EP211: How Contractors Can Sell More and Scale Faster – Chad Lefevre Explains

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Brad.

Lefebvre, yeah. Okay.

If it happens, it happens. We do our best.

Sure, yeah. Best way to think about my background is it kind of intersects between leadership development and what we would call leadership development. I refer to it as regenerative leadership. And the work that I've done all the way with from startups and small companies all the way to Fortune 100 companies like Coca-Cola, Shell, J &J, a big mobile company up in Canada called TELUS. Really helping to develop leaders and using technology to do so. So technology is the other part of the intersection of my background is how do we leverage technology for better performance, optimal results, and how does leadership and the relationship that leaders have with technology dramatically influence the level of their success. And so that's kind of been, you know. where I've spent a lot of time. I also used to produce conferences many years ago where we'd bring together some of the top leading thought leaders in the world, the Tony Robbins, the Mark Victor Hansons, the Timothy Ferris types. We'd bring them together for closed door sessions every year. And it was sort of what's working and not working in that industry. A lot of those guys were small business owners who became, in some cases, large brands. But we had a lot of these same conversations. How do we use technology to amplify and accentuate our work? And what does it mean to be a leader in this moment in time? And of course, that moment's always changing. And we exist right now in... a moment of in human history that's frankly unparalleled in terms of the dramatic change that we're all facing. And change can be either something that can be feared or something that can be embraced. And when you really step into the power of what it means to be a leader, you tend to find ways to embrace those moments of change and to make it work for you. And I think that's... you know, our organization, the most important conversations. That's what our focus really is, is helping to curate and facilitate the most important conversations that humanity needs to be having right now around any number of topics. There's no shortage of them, no shortage of topics and areas of the economy or our cultures or our societies that are in enormous amounts of change. And we can either lean into that and... and actually work together and optimize ourselves for that change, or we can be afraid of it and hide and pretend it's not happening. And that's a big thing right now that we're dealing with and want to address.

Well, I think the first thing to say is that in my discussions and the research that we've been doing around this, actually, a lot of people don't understand what AI is or its true potential. They'll think of AI as chat GPT, right? But ChatGPT is an interface that uses a language model behind it. Effectively, what we've created with artificial intelligence is a global interconnected brain that is the aggregation of... all of our individual brains into a single brain. So the power of it is enormous. And there are so many different interfaces like ChatGPT. There's so many different tools out there that are AI based that are great for small and mid-sized companies. I think this is going to be a revolution in small and mid-sized companies like we've never seen before in terms of their ability to match and meet the moment of what large companies have traditionally, you know, where they've traditionally dominated in the marketplace. I think you're going to be seeing the ability of small businesses to, in many cases, operate like large businesses without having all the overhead of the staff and the employees and the training costs and all of that kind of stuff. So, but the thing is a lot of small businesses aren't really spending the time to optimize and learn. optimize their business with AI and learn how to use AI in a way that is going to give them that advantage. Those that do are going to soar right now. And here's the other thing that I think is really interesting. We can talk about this in more detail as well. The number of small businesses, so according to Pew Research,10% of Americans are either small business owners or entrepreneurs, and there is a distinction in those two categories as well. So 10%,90% are employees. What we're starting to see, and I've looked at everything in terms of the research being done by... EY, Deloitte, Gartner, Google, Microsoft. I mean, all of these different companies are posting sort of predictions of the impact of AI, how will it impact the economy, how fast will it scale. I've seen this range of anywhere from 30 to 85%, and it's a big range, and it is a... Nobody really knows till it happens. But these think tanks and these firms are assessing that we're going to see by 2035, some displacement of anywhere from 30 to 85% of the 90% who are employees working currently for companies will be displaced into the 10% pool of self-employed or entrepreneurial. workers. We don't know what the percentage is going to be until it happens. It's widely speculative, but we do know it just makes sense that AI is going to displace people. And why am I bringing that up? Because those who are currently self-employed, those who are currently entrepreneurs, now is the time. for you to optimize the integration of artificial intelligence in your business. Because as more people move from the 90% to the 10%, simply because there's no ability for them to just go get another job, because the same efficiencies that AI can produce and provide for a small business owner are also going to be being provided for large companies. And so they're not going to need those employees. So I've been saying to people, for the last two years. We're not gonna need accountants. We're not gonna need lawyers. We're not going to need engineers. The IT departments are gonna be massively whittled down in these large companies because AI is gonna provide capabilities that won't require as many humans. You may have a lawyer, for example, an attorney who oversees an AI system that is writing contracts and just as the human that rubber stamps it and says, yep, this is good, but you're not going to need all of that staff. Same with engineering, accounting, et cetera. So those people aren't going to just be able to go get another job. So the competition is going to increase massively in the self-employed world over the next five to 10 years. So this is a sort of a heads up for your listeners. who are self-employed business owners entrepreneurs uh etc that if there was one move you made this year it would be to fully take on learning how to optimize your company your your systems inside of your companies using artificial intelligence so that you're ahead of the curve When all of those new people jump in and they're like, how do I start a business? How do I become a self-employed person? How do I use AI to do that? You want to be really positioned in the marketplace before that transition happens.

