Ditching Best Practices with Keith Ellis (EP 936)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter and faster. Today folks, I am going to do something that I told you we would do from time to time and that is going to step outside of our tech bubble and put on our business owners, business leader hats and think outside the box. And we are going to do that today.

I have joining me, Keith Ellis, also known as the Impossible Success Coach. He is a bestselling author. He is an entrepreneur coach.

He is a founder of the Work Less, Scale Faster Community. And I'm going to stop right there, Keith, and first of all, say welcome to the show. Thank you, Marvin.

Delighted to be here. All right. And then let me continue on with this bio of you.

You have authored something called The Magic Lamp, which is goal setting with people who hate setting goals. Yep. So that's kind of an interesting concept there.

And most of the time, you know, we think that we have to be these leaders and all of this stuff and have these giant dreams. And yet you're coming at it from a little different perspective. Yeah.

When I wrote that book, somewhere I had written or read advice that a great way to write a book, because I hadn't written a book before, is to write something that you would read, that you would want to read. And I was at a stage in my life where I knew I needed to set goals. I'd actually been in the personal development space for years, but I had, for whatever reason, goals just didn't work for me.

They were too constraining, too confining. It killed my spontaneity or whatever. I talked myself into believing.

Anyway, I didn't set goals. I knew I needed to. And I was literally in the shower one day.

And I think we'd just taken the, you get an idea of how long ago this was, just taking the kids to see Aladdin or something in the theaters. And so I was thinking about magic lamps in my mind. And I was thinking, you know, wouldn't it be great if setting goals would like making a wish come true? You know, just rubbing a lamp and you could make something happen.

And it was one of those aha moments. It was like I was struck by lightning. I almost slipped in a bar of soap.

I stepped out of the shower, dripping wet, started writing notes to myself. And I created what then became the lamp model or the lamp system. And it was the idea that setting goals is the same as making your wishes come true.

But you're your own genie. And once you flip that little switch in your brain, what it did for me, so like I said, then I wrote the book for me because I didn't like setting goals. What it did for me is it was the difference between waking up in the morning and saying, okay, today I'm going to work on these goals, as opposed to waking up in the morning and saying today I'm going to make my wishes come true.

And that was so exciting and so energizing for me. So I wrote a book about that as the theme goal setting for people who hate setting goals. And it became very successful.

So, I guess, I guess it does make sense, write a book that you would want to read and see what happens. Yep. There you go.

Now, I know you, you know, had a bunch of leadership experience before that. Were you always a leadership coach or did you start off in sales and, you know, how did that journey for you begin? Started off in sales, worked my way through college selling high end audio equipment, working part time at a salon kind of affair and then going to school. And then I got into the business world and I was an entrepreneur.

I was always with startups. I love the startup mentality, not a not a big company mindset. It's just it's one of those things I don't feel very comfortable there.

Ironically, over time, I had some success with various startups. And the last one I worked for, besides my own, the last one I worked for was an e-learning company called Lynda.com that was very successful and they hired me to do a to bring in a new market segment for them. And we were so successful that we got bought by LinkedIn.

And I didn't want to be part of a big company. I was ready to leave and they made me this great offer and I said, OK, I'll stay around for a couple of years, see what happens. So I did saw what it was like in a big company.

I was ready to leave again. And then LinkedIn was bought by Microsoft. And it was like, OK, don't really want to be here, but it would be kind of be cool to see what it's like in the belly of the beast.

Right, right. At the time, Microsoft had the highest valuation of any company in the planet. So really, I'm an entrepreneur at heart.

All of my experience, except for the last couple of years, was with small companies. But the big companies really sort of rounded that out and gave me a chance to understand how those people think as opposed to sort of my peeps in the entrepreneurial community. So then I left that and decided, OK, it's time I take what I've learned over all these experiences of my own and share it with other entrepreneurs.

So that's how I created my own practice. All right. And as you may know, we talked earlier to kind of prep for this.

And, you know, in our space, a lot of us as IT business owners, MSP business owners, we come out of that entrepreneurial, you know, but it's more from a technician side and we try to turn into entrepreneurs because we want to take what we've learned in tech and make it work as a business. So it's one of the reasons I like the idea of having you on the show to kind of give us that perspective, because a lot of us, we're good techs, maybe not good business owners. Well, you know, it's that's actually an advantage.

