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

Not as a box to check.

As a practice worth understanding.

The more I read, the more I think it has something to say about how we’re designed to work — and what most of us are missing.

Here’s what I noticed.

There’s a word most of us use incorrectly.

Appreciation.

In conversation, it means…

Gratitude.

Thanks.

Recognition.

Fine. But in financial terms, appreciation means the increase in value of an asset.

A portfolio appreciates.

A piece of land appreciates.

A well-built business appreciates.

Most founders never apply that second meaning to the work they’ve already done.

They finish a project and move to the next one. They close a good quarter and immediately open the next. They build something meaningful and never let it land.

The asset is there. The value never registers.

And so the question — have I done enough? — never gets answered. Because you’re already moving.

That’s The Appreciation Gap.

Not a productivity problem.

A value-creation problem.

You’re sitting on an appreciating asset and treating it like a sprint you haven’t finished yet.

I know this from the inside.

In the early years of building this company, I didn’t stop.

Constant anxiety.

Always one more thing to do.

No peace, no rest, never a moment where it felt like enough.

That’s a good way to burn out. It’s also a good way to stop being creative, because you can’t generate anything new when the treadmill never stops and your mind never recovers.

I was trying to out-hustle my nature.

You can do it for a while. Entrepreneurs can run hot. But business is the infinite game.

The strategies that win in the long game are the ones aligned with how you’re actually built — not the ones that override your limits until your limits override you.

What I found in the Sabbath study was a pattern worth paying attention to.

At the end of each day of creation, before moving on, God paused. He assessed. He reflected. He declared: It is good. At the end of the sixth day: It is very good.

That pause was not downtime. It was appreciation.

The act of reflecting on what had been made increased its value. It fixed the meaning of the work before the next work began.

Then came the Sabbath. One full day of complete stop.

Not because the work was done — it never is. But because the conditions for “enough” were already set. Provision was built into the structure of creation before the week started. You take action. You apply wisdom. But the foundation was there before you showed up.

Trusting that is not passive. It is a deliberate act.

The minute you try to fill every space, you’re making a different statement. You’re saying the provision isn’t there, and you have to manufacture it yourself.

That’s a hard way to live, and it’s not a long-term strategy.

Right now, AI is manufacturing anxiety throughout business at a scale I haven’t seen before.

Even the people at the frontier feel it. Andrej Karpathy (one of the co-founders of OpenAI and now at Anthropic)--someone who helped build the technology–tweeted within the last year that he feels behind on AI.

If someone at the leading edge of the technology feels behind, that tells you something.

The anxiety isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s structural. It’s a feature of this moment, not a reflection of where you actually stand.

Which means working harder doesn’t fix it.

Consuming more information doesn’t fix it.

Moving faster doesn’t fix it.

The practice of intentional pause is more important right now, not less.

As AI takes on more of the production work, writing, research, scheduling, and systems, what remains most valuable in the people who use it is judgment and creativity.

You cannot access either from inside chronic anxiety.

The firms that build deliberate reflection into how they operate will have a clarity advantage over the ones just reacting to the noise.

The Appreciation Gap will widen.

The firms that close it will compound.

The ones that don’t will grind harder and wonder why nothing seems to stick.

The question “Have I done enough?” doesn’t get answered by doing more.

It gets answered by stopping long enough to appreciate what you’ve already built — and trusting that the conditions for enough were set before you started.

Build that pause into the week. Before the calendar fills itself with something less important.

Look at what you’ve built.

Call it good.

Steve “enough is enough” Gordon

P.S. The calendar will fight you on this. White space feels like waste until you experience what comes after it. Try it once, deliberately. See what the next working day looks like.

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

Watch:What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

Full week back in the office. No stages, no airports, no handshakes in hotel lobbies. Just me, the quiet of my Florida office, and a blank canvas.

I’m spending the week building AI agents to transform every part of our company. Not automating old tasks. Building new capabilities. It’s one of those weeks where the work is the thinking.

Which brings me to something I keep running into.

Every conversation I have these days about AI lands in the same place.

“What are you using it for?”

And almost every answer is some version of the same thing: doing existing work faster, cheaper, with fewer people. Cutting the cost of content creation. Reducing research time. Shrinking the number of steps in a process.

All of that is fine. None of it is the game.

Here’s the problem with building your AI strategy around productivity.

Productivity means reducing the cost of output. That’s a bounded gain.