And there's so many other AI platforms that if people are only just now hearing about, they've been around for a while, whether it's to create graphics, to create websites, there's AI platforms that are now, you know, you can create mobile apps, movies, music, like all kinds of things. Right. And they just get better and better every single day. So, you know, I think it was Mark Cuban a couple of weeks ago. he posted a story of how his son's friend or something like that had asked him, what is advice that you would give someone in their 20s in terms of optimizing themselves for where we're headed in terms of the economy and where business is heading? And he said, read every book you can on artificial intelligence and literally experiment with every artificial intelligence you can get your hands on. That was his advice because he said, effectively, that's the future of business. If you're not in that game, you might as well shut your doors because it is going to impact every type of business. Even businesses that are more sort of a bricks and mortar, hands-on can benefit from artificial intelligence to optimize their processes, their systems. Um, and, and there's going to be all kinds of new businesses that'll open new markets and new types of things that we're not even thinking about right now. I can't even tell you what they are. Cause you know, it's like Dell came out with a study years ago, which they're standing by to this day. And they said that by 2030, uh, this is Dell computers. They said by 2030,85% of the jobs we are doing right now won't exist. Uh, and 85% of the jobs that will exist. we don't know what they are. Like we can't even plan for them because they haven't been invented yet. Right. Right. Now that's pretty high. Right. So, and I want to qualify that too. Not that they won't, not that 85% of the jobs we're doing won't exist, but they won't exist in the same capacity. They're going to be wildly different in terms of how they're done, how they're conducted, et cetera. So, you know, are they right about this? Probably not. It's speculation. But what if it was 40 percent? What if we cut it in half and say that 40 percent of the jobs that we're currently doing, we won't be doing the same way. And the new jobs haven't even been invented yet. That's still massive. And when you think about the last time as a culture, we had 30, around 30 percent displacement in terms of people's jobs and that in some cases would even lead to unemployment. You have to go back to the Great Depression to get to those numbers. So, you know, it's like anything. We can either plan and be prepared or we can pretend it's not going to happen to us and then be surprised. So, you know, one of my messages is to small business owners and entrepreneurs is this is a great time to actually optimize your business. There are things you can do today you couldn't even have done five years ago for your company without spending a lot of money. And they're just immediately accessible and available to you. And so now's the time to lean in to these, these tools and these technologies.

Yeah, they become what I call the master engineers or the master accountants or the men that we don't necessarily use that terminology right now. But it's going to be people who have mastered the use of AI. I mean, they're just going to have economies of scale that are so much better. than say someone trying to operate a regular engineering or law firm or accounting firm with all of the staff. You know, you don't need paralegals going and looking up case law anymore. It's all there.

Yeah, write me a contract referencing this case from, you know, or find the case law if you don't even know it. Write me a contract that, you know, cites case law about this issue. AI can go get that done because All of the books, all of the resources, all of the materials are in the brain of this thing.

And the personality.