It doesn't sound like it kind of the way you phrase that, but you bring some real value to the to the table you probably have if you've spun out of some other part of the ecosystem and decided to create your own business, you probably have some customers who love you. You probably have some people, maybe the people you work for before, who couldn't stand the idea that you were leaving. And so, you know, they sort of you rent yourself back to them and they're your first customers. 

But the point is, you actually have some revenue from prior relationships and from the value you created in those relationships. And that's a great start. Now, you'd have to turn that into a business.

Granted, it's a different mindset than coding or managing professional services, but it's a great place to be. It's a whole lot better than starting a business and having no, no, nobody to talk to, you know, for your first customers or no value that you've already created in the marketplace. So it's not a perfect position, but it's not a bad position.

All right. OK, before we get into the, you know, the meat of our talk here, I want to ask a question about the impossible goal. Can you kind of give us an idea of maybe an example of what an impossible goal is that either you did or one of your people that you worked with did so we kind of get a baseline understanding? Yeah, absolutely.

So first, first, let me make it clear what I'm talking about by impossible goal. When I say impossible, I mean something that you believe is impossible for you. You believe you are not capable of this.

I'm not talking about violating the laws of the physical universe, traveling faster than the speed of light or being in two places at the same time or the Browns winning the Super Bowl. I'm not I'm not talking about that. Those things are physically impossible as we understand physics.

My wife would so hate you for that Browns comment. No offense to Cleveland. OK, love the town and the people.

But there are some things that, you know, that's out of our purview. What I'm talking about is what is impossible right here, right between your ears. You define it for yourself.

You have some beliefs, some experiences, and you operate accordingly. You may not even be aware of these beliefs. Psychologists talk about limiting beliefs, and we all have an idea of what that means.

But we may not have an idea of what all of our limiting beliefs are. I remember when I was a kid, I struck out my sixth grade. I struck out on a batting tee.

OK, now that's a little embarrassing to do in front of a class of your peers. But I was I had no hand eye coordination. You know, my body was growing faster than my coordination was.

So the limiting belief I took from that was that I couldn't play baseball, couldn't hit a baseball, right? Years later, in high school, I'm in gym class and we're playing baseball. It's like, OK, Keith, you're up, batter up. I was like, oh, God, I don't want to go through this again.

And I got up to the plate and I knocked the ball over the fence. And it was like, how did that happen? What had happened is my body, my reality had surpassed my limiting belief. But nobody phoned home to tell me that.

Right. I still had the limiting belief. I was not going to step in that batter's box unless somebody kind of forced me to do it, which is what the coach did.

So in the in the real world, we have these same kinds of things. So a classic example of this is you're a business person. You want to grow your business.

You'd love to grow your business by 20 percent or 30 percent or something like that. Right. But you're working really hard.

You don't know how you can work 20 percent or 30 percent harder than you do. But you really want to do this. Right. 

Well, I come along and I say, OK, that's great. 20 percent, 30 percent. That's incremental progress.

What about 300 percent? Would you like to do that, grow your profit by 300 percent? And of course, everybody says yes. Who would say no to that? But then they start giving you all these reasons why that couldn't happen. Right. 

And because they know they can't work 300 percent harder. They know they can't work 300 percent more hours. So it's an impossible goal for them.

And what I do is I say, here's what you need to do. You need to commit to something that you believe is impossible for you. But you need to commit to it because you want it so badly.

And then once you commit to it, your brain changes, it flips a switch. It's really it's like magic. And it's hard to describe unless you've gone through this process, this process.

But what your brain does is before it would never even entertain this because you kept believing it was impossible. I wouldn't entertain stepping into the batter's box because I knew I would screw it up, make a fool of myself. But once you commit to something, once you say, OK, I'm in this, I'm going to do this, even though I believe I can't do it, I'm going to do it.

Your brain says, oh, this guy is serious. We got to get with the program. Let's figure this out.

So your brain starts figuring out how you can make the impossible happen. And it's like, wow, where did that come from? It came from in here because you did what I call an end run around a limiting belief. I don't think you talk yourself out of limiting beliefs.

I don't think you try to convince yourself they aren't limiting, that you really don't have these beliefs, that the that the impossible is actually possible. I don't I don't fool around with any of that. That's just a disaster waiting to happen.

