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Overview
This one’s back from the vault. AI tools keep piling up, so the question John Jantsch and Ryan Levesque take on here matters more now than when it first aired. Where should AI save you time, and where does a personal touch let you charge more?
Levesque runs AI every day inside his own company. He explains how he decides what gets automated (the back office comes first) and what he won’t hand off. He and Jantsch also get into why work that doesn’t scale can set you apart and how letting customers see your process supports higher prices. Levesque also shares a 30-second morning habit that shapes the rest of his day.
Running a consultancy, an agency or a growing business? You’ll walk away with ideas you can test this week.
Guest Bio
Ryan Levesque has built and exited 2 companies with a combined value of more than $100 million, and he’s made the Inc. 5000 list 7 times as CEO. He wrote Ask, a No. 1 national bestseller and Inc.’s marketing book of the year, and he founded the ASK Method. His latest book is Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything. In it he argues that the things our bodies and spirits are hungry for are the same things customers will pay a premium for.
Key Takeaways
- Point AI at the back office first, the work that sits furthest from your customer. The email sequences and social posts that make your first impression need a human voice.
- Choose a few moments that won’t scale and handle them yourself. A voice memo to every new customer or a handwritten note to every new client shows a kind of care software can’t fake.
- Show your work. Let customers see how things get made and who makes them. The story behind the work is part of what they pay for.
- Make something before you scroll. Use the first minutes of your day, while your head is clear, to write or build before email and social media pull you in.
- Publish your own thinking on a schedule. For nearly 2.5 years Levesque has sent a weekly email, often 2,000 to 4,000 words long. He credits it with bringing in more opportunity than anything else he’s done in 20 years of business.
Great Moments
- [04:19] Having a website used to set a business apart. Now, Levesque says, people are surprised when they reach a live human on a customer service call.
- [05:27] Two photos of his sons taken 7 years apart, a $70 million deal that collapsed at the last minute, and a summer spent living in a tent on a Vermont farm.
- [09:45] His “touch earth before touching a screen” routine: walk outside barefoot, put your feet on bare ground and take one deep breath.
- [12:57] The morning he read an email sent under his name, hated it and slammed his laptop shut. That led to “The Embarrassing Confession” and his comparison of freshly squeezed orange juice to the canned kind.
- [16:39] A painting bought for about $10,000 sold for $450 million after it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Levesque ties that story to Steinway’s documentary and to the time-lapse video he made of hand-illustrating his book.
Memorable Quotes
- What doesn’t scale for you also will not scale for your competitor. And therein lies the competitive advantage. Doing the things that your competitor will not be willing to do.” – Ryan Levesque
- “It’s not about being anti AI or being pro AI, it’s about finding the right places to put AI into your business.” – Ryan Levesque
- “What the world is craving is what I describe as the freshly squeezed version of orange juice that you get at Sunday brunch in a world where everybody else is serving the watered-down stuff that comes in a can.” – Ryan Levesque
- “When you combine those two simple practices, touch earth before you touch screen, and create before you consume, it’ll shift your day, which will shift your week, which will shift your month, which will shift your year.” – Ryan Levesque
- “For those of us who are knowledge workers, for those of us who spend time in front of a computer, we have to find an outlet that reconnects us to our body, that reconnects us to the analog, that reconnects us to the physical world.” – Ryan Levesque
