Interview: Burn the Ships, Build an AI-Driven Company with Rusty Cagle

[MUSIC] 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. Imagine sitting in a room of your peers, and when the topic of AI is brought up, everyone in the room scoffs and says it's a fat. This is what happened to our guest today. He's someone who is in the financial services industry, and when the leaders in the room scoffed, he realized the world is changing, and they're all committed to staying the same. But not this person. Being in his 60s, he's been through technical transformations before, and he knew in his bones that AI could be a leapfrog moment. A chance not only to build a better business, but also to create better lives. And so he drew a line in the sand. While he knew nothing about AI and didn't have a technical bone in his body, he said I'm going to start learning. He ended up coming across my book, the AI-driven leader. He read it seven times, listening to it five on audible, and reading it physically and hardcover twice. By the time he was done reading, he realized, if I don't adopt AI, I'm never going to build the kind of enterprise value that I know I'm capable of building. He drew a line in the sand, no more dabbling, no more hedging. He lit the match and burnt the ships, walked straight into his leadership team and said, within 90 days, we will be an AI-driven company before he even really understood what that meant. Today's episode is a masterclass, and what it means to lead change even when you might not feel capable. Or worthy of leading it. What if in order to go on this journey, you didn't actually even need to become an AI expert? What if you just needed to become an AI-driven leader? Meaning you know enough about how to use the technology strategically so you can cast a new vision for the future. You can define your strategy for how you're going to win, and you can begin leading the change so that eventually you can get into relationship with the people who can guide you along the way. That is exactly what has happened with this individual and the results you were going to hear him share in terms of how he legitimately measurably grew his enterprise value in under 90 days. My hope is that this inspires you to think a little bit bigger about what's possible. With that, let's get into this conversation with the founder and CEO of ASE Private Wealth, Rusty Kegel. Rusty, what was the moment that you realized that AI needed to become core to your business strategy? The moment I realized that was when I had listened to your book three times, I read your book twice, and then I was starting to think about this and how I needed to think differently. I said, "This is something I must look into." Then, when we were at Strategic Coach, there was a gentleman there who was in his early 60s like me, and he had this negative connotation about AI. Then, he said, "It totally transformed and changed his life and how he thought about it." At that point, I knew that if I didn't learn about AI, become someone who would change our business, then I was fearful that I wouldn't build the enterprise value that I needed to. Then, I emailed Vaughan, "Look, I need to get into this. I've read. I've listened. I'm all in. Let's get started." I paid for me and then for my COO, because for me, I knew I wanted to do this, but having a younger COO, who believed in this also as well as I did, was instrumental for me to get his buy-in so that we could change the whole culture of our organization. Give people a sense of what your business actually is. A little bit about ground. I've been in financial services industry for 28 years with tech strategy and consulting. Seven years ago, I got punched in a gut where I was advising a client that was selling his business for $200 million. Literally, right when he saw it, he said, "Look, I need to go somewhere else. You're not big enough. I need a different platform." That was a punch in the gut where I am now with AI. I have to change my business model. I reconstructed all of my entities. We have a holding company now. We have different verticals that serve under different regulatory bodies. One on the BD side for Fender, one on the advisory for the SEC. I have one on the Trust Services side. I have an insurance side and all of those different businesses roll up to a holding company. For me, I saw this as the framework for our strategic advisory firm. Here's what we do. We help gain clarity. We focus on collaboration and we help the overly tax become fairly taxed. This whole mantra, what I'm doing, really has set us up in the past seven years to really impact probably whole business owners. And yet, by going in with AI and learning this is transforming the game for our own internal company, as well as those we serve. You mentioned at the start, you listened to the AI driven leader three times and then you physically read the hardcover twice. Yes, I did. That's not lost on me and that's actually pretty rare. Why? For me, I knew there was something special here and everybody who reads chapter 11 reread it, keep reading it and everything. And I'll share some other stuff later. We're barely tapping into it. Chapter 11, where you just go through 30 days, 30 days. That has been what our whole team has been focusing on. And then it is a game changer. It is. And so we don't like read it. Even though it's a little bit of context. Chapter 11 is titled the critical first 30 days, focused execution to drive results. And it's all about how do you come out of, you know, we all set goals every year and create our business plan. But how do you turn