What I do is do a complete end run. And I say, yeah, admit it. It's impossible. 

You can't do it. Now, commit to it anyway. And you go, oh, OK, and then your brain gets with the program.

It's really remarkable. So you're talking more of mindset plus discipline or. Yeah, so I would call it commitment.

Discipline is a component of commitment. Absolutely. OK, but commitment is I want this so much I'm going to commit to it.

I have I don't have the means to do it. I don't have the capabilities to do it. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I want it.

I want it so much that I'm willing to commit to it. And then you essentially call your brain's bluff. You essentially say, OK, whatever, whatever is holding you back, I get it.

I'm not trying to talk you out of that. I'm just saying you're now committed to it. Let's make it happen.

And your brain will join the program once you commit to it. If you don't commit to it, if you waffle, if you say, yeah, maybe, you know, I'd kind of like that, but I don't know, your brain is not going to do anything. It's just going to keep doing what you've always done.

But if you if you commit, then your brain starts trying to figure out how to make this happen. One part of that is typically going to be some new disciplines. I don't want to just say discipline.

I want to say disciplines around some new habits, because what the impossible really means, this is the subtext here, Marv, and it's important. What impossible really means is that what got you this far in life is not going to get you to this next level. It can't. 

What got you to growing your business 20 or 30 percent a year can't grow your business 300 percent. It can't because there isn't enough hours in the day. There aren't enough hours in the day.

You don't have enough time to do it or energy to do it. So you have to do something different. The way I've heard it described by a couple of people, and I love this phrase actually comes out of the Bible, what got you out of Egypt is not going to get you to the promised land.

That's the mindset of impossible. Once you recognize that, once you realize, OK, I want this, I'm committed to this. Don't know how it's going to happen, but I'm committed to it.

You accept the idea, the premise. I have to do things differently. I have to come up with some different things.

And then I have to be disciplined around those new things. All right, so you've talked about scale, and that's something that our community understands. We are taught by our marketing and our MSP coaches, you know, that we need to scale.

But I want to ask you about the concept of quantity, because what we're being told is everything right now is all about 10 X, 10 X your business. And, you know, forget just trying to grow 20 to 30 percent. We want to 10 X it and they make it sound as though it's easy.

How do you deal with that, because that right now is the big frame, you know, 10 X everything. So I'm going to you and I talked about this earlier, I have declared war on conventional wisdom. And one of the things that conventional wisdom tells you is something called best practices.

Best practices is, you know, OK, folks, we're going to do best practices to accomplish this, that and the other. And what the people who are telling you this don't seem to understand is, is that if everybody's doing best practices, if this is the thing, the trend, then they aren't best practices anymore. They're average practices.

They're what everybody does, which means they're going to produce average results. If you want extraordinary results, you have to do something extraordinary. Now, this 10 X thing has become kind of a cliche.

It's become a best practice. When I was in the large companies I mentioned earlier in the intro, that was the thing they would assign you this or you assign your team this project or this piece of revenue they wanted you to knock off. And then they'd say, and we want you to 10 X that.

They never told you how, they never told you what that meant, they never told you anything about it. It was a cliche. It was a best practice.

It was empty. But it's not empty. It really can be a great way to illustrate impossible goals.

And if you bear with me for a second, let me just illustrate. So we talk about growing a business 20 percent, 30 percent a year, whatever it is. Right. 

Think about how many ways you can do that, what you could do to grow your business 20 percent, 30 percent. You could make a few more calls. You could network a little bit better.

You could hire some marketing help. You could improve your sales pitch, maybe hire some salespeople. You could get more revenue from your existing customers, all kinds of things, literally hundreds of things you can do to make incremental progress.

It's all good. But those things are details and they are essentially if you go back to another cliche, but it also is based on something that is very accurate. The 80-20 rule, you know, 80 percent of your activity produces 20 percent of your results, 20 percent of your activity produces 80 percent of your results.

That's not BS. That actually happens. But people don't think it through clearly to really get the meat of that.

What we're doing with our typical workday when we're trying to grow the business 20 to 30 percent is we're getting lost in the 80 percent. We're spending our time doing 80 percent of the things that will give us this little tiny return. What we need to do is switch our focus.