Yeah, I mean, I agree in principle. I don't, you know, I think it's a while before we're going to have robots building houses, but it's definitely going to happen. I mean, there's no question about that. Will it be 50 years from now? I mean, who knows, right? I don't know. Robotics are advancing rapidly right now. I mean, you can just find, you know, examples of this on YouTube of some of the videos that are coming out of Japan and other places around the world where they're. They're training robots to move very much like human beings. And, you know, some of them are teaching them martial arts and stuff like this, you know, so. So and it looks clunky still. I mean, it's not smooth. It's like a human. But the exponential rate of change is such that we're seeing dramatic transformation in mere months that would normally have taken years. So, you know, it's not going to take long for those robots to become, you know, adept at being able to move like a human being. But I think it's still a while away. I would say that anyone in the trades businesses, you're a little bit insulated from the total restructuring of your industry. We're going to see white collar displacement way before we see blue collar displacement, because anything that was sort of an office job. that didn't require you physically to be engaged and it was only mental work. Well, that's what AI is. It's the ultimate brain. So mental work is now going to displace white collar workers first. And that's what we're going to start to see. And then when robotics, you know, you look at an Amazon, you know, facility right now in terms of where the, you know, some of these, they're all robots, you know, an order comes in and you see this robot flying through the sky. And it drops down and it gets your package and it takes it to where, you know, like they don't have people in those, in those warehouses. They're all robots.

Exactly. Robots.

So we're seeing little bits of what you were talking about already happening, but, uh, is a robot going to build houses tomorrow? No, we're not there yet.

And once it happens, it'll be immediate. It'll be quick. It'll just ripple. Yeah.

Really what's happening is we're moving into what I call a creator economy. And, you know, migrating from a producer economy of goods that people consume, and we're moving into a creator economy where individuals, because of the power of these tools and the leverage that these AI tools provide them, are going to be able to create things. um much more rapidly and it's going to be creators selling to other creators because effectively everyone is is going to eventually be in able to participate in this creator economy because of artificial intelligence now the problem is that we live in a society that is predominantly we've been trained for the last hundred or so years to be very left brain so we have a left brain dominant society so just for your listeners, if you can think about this. So your creative intelligence and your emotional intelligence exists on the right brain. Okay. And your left brain is, I liken it to being kind of like the executive assistant of your life. Like your left brain is great to figure out how to do things and how to take action around it. But what you decide to do is actually an act of creation. It's a right brain function. And so we've been in a very left brain leaning society because Basically, since the Second World War, the grand bargain has been, hey, listen, if you come and work for this company, we're going to pay you a salary. Your job is X. It's very specific and defined. So, you know, one of the things we talk about in our organization, the most important conversations is we're helping human doings become human beings again. We've been all, as a society, kind of relegated to human doings, right? And it's like even you meet someone for the first time and what do you ask them? You know, what do you do? Right. So like we're very preoccupied with the doing this of life. And that's been a conditioned thing that's cultural that hasn't always existed throughout human history. But it's a result of what happened post Second World War, where we had this explosion in manufacturing, this explosion in the invention of new products, new technologies, all of this. If you kind of track it through the 1950s,60s and 70s. It was sort of this grand golden age of the building of new things. And we needed a lot of human doings to do the work to build that stuff. What we're talking about now, if artificial intelligence and AI directed robotics are going to basically handle a lot of the doing, what does that leave us as human beings to do, right? not as much as we used to. And we need to rely more on our right brain, more on our creative faculties. Now, a lot of people don't know how to think creatively because we've kind of been squashing it, taking it out of the school system. We've been sort of diminishing it. You know, for years it was... You know, go into the sciences or get a profession, you know, that's, you know, white collar profession, doctor, teacher, lawyer, executive, et cetera. You know, that's been sort of what we've aspired to in many cases as a culture. And I see an opportunity, like for anyone who works with their hands, who's, you know, building things, I see a huge opportunity. um, and almost a Renaissance for anyone who wants to create something, build something and leverage these technologies to do it more effectively, that you don't have to just be relegated to being a human doer that's punching a clock, uh, and just fulfilling, you know, your very small role that you were given because your potential is much greater than the role you've been given, but you've never been asked to actually step into your potential. It wasn't needed. Corporations and companies don't want people with funny, creative ideas on how to improve things. They want you to just follow the rules, stay in line, and we'll pay you for that and we'll give you your vacation. And that's all we expect of you, right? So in a way, I feel like our society has been intentionally dumbed down because of all that was required. of us for so many years was just to kind of fall in line and check the box of what it took for us to get a paycheck. But now when those, when those people are being displaced from those companies, they need to learn how to think creatively because it hasn't been something that has really been reinforced and taught. And, and, um, you know, it can be scary for some people because it's changed and it's new and they have never maybe had to do that. But on the other side of it is autonomy. for you is aliveness is the sense of you're creating something you're the master of your own destiny and these tools allow you and allow all of us to step into that place of power for the first time possibly in our entire life So it's an incredible opportunity.