plan into execution? Yes. And as founders, leaders growing, if you don't have a structure and then you have accountability to that structure, you get lost in so many other things that pulls us in so many different directions. That's amazing. So to give people a sense of time, when did you read the book? How many months ago was this? The first time. I started February. Okay, so that's February to March, April, May, June. So that's four months ago. And then the strategic coach meeting was when? So I joined your collective in May, so that was in April. Got it. So I mean, you were literally talking. You actually being in the driver's seat and purposefully driving this. Really in under 60 days. Yeah, but because as so many books, I mean, so many people say, hey, I'm reading four books a month or whatever case may be, but do you really grasp the context of the impact that it can have? And then we just something here that just kept pulling me and pulling me, I got to keep getting deeper and deeper into this, because this is a game changer. And so for me, that's why I kept listening. I wrote things on the whiteboard. I kept doing all this. And yet I knew that I couldn't fully implement this in the way that it could have a 10X magnitude on our company. And then those clients we advise without fully committing to being in this all the way. What's happened in the last 60 days? And let me preface the reason I'm asking this is because I think people grossly underestimate how far they can move the ball in literally 30 to 60 days if they really commit and they get surrounded by the right resources and people. So walk me through the things that have happened for you psychologically as a leader, walk through what the talk inside the organization has looked like and what have you done? So the book I did with Chris Voss, which became the best seller, we're the chapters in there. I talk about the compound depletion effect and I can get on that a little bit more, but also talk about a study that was done by EPI exit planning institute. Where in the next 10 years, there's $10 trillion, probably how business value that's going to have a ability to be monetized. And unfortunately, 80% of that will not be realized to a full value. It'll have a diminished value or no value. And to me, this is devastating and that's why I've committed for the next 10 years to help probably help business owners. Because if you take out federal government, state government, local government, almost 85% of those companies employ everybody in America. There's absolutely devastating to know that people put the risk, they do all of this, employ people and they're not getting So in that context, I read your book and I was sitting there saying, "What I'm actually trying to help businesses do more, I may be part of the wrong side of this equation if I don't adopt this AI, 100 percent." And to me, I started going in and as I looked at this, those of you remember international history, Hernán Cortez, when he came to Mexico, he basically said, "Burn the ships, we're not going back." And literally, I came back from your collective and I told everybody, "We're burning the ships, we're not going back." And so in 30 days, just to give you some context, my COO has identified cost savings, getting rid of software, being able to annualize a hundred thousand dollars worth of savings, increased productivity and those sort of things. And the impact of that helps us be smarter with our capital, helps us be more resourceful and it gives everybody more time to focus on more strategic type of things and serving our clients. And talk a little bit about what shifted for you internally that had you leave the offsite for the collective and come back to the company and say, "We're going to be an AI-driven organization. What does that mean to you and do you even know what that means yet?" No, I don't. I'm glad we can just be open and transparent on the skull because that's the way I am, that's where you are. Literally, I came back and I said, "We will be an AI-driven company and go and forward thus a mandate." And I had responses like, "Well, what does that mean? Well, is that going to take my job or I'm scared of the science fiction AI type of thing?" So we instituted, "We're just going to try. Let's just look at little things that we can do. Let's get comfortable." And again, we're very highly regulated in my other companies yet on the holding company which is strategic, how do we just look at this to be more operationally efficient, with appointments? How do we take our client meetings as we prepare for them? And sometimes that can be two hours and think about how we can get this down to 20 minutes, literally, by getting people to change their mindset. And I don't know if you can see this or not, "How can AI help me do this?" It started changing, but I didn't come in and put mandates. You got it. Hey, just think about what your job and what are things that are, if I asked this question and then I asked another question, "How could I get better?" And now that energy over the last 30 days is starting to just take off in our whole company. It's also, I mean, it's not all butterflies or rainbows. We've got a couple people that probably aren't going to be a cultural fit because I did tell everyone in 90 days everybody will be committed to being an AI-driven employee so we can accomplish greater results. And there's a few that still maybe not fully am. And that's okay. I want to know that as a CEO in the other companies that I want individuals who will embrace this and make a difference. Here's what I think is valuable