How One CEO 3×’ed Revenue and Scaled Institutional Knowledge with Todd AI—with Todd Schmiedeler

Welcome to the AI-driven leader, the podcast dedicated to helping leaders harness AI to build better leaders, better businesses, and better lives. I'm your host, Jeff Woods. What's the business that would put you out of business? And what would it look like for you to be the one that would build it first? This is the question that stopped today's guest, Dennertreks. In the moment he heard it, he realized he needed to make a shift. At the time he had been using AI as a glorified Google, but then he realized there was a higher standard he could be holding this relationship to. And that was using AI as a thought partner. This began him down a path of challenging everything he knew about his business. As someone who works in the nonprofit world who helps companies get grants, post-COVID grant money was drying up. And while his competition was declining, by harnessing AI to help him think more strategically, he went on a journey to triple his revenue, launch five new businesses, and even harness AI to scale himself so he could begin removing himself from day to day operations by creating an AI digital twin, he called Todd AI. And this is someone who before the journey would say he didn't have a technical bone in his body and he barely knew anything about the technology. Today's story shows what's possible when you just make a commitment to saying I'm going to be an AI driven leader and I'm going to build an AI driven company and just by taking one step at a time with AI by your side. I hope that this episode challenges you to think more strategically about how you can harness the technology where it matters most, whether it's driving revenue, creating more EBITDA, raising the enterprise value of your company or even thinking your business model over from the start. With that, let's get into this episode with Todd Schmiedler, founder and president of Thumbprint Consulting. Todd, let's go back in time to when you were starting Thumbprint Consulting, walk us through your journey and how you ended up interacting with AI for the first time. You know, I started Thumbprint Consulting almost 25 years ago as I moved from the for profit world back to the nonprofit world because that's where I started that I really had more purpose in the work in the nonprofit world. But I needed the money because we had a lot of kids and so I needed the money. So I started Thumbprint Consulting because I ended up doing a contract with a bank, a regional bank and they told me they could not pay me as an individual. And so they ended up saying, hey, you need to create a company and I did that Thumbprint Consulting. And I started down that journey of really having Thumbprint do work that would allow me to be in the space of both the for profit nonprofit world at the same time. About five years ago, I left a for profit company in long term care called Trilogy Health Services, great company when I left it was 122 locations, 16,000 employees, $1.8 billion in revenue. When I left, I really wanted to do a lot of the work I had been doing there for other organizations. And so I really started focusing in on expanding what I did and I had a promise that every person on the team about 35 people would have an opportunity to earn $100,000 or more in income this year. Just as a point of clarification, half of my team are college interns, so including them. And I wanted to be able to keep my promise and about a year, not even a year ago, nine months ago, I realized that we did not have the business to be able to deliver on that dream on that promise that I made. And I thought, okay, how can I do that? And I realized I needed a scale. And I didn't know how I could scale and not add people because then all of a sudden when you're scaling, you make a commitment on how much people are making your add people, you got to make more, you know, then that's when all of a sudden, I came about. And I had a buddy read your book. And he said, dude, you got to read this. This is so you and you don't even know it yet. And I read it and immediately I was like, holy cow, I have totally missed this whole ballpark on AI. I knew that there was something, but I didn't know what it was. And when I read your book, I realized that I had been treating AI more like a souped up Google and an admin assistant. Then I was ever thinking about it strategically about how to make my business into the dream business that I wanted it to be not just for me, but for everybody in the company. A few things stand out to me. One, most people, they set goals based on what they think they can do based on current constraints. And they allow the current situation and reality to dictate what they believe is possible. You did the exact opposite, which is you set a big goal to say, I want to create a world where every person who works in my company, including college interns can make $100,000 a year. What kind of value would they have to deliver and realizing our whole business model would have to change. And you made the goal via movable object and said, I am unwilling to sacrifice this goal. Therefore, I'm willing to make changes everywhere else, including the business model, which also led to you asking, how do we scale revenue without having to proportionally scale headcount in a traditional manner? Yeah. And how do we also not just scale what we had been doing, but where were the secrets of new revenue that I could not see because I was