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The bad news is your business is already dead, AI has killed it, and you need to reinvent it.
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The good news is you've got 12 to 24 months to reinvent your business, and if you do this,
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you won't just survive, you will thrive. You'll have a business that's 10 times bigger
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on the other side of this disruption. Now, if we've not met before, I'm Daniel Priestley. I'm
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an entrepreneur. For the last 20 years, I've been doing startups. I've had seven startups that went
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zero to a million in their first 12 months. Three of them went north of 10 million in valuation.
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I've lived through many disruptive times in the economy,
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from the dot-com crash, to the global financial crisis,
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to Brexit, to the pandemic.
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And I can tell you this AI disruption
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is gonna dwarf all of those.
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I've been sharing three big ideas with my businesses
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and my clients' businesses to get them thinking
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about how to tackle this disruption.
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And I wanna share those three ideas with you now.
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Let's get into it.
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So there are gonna be three mental models
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that we're gonna explore in this video.
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The first mental model is that your current business
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is dead.
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The current business that you have, every decision that you've made about the CRM system that you use, the marketing strategy that you have, the people that you have on the team and the roles that you have employed, all of those decisions are terrible decisions in a post-AI world.
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You need to rethink every single decision from the top down and the bottom up.
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In fact, at a recent team retreat that I held with my team in Portugal, we literally started
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the team retreat with a tombstone that had the company name on it and it said the business is
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dead and we actually held a little bit of a wake and we basically said this is a line in the sand,
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the business as we know it is over and we're using this retreat to rebuild from the ground up and we
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went through that process step by step at that team retreat. So what are some of the decisions
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that you're going to make now that your business is dead? You might want to think right from the
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start? Do you want to stay in this same business? Do you want to stay looking after this same
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audience? Do you want to offer the same sort of thing that you currently offer? So you want to
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start with all of those basic questions. Concept audience offer sales. You may want to ask yourself
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a question about speed to value. So speed to value is a question where you ask the question,
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what are my customers trying to achieve? What is the outcome that they most want? What would be the
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fastest humanly possible way? In fact, forget humanly possible, AI possible way to get them
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the outcome that they want.
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So for example, in dent accelerators,
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we know that our clients are trying
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to reinvent their business.
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They want to become a key person of influence
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in their industry.
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They want to stand out they want to scale up they want to make a bigger dent in the universe So we took those three outcomes We said stand out scale up make a big positive impact in the world And we made a list of 17 different ways to do those things
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And then we said, how would we use AI
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to make sure that those 17 things happen?
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What we discovered is that we could easily build
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an AI portal that allows every single one of our customers
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to get 80% of the work already done for them.
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If they just fill in a little bit of information
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about themselves and their business,
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then these 17 things can almost be 80% done within minutes.
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One of my businesses was called Rethink Press,
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which is a book publishing business.
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And a huge part of that was coaching people
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through the book writing process.
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And it was a hands-on human process.
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What we did is we took all of that intellectual property
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around how we coach people through writing a book,
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and we spun out a new business called bookmagic.ai,
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which is a step-by-step portal that uses AI
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to guide you through the book writing process.
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So those are some real examples
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of how quickly we can innovate
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once we acknowledge that the current business is dead.
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So what have the results been?
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So Rethink Press doing very healthy seven figure revenues
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is continuing its revenues
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because we're getting more customers
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and we've already signed up 400 people
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who pay about $50 a month
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to be on the platform called bookmagic.ai.
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So this thinking of my business is dead,
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what do we do next?
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Is a really powerful way to prepare yourself
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for this AI enabled world.
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So point number two is Atlantis has risen.
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This is a new mindset that I love to work with my team.
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Well, Atlantis is this sunken city
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and it was an advanced civilization apparently in mythology
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and it sunk to the bottom of the ocean
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and it disappeared forever.
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And in mythology, people have said
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that one day it'll rise again.
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So what's this got to do with AI?
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Well, because AI has this new technology
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called agentic technology,
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where AI can literally do things for you
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and AI is like a PhD in your pocket,
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I like to think about this idea
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of what if Atlantis had risen out of the ocean?
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What if we discovered that it's there?
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What if we discovered that there's now
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a billion people living in Atlantis,
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they all have a master's degree or a PhD
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in all sorts of different things,
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and they're willing to work for free.
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How would that impact your business?
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What would you be doing differently?
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When I think about this for my businesses,
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I think to myself, hmm, okay,
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for every client who we take on at Dent,
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wouldn't it be great if we gave them a marketing assistant
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who could actually go through and give them recommendations
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as to how to improve their website?
