[00:00:00] Speaker A: Let me tell you, the business owners who will win in the next five years are not the ones who necessarily adopted fast, but they're the ones who adopted on purpose.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: You weren't born to sit in traffic, work for approval, or wait for Fridays. You were built to be free.
Welcome to Rich and Remote, the show for the ones who dare to do life differently. Here we talk about building businesses that give you choices where you work, how you live and what you create.
This is for the entrepreneurs who crave freedom, financial freedom, location freedom, and freedom from everyone else's expectations. If you're ready to design a life on your own terms, you're in the right place.
Rich and Remote Hosted by Alex and Carla Booth.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hey, quick one for anyone still doing $15 an hour work when you should be doing $10,000 an hour thinking if you've ever tried hiring a virtual assistant and ended up with someone you had to train from scratch, I want you to check out the Hire an AI VA playbook which you can
[email protected] It's a $17 toolkit that shows you exactly how to find, vet and hire an AI savvy virtual assistant. Someone who already knows how to use ChatGPT and Claude properly so they can actually take work off your plate in as early as three hours and not in three months. It has betting checklists, masterclasses, job post templates, prompts and even done for you. AI Skill Skills Test will even guide you through the interview process so you'll truly have everything you need to land a proper AI enabled virtual assistant who can finally take these tedious everyday tasks off your plate. Link is in the show notes so go grab it and do yourself a favor. Once again, it's hire an aiva.com you deserve high quality support and you deserve an AI savvy virtual assistant. Go check out hireanaiva.com right now there's a business owner watching this video or listening to this podcast thinking that they might be doing AI wrong because they feel a little bit behind compared to maybe what their friends are sharing on Facebook or Instagram. This new workflow, this new automation, this new agent, this new tool, right? And on the other side of the table there might be some business owners who feel like they are doing AI so well because now ChatGPT writes their emails. But let me tell you, it's really not belonging on either side of the spectrum that's important for me. We have to remember that we are here to do business and the purpose of a business is to make profits to make money to invest something like time and effort and money and labor, and then turn it into value.
And because it turned into value, then we get paid for it. Honestly, that is the main point of business. You guys already know that the purpose of business is to make a profit. If it doesn't make profit, if it doesn't make money, then it is just a hobby, not a business. I am recording this episode because I really feel that I wanted to share with you how my team has grown throughout the years with AI and how we have approached AI. So in this episode, I will not be sharing with you what we're doing, what. What workflows we're doing, what tools we're using. Instead, I will share something that will really contribute to your hashtag rich and remote life by showing you the mindset shifts that we have done in our business that led us to grow at least 30% each year since AI has rolled out. And let me tell you, we haven't even gotten full force with AI yet. We haven't gotten back into turning on ads, although that's coming very soon. But we have done very well. We've done multiple seven figures throughout the past few years. And I'm very proud of the team that we have built, and I'm very proud of the companies that we have served. And our clients are also getting bigger and bigger. They're getting better and better.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: And.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: And yes, it was on all success, obviously, but I noticed that my business have gained a lot in terms of personal motivation. And of course, it also all reflected on the books. So I'm really, really excited to share these with you. And these are just mindset shifts that I want you guys to have as you grow your own business. And for me, these are the mindset shifts about AI, and these are the approaches towards AI that I was able to do and that I was able to deploy in my business.
And for some reason, it just all worked out. I hope you learned a thing or two. By the way, if you like this episode, I would love if you can drop a. Like drop a subscribe or a follow. And of course, if you feel like there's someone in your mind that could really make good use of this information or this information could really help them grow their business or live a hashtag rich and remote life, I would love if you can share this with them too. All right, so first mindset shift is hire for the brain and not the resume. This is one thing I always keep repeating to literally everyone I meet who asks me about how hiring has changed Since AI came on. So the most important things are really screening for critical thinking and abstract research reasoning. Now, you may or may not test for AI fluency. It differs from business to business how AI fluent you need this person to be. But let me tell you, most of the AI tools that we have right now, whatever you're using, you can learn everything in one afternoon. Well, maybe not everything, but most things. And if you don't know what it is, then you can figure it out because you can talk to AI and just ask it about the next step. That's the best thing with artificial intelligence. It has its own intelligence. And let me tell you, sometimes it's even more advanced than some of the intelligence that I encounter human wise. Right? So two tasks that I want you to think about. One, critical thinking. You can form or build this test by using