You can only reduce cost to zero.

You cannot go below zero.

That’s The Productivity Ceiling.

And everyone racing to cut costs with AI will hit it at the same time. When they do, you will have gained nothing structural. You will have optimized yourself to the same level as everyone else who optimized.

The firms that figure this out will be playing a completely different game.

The question I’m asking is different.

Not “how do I do this cheaper?”

“What can I now do that I couldn’t do before?”

That question has no ceiling.

I’ll give you three examples from the past few weeks.

We launched a new website. Fully built and optimized for both traditional search and AI-driven discovery.

We didn’t hire an SEO agency.

We didn’t replace anyone.

We added a channel we weren’t going to buy.

New capability. Not lower cost.

One of my clients built internal software. AI-powered analysis that was cost-prohibitive before. He can now do a level of due diligence on every deal that his competitors can’t match.

That analysis became a new service offering.

The new offering attracted new clients.

One AI tool turned into a product line.

Another client is in healthcare. He’s using private LLMs to analyze data on Parkinson’s treatments.

The data existed before.

The connections between it did not.

He is creating new value (treatments) from data that was always there but couldn’t be fully understood. That new value will be worth a great deal to patients… and the practice is growing fast as a result.

In every case, the pattern is the same.

New value is being created.

Not existing value delivered cheaper.

This matters a lot when you zoom out.

Twelve to eighteen months from now, the firms using AI for growth will have a structural competitive advantage. Not because they use AI. Because the value they deliver is better. AI is the enabler. The better value is what people pay for.

Tesla is the clearest example at scale.

Tesla is not a car company that adopted AI.

Tesla is an AI company that makes cars.

When electric vehicles started getting traction, every major automaker built one. They approached it as a new powertrain for an existing product.

Tesla built something different. They built an AI vehicle that happens to run on electricity.

The result is a driving experience that the others couldn’t replicate.

We bought one last year for my wife.

I was not an EV person.

I had no interest in an electric vehicle.

We bought it because the driving experience is extraordinary. On a long drive, I can engage full self-drive. I can drink a cup of coffee. I arrive after five hours refreshed in a way that never happens when I’m the one driving.

I know some of you are skeptics. Once you try it, you’ll understand.

Tesla’s market cap is 10 times the combined valuation of all other U.S. automakers.

Not because they use AI.

Because they used AI to deliver a driving experience that is, for many people, a dream come true.

The other companies built efficient electric vehicles.

Tesla gave people something they didn’t know they wanted until they had it.

AI is the enabler.

What people want is the result.

The firms that understand this are asking a different question than everyone else chasing the productivity ceiling.

They’re asking: how do I use AI to give my clients a dream come true experience?

Your answer to that question will have no ceiling.

The firms still asking “how do I cut costs?” are playing a game with a zero lower bound.

Which question are you asking?

Steve “making dreams come true” Gordon

P.S. Most firms have the raw material for a dream come true offer. They just haven’t asked the question yet. Start there.

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

Watch: [What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future]

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Where’s Steve:

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 17-20 - Exit Planning Institute Growth & Impact Summit, La Jolla

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

No flights. No speaking gigs on the calendar. Just my office, my coffee, and the kind of quiet week where you can actually hear yourself think.

My phone buzzed Thursday afternoon. It was Amy.

Amy is a client. She’s an AI privacy expert.

She works with major companies, the kind whose names you’d recognize. She published her book in January.

Thursday’s text was the kind of update every author hopes for and most never get.

She’d been invited to speak at the Tech Futures conference in New York City. Five thousand attendees. The exact people who buy what she sells. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are podcasting from the event.

She didn’t apply. She didn’t pitch. She didn’t network her way in.

The invitation came to her.

Here is how it actually happened. A reader of her book, an AI thought leader in his own right, was originally asked to speak. He had to decline. So he put Amy’s name forward, and he sent the organizers her book.

They read it. They liked it. They invited her in.

A book she wrote, in the hands of a stranger, did the work of getting her on a stage with 5000+ in the audience.

That’s not a fluke.

That’s The Author Effect™.

The Lottery Ticket Mistake

Most authors treat a book the way most people treat a lottery ticket.

Launch it. Wait a few weeks. See if anything happens. If nothing big happens fast, get discouraged, write it off, and move on.

That is not how the asset works.

A book is not a launch event. It is a deployment vehicle.

It is an asset that pays over years, not weeks. And only if you keep deploying it.