And the people who preach 80-20 never tell you how to switch your focus. It's always about the data from the past. Right. 

Well, if you know those activities produce this result, so we will we'll do more of those activities and they're missing the point. What you want to do is look to the future and the 80-20 rule doesn't tell you how to do that. But here's something that does committing to an impossible goal.

So if you commit to an impossible goal, let's say the goal is 10x instead of 20 to 30 percent. Let's take your example of 10x, whatever that is. But let's say your revenue is one hundred thousand dollars.

You want it to be a million dollars. OK, 10x. That's your goal.

Chances are you think that's impossible. You'd like to have it, but you think it's impossible. And that's exactly where we want you to be, because once you commit to something you believe is impossible, then your brain does what we were talking about earlier.

Your brain says, OK, let's figure out how to make this happen. Let's figure out what we need to do. It stops telling us, wasting its cognitive resources, giving you all the reasons you can't do this, why you can't grow this fast.

And it starts getting with the program and coming up with ideas and resources. And here's what it comes down to. If there are dozens, maybe hundreds of ways you can grow your business by 20 or 30 percent, then there's maybe one way, maybe two ways you could grow it by a thousand percent, which is what 10x is.

And that's the beauty of this, because you then focus on the one or two things you can do instead of wasting your time with the hundreds of things that you, you know, bouncing around trying to figure out what to do and which are sucking up all of your day. And you focus on the one or two things you can do. And suddenly the magic starts happening because you realize, wait a minute.

Yeah, that's a leap for me. I've never done that before. I'm not even comfortable doing this new thing, whatever this new thing is.

But that can actually get me to where I want to go. So now you start, you've changed the problem. You've redefined it. 

You're not saying it's impossible. You're saying, oh, it is possible. I just have to make a couple of adjustments in me.

And this is back to the, you know, what got you out of Egypt is not going to get you the promised land. You what got you here isn't going to get you there. You have to make some changes in your thinking patterns.

This is what you were talking about earlier. And then in the behavior that flows from your thinking patterns. All right, Keith, we got a lot to digest there because you hit on several different things, some of which are going to be sensitive topics to the tech industry.

Because the best practices comment, that's what we have certainly been told in our industry is that you want to run your business according to best practices. Now. You also talked about the 80-20 rule, and I know that I'm going to go backwards and then reach back here.

So in the 80-20 rule, we've heard of that and we've kind of gotten around that by reading Mike Michalowicz's book, The Pumpkin Plan, where we, you know, we know that the bulk of our revenue comes from, you know, a small percentage of our clients. And then how can we replicate those clients and get rid of the low profit ones? First of all, are you familiar with that book concept and does it apply here? All right, but I like it already. OK, so, yeah, he talks about, you know, you take your best client and what is it that makes them your best client and you basically, you know, strip away all of that so that you only deal with best clients.

The idea being that, you know, when you look at those county fairs and they have those competitions with, you know, the largest pumpkin and stuff. Well, in a lot of cases, the largest pumpkin wins because it's sacrifices all the other pumpkins on the vine. So.

That's a great metaphor. And if I if you don't mind, just unpack that thought for me. I haven't read the book, but the simple phrase deal only with the big pumpkins changes dramatically how somebody does business typically, because most especially people who are relatively small and trying to grow 20 percent, 30 percent, they'll essentially take whatever opportunities come their way.

Right. Oh, yeah. They'll because they got to pay the bills.

I get that. And so what they'll do is devote their time to these 20 to 30 percent growth opportunities rather than having the courage, stupidity, call it what you want to focus only on the big pumpkins. There's a joke I heard years ago that I always comes to mind when I think about something like this, there's this guy that's hanging by his fingernails from the side of a mountain and he's just begging God to save him.

He's begged, please, God, please help me. So finally, this voice comes from above. And his voice says, I will save the just let go and trust God.

So the guy hanging from the mountain thinks about it for a second and he says, is there anybody else up there? And that's what it feels like sometimes when you take one of these bold leaps, you commit to the impossible. Even though you don't know how it's going to happen, you commit to the big pumpkins, even though you don't know how it's going to happen. I mean, it's really easy to say, OK, I only want these, you know, these big profitable customers that I really love to work with.