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Wouldn't it be really cool if we could have
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a PhD level McKinsey consultant who could rewrite their pitch for them Now by thinking about that we actually can automate that through AI We can actually assign agents to our clients We can assign report writers to our clients All of that is totally
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possible. We give people so many reasons that they would want to subscribe to
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ScoreApp and they would never want to cancel that because we're delegating
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Atlanteans onto the business. So in my businesses now we have this term called
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let's delegate an Atlantean onto that. Now if you don't think this way you're
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limited to just doing very simple very basic things for your clients because
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you're limited to an old way of thinking as soon as you start thinking about the
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fact that there's a billion people willing to work for free it opens your
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mind up to all sorts of things that your business could be doing for customers
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that you're not currently doing for your customers the third thing that we need
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to think about is the new moats so a moat is what we use to protect a castle
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if we think about a castle as a very valuable thing and you don't want people
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to invade that you put a moat around it to stop people from invading your castle
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In business, we use a moat to describe something that protects your business and stops people from copying your business or stops people from taking your customers or taking your future success.
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And there used to be a few key moats that worked really, really well.
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So, for example, for a software company, you used to spend a lot of money developing lots and lots of lines of code.
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And it was very, very difficult for someone to compete with you because they had to recreate that code at a very great expense.
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But in a post-AI world, we can just simply ask AI to build something that's very similar and it can do all that coding for you.
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and that makes it very easy for people to copy a software business.
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So some of the biggest moats are going away from traditional business.
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So what are the new moats?
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There are four things that we need to consider.
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The first one is to define a game where you can be in the top 10%.
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So you may not be able to be in the top 10% of being a fitness trainer,
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but you may be able to be in the top 10% at helping men who are over 45
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to run their first marathon.
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You may not be in the top 10% of film production companies,
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but you might be able to be in the top 10% of helping academics to share their expertise on YouTube channels
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So after you've defined the game that you're in the top 10% of you're gonna add these three ingredients ingredient number one is exclusivity
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Exclusivity could be that you've got lots of people who want to work with you
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But you only choose to work with a smaller number the other form of exclusivity is an entry criteria
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So if you think about an exclusive nightclub, it probably has an entry criteria as to how you've got to be dressed
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You could say, I only work with businesses that have
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north of a million of revenue or I only work with people who have achieved X Y and Z in the past The next thing that gonna give you a moat is community Especially linked to exclusivity is where
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not only do I get to work with you,
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but I get to meet some of the people that you know.
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Getting to know some of the other people
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who meet your entry criteria.
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I'm gonna be able to sit around a table and share notes.
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I'm gonna be able to have introductions
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to those types of people.
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So there's gonna be some sort of community
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that I get to join that is a filtered curated community
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that is desirable for me to be part of.
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And the third thing is experience.
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That as a community, we're gonna have some sort of experience.
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We're gonna do something special together.
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Probably something in the real world.
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Maybe we're gonna have dinner together.
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Maybe we're gonna do a high level experience
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that goes along with your service.
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So the three things here is exclusivity,
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experience and community.
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And they kind of form a little bit of a triangle.
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And when you put them together,
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you end up with a good strong moat.
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So at Dent, the core thing that we're the top in the world
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at is producing key people of influence.
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We have been doing that for 15 years.
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We know how to take entrepreneurs
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and to build their personal brands
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and to drive founder-led growth.
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And we're probably not just in the top 10%,
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we're probably in the top one or 01%
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of doing that in the world
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because we've been doing it so long
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and we've got all the frameworks really nailed down.
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We use AI to deliver that result really, really well,
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fast and best in the world.
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We are exclusive as to who we take on.
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We have something like 100 people apply
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for every person who gets through.
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We also deliver an amazing experience.
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So we do things like take people skiing.
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We have something called Ski Person of Influence.
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We're taking 30 of our clients to Necker Island
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to spend a week with Richard Branson.
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We have dinners, we have special get togethers,
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we watch entrepreneur movies together.
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We do all sorts of fun things together as a community.
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So we have the exclusivity, we have the experience
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and we have a community.
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If you apply those key ideas,
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you're not just going to survive the AI disruption,
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you're gonna thrive post AI disruption.
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You're gonna be one of those companies
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that goes from a million to 10 million
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or 10 million to 100 million
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as a result of implementing these ideas around AI.
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Now, if you've enjoyed this video,
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I think you'll actually enjoy a longer conversation
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that I had at Diary of a CEO,
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and we talked about how AI disruption
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is gonna transform everything and everyone.
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Also, in the next couple of weeks,
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I'm gonna be talking about how AI is gonna change
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the way that money flows around the economy,
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and I think you're gonna wanna check that one out as well.
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Like this video, leave me a comment,
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because I love reading the comments,
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and subscribe to the channel so that we can stay in touch
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and I can keep sharing some of these ideas with you.
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I hope your business is doing well
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and I look forward to seeing you soon.