Most authors stop deploying right when the asset is starting to compound. They publish in January. A few podcasts in February. By April they are half checked out. By summer they have decided the book thing did not work.

They did not fail. They never started.

I have written about this same dosage failure in other channels. The consultant in Miami who said “LinkedIn doesn’t work” while posting once a week. The client who sent twenty-five copies of his book and called it a failed experiment.

Same root cause. Different surface.

The Author Effect™

Three things compound when an author keeps deploying.

Reach you didn’t create. Other people start putting your name forward. Amy’s invitation did not come from her network. It came from a reader. The book did the proof work for someone who was not even Amy.

The same week, she got nominated for the prestigious Fortress Cybersecurity Award. Same mechanism. The book was in the room. She wasn’t.

That is a different kind of marketing than most experts have ever experienced. You are not pushing. The asset is pulling.

Asymmetric rooms. A book gets you into rooms you cannot network your way into. Amy is about to stand on a stage in front of five thousand of her perfect prospects, alongside two of the most listened-to voices in business media.

No amount of LinkedIn posting, cold outreach, or personal branding gets you into that room. The book does.

Compounding velocity. Each deployment makes the next one easier. Since February first, Amy has done four podcasts, two book events, and two webinars. She has given away around a hundred copies and sold about three hundred more.

Several hundred people in her space now know her work directly. Each appearance creates the next one. Each reader becomes a possible referrer, like the one who sent her book to Tech Futures.

This is the Author Effect. Not the launch. Not the Amazon ranking. The slow, steady, compounding return on a book that keeps being deployed long after most authors stop.

Finally Write the Book. Then Keep Pulling the Lever.

Two failures, in this order.

Failure one is never writing the book.

Most experts have been thinking about their book for years. Talking about it. Outlining it in their head. Telling people they are going to write a book.

And never doing it.

Every year they wait is another year the asset is not compounding. The Author Effect cannot kick in for a book that does not exist.

This is the bigger gate. It is also the one where most people are stuck.

If you are in that group, stop thinking about it. Write the book.

An imperfect, finished book is worth infinitely more than a perfect, unwritten one.

Failure two is writing it, then quitting too early.

Amy is at month four. She is doing well. She is also at maybe ten to twenty percent of full deployment.

A serious author at full deployment in year one looks like this:

• Forty plus podcasts.

• Twenty plus webinars.

• A thousand or more books out the door, gifted, sold, mailed, handed to prospects.

• A handful of speaking stages.

• Every sales conversation seeded with the book before the call.

That is the deployment plan. There is no shortcut. There is no version of “the book worked” without it.

The good news: once the asset exists, you are not creating anymore. You are deploying. The work is mostly the same kind of work, repeated.

I told Amy this yesterday. She has done well. She has also barely scratched the surface.

She wrote back: “The author effect is real!!”

It is. And like most, she’s experiencing it less than 6 months after her launch.

What’s Coming

The trust gap is widening fast.

In a year, AI will have flattened most of what shows up online. Articles. Posts. Even most podcasts. Generated, generic, indistinguishable from each other.

Buyers already feel it. The ninety-four percent of B2B buyers using LLMs to research vendors are not trusting what they read.

A real book, written by a real expert, structured around hard-won ideas, sitting on someone’s desk or in someone’s hand, is going to read like signal in a sea of noise.

Because books are special--there is no greater signal of expertise, credibility, and authority.

A year from now, the experts who already have the book and are deploying it will look untouchable. The ones still saying “I’m going to write it someday” will be invisible.

This week Amy texted me a sentence most authors never get to write.

The asset she built in January is still working in May. It will still be working next May. It will still be working five years from now if she keeps pulling the lever.

A book deployed for one quarter is a launch.

A book deployed for three years is a category.

The difference between the two is not the book. It is the author who refused to stop.

If you have already written one and put it on the shelf, the work is not done. It is barely started.

If you have not written one, the question is not whether you have the time. The question is whether you understand what you are losing every day without one.

Steve “the author effect” Gordon

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

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

Become Unavoidable Inside Your Market — Be Everywhere Now is our done-for-you omnipresence service. We pick the right places, create the content, and put you in front of your defined audience everywhere they show up.

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

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Where’s Steve:

• May 27 — Boston Small Business Expo (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

I just left New York City after speaking at a conference. Tomorrow I’m on stage in Minneapolis at another one. Two cities. Two days. Same world.