about your journey so far, Rusty. You're not a technical person. Nope. Not at all. You're not an AI expert. But you're a leader who realized that in order to lead what's next, you had to get in the game. You didn't see AI as something that you could just hire a consultant to, quote, "do it for you" or something that you just delegate to IT. You said, "No, this is something that I personally need to learn enough about to lead our company moving forward." And you came into the collective. You're in the room with 100 plus other sea level leaders, hearing how they're using it. And you walk out of the room saying, "I am going to declare that we're going to be an AI-driven organization before you even really understood what that meant." And this, here's why this matters. You don't have to know everything about AI to get started. But it does require leadership to say, "I'm going to walk the talk. I'm going to start acquiring the knowledge myself. I'm going to lead this from the front. I'm going to acknowledge that I don't have everything and I can still cast the goal and say this is going to be a standard in the company. Everybody is going to be AI-driven. We got 90 days. Let's go." And you're starting to see how people are grabbing on. You're starting to see where some are resisting. I want to talk about those that resist. What has your approach been with them so far? So, every week we have a court always, like, "How did you use AI this week? What were some of the ways you used it?" And we have a group share in our Monday morning meetings, right? And we're starting to hear how other people are sharing how they're using it and they're getting more confident. Those that aren't, well, they don't report that they used it or here's how I did it with an email. So, now we're starting to dig a little deeper and say, "What is the apprehension? What is causing you maybe not to go that extra step?" And we're helping them with the way that they think and to see if they can get over that home, but in whatever it is. So when you look at my COO, my office manager, they're talking about all these creative ways that we're using it. And I'll give you another point that is so freaking powerful. So in June, we have what we call the halftime report. So there's at least 75 clients. We do tax-dack optimization. And tax-dack optimization, think of it in football. At the end of the year, you're getting your butt kicked 48 to nothing and you kick a fill goal because you found some last-minute tax tips and you carry the coach off the field because you scored a point, but you still lost 48 to three. Our whole process is we have halftime report and what is your liability going to be? Let's turn that into tax capital and now we can proactively reduce your tax liability, right? Going through this in June, I'm like, well, how are we going to do this? I'm like, think differently. How can AI help me do this? Because we have to get stuff from accountants. We have to get PNLs. We have to get 4K. We have to do all this data gathering in order to be able to have a halftime report to be able to plan in its very intensive. So usually this is about a six or seven hour process with 75 clients getting all this. Literally, everybody kicked and screamed, now we have reduced that now. I believe to 90 minutes. And it just allows us to take on more capacity. It allows us to serve the client. It allows us to think differently. And we're just touching the edge of what we're doing. I mean, it's unfriickened believable. Let's get tactical. What specifically, because if people hear you're going from, you know, six, seven hours of prep per client to 90 minutes, what'd you do? How do you do it? So a lot of what we do is labor intensive. If I asked my guys to think about this, how do we ask for the information in a way that we can get it faster? So we start saying, all right, what is typically the bottlenecks? Bottlenecks may be the client. The bottlenecks may be the other professionals. So how do we communicate with them and then ask them, and we have this process called 244872, right? So literally if we're asking another professional, we're asking when you can get it 48 hours, 72 at the max, how do we get that back? Once we've got that now, when it comes in to our poor to our secure portal, now we have the ability to start sorting this. And so we ask, how do you sort this? There's no client names. There's none of that. It's just hypothetically in our attack stack optimization. How do we create this so it feeds it into our diagnostic? You're asking AI hypothetically within this system, how might we sort details so we can better feed it faster? You're not giving any client information, but AI is coaching you on tweaks you can make to sort through the data faster to access it. 100%. So just that way to go about doing it allows us to build a process in the advisory firm, holding company. But then when we're in the regulated entities that we have to follow that, we're not putting any kind of client information in it, but we still got the process that reduces this down so much. So basically you used AI as a thought partner to look at your current process and identify how to streamline it. And then you made those tweaks and it took a task from six to seven hours per client to an hour and a half per client. Yes, basically. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So let's talk, I know you mentioned there's a flagship use case in the $10 million deck. Walk us through how you utilized AI to help one of your clients go from zero to a $10 million line of credit using AI to make it happen. This is such an incredible story. I just turned 60 in the way that we're impacting lives now. It makes me feel like a 22 year old just getting in a college. It really does. So one of my other companies, I create a board for certain clients, a board of advisory where we're looking at the problems they're trying to solve. And these clients have to be wanting to have a hundred year impact. And so these are companies that are operational velocity is going fast. It eats up their capital. They're just going to be a lot of money. going so fast their systems aren't in any kind of way because they're going out and they're trying to change the industry and go fast, right? Early adopters. So one of the things we first realized is that because they're growing so fast from 5 million to 15 to 40 now 80, they kept trying to go to banks and being able to get, you know, a working line of capital. Well, they just sent the tax returns, they sent the, they sent all this information and they were wanting the bank to make a determination and the banks couldn't put it all together. So literally 35 banks had turned them down and they're just absolutely growing and just killing it out in marketplace. So let's think about this. Let's get your financials so they look better. Let's use AI in our thought partner to create how we can make this easier for banks to understand your true story. So we got information from them, their financial information and we put it in a way that it could be understandable. We told their story on their three year growth. We looked at the next two years on what they're doing. The signed contracts that they already have and if they had capital, they can even go further with it and literally after we built this deck and we did all this, we have two banks competing for a 10 million dollar line and we got another one that's coming into the mix that may even be a bigger partner for some longer term type of thing. It absolutely changed their world and one more thing, Jeff, because here's the drop the mic moment. They literally before they met me, we're going to give up 25% of their capital on equity because they didn't understand how to do this and literally I saved them tens of millions of dollars on equity on their cap table because we repositioned everything so that the banks and their working capital could get us there and now we're much better position if we're going to partner with a private equity or somebody there that we have a higher value from that standpoint. Here's what I think is incredible about this. Every day for you who's watching or listening, there are things that you face in your work that there are real challenges that require your ability to think strategically. The old way of doing that is relying on your own human processing power. For your client, they're like, let me just go meet with these banks. They meet with 30 plus banks, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection and you come in and you just ask a simple question, how can AI help me do this? And you go to AI as a thought partner and you give it tons of context. Here's the financials. Here's the sign contracts. Here's what the capital would be able to do and you turn it into a thought partner that had to interview you to gain deeper context and then the task in terms of how might you present this to a bank that would be more compelling? And it's able to process different data that we don't have access to as humans and help you come up with non-obvious strategies that can get it done. And Jeff, I couldn't put our point together to save my life. So we took all that and then I believe it's gamma. We used that to create a power point that got us 80% there. Then I plugged in the pictures of them. Happy clients, you know, this had another and now it told a vivid story that truly got these banks excited to be a part of as opposed to we don't understand your business, your financials aren't where they need to be. You know, we're just going to, you know, our approval committees, like we don't like this kind of risk. I mean, literally it changed their lives on what they can do now going forward. How long did it take you to write the initial prompt to get AI to come up with how to restructure this and to use AI to create the slide deck in total if you had to guess. Knowing what I know in order to make this appealing for banks, telling the story, doing all this, it would have literally taken them three months with a whole bunch of different people coming at different angles and having the aptitude to know it. Literally, it probably took us two weeks to get it put it in there and to be able to then craft it and then we had to get some more and clarifying information from them, right? You know, once we got all that together, literally we had banks having conversations with us the next week and then ready to move on funding that within the next seven to ten days. My guess though in terms of total time on keyboard, where you were, I know it took weeks to get it all the way through, but that was some back and forth. Was it even more than an hour of your time on a keyboard to really get it done? For me, I'm a little slower. Probably I'd say two hours. Okay, two hours. But yeah, and again, I got people, I can communicate to some of my younger team members, but you got to be able to communicate what you're trying to, you got to know the right questions and the right way to go down this and then it helps. I mean, again, that's another compound in effect. I don't even think about it helps them be more focused on what they know how to do, the PowerPoints building out the