blinded by my own building of my own company. And all of a sudden, as I started to get in and use the crit model, and then obviously, you know, joining the cohort, the collective, and it got me so excited and energized, not just about AI, but about where we could actually take the business and how we could exponentially serve more people. And that's the thing that I kind of, I was a little expecting, but it was small compared to, hey, I got this one thing I'm trying to do. And then all of a sudden, after the first four hours in the collective, I had a whole nother mindset. But that's what I was missing. I knew I was missing something. And then the first thing I was missing was a different mindset, not just of growth, but about who I needed to be to be able to do that. And how I was going to ask a different question, that question about how can I do this for me instead of just how can I do this? And that helped me tremendously on on rethinking the entire business. Okay. Before we dive into that, I want to talk about your life, moment, that moment when AI turned a relatable moment into a remarkable experience for you. What was it? I've honestly had a couple, but the one that comes first to my brain is that morning, that first morning of the collective, which for context that for people who are listening to this, the collective is the core of our business. We have groups of about 100 sea level executives. Most of these people are not technical yet. They all recognize they need to own casting vision, driving strategy and leading the change. And so they are saying, I'm going to become an AI driven leader and I'm going to surround myself with other sea level leaders who are doing the same. So you're in the room and what happens? Yeah. And so you get up, you know, we're going through a prompt. And you know, you say, here's how we're going to start this thing. What is the business that's going to put your business out of business? And I thought to myself, okay, what's differentiating me? And I had this particular thought about it. And as I went through that first prompt, I realized that I was blinded by how I built the company to begin with because 18 months ago, there were three people in my company, three. And that's when I flipped it to build a family business instead of just a business, you know, and so as I'm sitting there and I'm going through the prompt, I realized I had all this narrow thinking and I realized exactly what the business is. It's going to put me out of business. And then you got back up on stage and you said, and why aren't you building that first? And I realized, I can do that. And I literally went in and during the break, I went into the AI and I said, how do I do this? And it started kicking things out. And I started to see it. It was a light bulb. I mean, I started to say, oh, I can do this. And I need that for my current business. And it will evolve into the business of the future that is going to transform what I do. What were some of the things that when you engaged AI as a thought partner around those questions that it called out that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. So I was limited because again, I was thinking about how can I do it? You know, I used to think of myself as being very techy. You know, that was 20 years ago. Okay. You know, two years ago, five years ago, everything shifted so much that I thought, well, I don't even know that I can do this. But as I started to ask the right questions, which is a key point, ask better questions, ask more specific questions. And you will get better answers. And you will get the answers that you can't even see because you weren't even sure that that was actually the question that you should have been asking. And when I asked better, I started to see, oh, AI can. actually helped me build that company. I don't have to be an expert in coding. I don't have to be an expert in this. I'm an expert in seeing what I just didn't see five minutes ago. I now see it. All I gotta do is ask, "Hey, how can you help me do this?" And then have a conversation. So people think I'm really weird because I lead the office and I have a seven minute drive home. I was very purposeful about where I put my office. And as soon as I get in my car, I'm literally on an AI, usually chat GPT 'cause that's my preference. And I'm literally talking back and forth about my day so that when I get home, I'm present with my wife and my kids. So this wasn't just an aha business moment. It became an aha transformation of me as a person and being relevant and actually there in presence with my family to a greater degree because I tend to be exceptionally driven. And I had a hard time being able to stop one thing and really spend time without thinking about what I needed to do tomorrow to make sure I could deliver on my promise. And AI has helped me do that just in a seven minute drive. So I'm prepped for the next morning because I've told it, here's what I need for the next morning. Go to work on this for me so that I've got it ready. - So let's fast forward, you read the book, you get into the collective, you have these series of light bulb moments, you are willing to challenge your existing business model, you think differently about how you construct for the company so it could create enough opportunity for the 35 people in it to each have the ability to earn $100,000 a year. What did it look like when you started talking about AI with the team? - I made a mistake on that. It's openly, you