.

Her book has been published. It launched as a bestseller. She’s already seeing results in the first few weeks.

We had never spoken before.

Not when she bought.

Not during strategy.

Never.

She complimented our team and our systems so many times I lost count.

Systems and team win. Every time.

Now. To the point.

These three patterns apply to everything in a professional service business.

But the first constraint is almost always the same.

Visibility.

When you start, you get visible to your network. And a lot of businesses do quite well at that level.

But you will hit a ceiling.

Your network ages. The warm introductions slow down. And there are only so many hours in a week to grow it manually.

For years, I was a networking machine.

Ten to fifteen hours a week.

Breakfast meetings.

Lunch meetings.

Evening events.

Coffee dates with referral partners where we’d leave excited about the new “mutually beneficial relationship” we’d just built.

Then I’d never hear from them again.

Unless I reached out.

It worked.

But it was a lot of manual labor for slow growth.

That’s The Referral Ceiling.

The natural limit of a manual system.

The fix isn’t more networking.

It’s leverage.

In 2012, I wrote a book. Unstoppable Referrals.

Everything I’d say in a dozen coffee meetings, three presentations, and four discovery calls… I put it in 150 pages.

The same effort it took to reach one person could now reach a thousand.

In the first week, 15 people with influence in my market shared it to their networks.

5,268 people got a copy.

I went from a local consulting firm with a part-time assistant to inbound inquiries from across the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Podcasts called.

Conference invitations arrived from places I’d never been.

None of that was in the outreach plan.

The book went where I couldn’t.

That was twelve years ago.

I still get clients from that book today.

Zero additional time invested after it was written.

One of our clients made a few posts on LinkedIn while she was writing her book.

Not after it published. During.

Just: “I’m writing a book about X.”

Sixteen appointments.

Before the book even existed.

The signal alone was enough.

Fix the visibility constraint and you’ll hit the next one.

Credibility.

Then sellability.

The constraints don’t disappear. They level up.

That’s the game.

Find the one constraint.

Build the leverage to break it.

Move to the next.

The referral ceiling isn’t a failure.

It’s information.

You’ve built something real. You’ve maxed out one level.

The question is what you build next.

Steve “visibility compounds” Gordon

P.S. Next week: Sellability Leverage. The constraint that hides behind a full pipeline.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

He’d seen her book.

He told her he might make her method mandatory for every company he acquires.

She didn’t pitch him.

He came to her.

Same expertise as before.

Same track record.

Same client results.

One thing different.

She had something that made the case before she was in the room.

That’s Credibility Leverage.

Most professionals ask: “How do I get in front of more buyers?”

The better question is: “What happens when a buyer finds me on their own?”

Expertise lives inside the person who has it.

It shows up when you’re in the room. It disappears when you’re not.

Without a credibility asset, every new prospect starts from zero. You re-prove yourself every time. The track record that should be opening doors is locked inside your head.

A book changes that equation.

Tabetha’s mentor from twenty years ago found her on LinkedIn after her book was published a couple of weeks ago. He ordered a copy.

He emailed her: “I’m 40 pages in. I know 20 people who need this.”

He read the book and then, unprompted, asked to send her to the people he cared about.

That’s the difference between having expertise and a credibility asset.

Expertise says: trust me.

A book sends evidence ahead.

Chris Cornelison, one of our clients, had two paid speaking contracts canceled.

The event organizers’ reason: he didn’t have a book.

He met me at a conference.

Read my book in the hotel room that night.

Booked a call with us the next morning.

Ninety days later, his book was done.

His speaking fees doubled.

He’s been fully booked for two years.

Zero selling. The book created the belief.

I know this from the inside, too.

When my book Unstoppable Referrals launched in 2014, 15 people with influence in my market shared it to their networks.

5,268 leads got a copy in the first week.

I went from a local solo consulting firm with a part-time assistant to inbound inquiries from across the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Podcasts called.

Conferences called.

From places I’d never been.

None of that was in my outreach plan.

The book found those rooms on its own.

But don’t just believe those stories…

The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn study asked 2,000 business professionals about thought leadership.

75% said a specific piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering.

Not a sales call. Not a referral.

A piece of content they found on their own.

By the time most buyers contact a vendor, 57 to 70 percent of their decision is already made.

They’ve done the research.

They’ve formed an opinion.

When they call (whoever they call), they’re close to decided.

That should scare you.

The question is: what did they find when they looked you up?

Why a book and not another 300 LinkedIn posts?

Because 81% of Americans say they want to write a book.

Not because they’re writers.

Because they know what it signals.

“I committed my thinking to paper. I was willing to be wrong in public. I believe this enough to put my name on it permanently.”

You can’t manufacture that signal.

Most of your competitors haven’t built it yet.

The ones who have stand in a different category.

Your expertise is real.

Your results are real.

What your clients experience is real.

The question is whether the right buyer can see any of that before they work with you.

A credibility asset makes you findable and believable before you say a word.

It gives you “credibility leverage”

Steve “credibility travels” Gordon

P.S. Next week: Visibility Leverage. How to be findable by the right people without being online all day.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in two ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io