That’s not an accident. And it isn’t ambition. It’s the play.

Two weeks ago I was at 1200 person conference at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville.

We had books. We had a booth. We had real conversations.

In a day and a half, we booked 57 appointments.

Not contact cards. Not “I’ll email you next week.” Actual calls on the calendar before the conversation in the booth was over.

That’s the number. But the number isn’t the lesson.

The lesson hit me sitting in my hotel room that night.

This audience has local chapters. They have a member directory you can look up. They get mail at their offices. They live on LinkedIn. They have podcasts.

We had just produced one of the best event runs of the year. And I realized we were leaving 2x or 3x of it on the table.

Because the event was one node. Not the whole strategy.

The Visibility Illusion

Here is what most firms believe.

They believe they are doing marketing.

They post on LinkedIn when they remember. They send a newsletter when they have time. They go to one event a year and scan badges. They follow up once or twice.

Then they go quiet.

They mistake a little bit of activity for presence.

The market doesn’t see them. It can’t. The message is aimed at everyone, yet spread thin and inconsistently across channels that don’t connect.

That is the Visibility Illusion.

You feel like you’re marketing. The people you want to reach have no idea you exist.

Watch what most firms do at events...

They scan badges. They send one or two manual follow-ups. They sound like salespeople. They give up.

That is the symptom. The illusion is the cause.

Narrow + Deep = Be Everywhere Now

Here is the move.

Narrow means a defined group. Not “all financial advisors.” Not “all law firm owners.” The members of a specific organization. The attendees of a specific conference. The readers of a specific publication.

A real list of real names... Not anonymous “Internet” connections.

Deep means looking for every single way you could possibly be in front of that group.

Their events. Their local chapters. The podcasts they listen to. The publications they read. Their LinkedIn feeds. Their mailboxes. Their inboxes.

The book they’ll pick up. (Your book ;-)

You map it. All of it.

Be Everywhere Now is what happens when you put content in every one of those places. You appear to be everywhere that group looks. You appear bigger than you are. Inside that defined audience, you become the #1 player.

You don’t need more marketing. You need the same marketing pointed at fewer people, more times, in more places.

There are two distinctions worth keeping straight here.

Visibility is not presence. Visibility is one impression. Presence is repeated, multi-channel, across the contexts that matter to the buyer.

Reach is not resonance. A firm with 50,000 random impressions per month loses to a firm with 500 right people seeing the right message 20 times each.

The math the reach crowd misses is simple. “Dosage” is per-person, not gross.

How it played out in Nashville

Here is the whole play, in order.

1. Pick the right defined audience. A defined group. High concentration. Identifiable members. Real gathering places. A real online footprint. We didn’t pick “all advisors.” We picked a small sub-group.

2. Show up offline with your best asset in their hands. Books in the booth. Real conversations. The book does the IP work. The conversation does the trust work. The two together do something neither does alone.

3. Don’t take cards. Book the call right then. This is the line that separates the pros from the amateurs. The amateur scans badges, hopes, chases for two weeks, and lets the conversation go cold. The pro turns the conversation into a calendar slot before the conversation ends. Calls happen the following week. Momentum intact.

4. Then go everywhere they go between events. Local chapters. Their podcasts. Their LinkedIn feeds. Direct mail to their member list. Sponsor the chapter dinner. Same defined group, encountered everywhere.

5. Walk into the next event already known. The booth conversation isn’t cold the next time. It’s a continuation. The 57 becomes 100. Then 150.

That is what narrow plus deep actually looks like. Not a niche. A saturation map.

What’s coming in the next 12 to 18 months

We’re living through a recession right now... a trust recession.

Markets are moving towards a winner-take-all condition.

Inside every defined audience, the #1 slot is about to get taken. Once it’s taken, it’s gone for years.

More firms are waking up to The Snapback.

Digital arbitrage is dead. Building an ecosystem wins...what I call “Be Everywhere Now”

The smart firms are about to pick a defined audience and saturate it.

The first firm to commit to omnipresence inside a defined group becomes the obvious choice. The second firm to try the same play arrives to find the slot already filled. Same audience. Same channels. But a competitor already living in every meeting, podcast, mailbox, and inbox they planned to use.

Firms still chasing reach won’t slowly fade. They’ll wake up one quarter and realize someone owns the audience they thought was wide open.

By then it costs 5x to dislodge them. If it’s possible at all.