know, I'm an all-in guy, I'm like, we're going on all-in on this. I know that you and I joked about this before. I mean, I went back and I was like, everybody's gonna read the book, okay? You know, and as soon as I got back, I was telling people we're an AI company. We're no longer a consulting company that happens to be really good at winning grants for for-profit non-profit companies. We are an AI company that happens to consult that wins a lot of grants. And there was the early adopters, the 20% that were like, yes, I'm in and they were reading the book and they were done with the book in a day 'cause they were just so absorbed and they were working on it. There was 20% on the other side that were really never gonna get it. And it's not because they're not smarter anything. It's because it's not their thing. And I know that 60% is where I drive culture. And so I went too fast for the 60% at the beginning. I was fortunate that I didn't lose 'em. The other 20% helped me be able to bring them up and show them practical ways where they can absorb that. And the 20% that are never gonna get it, I've actually figured out that there are tools with NAI that are deeper. They don't have to be an expert at chat GPT. If I can help them find a tool that is more specific about what they do and can show them in 10 or 15 minutes, how that can be a huge asset to them, which I've been able to do in part because of our collective group as a whole. I mean, I get on what's up and I'll say, hey, does anybody have a solution and app or anything that's more specific around this? And wow, I mean, one an amazing tool for us because every time I get vetted products that these other 75, 80, 100 people that are in the same position I am, they've already vetted them. I trust them and I go all in on 'em. And because I go all in on 'em, I can then with confidence give it to my people. And then the people who are laggards, they come along because I give them a simpler tool. Not the whole, you gotta be a good AI person for everything. I give them a tool that's more directed toward them and that's helped come along. If I had to do it over with, I would have gotten some early adopters and just kinda not kept it quiet, but kept it refined and said, here's where we're gonna start, your influential. I want you and I to work on this together and figure out how I can get you to be excited about it and that was gonna be easy. And then how to cascade that so you're mentoring the people that you work with who already trust you so that it's not just something from the CEO DAO, it becomes part of the fabric of the organization and that's something that I learned now that I need to do on a constant basis with our AI journey 'cause we're at the beginning of it. I mean, we know we're at the beginning of it. And so I want to take my time at it now, I'm not in a rush. - What's interesting hearing you say we're at the beginning of it and I reflect back to the offsite. We had in January and where you were. And then the offsite we had in May. Four months later and hearing how differently you were talking, that was a light bulb moment for me to say, wow, the way to win is not trying to know everything about AI 'cause it's moving so fast. The way to win is you surround yourself with the right people. You ask the right questions and you tap into collective knowledge and seeing somebody like you in four months go from just starting to the way you have started to wield it in the company. I think it's really interesting. Now let's talk about some of the results 'cause I know there has been impact revenue. I know this has been impact to what labor is as a cost of revenue, not because you cut heads, but because you drove revenue up so much more. Talk about that. - Yeah, and I want to preface it by saying, you know, a large portion of our business are built off grants. And if you're watching this today, you know that over the last three months or so, the federal government's gone through a transformation about what they support grant wise. And it's impacted us fairly significantly. And so I say that because even during that time, we tripled our revenue, okay, during a time when everything was being cut, or if it wasn't being cut, it was at least frozen by dose. And so we did that because we had AI to work as our partner to look for alternative things that we could be doing while this was going through its process. And fortunately for us, a lot of that process is over with. Last week we did almost $1.2 million in new grant awards. And we anticipate this week that we're gonna double that. And I see how that's going to continue to scale up 'cause our goal at the beginning of the year was to do 100 million for our clients. You know, we don't have that many clients. We just had the right clients. You know, and so at the same time, we've been able to increase our monthly revenue that allows us to all set the cost of our team. And at one point, my monthly revenue was basically 90% of what was taking my labor. And I set a goal to beginning of the year to get that to 50. You know, and so I'm happy to say knock on wood, you know, that we're at about 60% right now. And we're not even halfway through the year. And I'm overly confident that we're going to not only exceed that, but with some of the things that I've seen recently, I think that we're going to actually transform. And like I've spun off five companies in the last two months because I figured out that thumbprint now with AI's help as my partner is really my