I don’t know about you, but...
I’ve never been more excited...
Things that used to require capital, lots of people, and expensive tech are literally a 30-minute conversation with AI away.
You’ve probably read a lot of articles written in awe and amazement at this brave new world we’re living in.
This isn’t that.
It’s time to move beyond wonder and to execution.
Today, I want to share what we’ve been doing to rebuild the company from the ground up.
This isn’t about AI, though AI is the enabler.
This is all about the problems we’ve uncovered, how we’re building the company differently than we were six months ago.
I’ve identified 3 problems in our business, and I’m convinced they are universal.
#1. DRIFT
The natural order of organizations is to drift.
The founder has a vision.
He or she communicates it.
The team hears it (usually not often enough).
Off they go based on their interpretation.
At first, they’re only off by a little. The founder looks at the progress and thinks...
“This is great. They get it! And I have all this time, and attention freed up for other things!”
Months (or years) later...
The same founder looks at the business and says...
“Why are you doing it that way? That’s not my vision!!”
Frustrating for everyone.
Drift is extremely common in client-service businesses. The founder builds a set of procedures to replicate what he or she is good at so that less experienced people can deliver the same result.
The world changes, and processes must adapt.
This is blindingly obvious.
And we still had drift.
#2. DUCT-TAPE
The second (and frankly bigger) problem I found in the last few months is duct-tape.
And, throw in a little chicken wire and chewing gum...
We have a great team, and they are motivated problem solvers.
We’re moving fast.
So, sometimes solving a problem quickly means patching it up with some duct-tape, chicken wire, and chewing gum.
That works here and there.
Do it long enough and you’re going Mach 2 in a plane with more duct tape than steel.
Two weeks ago our marketing tech person left to start an MBA program.
I took the opportunity to pop the hood and see how things were running.
Man... the amount of duct tape holding things together is a sight to behold.
That’s usually a result of moving fast...but it’s a big problem.
#3. DEAD WEIGHT
The third problem is dead weight.
That thing you tried last year that didn’t work the way you’d hoped...
But the files are still sitting in the shared drive... The automations you created are still live... The funnel is still there... The half-done SOP is sitting in the system...
It’s all dead weight.
No one wants to delete it.
It was a lot of effort to create.
And we might need it someday.
So, you keep it all around.
Now compound that across dozens of experiments every year, across all the years you’ve been in business.
And you’re carrying a metric ton of dead weight.
I know we are.
In the past, these were all difficult to solve in a fast-moving company.
Not anymore.
Here’s how we’re rebuilding the business, eliminating these problems for good, and freeing up space for growth...
How we’re rebuilding the business with 3D THINKING
DELETE
The first thing we’re doing is aggressively deleting.
Deleting the duct tape and dead weight.
But we’re not doing it alone.
We’re letting AI do the heavy lifting.
It started with cleaning up our files... 16 years of dead weight cleaned up in a weekend.
That would have taken a human weeks to do it well.
That duct tape in our marketing systems... I had a conversation with Grok Bot on the way home from the coffee shop in my Tesla and gave it the outcome.
It analyzed all the systems and built a plan to fix every one of them. And is executing the plan as I write this newsletter.
Again... weeks of work for a person. Done in a couple of days.
That’s the low-hanging fruit.
We’re now analyzing everything we do for clients. Each piece of the process is on trial for its life.
If it moves the needle for a client, it stays. If not...deleted.
It’s addition by subtraction.
None of this is groundbreaking. It’s obvious.
And it was always hard to do. It’s not hard anymore.
DESIGN
We’re now designing the business as if it were software.
We’re writing “code” for how (and why) we do everything.
That “code” comes in four forms...
The ground-truth of the business.
The skills, plugins, and literal computer code for our AI (or SI) teammates to execute.
The checklists and procedures our people use to do their work.
The evaluations that both AI and people use to determine of the work product meets our standards.
So, why do I call it code?
Like computer code, it’s the input, instructions, and checks we run to operate the business every day.
I’ve started approaching every function in the business as if I’m designing software.
I have an advantage... I have a technical background. I’ve built software before.
But you don’t need to be technical. It’s a mindset.
It’s designing the permanent and elegant solution on the first go, instead of patching and fooling yourself into thinking you’ll fix it later.
AI makes the permanent, elegant solution just as fast as the patch.
DOCUMENT
Document is the last and critical piece if you want to own a Freedom Firm.
It’s the thing we all hated to do before.
We’re documenting differently now because of AI.
We divided our “documentation” into three buckets:
Slow information
Fast information
Workflows
Slow information is the stuff that doesn’t change often. Your brand spec, your pricing, your offers, the team, your ideal client profile, etc., etc.
We had this stuff all over the place. Some of it, embarrassingly, still in my head.
We got it all together, organized, reviewed, and then we put it in a version-controlled repository (we use GitHub if you’re curious).
Everyone on the team can propose changes to it. When they do, three people on the team are alerted and must approve the change.
When they do, everyone on the team (bots and people) has it instantly.
This one single change has 10X’d the quality of our AI results.
Fast information is the stuff that changes all the time. Think metrics, communication strings, project and work status.
For that, we’ve built databases that gather it from the various sources that create it, organize it, and make it available so we can ask questions like...
“What are the top objections we heard on sales calls last week?”
“Based on client questions this month, where can we proactively improve systems to eliminate the questions?”
And instantly we have the answer.
Workflows are the steps that create outcomes. Like most businesses, we had some documented and some lived in the company lore.
AI is a fantastic forcing function...
To get AI to help you, you have to get it out of your head. Show it, speak it... It will handle the documentation drudgery from there.
Our workflows live inside AI skills (73 and counting) and SOPs.
All versioned and accessible. Like our slow information, anyone can propose a change to a workflow.
Most of the time, someone on the team works with AI to write up the change and submit it.
Every change is reviewed, and if approved is instantly applied.
We’re in the very early days of this, but I’m beginning to see fewer patches and more permanent solutions.
If you want freedom, that’s the key.
The patches keep you trapped. As the team begins consistently building permanent solutions and develops that muscle, you can stop being the firefighter-in-chief.
Steve “3D thinking” Gordon
P.P.S. When you’re ready, we can help you in four ways…
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