financial models and all of that that brings it back all together too. Totally true. Totally true. I want to talk about you and how you continue to grow as an AI driven leader because you're early in the game and that's what I love about this conversation. It's, you know, this isn't about just having conversations with the people who are the best in the world. This is about having conversations with real leaders who have made a real commitment to becoming AI-driven leaders themselves and building AI-driven organizations. I know you've carved out time every week just to use AI personally. What has that done for your leadership? It's done a number of things. I think the aha moment for me is in your session and I got up and I said some colorful language back to you because what I wanted my firm to represent, it wasn't being representative in the traditional models, right? Well, to manage, but you know, it thoughts, research, right? And I just kept having to go back because like, don't come out of this until you get it right, right? And literally, I mean, it's not right yet. It's not right yet. And then when it asked me, I'm going to scale one to 10, do you feel like you got a 10? And I said, well, if you're so smart, why don't you tell me what would make it a 10? And literally, it sat there and said, I do this, this, this, this, and this, and make it a 10. And I'm like, "Daggummit, Jeff," I didn't say "Daggummit." Why didn't you tell me this instead of two hours and you're like, you wouldn't have really gotten where you needed to if you didn't go through there. And that was a defining moment for me. And then you go, now we're going to a deep think and it's going to tell you what's wrong with that to get you on that 20%. And so let me give a little bit of context on the use case. This is something that we do with people in the collective. Everybody gets access to our AI thought partner. And you did an exercise where you literally clicked a button. You didn't even have to write a prompt. And AI turned into a strategist in competitive positioning. It interviewed you about the business that would put you out of business. And what it would look like for you to be the one that would build it first. And then as an AI futurist, it was able to project what it would look like for you to build a sustainable, defensible competitive advantage in an AI driven future. And then collapse that into a very simple statement that would articulate what your business does as an AI driven organization that causes you to win. That's the prompt. That's what you went back and forth. And so what you're saying is it was able to crystallize your future competitive advantage. And it asks you if it's a 10 and you're like, well, you tell me what a 10 would look like. And it goes and takes it up a whole another level. Yeah. And by the way, the reason I said you couldn't have gotten there if you didn't have to hammer through it interviewing you for 10 or 15 minutes is because it doesn't know you the way that you know you. But we really struggle to organize our thoughts and unlock the context that we have in our minds. And if you use AI as a thought partner and know how to prompt it correctly, you can get it to pull the right data out of your head. And it can organize it and restructure it in a way that is so much more clear and compelling than we can do on our own. And I just add to that back to original question, how am I using it personally? And then how's it changing? You're not both are in Dan Sullivan's 10X. And part of that is having your free days, your buffer days, between your focus days. And for me, I struggled with that. So now using AI helped me maximize my personal time, my thought and strategic thinking time. And then things I need to be doing operationally with all the companies, right? And led me to saying, all right, I got block time in many minutes, three days a week. I also have 90 minutes with my COO. And we go through all the things that I'm thinking, all the things that we're implementing here in all the companies. And then how do we continue to get so much better? in what we're doing. And to me, I think that's what's helped me, not only quality of life. It allows me to be, I've called it life, but also creating 10x vision for all that we're doing and absolutely feel confident that we can get there. I was listening again this morning and you mentioned the gentleman has around seven million dollar business and it's very similar where we ordered wrist-wrestling. And literally he and four years got to 50 million. They did 50 last year and they're going to do 100 this year. And that to some people is un-thousandable, but yet going back to, hey, burn the ships because this is the new world. Right? This is where we're going. And so how do we keep thinking that way? That's just what excites me about being a part of this collective. You work in a industry that is highly regulated in financial services. I know of many people in regulated industries that use that as a justification for inaction. What do you say to your clients when you talk about how you are using AI? And what do you say to the people who say we're in a regulated industry? We can't touch it. I would tell you some of that may be true. There's larger organizations that have those mandates. Then unless you're able to have OBEA's which is outside business activities that you can say, hey, I have a consulting company or I have a company that has my IP in it. And this is my IP that I'm using. And your IP then helps you in the regulatory side, but you still have to go to compliance, the structure, suitability, all