Yeah. Well, I think so competition is going to go up dramatically. And this is why I'm saying for your existing listeners who are already in that 10% in that, uh, entrepreneurs, uh, business owner, uh, or self-employed category. Now is the time to really step back and give consideration to what do you want to create for yourself? Is your business exactly where you want it to be? If not, AI and these high-tech tools can actually help amplify and accelerate what it is that you want to create. And now would be the time to do that because to your point, yes, there's going to be way more people that are joining that 10% and they don't know what they're doing. Um, but, and I'm not meaning to be pejorative about those folks because they can learn and become, you know, good at it, but, um, there is going to be noisy and messy for a while because, and I'll give you an example, um, for years, you know, in addition to my work in leadership and tech on the side, I also, because prior to getting into all that in the late nineties, in the early two thousands, I was heavy into public relations. And so I did a lot of PR stuff. And I was really good at the PR stuff, you know, being able to get people on major TV shows and et cetera. And, but there were a lot of people who weren't good at public relations and it would, I would often happen to me that I would be talking, say to a new, a new company as a potential new client. And they would say, Oh, we tried PR and it didn't work. And I'm like, well, you probably had a. bad company that didn't know what they were doing. Right. But the problem is that once they have that experience, it's like, yeah, I'm not really sure if, you know, and so you're, you're up against that. So when all these people move over from the 90% to the 10%, a large percent of the gym, a percentage of them who've never had to, like you say, figure out how to start a business, operate it, run it. And, and now They also probably don't know how to use all the AI tools because if they're even using any in their current job, it's probably only chat, GPT, and a few others. So they won't even know where to look. Like there's just the brains of people who've been stuck in sort of a corporate environment who are now moving out of that. are different brains that, uh, because they've been doing something the same way for years and years and years and years and years. And there's parts of their brains they haven't had to exercise. So there's going to be this moment in time where they're the other, you know, their creative center is starting to come online and, but it's going to create a lot of noise. And so just like me in the PR, you know, story that I gave anyone who's already existing as an entrepreneur or self-employed business owner. you're gonna have all that extra noise of all those new people who've now joined and are competing with you just like the PR companies. And so the more market share you can get for yourself right now, the more you can implement artificial intelligence tools and other tools and optimize yourself and get ahead, the better off you're gonna be because it is gonna get very noisy, very competitive. And unfortunately, there's going to be those who are stumbling around not knowing what they're doing for a minute until they figure out what they're doing. But they may cause that deleterious and sort of negative experience with people. And then you come along and you know what you're doing and you've been doing this for years and you have to deal with that. So, you know, I just think that the more that people get proactive right now who are already in that 10%, the better off.

I mean, I know people who are working white collar corporate office jobs. and are moonlighting on the side as plumbers or electricians. Okay. And some of them don't have the skill set, like, because they're just doing the odd one-off job. It's not like they're in it every single day. Right. Now, what happens when that white collar worker loses that white collar job, that moonlighting position is probably going to be what he or she's going to start doing all the time, but they haven't got the mastery under them yet. So yeah, to your point, uh, that's just going to get exacerbated. Yeah.