any form fill or Google form or even any AI tool. You can just build this on your own or you can use a testing platform such as test or gorilla. Critical thinking is very important because it shows you which people are actually naturally smart and can think critically. You're now hiring for a particular judgment for a particular thought process. And really that's what's important in the age of AI. You need smart people who know how to use AI instead of people who may know how to use AI, but they're not as smart and they're not very good problem solvers. You need someone who can be nimble and someone who can think, think fast and think critically, and has high standards on their own. Number two thing that you need to test for is abstract reasoning. So obviously you can Google the meaning of that word. But simply put, abstract reasoning is the ability to solve problems or to reason out for problems that you've never seen or encountered before. So if you are one of those people who had to take a pretty difficult entrance test you in, maybe a particular exclusive high school or a job that requires one of those tests that make you read patterns. I think you've seen some of them, that is abstract reasoning. If someone scores high on abstract reasoning, it means that they have the ability to solve problems that they haven't encountered before and they have a way to think out of the box. And they are also primed for AI adoption or for any type of tool adoption. One of my favorite stories to tell about this is when my dad was in his mid-40s, he was trying to learn WordPress and he was asking for my help and I was busy that time and honestly, I regret it. I was not being a very nice Daughter. But I said, dad, you can figure it out. You have two engineering degrees. You can figure it out. My dad felt a little bad that I was like telling him to just learn it on his own instead of helping him. But let me tell you, it didn't take him more than a week and he had already been building websites, so he asked me to help him build a WordPress site and he was able to figure it out on his own. Why? It's because even though he hasn't used WordPress before, he had really good critical thinking and abstract reasoning. My dad was a very, very smart person. Like I said, he had two engineering degrees and had no doubt that he would be able to figure it out on his own. RIP Dad, I hope you're smiling down from heaven. So AI fluency isn't technically like a skill list or just like a badge in the resume. It is a way of thinking that you screen for. So this is how we deploy AI fluid hires in our team and AI fluent hires for our clients as well. We have a ton of big and small businesses that we are serving right now that have a firm requirement for AI fluent talent, and this is how we do it. And by the way, speaking of hiring AI fluent talent, if you want to learn our process, check out hire an aiva.com if you want to learn our lessons, the tests that we do, some templates, and even a guide on how to interview people. You will learn it there. It's just $17. I tell you, it is such a deal. If you want to DIY and do it all by yourself, definitely grab that guide and masterclass and you'll have everything that you need. And of course, if you don't want to do it all on your own, we're here to help as well. I will drop our calendar link and we would love to have a chat with you and help you hire amazing AI fluent management and marketing talent for your company. All right, so point number two, one big AI shift of mindset that I was able to do with my team and that I really love is having that big AI conversation out loud with your team. We talked about mindsets, we talked about transparency, we talked about realigned productivity expectations. Basically, I was telling them that as a boss and as their leader, I am expecting them to produce more, to have better outputs. I want you to know that your team knows that, that if they use AI, they can also lessen burnout and they can also produce more. But you have to strike the balance of not pressuring them to produce more per SE as a way to kind of like crack the whip on them, but you can use it as a way to motivate them where you can say that, hey, if we produce more as a business, then I can pay you more. Right? The line that I told my team is that I don't want to hire more people, I want to pay you more, I want to reward you more, and I want you to not be so burnt out. So I invested in AI learning. I invested masterclasses, tools, consultants, and my team and I always do little, like show and tells with each other. We help each other out. If there's someone in a particular department that has built a tool for themselves, they share it with the other people in the department so that they can all use it. And we always check each other on how we can improve workflows and how we can check ourselves also.
So it was good to have that conversation because it motivated them just knowing that their boss thinks about their burnout or want to give them more in terms of salary and rewards, right? So not only am I able to pay my people more, I'm also able to invest in more learning. I'm able to invest in better experience experiences for retreats. I'm able to invest in more bonuses. So these are the things that I was able to do because thankfully, AI has just made a lot of things more efficient in my company. And of course, like I shared earlier, we were able to grow steadily and this reflected on the books as well. You know, profit is coming in, money is coming in once again. That's the point of business. And AI has only helped us do that. So have that big conversation with them.
Don't rush it. You have to plan this conversation well. But it is just a really good way for you to all be united in that goal. Producing more, making a big business, bigger business than the business that you have right now and then showing people that they don't need to be burnt out, they don't need to overwork themselves in order to produce more.