R&D company. Mm-hmm. You know, and all of a sudden I realized that once I get the model down and I start to scale, well, what I don't want to do is I don't want to scale inside thumbprint and clog my resources on our base thing that is driving our revenue and doing really well right now. And so I've got these other ones that I'm calling the accelerator companies. And then AI is the bulk of that company, you know, for each one of those. And those are the ones that are going to be even higher growth potential than over here as my R&D. And I think that's a 10X. I think these are going to be off the charts. When did you read the book? In the October, last October, so nine months ago, not even. So I said a goal, you know, for just thumbprint, I've got a couple of other companies, but you know, under thumbprint, when it was just three of us, I said a goal a year before that that I wanted to do 1.5 million in 2024, okay, with three people and then we were going to expand from there. All right. We hit 1.5 million last year. And my original three year goal was 1.5 to 2.5 to 5, okay. Now my goal is in just thumbprint, 1.5 to 5 to 20. Or you know, and yeah, I mean, I see the 10X kind of effect over a two year period. I don't see how I can 10X in this core company in one year, but I mean, who wouldn't take 10X in two years? I agree with that. You know, and I don't think we're going to add that many staff. Let's talk about, so let me make, I'll make a point that's standing out to me that I think is important for those who are watching or listening to this. Might you be underestimating what's possible for yourself any year? Yes. Hearing you, Todd, and again, knowing you and seeing just where your mindset was in January. So, you know, a few months after you had read the book to what you had accomplished by May, crippling revenue, taking labor from 90% of revenue down to 60% of revenue and under a year, launching five other accelerator companies, recognizing that thumbprint as a core is actually an R&D company to understand your ideal customer's needs. And that. can print cash and scale really nicely as you're finding out. But that then allows you to launch accelerator companies that can go 10x 20x in eight months. And the thing that shifted was recognizing that you have a powerful technology at your fingertips that you no longer looked at it as a Google. You no longer looked at it as an assistant to write better emails. You started to view it as a thought partner to ask you the right questions to enhance how you think and those that thinking drove actions, which are now driving results. Yes. And can I have one thing to that Jeff, because right now I'm looking at it and I say it's AI plus automation plus the collective. When I had those three together, the first time we got together, I saw that the AI was amazing, everything it is. And then in between the first collective and the second collective, I saw the need for more automation and what I'm doing and tying AI and automation together. So yeah, it's great to have a thought partner. I always laughed at somebody told me earlier today. They were like, oh, knowledge is power. And I was like, no, it's not. Knowledge is potential power. If you don't know how to apply it and you don't actually apply it, it does nothing for you. Same thing with AI and in my opinion, using AI to be able to also automate things that have traditionally been people driven. But the thing that I didn't realize above everything else is I'm in a room where first off that first session, I didn't know that I deserve to be in that room. I mean, there are people in that room that were way way way way way more successful than I am. But it's almost like finding your own tribe. I stop being the only weirdo in the room. Even internally, they're like, oh my gosh, how do you think that way in the collective? I'm sitting in a room with people who are like-minded and we're feeding each other in ways that are deeper than just good ideas. And I don't think that I could have ever imagined that that was going to be part of the equation and how important that AI plus automation plus that collective is in actually knowing the right decisions to make by understanding all three of those. So I might get a good direction from AI and that conversation I'm having with AI. And it's giving me great feedback when I'm putting context in there, when I'm asking it to interview me, when I'm doing the simple, kind of stuff, I look at that and I call that simple brilliance. This is a rocket science. But somebody had to create that. Somebody had to teach me that. And because of that, it's transformed not only my life. It's literally transforming my entire family because four of my kids and one of my nephews are in the business. And the thumbprint business, the R&D company, is a family business. I'm not going to sell that. That's for me to give to my generations of my family. And so because of this relationship with AI and the collective and with you, candidly, my brains opened up to where I can have both. I can continue to generate wealth for my family, but also keep my family business. And that's something that I wouldn't have thought about six months ago. Where do you think you're thinking too small now? I think that I'm thinking too small about what AI could do that would take some of the lower level work stuff from the people that are on my team now that would love to be freed up and love to be thinking more strategically than just thinking tactically. So we've got 