The window is open right now because most firms are still chasing everyone. That window closes faster than people expect.

The Choice

You can keep doing scattered marketing aimed at everyone, and stay invisible to anyone who could buy.

Or you can pick one defined audience and become unavoidable in it.

You don’t need a bigger marketing budget. You need a smaller target and a deeper saturation map.

Pick one defined audience right now. Name every place they show up. How many of those places are you currently present in?

That number is your starting point.

Steve “be everywhere now” Gordon

P.S. Next week I’ll show you the economics that make this play even more lopsided.

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

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Where’s Steve:

• May 27 — Boston Small Business Expo (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

Successful operator.

Built the right way.

Not the kind of guy who rattles easy.

He was rattled.

He was telling the room that, almost overnight, his Google traffic, paid AND organic, had dropped by 90%.

Big plans for the quarter.

A few of them now on hold.

I sat there thinking, I cannot imagine a 90% drop in a major traffic channel.

The thing keeping his business alive right now is the blocking and tackling they’ve been doing offline.

Real conversations.

People meeting people.

The stuff a lot of marketing people quietly stopped respecting somewhere around 2005.

The Free Marketing Mirage

For about fifteen years, online marketing had an arbitrage edge that flattered every firm that touched it.

Penny clicks on Google.

Free reach on LinkedIn.

Cold email that landed in inboxes instead of spam folders.

Content that ranked because there wasn’t much competing for the slot.

You could get prospects on calls and into sales conversations for almost nothing.

That world is over.

It’s not that those channels stopped working. They didn’t. The arbitrage is gone.

The thing that made digital marketing feel “free” was never the channel itself. It was the gap between what you paid and what attention was actually worth.

That gap has closed.

The windows used to last years.

Google had five, six, seven years of arbitrage.

Facebook had a similar run.

When new platforms launch now, the window is months. Sometimes weeks.

A 90% drop in a major channel is not a freak event anymore. It’s the new normal.

Firms still running their marketing like it’s 2018 are going to wake up one quarter and find their lead engine is gone.

They will not see it coming.

They’ll think it’s a temporary blip.

It won’t be.

The mirage is the belief that “free” marketing is cheap. It’s the most expensive thing in your business right now, because what it actually costs is the upper bound on your growth.

The Second Thing That Broke

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Free reach disappearing is only half of what changed.

The other half is trust.

The same fifteen-year window that gave us cheap attention also flooded the channels with operators who didn’t deserve it.

Prospects watched.

They learned.

By 2026, the average buyer’s guard goes up the second they’re alone with a screen. Suspicious by default. Polished landing pages, vague claims, people they’ve never heard of selling certainty about things nobody can be certain about.

And it’s getting worse fast.

A recent study of 900,000 new web pages found that 74% of them now contain AI-generated content. Three out of four. Buyers can feel it even when they can’t name it.

The internet trained them to be careful.

Their guard is not up the same way in person. Not at an event. Not when a real book lands in their mailbox with a personal note. Not when they meet someone who is actually an author rather than someone running an ad.

I’ve watched this play out in our own marketing over the last twelve to eighteen months.

We’ve been doing more and more events. And consistently, people walk up to me at the booth and tell me they’ve been reading our content.

They already know what we think. The event isn’t the first touch. It’s the room where the proof they already collected online finally meets a person.

It runs the other way, too.

Prospects meet our team at an event, then go check us out before they get on a sales call. Our salespeople hear it directly. “I went and looked at your stuff, and I was impressed.” That sentence shows up over and over.

That is the ecosystem working.

Offline opened the door. Online held the proof. The two channels are not competing for budget. They’re feeding each other.

So now we’re living with two forces moving at the same time.

Reach got expensive.

Trust got harder to earn online.

The world is snapping back to a more complete way of going to market.

Online is no longer your reach engine. It’s your proof engine. Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research told us years ago that the average buyer interacts with about 7 hours of content across 11 touches in 4 locations before they ever talk to anyone.

That’s still true.

What’s different is what online has to do during those seven hours. It used to find the prospect. Now it has to convince a prospect who already found you somewhere else that you’re real, that you think clearly, and that you’ve been at this long enough to trust.

A 2026 study found that 94% of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to research vendors before they ever pick up the phone. They are vetting you before you know they exist.

Offline is the door. The events. The direct mail. The in-person presence. The book that arrives in a mailbox. The handshake at a booth.