That's right. And your reputation as someone who's already been doing it for years and has built up a reputation with customers and it's got those testimonials to back it up and all of that, you know, that's just going to help because, and you're going to need that. Because again, there's going to be so many people who've had a bad experience and now you're having to overcome that. Well, the more good stories you have behind you, the more experience that you can point to, the more you're optimizing your business for efficiencies, using AI, for example, to assist with customer service. And like you do with social media and those sorts of things can free up your time. So you can be more hands on with the things that matter. I mean, those are the kinds of tweaks that now is the time to be learning and implementing those. Not when the rush of the displacement, you know, I think peak displacement of employees that are specifically those who are in office jobs and white collar jobs is going to hit us around 2030. We're sort of in this bell curve. sort of period right now where we're just starting to see it. And I'm seeing stories every day. If you pay attention, you'll start to like really notice it. It can seem like the odd story here, the odd story there, but the number of layoffs is starting to increase, right? The problem with an economy is it's like a big oil tanker. It's like you want to turn it around and it takes forever to turn around. So it can occur to us as, oh, it's not really a big deal. But the thing is it, It starts as a trickle and then it picks up speed and you see more and more and more and more layoffs. That's where I think we'll see peak. The peak impact of AI will probably be around 2030.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Right. I mean, nobody knows. Thing about AI is it constantly proves us wrong in terms of, you know, was it just last year that Google came out and said that the language models are learning way faster than they ever predicted?

Listen, the future of warfare is AI-directed robots. We know that. When does that happen? Who knows? Yeah.

Or, you know, pilotless jets. And, you know, this is already starting, but I'm just saying it's not on mass. You know, we still have a military that's human beings largely driving everything. That flip will happen at some point.

Oh, yeah. It's always that way. Listen, we have the consumer version of AI. Yes. They have like 100x whatever they're doing. We don't even know what that is right now. Yeah.

So in your, your hypothetical, so the employees are giving pushback to the leader about wanting to use AI. Yeah. Well, I think that, um, so we, we actually run a process, um, and there are other versions of this process that are available. Basically it's called design thinking. Uh, you can find different design thinking models out there. Um, and what design thinking does is it allows you to create a context for you and your employees to get together in a creative sort of environment that you set up. And so what I would say in that case for leaders, I would say, you know, huddle your team together, get them together and set aside two or three days and actually plan out a, you can call it a strategic design session or whatever you want, but enroll them in the use of AI. And what are the ways that we could use this? You know, guys, like, let's explore this. Maybe bring in, you know, a local. AI expert or something to demonstrate the different platforms that are available and the things that could be used inside of your business to optimize and increase efficiencies. You know, so there's this, there's this old saying that people adopt what they help create. Okay. So, you know, the best leaders are always those that engage their employees to be part of the creation process. And in this case, the creation process is how do we want to, how do we versus telling them you're going to do this, how do we integrate these AI tools so that we can all perform at a much higher level and enroll them in joining you to learn that together and to create that together. So the reason we have our organization that we call the most important conversations is very strategic. Human beings socially construct reality through conversations. It's in a conversation that you share your worldview and your perception. I share mine and something new emerges between us where we both get, we both see new things. We both experience a new reality, which is sort of the conjoining of both of ours through the conversation. So when you do that in a company and you invite your 10 employees, for example, to participate in a conversation about how might we use AI to create better optimization within our organization and better efficiencies and economies of scale and all of these sorts of things, you're not likely to get resistance. You're likely to get people who are leaning in and who are engaged and curious. And so what I would do in that sort of situation is I'd probably bring in a local AI expert. to show us and demonstrate some of the AI tools that are being used relevant to our industry and what's going on, and then invite the employees to explore and to have conversations about the ways that we can implement this in our business. How might this look? And now you get them really excited because the thing about humans is they don't like being told what to do. But if they get enrolled and are invited to be part of the creative process of what's going to happen, they're all for it. And we've seen this over and over and over again. You know, so there is this leadership model from the industrial age called command and control leadership. And the military still uses a command and control model. It's good for certain environments and certain cultures. But what happened was we kind of. deployed it across every form of human organization and and not every form of human organization thrives in a command and control model and what we're starting to see is that creative collaboration models are producing much higher results than command and control models in many types of businesses and because you just don't need the kind of rigor that you need in say a military environment inside of running a plumbing business. It's just, you know, there's certain things that need to be true and need to be adhered to for regulatory and all of that. But in terms of how you interact with each other, how you come up with ideas, how you find new customers, how you market, how you service the customers, how you talk to the customers, like all of these sorts of things. Those things can be an act of co-creation within your company. And so leadership inside of that type of model is much more of sort of a leading by example and inviting them into a co-creative collaborative space. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's what I would do in that situation is I'd invite my employees to participate in the, okay, guys, we're going to use AI. How should we use it? Let's get a brainstorm going. Let's get some interaction going. Let's bring in an expert to help us think this through and enroll them all in it. And then you won't get that resistance.