That's great. Where do you get them? How do you find them? Now, suddenly you're thinking differently than you've been thinking, which is I'll take this, I'll take this, I'll take this little piece here. I'll take this little piece here.

Maybe I'll try this over here, which is where you get buried by the 80 percent. So like I said, haven't read the book, love it already. So now let me go back to the phrase that I think listeners will gravitate to most, and that is the idea of best practice in your space.

How did you come across the best practice phrase and why did you use that as the one to pick on? So this gets back to I told you that I came out of an entrepreneurial environment and got into the larger companies that I was with for a while, total of, I guess, five years, and they were all about 10x, which was meaningless the way they tried to apply it, and they were all about best practices. So they'd say, OK, we're going to we're going to do training, you know, for this new thing because they were big into training. We're going to do some training and it's all going to be on best practices.

And you go through the training and it's what you've been reading in whatever you've been reading. It's what everybody else is doing. It's what everybody else is training on.

It's what all the other big companies are doing and training on. In other words, they aren't best practices. They're average practices.

Somebody has just put the word best in front of them. And that that's not enough. It has to be more than that.

It has to actually be something that in my mind, best practices distinguishes you from people who were doing the other practices. So the way I, you know, you don't push real hard up above you when you're in a multibillion dollar company. What you do is you figure out how to make it work inside your little world that you control.

And what I did was I just kind of looked at best practices and said, OK, how do we do something different? Because the only way we're going to succeed in our little world is to do something different than what everybody else is doing. So I took aim at best practices. And that's what came up in my sales meetings.

That's what I talked to about my team. I said, you know, you know, don't talk to me about best practices. Talk to me about practices that are different, that will help us stand out with our customers, help us offer them more value and not incidentally make more sales. 

Right. So I'm going to go off book here and go with the concept of this makes me think of McDonald's as an organization where when, you know, they were on the up and up, you know, everybody wanted to be like McDonald's. McDonald's had a system.

And as a franchise, every McDonald's did the same thing in their in their way. It was their best practice. They had their SOPs.

They had the way that, you know, everybody cooked a hamburger the exact same way. Everybody kicked a quarter pound of cheese the exact same way. The registers were all run the exact same way.

And I guess to some degree that kind of was my first understanding of technically, you know, best practice. And then everybody tried to duplicate it with systems and stuff like that. Do you think that's part of where we are running into this issue where we're all trying to standardize? We're all trying to create systems.

And in a lot of ways, those systems basically make us just like everybody else, because essentially we're all going to use the same type of system, even if it's not the same. Well, so I would agree. Generally, OK, you said everything made sense to me.

It's an interesting example about McDonald's, because when you think of McDonald's, what you think of is you go into one McDonald's and you expect a certain level of service and food. You go into another McDonald's in another country or 3000 miles away and you expect the same thing. So their best practice is consistency.

That's what they're selling to their customers. It's very, very hard to have that level of consistency across cultures, across countries. It's very hard to imitate what McDonald's did there.

So their best practice differentiated them from others. Right. So what and this is where I think we get into trouble with best practices.

We think that we're taking what McDonald's did and then we apply it to our business and we completely miss what McDonald's did. Right. Which was essentially crush all the creativity out of their business enterprise in favor of consistency.

They were selling consistency. They weren't selling quality of food. They weren't selling anything but consistency.

And if that's your value proposition, it makes sense. But if your value proposition is something else, you don't want to imitate that practice. You certainly don't want to call it a best practice for you.

It's almost. It's an example of something that is a differentiator from McDonald's. So it they made it very hard for anybody else to do it, which means it's not really a best practice, it's a differentiator.

What I'm what I'm preaching is find that differentiator for you. The unless for some reason you think your customers more than anything, want consistency. They want you to sound a certain way and your employees to sound a certain way and all your projects to come out a certain way.

Or if they're looking for something else like something innovative, something that helps them differentiate themselves in their marketplace, then they don't want consistency. They want creativity. They want ingenuity.

They want next level thinking. So you should focus on that rather than this myth of best practices. I mean, that's the world, according to Keith anyway.

All right. So let me kind of shift gears here, and I don't want to spend too much time on that. I do want to come back to that and I will let the listeners know that Keith will be joining us on an upcoming live show.