Offline opens the door because that’s where the prospect’s guard is down. Direct mail is delivering a 42-to-1 ROI right now for firms doing it right. Live event sponsorship is converting at a fraction of the cost per quality conversation we get online.

Most people are doing online wrong, which is why the ecosystem matters. They post. They publish. They show up. But they don’t reveal their unique thinking. So when a prospect meets them offline and goes to look them up, what they find is thin. Generic. Indistinguishable from a hundred competitors.

The door opens, and the prospect walks back out.

You don’t get to pick one anymore. You used to. Not now.

The Move

Two things to do, both obvious once you see the problem.

Stop calling it “free.”

If a marketing activity only happens when you do it yourself, that’s not free. That’s a salary you’re paying yourself in time.

Real marketing has a budget. Real marketing pays for the door to open and pays again to make sure that what’s behind the door is worth walking into.

Build the ecosystem on purpose.

Offline opens the door. Online holds the proof. Both have to be there or the system breaks. Some firms will do their offline through events. Some through direct mail. Some through pure referral and a book that travels for them. That part flexes by industry.

The online side does not flex. You need a body of work that reveals how you actually think. Not posts that summarize what other people have said.

Your thinking.

In your voice.

Deep enough that a prospect can dive in and feel like they know you before they meet you.

That body of work is the asset that lets the ecosystem do its job. Without it, you can attend all the events you want. People will meet you, like you, look you up, and not find anyone home.

I’ve watched what this looks like when it works.

A boutique consulting client of ours in the Boston area mailed her book to her top 100 prospects. Then she expanded the list to 500. Then she held a small but powerful book launch event at an exclusive club. Forty or fifty people in the room.

The right forty or fifty.

Six months. Three speaking engagements. Multiple six-figure opportunities walking in the door.

She didn’t pick offline over online.

The book opened the door. Her body of work, sitting online, did the proof work behind the scenes when prospects went to look. The offline play landed because the online presence backed it up.

Narrow and deep, on purpose, both sides at once.

I’ll tell you the second story next week. I sponsored an event in Nashville and walked out with 57 high-quality appointments in a day and a half.

It changed how I think about the next five years of how we go to market.

What This Costs You If You Ignore It

The HVAC owner’s 90% drop isn’t a story. It’s a warning.

Every firm that built its growth on cheap online attention has the same exposure. Most of them won’t see it until the channel breaks.

The ones who do see it are quietly rebuilding their marketing on fundamentals that don’t depend on platform pricing.

Even if your online reach holds, you still lose if you can’t open doors offline. Trust online is going the wrong way, and it’s not coming back. The firms that win the next five years are the ones running both halves of the system at the same time.

Not picking. Not switching. Running both.

The free marketing mirage is the belief that you can grow a serious firm on whatever you can squeeze out of unpaid channels in the cracks of your week. Whether that channel is online or offline, alone, it’s not enough.

That belief has a sell-by date. It’s already past.

Stop optimizing for “free.”

Start building the ecosystem.

See you next Saturday,

Steve “narrow and deep” Gordon

P.S. Next week, the magic fishing hole. What happened in Nashville, and what it taught me about the way successful firms are going to grow over the next five years.

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

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

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Where’s Steve:

• May 7 - Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)

• May 7-9 - NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)

• May 27 - Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Same story. Again and again.

They ask it questions.

They get answers.

They feel productive.

And that’s where they stop.

I grabbed my notepad and started sketching. Three circles. Because sitting in that room, I realized there’s a word for what most people are doing with AI.

Addition.

AI Addition

Most people add AI to their workflow.

They bolt it on.

Ask a question, get an answer, move faster.

That’s AI Addition.

Linear.

Helpful.

Limited.

When 42 super-successful entrepreneurs are all describing the same one-dimensional use, you start to see how much is being left on the table.

The real results in my business haven’t come from adding AI. They’ve come from multiplying with it.

AI Multiplication: Three Dimensions

There are three dimensions of AI. Each one multiplies the others.

Dimension One: Insight.

Ask AI questions.
Get answers.

Research a topic.

This is where everyone starts and where most stop. It feels productive because it is productive. Just barely.

This is what the entrepreneurs in the room kept describing.

“I asked ChatGPT about X.”

“I used it to research Y.”

Linear value. One dimension.

Dimension Two: IP.

Load your proprietary knowledge into AI.

Your methodology. Your playbooks. Your decisions. Your operational IP, the judgment you’ve built over 10, 15, 20 years in your domain.