35 people or so in the company. And again, give perspective. I've got two people outside of myself. So three people told her who above the age of 34. Everybody else is younger than that. And I think that they have naturally in school just based off of the way that we educate. They think very tactically minded. And yet when I start to get them and I mentor them and spend a little time with them showing them strategies and then working with them like you do us about, hey, let's get into AI. Let's do this together. Okay. And they start seeing what they could do together. It not only creates a light bulb for them also, but it creates freedom. You know, I've got this challenge right now with this big project we're rolling out that I think AI can be involved and I can't quite figure out where that's going to be and where it's not going to be. So I actually called one of our collective members and I said, hey, do you think I could get 30 minutes of your time to brainstorm about some? And you know, the answer was absolutely. I mean, there was no question about it. You know, but I think that 30 minutes is going to help me be able to ask the questions that I need. And then together, we're going to find these solutions where I'm gap right now. Then I know there's a gap in just like nine months ago, I knew there was a gap. I couldn't even see where that gap definitely was. I just knew I was scapping. And I think those three things are going to transform freedom for my interest in building a team. I might say anything negative about you, but I'm focused on building a family at work. You know, because to me, the difference is a team is a group of people who have a singular goal that you're all trying to achieve together. It's awesome. A family is a group of individuals who care so much about each other that they're working together to make themselves the best versions of themselves. And together, we're achieving many goals. Okay, there's goals and people in both. It's what's at the center. For me, it's always people. Okay, that's how my mom raised me. And I want them to be free and not necessarily live the same life that I lived the last 20 years to get to this moment in time. If I could give some people in my family, both direct family blood and work family, some of that, that would be a major accomplishment for me. And one that I'd look back and say, every single dollar, every single minute was well worth it because of that. So let's talk about the 10x challenge, because this is something that I thought was super interesting. And honestly, the fun part for me being in the room is that I don't have to be the guy with all the answers. I get to ask the right questions and learn from people like you. So talk about what you did there. Yeah, so I started reading about strategic coach and I've actually joined strategic coach recently between you and strategic coach. I started hearing us 10x stuff. And you know, I did it to myself first. And then I was like, I'm going to challenge all of our people. And I did two things. The first thing is, is that reset in a better way that we were an AI company and how that was going to be a positive for everybody. And I helped show that in a much better way that they embraced it more. But I also went and said, okay, here's what I'd like everybody to do is here's an example of a 10x. And I gave them my example. And I said them both a email and then a video that I outlined and said, I want you to come back with your 10x. You know, I'm not going to judge you. This is a journey. So tell me what you could do 10x. And then we paired off and we were holding each other accountable in that. So they had to pick something that they do that matters that they would want to do 10 times better. 10 times better. You know, it might be like, for example, one person said, I did this many grants last month. I want to do 10 times that number next month. Really 10x for me was about inspiring a vision. And then what you inspired the vision, you give the resources and the accountability and encouragement to each other that actually, even if you don't reach the 10x, you're going to reach so much more than you would have done if you didn't have that moment where you said, I can do this better. And part of the challenge for me now is it's not about a challenge. It's about the culture. So the first time I do it, it's a challenge. But how do I weave that into who we are as a company so that people don't see that as a negative or just a one off event? They see it as part of the fabric of who we are so that they get inspired to actually use a actually use each other, actually use, you know, podcasts like what we're doing today and actually take themselves and elevate themselves with us walking with them. And with a, as their thought partner, that they can just have a conversation where they're not afraid that they're going to look stupid. AI doesn't have an opinion of you. So AI's not going to tell you, oh, that was a stupid question, Todd. AI's going to say, hey, here's what I'm going to feed you back some information. And I might even ask you a question or two. And as it learns more about you, it's actually going to understand the way that you ask questions. And it's going to develop better answers with you that you couldn't get outside of that. And that's kind of part of the 10 X is going in and they literally had to go into chat GPT and find their 10 X inside chat GPT and bring it back. Did you teach them how to write context role interview task or