The creative collaboration process.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So people, people adopt ideas when they're invited to co-create them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, when we've run design sessions for all types, sizes of different companies, it's remarkable. I mean, sometimes... How our design sessions work is a company will have a very specific problem that they want to address. And then we bring in not just the executive team for three days and lead them through our method, but we'll bring anyone in the company or at least a representative of all the different facets of the company that touch that problem in some way. So in this case, artificial intelligence and the implementation of it is a problem to be solved for a small business. You're going to want everyone in your company who's going to have to touch and interact with AI to be part of that creative design session in terms of solving the problem. How do we integrate artificial intelligence in our business? Because there's something that emerges that we call group genius. And again, it's through the conversation, through a facilitated process. Something emerges when all of our brains get together that's bigger than any one individual brain that's contributing. And you want the insights and the experience of everyone who might be touching AI. So we've had situations where large companies are trying to solve a particular problem and we bring someone from the mail room to participate in our sessions. Now, in a command and control model or approach, you'd be like, well, why is he here? I mean, you know. We just give him directives. But he's here because he has a viewpoint and a perspective that may be that is relevant to the problem. We've deemed it relevant. That's why we invited him. And in many cases, sometimes the people you never think to talk to in your organization hold the linchpin solution to the problem that you. Couldn't figure out.

Yeah. So there's might be someone in your company who's actively working with AI on their own just for fun or whatever. And, and if you don't know that and you're just directing and saying, this is the system we're going to use, and it may not even be the best system to use or the most relevant. And you don't. you don't invite them into the creative process of how do we do this so that our business can succeed, you're missing out. So it's a great example. Yeah.

Oh, one that I'm currently, I read seven or eight at a time. But one, it's an old one, actually, that I think. would benefit your listeners is called the alter ego effect. Oh yeah.

Okay. So there you go. I'm going through it right now because we're using a lot of the, the ideas in there and we're integrating it into some of our leadership development processes. And so you know it well, so that, that one's a great one.

Yeah. Another one that would be probably interesting is it's called recapture the rapture.

Okay. So it's called Jamie wheel. And he's basically articulating the moment in period in time and this period that we find ourself in. And his essential argument is that we're in a moment of time because of the transformation we're going through where humans are seeking new. sources of meaning for their life. And, and he says, we've gone through two different sort of meaning phases. He calls it meaning 1.0, meaning 2.0. And now we're, he says, we're entering into meaning 3.0. And, you know, he said, meaning 1.0 was, you know, where, where we were relying on. um for you know answers to direct our life and who to be in the world we were relying on religion and spirituality and then then we kind of we didn't drop that that's still there but we then shifted our focus and meaning 2.0 to science and and technology and he's saying now we've hit a moment where now science and technology is starting to not be trusted and relied on as much And so there's this gap and it could be a reemergence of spirituality and religion or something else. But he said there's this gap right now where people are really seeking for what gives me meaning, what makes me come alive, what makes me fill myself up in life. And so it's an interesting read. So that's another one that... Only because you've read the alter ego effect. So I thought I'd throw a second.

I would just go to this TMIC, TMICglobal. com. And I'm not sure when this is going to air, but we have a new website that'll be launched within the next three to four weeks. So depending when you go, if it airs before that time, come back in sort of mid-April because it's going to look totally different. But if it's after that, then you should be fine. So TMIC Global, you can also find us. It's the same website, themostimportantconversations. com, but not a lot of people like to type that long domain. So we have TMIC Global as a shortened version of it.

Yeah, it was really a pleasure, Brad, and happy to do it again. I really enjoyed chatting with you.