This is how you clone expert-level thinking. Junior people start operating like seniors. The firm’s expertise stops living in one or two heads.

IP is the hinge dimension. Without it, you just get faster mediocrity.

Dimension Three: Iteration.

Compress the cycle. Experiment, improve, experiment, improve.

AI lets you take more turns in a day than you used to take in a quarter.

One dimension: you’re smarter.

Two dimensions: your team is smarter.

Three dimensions: you’re running away from the field.

Four Examples

I’ve been running this in my own business. Here’s what all three dimensions look like working together.

LinkedIn Ads. Cost per lead was $846. Now it’s $532. Still dropping.

Dimension One: I had AI research the current best practices for LinkedIn advertisers in 2026, then pull the best performing ads from similar companies in the LinkedIn ad library. It now updates me weekly, automatically, on what competitors are running.

Dimension Two: I’m a trained advertising copywriter with 15 years of running campaigns. That’s operational IP. Our positioning, our past winners, yes. But the deeper layer is the knowledge about what makes advertising work for businesses like ours. All of that, loaded in.

Dimension Three: Testing used to take two to four weeks, mostly because I was the bottleneck. We hired an agency. Fired them because they couldn’t match what we were doing internally.

Now AI pulls data from three different platforms I used to check manually, gives me a report with recommendations, and creates 15 ad angles in five minutes. I pick the ones worth testing. The cycle went from a month to 48 hours.

Do the math. Monthly testing gives you 12 improvement cycles a year. At 48 hours per cycle, you get over 180. Same year. Fifteen times the reps. That’s what compounding looks like when you use all three dimensions.

Project Management Tool. We ran on Airtable. Ten thousand dollars a year. 60% of what we needed.

Dimension One: We used AI as our lead developer. I know the principles of software development from a prior company, but the details have faded. We leaned on AI for that insight.

Dimension Two: We have a unique process with many sub-processes for delivering our clients’ books, written and published in 90 days. We trained the AI on every step so it could build software perfectly tailored to our delivery model.

Dimension Three: Someone on the team sees something that should change. They record a Loom video. We decide if we want the change, then tell the AI to implement it. Feedback to feature used to be one to three weeks with a hired developer. Now it’s 24 hours.

SEO Site. I’ve known how to do good SEO for years. Never had the bandwidth.

Dimension One: AI researched the latest SEO and GEO practices for 2026. GEO is generative engine optimization, how you show up inside AI tools when people search. Full site audit in under 15 minutes. Technical issues, content gaps, a complete punch list.

Dimension Two: I brought my own knowledge of SEO and of our business to judge the AI’s output. It’s not always right. Sometimes you have to redirect it. You have to know the difference between a good answer and a correct one. That’s where your IP earns its keep.

Dimension Three: First version of the rebuilt site in an hour. I gave feedback from my phone between conference breaks. Within 48 hours I had a fully redesigned site, technically optimized for both SEO and GEO, with 25 articles written in my voice using ideas from my book and these newsletters. All done for me. That same AI now analyzes our traffic weekly and proposes updates. We’re already seeing a 20% bump in organic traffic.

This Newsletter. Used to take three to four hours of my week.

The idea for this one came to me in that Strategic Coach room. On a break, I took a photo of my sketch. Walked into the hallway and described what you’re reading now. My AI junior writer runs on all three dimensions.

Dimension One: best practices from the best copywriters.

Dimension Two: my books, my prior newsletters, my voice as IP, and all of these original ideas.

Dimension Three: I iterated this draft in meeting breaks and while walking from security to the gate at O’Hare, dictating changes into my phone.

Total time: 37 minutes.

Every one of these results required all three dimensions working together. Dimension One alone would not have moved any of these numbers.

A year from now, firms still doing AI Addition won’t be slightly behind the multipliers.

They’ll be in a different category.

Everyone uses AI now. That gap is gone.

Stop adding. Start multiplying.

See you next Saturday,

Steve “multiplication, not addition” Gordon

P.S. Last week I wrote that AI amplifies those who can define the what. This is what that amplification looks like. Addition gives you answers. Multiplication gives you an unfair advantage.

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

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

Want a Freedom Firm?: Read The Freedom Firm Manifesto >> The roadmap for a business and life you’ll love.

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Where’s Steve:

• May 7 - Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)

• May 7-9 - NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)

• May 27 - Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.