crit? They read the book every single person in the company read the book and then they, you know, here's what I didn't do. Okay. They actually created a book club. They got together two nights a week. I gave them eight weeks to finish the book. Okay. There's real life going on. I don't want them to take away from their family. I'm trying to get free them from the burdens of having these tactical things that weigh on them, but they decided that they were going to do a book club. So they two nights a week, they came together. I wasn't invited. You know, they wanted to be able to have a safe space where they could talk to each other. And in fact, it created this relationship between my team because none of our employees are international MBA students that are interns that have not been in America, but for the last like nine months. And so one of the byproducts of of this 10x challenge and them reading the book and that sort of stuff is the interaction about clarity and working together and building that relationship that you know that person's with you. - Yes. - And all of a sudden, tapping into a possibility to create the ability for you to be with anyone that you think could help you, that you could imagine, is it Steve Jobs? Is it, you know, Donald Trump? Is it, you can create that persona. Hey, I can do that for you and you can start asking advice from that persona. A CFO, like I hate numbers, okay? I know numbers, you know, I've accountability around numbers but I don't want to do a CFO role. So if I want advice, I then ask AI, give me this as an expert CFO for the last 30 years. Here's the context by which I really need some advice and ask me three to five questions, one question at a time. And here's the output that I want to have from this. And I know that and it's just like natural to me. I literally, so this is, I'm gonna reach up to one of my monitors. I literally have CREIT on there. I don't know if you can see that. But I had the CREIT model. I didn't do this again. One of my, one of the people on our team did it. They printed it out for everybody to put on their monitor. Every monitor you walk to in every office, in the bullpins. Have monitors so that they can remember and they can just look at and say, "Oh, I need to make sure I put the interview part." - I love that. I want to talk about Todd AI real quick and then I want to get the real challenge that you're facing. Talk about, I know you had a goal to exit day-to-day operations by 2027 and you realize you couldn't just delegate to people. You had to be able to transfer knowledge. And you have over 30 years of all this leadership insights and wisdom that you want to pass on to the people in your company. What was your vision for Todd AI and what's actually happened? - The vision for Todd AI was two-fold. Number one is how do I serve our people better? Because my calendar gets really full and then I'm the bottleneck. And so how could I serve them better? And at the same time, how could I stop having people come in every 10 minutes and not allow me to find strategic time that I can actually move the company in ways that frankly I was having trouble doing. And so I literally got on AI and I was like, if I can create a persona by future self and start asking myself questions and I put in all of this information, why can't I just do that for all of our employees? Everybody on the team, they want to ask me these questions not just about what to do, about how to do it. And so going into my email, going into my writings, I do a Monday message every Monday that's a cultural message out to the team about our culture. You know, I've got all this data, you know, from years and putting that all together. So I had two of the guys on our data analytics team literally create inside chat GPT, you know, the ability for us to have a custom chat GPT that is, you know, Todd.ai. And literally I said, okay, I'm gonna give this 60 days. I am going to, you know, reference this. I'm gonna look and see what the questions are. I'm gonna make sure that the answers are relevant. I'm gonna keep feeding it data. But after 60 days, you are not allowed to come into my office without having checked, Todd.ai beforehand. Because January of 27, I am committed to my wife that I will not be running a day-to-day operations of this company. No matter what that means, I am committed to her over this company, you know? And so as a result of that, I got to create the tools and the ability for this company not to be me anymore. The biggest challenge that I see in my entrepreneurial experience is sometimes the company is really about the leader instead about the culture of what the leader wanted to actually build in the first place. And I didn't want to be a victim of my own stuff. You know, it ain't about me. You know, my doctorates in leadership and ultimately it focused on servant leadership and change management. And if you're a servant leader, you care more about others than you care about yourself. And I know that for the past year, I was failing on that subject. And as silly as it sounds, yes, it does free me up to mean I can have strategic time and really get creative and do the things that I love to do and not just ask technical things, had one of the guys in just a little bit ago. And he was telling me how it's given him great answers and he didn't have to bother me so he felt free. It wasn't just that I felt free from it. He felt free not to have to come to me because they look at my calendar and they can see it jam