of those things. What what I would tell you there is that those who figure out a way that they can do it, it is an absolute game changer. But when it comes to clients, we share with our clients. Look, we take confidentiality and privacy to the highest standard there is. We will never use any AI that has any of your personal information, any of your financial information. Absolutely nothing. We use AI structurally to help service you better, to create operational efficiencies, to help you better, to communicate better, making sure that we're following up more timely on your request, and making sure that we're adding increased value to your relationship with us. But nothing from your situation goes into any other companies that we have. We just build out the framework up top and then we implement it in a way that protection. And here's I think the fundamental difference. If you're worried about compliance or legal and they're shutting it down, at the core, they're trying to protect something, which is good. And this is where minds that comes in. Are you looking for a reason to say no? Or are you exploring a way to say yes? And those are fundamentally different lenses. And what you talked about there, Rusty, like no, in your industry, you cannot load personal information into one of these large language models against the rules from a regulation standpoint. It says nothing about you not being able to use it to enhance your leadership, or to figure out how to improve your processes, or to fine tune your communication. So it's more effective. And you are playing in the areas that you are allowed to play until the regulations and the technology catches up on the other areas. What you have said, we are going to get in the game and we are going to use this where we can. And oftentimes I find that compliance are legal that's blocking it. If they're saying no, oftentimes it means they don't understand what's available that could get them to a yes. I had a very large RAA that we're literally doing an offsite for I mean there's probably a hundred people in the room. And it surfaced that they couldn't use it because compliance was blocking it. And I said how long has compliance been blocking it? And somebody said six months, what I didn't realize is that the head of compliance was in the room. And somebody called it out. And I first praised him and said you're doing the right thing. You're trying to protect the company. Help me understand what you're trying to protect against. And he walked through it and I said what would have to be true for you to stop saying no and to start saying that yes. And he basically said I would need to know that our data is in getting trained on and it's locked down and that we could prove it. And I looked straight at the CTO and said aren't you guys hosting chat GPT on your own AWS server and you've established a walled garden that means that it is literally locked down and no data leaves the premises and he goes exactly. And I looked at the chief compliance officer and said does that satisfy your request? He goes I had no idea. I said so we're approved. He goes approved. Mind blown. But it's like they had the right they had the right infrastructure in place. But the right questions weren't being asked. What are you trying to protect and what would have to be true for you to say yes. Yeah. And we talk about empowering the exceptional to think differently right. So I think every entrepreneur is kind of like in my book or have a lot of frog analogies and metaphors. You know, most entrepreneurs are these tadpoles just think about the rest of the world. But yet they're the ones that become frogs and they just transform and have a metamorphosis because they don't want to maybe do things the way that the rest of the world does and they take those risks. If you just think differently and so many times having people around you that says well let's think about this. Let's stay within the rules. Let's stay with protecting classes. Stay with ethics and things we need to. But how can we think about this differently in order to create greater value. And that's what entrepreneurs and founders do. Right. And so this excites me to bring a lot of this to the clients that I serve because it's going to be a game changer. I love that. What do you say to the leaders who are watching or listening to this? Who they know it's the future? But they still aren't clear where to start. They fear they're falling behind but they have not found sufficient motivation to make it a personal priority to lead the charge. What's your guidance to them? So I spoke at a dinner on Wednesday with 50 people. A lot of what we do when you look at the compound the police in effect, if you think of Einstein compounding interest, eight one or the world, I eight seven years ago started doing compound the police in effect. And literally what people lose on taxes, entity structuring, investments is not properly aligned in focusing on building enterprise value. If you put it into our model, literally it's millions and millions of dollars. So I brought up the Travago commercial. The other senior Travago commercial is three guys, two guys there and I asked if anybody seen that and one of them was like, yeah, the guy with the big white teeth and they're like, yeah, that's it. So they're like, look at this great resort. This is amazing. And then the other guy says, yeah, it's a great price at 250. Let's just say. And the other guy started laughing. And like, he could have saved 40% by using Travago. And I start thinking about that. And I'm like, what we do for the class