So a lot of the concepts here that we're talking about, we're going to give you the opportunity to, you know, join us and ask the questions that you think I'm going to ask. But we don't have time to today, especially when it comes to best practices in our industry and stuff. But let me ask you about the work less, scale faster philosophy, because, again, that's something in our tech space with the addition of automation and scripting and now a I. We are definitely looking to, you know, work less, automate as much as we can so that we can scale faster.

But let me ask you your concept of the work less, scale faster philosophy. Well, that what you just talked about was certainly a component of the idea of using technologies where appropriate. But in the in the larger sense, what I'm talking about is for most I don't have data on this.

This is simply an opinion. But my guess is that for most small businesses, most entrepreneurial businesses say under ten million dollars, maybe even higher than that, their focus. I mean, for the most part, their focus is on getting the next bills paid, getting the next paycheck.

They're kind of in a how do I say this? They're kind of in a survival mode, even if they're successful. They're worried about that. And really what we're talking about is how to again, sounds a little sounds like I'm declaring war on conventional wisdom.

How do you break out of this success prison? Because where a lot of entrepreneurs find themselves is they are successful. They've got bills paid. They've got payroll covered.

They're making money and they're working for themselves, which is wonderful. But they started their own company to have some freedom in their lives, but they don't have any freedom because they're always working. They are the product, especially in consultancies.

If you're a you know, if you're managed service provider and you've got a team of people and you're managing the team, OK, that's one thing. If you are the team or maybe you and another couple of people are the team, it's really hard to scale that. So you look to technologies and technologies can indeed help.

But the real trick is, how do you take first? First off, what are you offering your customers? That's where everything starts. And it better be what they need, right? What is it they need? That's really the first question you ask yourself. And then how do you provide it? And then once you've figured that out, how can you scale that so you have more customers and you're and they're happier and stuff like that? One key piece of that.

So that's sort of the general answer. Here's the more specific answer. One key piece of that is what I call who scaling.

You find people who can help you. Most people, when they try to solve a problem like how do I grow my business, 10x, right? They ask it like that. How? That's the wrong question.

They should be asking who can help me grow my business. There's a great book by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan called Who Not How. And it's about this idea of switching your mindset, asking a different question when it comes to problem solving.

And it is absolutely empowering. It is absolutely liberating, because think about this. When I said my definition of an impossible goal, I said an impossible goal is what you believe you're incapable of.

It's something you can't achieve, right? So if you if you then say, well, how can I achieve this impossible thing? Well, that's one way of approaching it. But it's not the most powerful way. The most powerful way is who can help me achieve that.

And the reason that's powerful is if the way if the problem with an impossible goal is it's beyond your capability. What if you could add the capabilities of someone else? Changes the game, changes the whole equation. If you need capability X, Y and Z and this person over here has one and this person over here has another person.

You bring those people into your orbit, to your enterprise. You can contract with them. You can hire them.

You can have a strategic partnership with them to if you're trying to get additional clients, that kind of thing. But what you do is you solve your problem with who not with how. And once you start thinking that once you switch that switch, there is no limit to what you can do.

Because there are eight billion people in the world, which means there are all these different capabilities. And whatever you think you need to bring into your world to achieve your goals, there's somebody who can help you do it. Guaranteed.

And what I preach is who's scaling, which is instead of thinking about, you know, how much equipment do I need? How much capital I need, blah, blah, blah. All these things have to grow. The first thing you think about is who can help me do it.

And start growing that and who's scaling it. And by the way, nowadays, with the advent of modern AI, because AI has been around for a long time, but I mean, the stuff that's going on right now and the general purpose LLMs and GPTs. With that, it's a legitimate question to say or to ask which technology can become a who for me.

Because sometimes you're not looking for a who. Sometimes you're looking for and it. Sometimes you say, I need to acquire this capability.

A person can do that, but perhaps a new technology can do that. So that's part of the who scaling discussion. OK, I was going to ask, because every time you said who, I'm thinking, well, you can't do who if you're bringing in an AI agent, although they are making AI agents to mimic real people.

So I guess I could. And I mean, I've done this in my business. I wanted to do a newsletter and I started figuring out how much it would cost to.

I want to do something that hadn't been done before that would bring in lots of creative, innovative, anti, you know, conventional thinking people into a short space each week and share that with people and do it in a way that that would involve a fair amount of hands on editing and stuff like that. And then I found an AI company that did all this for me, did it better than I could do it, did it more quickly and way more cheaply. So I didn't hire a team. 