back. You know, and I want to be free and I want them to be free. And so that's what we've created. - So let's recap. October of 24, you read the ad driven leader and you have this realization that AI can be your Google. It can be your assistant to write better emails and you can also raise your standards and you can make it your thought partner. And you start learning how to write, crit context, role, interview, task. You start your own journey. You come into the collective in January, you start surrounding yourself with the right people. You fast forward, we're not even halfway through the year. You've tripled revenue. You've changed your business model so it actually could scale to a revenue point where every person could earn $100,000 without having to proportionally scale head count. You've brought labor as a percentage of revenue down from 90% to 60%. Without putting heads, you've taken people from maybe a little apprehensive, fearful, anxious within the 60 or 20, that balanced 20% to giving every single one of them a challenge to say, I want you to pick something that matters that you want to do 10 times better and figure out how to harness AI to do it 10 times better to the point that they started forming their own little core hurts and supporting each other to the point that now you walk into the bullpen and on everybody's computer screen is a little sticky note that says context, role, interview, task. Yeah, and again, I didn't do that. I know. I didn't even think of that. But what you did do Todd, and this is what I think matters, is you boldly said we're going to be an AI-driven company before you might have even realized what that meant. And you led the charge. You didn't delegate to IT. You didn't say, let me hire a consultant who can come, quote, do it for me. You said, it's my job as the CEO to cast a vision to define strategy and to lead the change and you're leading from the front. And I got really good people and good. Seriously, I'm not trying to just be humble. I'm not a humble person by nature. It's just not one of my strengths. But to join the collective and to pay the money to be in the collective was a real stretch for me. I'd never done anything like that before. I wasn't part of any of those groups. I never really did that. And I'm well-networked in our city. I live in Louis, Kentucky. Fenty. Yeah, just a small accident. But I am wearing shoes today. And so to do that was the first time I thought about could I afford to take on this cost? By the end of the first session on the first day, I was like part of my mindset was, this is not a cost. This is an investment. It's an investment in so many layers of my life and the things that matter to me and the people that matter to me. It's a no-brainer for me today. Because now I understand what I should be looking for and how I can harness that to really make a difference in my life, the people that I care about, and frankly, most importantly, my family's life. What a conversation. Todd showed us what's possible. When you stop letting today's constraints dictate tomorrow's results in an industry where grant money was frozen, Todd tripled his revenue. And like many founders, they struggle with how do we scale the business beyond themselves? Todd found himself asking, how might I harness AI to still give my team access to the information that's in my head while liberating me to drive greater growth of the business with Todd AI? For you, my hope is that you start to view AI as more than just something to help you write better emails or as a search engine. But to start to really view this as a thought partner and to raise your expectations for the type of results you can be getting when you harness this technology. If you're listening to this, you know that the world is shifting under your feet. You got to understand how you harness this. And I'm here to tell you, you don't have to become an AI expert. You just have to become an AI driven leader. So I have three simple steps you can take to begin putting this in action. First and foremost, if you have not yet subscribed or followed the show, hit the button. So all future episodes will automatically be downloaded to your device of choice. Second, if you've not yet read the AI driven leader, it is the number one book in the world for its category. It is packed with real use cases and the actual prompts of how leaders are harnessing this strategically to drive growth of their companies. And if you happen to be a sea level executive of a mid market to enterprise company, head over to ailitership.com. That's where you can learn about all the ways that we are helping companies. drive this in the organization in a way that leads to financial outcomes. Whether I be training for your executive team, our executive network called the collective, where we pull you into a cohort of about a hundred other executives and make sure that you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to AI and driving this strategically in a way that matters, or our advisory services where we actually partner with you to drive this in the company, to grow your enterprise value, and a stronger competitive advantage. The bottom line is AI isn't coming. It's here. Can you wait much longer? Our hope is that you start taking bold action so that you can create better leaders, a better business, and better lives. Thanks so much for joining us on the AI-driven leader and we look forward to being with you in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]