All right? Third mindset that I want to share is AI checks on you and checks you, but it doesn't replace you all throughout the years of my years of experience working with AI, so my team actually was very early in AI. I was one of the early adopters of Jasper AI, if you guys remember that. I also built with my former partner, one of the world's first AI copywriting agencies. So I was very, very lucky, was very privileged to be early in AI AI. And I know when ChatGPT came out that was when AI really became mainstream. And on the onset there was a huge kind of fear that AI would replace you. But this is also another crucial thing. You have to tell your team and you have to have that mindset in your team that hey, AI is here to make your work better. It's not here to replace you. People still would love to work with other humans. Let me tell you, there is nothing like talking to my team on a group call or joking with them or meeting them on our one year on our yearly retreat where I fly everyone in, I pay for their hotels, their experiences, their meals. I even give them a bonus so that they can spend money and go shopping. That one trip produces hundreds of stories, hundreds of gossips, hundreds of inside jokes that take us through the year. And let me tell you, working with humans is still the best thing ever. And I think that you will agree with me on that. So always bring up the mindset of AI as burnout relief. And it is also a form of non negotiable quality assurance discipline. So encourage your team to use AI to check on their output, to use their note takers, their, their summary AI, their recordings, their analysis AI, their, their agents, their workflows. Encourage them to use all of these things to make their work better, to make their work quality better and so that they can submit output that is also better. So, but also tell them that they can outsource the labor, the QA labor, but they cannot really outsource the judgment, so they should also watch the output. Please, please remember that AI is still very young and it can still, still hallucinate. So striking that balance in terms of quality assurance is very, very important.
Number four, let's talk about efficiency. So AI necessarily doesn't replace your bottleneck, instead it reveals it. So find real constraints before automating around it and fully analyze the issue or the problem and think about the pathway of how to solve it instead of, instead of thinking that this one particular tool will solve it. So the problem is not solved because you use Groq vs Claude, Cowork vs Codex. The problem is solved because you were able to identify the right path to solve it. Let me tell you, even just inside Google, if you are paying for Google Workspace, there are so many tools that are available. They have like the Google AI Studio, Notebook, lm. There's so many things inside it. I think there's Opal or something, but there are so many options, so many tools that you might already have been paying and you can benefit from those things. And what you just really need to know is you have to know the right path. So if you encounter a particular bottleneck, don't pressure yourself to move faster by just slapping AI or onto it. Analyze the problem, identify the path, and use AI as a way to really solve the problem and not just a faster way to get busy. Right? So I remember when I read the book the four Hour Work Week years ago, it had this concept of eliminate, automate, delegate, right? So always think about that process. You don't need to automate something something if it actually needs to be eliminated. So every task still has to make sense and every bottleneck still has to be, still has to be solved with a particular path or a particular solution that erases the unnecessary and makes sure that you're only automating what is really important for the business. So reduce redundancies, check the work, and remember that AI doesn't replace your bottleneck, instead it reveals it and use it to solve that bottleneck. Right? And number five, this is one of my favorite things about thinking about AI and how we use it in my business. Stop counting the hours saved, count the decisions that have been improved. Count the quality of life that you now have, the quality of conversations, maybe deeper relationships with the clients. What I'm saying is look for the non easily measurable or maybe the subjective wins of AI to help you encourage or motivate your team to invest more time in AI. So you want your team to be nimble, you want them to be solving problems, but you also want them to be encouraged and be personally motivated in learning about AI more. And the only way that you can do this is not only if you can of course pay, pay them more because now they're producing more, but if they also realize that there are a lot of emotional rewards that come with using AI, with the use of AI in their work. So that part is very subjective. It is different from person to person.
And if you are very good at making, at creating AI workflows, you can even build your own apps to deepen relationships and things like that.
So what is really important is that you can do that and that you're able to really emphasize those emotional rewards because it will just motivate your team more. All right, so I think that's it. I really love sharing all of these things and I love approaching AI in such a way that founders appreciate it more than just like a housekeeper in their business. And I love sharing different ways to think about it that also gives to your team and not just to you as a business owner, not just puts money in your pocket, but it also helps them emotionally, it encourages them to enjoy their work more. And I think all of these things are really, really great rewards. So none of the things that I shared is about honestly being good at AI, right? It's about being a better operator, being a better decision maker, and being a better leader. AI just raised the bar on what that means. And let me tell you, the business owners who will win in the next five years are not the ones who necessarily adopted fast, but they're the ones who adopted on purpose. And that's what I want you to take away from this episode. And yeah, have a great week ahead. Have a great weekend ahead. If you're watching this on YouTube. And once again, if you love this episode, share it with a friend in business and reach out and give us your comments. We would love to hear more about what you want to learn here at our podcast, Richard remote, or my YouTube channel, Carla Singson, where I publish weekly about growing your business through outsourcing and looking forward to get connected with you guys. Thank you. See you next week.
Thanks for listening to Rich and Remote, where freedom isn't a dream, it's a decision. This is Karla, this is Alex Booth, and this is our journey to our dream rich and remote life. If this episode inspired you, share with a friend who's ready to live life differently too. This is perfect for entrepreneurs who crave financial freedom, location freedom, and freedom from the opinions of others. And don't forget to leave a quick review. It helps more freedom seekers and find this show. Big thanks to our sponsors, Huckleberry Consulting, getcsm and Proximity Outsourcing.
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[00:21:23] Speaker B: Com.