I hired an IT. And I have there other examples of this, too, that I've used. So it's a very valuable way of looking at the world to think of who not how, but you could also say it not who.

Maybe I should write that book. Maybe that's the ultimate AI book, right? Yeah. You heard it here, folks.

It not who buy it on Amazon tomorrow. Once you once you start thinking that way, you also realize for the folks in your space, that's potentially a terrific value add. They can sell their customers, right? Oh, yeah, because they're selling them additional capabilities.

Of an it, but they're managing this whole thing, they're not just saying, oh, you know, check out a I can help, which is where a lot of people are right now. They don't know where to start because there's just this avalanche of new technologies. But your folks can say, OK, here's a very specific thing you want to accomplish.

Here's exactly how we'll do it in a way that nobody else can do it. And it'll be faster and cheaper and better all this other stuff. So it's a that's a huge potential opportunity for your folks.

Well, we will have to dig into that. Fortunately, we don't have time today. I started thinking of some things that I could ask you that would apply specifically to our tech space.

But I want to save some of that for the live show. Let me ask you this, because for people that may hear this and think, OK, let me check out Keith before this live show comes up. Where can people go to kind of get a first glimpse beyond this podcast so that they my URL is KeithEllis.com. That's easy.

I think you can probably see it up in the corner of the screen. It might be scaled out. But I have something that I just created.

Speaking of AI, it's really simple. It's a little question engine. I call it the magic questions goldmine, because it's something you can ask.

Any business problem you have, you can say, how do I solve this business problem? And click a button and it'll come back with ten questions. And I call magic questions. They're phrased in a certain way and they're questions you ask yourself.

These aren't questions you ask your customers or providers. This is what you ask yourself. And they contribute to solving this problem that you just described to this little engine.

And it's I don't want to make it sound more highfalutin than it is. It's really simple. It's uses, obviously, an LLM on the back end to come up with this stuff.

But it's phrased around the way I approach questions, and people can get that by going to magic questions dot com. You just fill in your name and a couple of pieces about your company and ask your question and it'll send you an email with ten magic questions in it. Now, are these designed just for anybody or designed for entrepreneurs? I mean, who is this targeted to? So I designed it for entrepreneurs.

OK, but its general purpose. In other words, if you give it a problem, you can doesn't have to be a business problem, it can be a personal problem. But the instructions, the prompts to the GPT are, you know, using your expertise in the business world.

How would you, you know, source? How would you come up with some questions that are useful? Because here's the thing about a AI that I find fascinating. One of the many things the human brain is way more powerful than AI. AI can do some things way faster and way better than people can.

But the most powerful AI in the planet can't tell you what your favorite ice cream is, right? It can't tell you what you want to accomplish in your life. It can't tell you what kind of impact you want to have in your life. The questions that really matter to us as human beings.

I can't do a thing about, but I can come up with the questions, which I think is just a delicious irony. It can't answer the damn things, but it can come up with them. It can say, OK, why don't you ask yourself this? So what this little tool is that I've created at MagicQuestions.com and I call the tool Magic MagicQuestions Goldmine, which is what you'll see when you go to the website.

What this does is it just gives you some questions sourced by AI. That you can ask yourself. It can't answer them, but it can give you questions.

And I just think that's the coolest thing. All right. So I will have the links for those in the show notes votes.

Hopefully some of you will do those before we do the live show and maybe we can talk about in the chat. But I'm going to go ahead and end this off now. As I said, we're going to have Keith back for a live show here and we will dig in to more of his.

I'm going to call it war on best practices. I know you said war on conventional thinking and then anti best practices, but war on best practices sounds for some reason better in my head. Work works for me. 

Totally. All right, Keith, thank you very much for joining me. Look forward to our next show.

And again, folks, Keith is known as the impossible success coach. He is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, coach and founder of the work less scale faster community. We will be digging into that a little bit more on the next time.

Thank you, Keith, for coming on. And thank you all for listening, downloading and subscribing. Find us in your favorite pod catcher and be on the lookout for our live show coming up.

That's going to do it. We'll see you soon. Thanks, Mark. 

Allah.