we serve, a lot of them were paying 25 to 40% more taxes than they should because they're just driving. They're doing all this. And then when we start looking at other ways we can help them and they look at the compound the police in effect by not taking the time now to stop inaction, you cost millions of dollars in a few, sometimes tens of millions. Here becomes the drop the mic moment. Yeah, for anybody who takes time to listen to this. If you really think about what I just said earlier, in less than 30 days, we've created a hundred thousand dollars of savings in 30 days. Every CEO, every founder, understanding EBITDA, you have growth, you have EBITDA, earnings before interest tax depreciation and arbitration. Every hundred thousand in whatever industry you're in, there's a multiple in our industry or where I'm at is just say, it's a 10X, maybe more of a bit of 10X, 30 minutes, finding a hundred thousand, that is a million dollars of value I just create. By the end of year profit and everything else will be 500,000. That is a five million dollar impact on my enterprise value. So literally I would tell any CEO, founder, anyway, your whole job is to create as much value for the risk and everything that you're taking. And I know no other way. And I was doing things that were showing amazing results. But I will tell you what I will start putting in is AI, how to measure it, how to grow. quantify it. Intellectual property is one other thing that think miss out on. And literally, it can create tens of millions of dollars in value. And so if you don't do it, the compound the police in effect is destroying wealth for future people and yourself and your family to do more purpose related work, big on this 100 year impact, because those who really get this, now we're making a 100 year impact on what we're here are families, causes. And this is just really what excites me. So I hope to drop the mic moment is in everybody who's in it. Unless your lifestyle business, you're able to in that multiple, if it's 500, even some five X, I mean, it's millions of dollars, millions, that you could be foregoing by not learning how to use AI. There you have it, our conversation with Rusty Kagle. I love how he showed us what it really looks like to lead in the age of AI, not by dabbling, but by making a commitment to becoming an AI driven company. In his story, I love how he used a past failure of losing a $200 million client, because his firm wasn't big enough as fuel to reinvent his business. And now when he looks at AI, he just sees it as an opportunity to do the same to build a better lit business and better lives. For me, the thing that landed was when he said, if I don't adopt AI, I risk losing the very enterprise value I've spent decades building. And I believe Rusty's journey proves something else. AI isn't just about efficiency. It's about leadership. In order to change your organization, you have to start by changing yourself by you becoming an AI driven leader. And if you are a leader within a mid market to enterprise company, this is your moment. Maybe your boards pressing your for answers, your competition for sure is moving. And the people who wait as a leader, this is your moment. Maybe your board is asking you how you're going to harness AI. Maybe you're worried that your competition is gaining a lead. Your people are looking for your vision in terms of what's the future the business going to look like and what's the future of my job? This is your moment. If you hesitate, you'll be left behind. But if you start leading from the front, if you start moving now, you not only have an opportunity to grow faster, but to increase your enterprise value, your competitive advantage and build a more engaged, meaningful and impactful workforce. This is why I want to point you to a few simple resources to guide you along the way. First, if you are not yet subscribed or following the show, click the subscribe or follow button. So all future episodes are downloaded to your device. In the next episode, you were going to watch me turn the tables on Rusty and ask him, what's the biggest problem you're facing in your business right now? That if we could solve it would unlock a new level of growth. And I'm literally going to share my screen and harness AI as a thought partner to solve one of his biggest problems. That's coming up. If you have not yet read the AI driven leader, what are you waiting for? It's the number one book in the world for its category. And I promise you, if you read this with your leadership team, this will unlock a flywheel of momentum that you haven't experienced yet. And if you are a sea level leader of a mid market to enterprise company, we encourage you to head over to a I leadership.com. This is where you can learn about the different ways that we can help you harness this technology to grow your enterprise value, starting with doing trainings for your executive teams to get them to use this strategically, then pulling some of your key C suite leaders into our executive network called the collective where we make sure that they learn how to become AI driven leaders who drive this in the organization and make sure that you never fall behind the competition. And finally, how we can advise you to actually drive this in a way that grows revenue multiplies your multiple increases your EBITDA and builds a competitive advantage. That's all available at a I leadership.com. It's time to start thinking differently because the future doesn't wait. And neither should you. I'm your host Jeff Woods. We look forward to being with you in the next episode.