13:00KeyPersonOfInfluence · Tutorial
How to Build an AI First Business
A 13-minute whiteboard blueprint for replacing the traditional 8-role org chart with four human roles orbiting a central AI system.
June 28thThe argument in one line.
Running multiple businesses is easier than running one if each business shares a unifying theme and runs the same repeatable five-part cycle: Alignment, Awareness, Accountability, Activity, and Assets.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run more than one business or are considering a second and worry about spreading yourself too thin.
- You're a founder who still gets pulled into daily operational drama instead of working on strategy.
- You want a repeatable structure for aligning a team around goals, ownership, and weekly execution.
- You're building toward a business that can run without your constant involvement.
SKIP IF…
- You're a solo operator with no team — several steps here (delegated leaders, weekly team huddles) assume you already have people to run them.
- You want tactical marketing or sales advice — this is an internal operations and leadership framework, not a growth tactic.
The full version, fast.
The host argues that running multiple businesses can be easier than running one, if each business shares a unifying theme and has its own leaders instead of the founder doing everything. He works backward from a future-state org chart rather than growing forward from where the business is today. The core mechanism is a repeating five-part cycle he calls the Five A's: Alignment (shared origin, mission, vision, and a rolling 3-year/1-year/90-day target), Awareness (surfacing risks and gaps before they become problems), Accountability (every team member owns specific numbers, visible to everyone), Activity (a repeatable weekly cadence of 3-6 priorities per person, checked Monday to Friday), and Assets (durable outputs like books, brand documents, or databases that make the business run itself over time). The founder's job becomes being the 'key person of influence' for each business rather than doing the operational work.
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00:00 – 00:24
01 · Cold open
Host states he runs multiple businesses across time zones with hundreds of staff and thousands of clients, and says it's not as hard as it sounds.
00:24 – 02:02
02 · The Microsoft/Virgin model
Argues one CEO structure can oversee many businesses, citing Microsoft (300,000 employees, one CEO) and Richard Branson's Virgin unifying theme (shake up industries, champion the customer, fun place to work). Introduces his own unifying theme and the idea that every business needs delegated leaders (head of growth, head of delight, GM).
02:02 – 02:15
03 · The founder's actual role
Defines his own role as key person of influence: making videos, writing books, speaking, making introductions, occasional coaching/alignment work.
02:15 – 03:21
04 · Future-state org chart
Explains building an org chart for where the company wants to be and working backward from it, instead of growing reactively from the present.
03:21 – 04:09
05 · Sponsor break: Gameplan Session pitch
Mid-video ad for a free one-to-one 'game plan session' covering intellectual capital, ideal customer persona, monetization strategy, and personal brand.
04:09 – 04:49
06 · The 5 A's: Alignment
First of the Five A's. Defines origin/mission/vision and the '3-1-90' goal structure (3-year target, 1-year target, 90-day actions), plus the quarterly off-site ritual.
04:49 – 05:03
07 · The 5 A's: Awareness
Second A. Awareness = surfacing risks, gaps, and things that could go wrong before they calcify into problems or issues.
05:03 – 05:36
08 · The 5 A's: Accountability
Third A. Every team member owns specific numbers (e.g. CAC-to-LTV for growth teams); the org chart makes accountabilities fully transparent to the whole team.
05:36 – 07:27
09 · The 5 A's: Activity
Fourth A. The 'perfect repeatable week': Monday huddle sets 3-6 priorities per person, Friday checks completion. Introduces 'locking antlers' — structured creative disagreement about whether activities are effective.
07:27 – 09:21
10 · The 5 A's: Assets
Fifth A. Assets are durable outputs (the video itself, books, brand guideline docs, clean databases, formalized culture docs, awards) that keep working regardless of daily activity, creating a flywheel effect.
09:21 – 10:05
11 · Why the model works
Summarizes the full loop: Alignment → Awareness → Accountability → Activity → Assets, repeating in 90-day cycles until the business runs with a life of its own.
10:05 – 11:19
12 · Founder's job + closing CTA
States multiple businesses can be easier than one because the founder stops getting pulled into daily drama; closes with a second CTA to book a Gameplan Session and a like/subscribe ask.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A founder running multiple businesses only needs one CEO-level structure per company, the same way Microsoft runs Office and Xbox under one CEO.
- A unifying theme across businesses — a shared mission statement — is what keeps a multi-business portfolio from becoming chaotic.
- Building a future-state org chart and working backward from it beats growing a team reactively from where it stands today.
- A quarterly off-site meeting exists specifically to re-align the team with origin, mission, vision, and the next 90-day target.
- Teams that surface 'awarenesses' early avoid problems; teams that wait for issues to appear are already behind.
- Every team member should know not just their own numbers, but everyone else's numbers too — full transparency on accountability.
- A repeatable weekly cadence — 3 to 6 priorities set Monday, checked Friday — is what performance actually comes down to, not one-off wins.
- 'Locking antlers' — deliberately disagreeing with a teammate about whether an activity is effective — is used as a structured tool, not a conflict to avoid.
- Assets outlast activity: a book, a brand document, or a clean database keeps working for the business regardless of what the team is doing that week.
- The more a business runs on assets instead of ongoing activity, the more it can scale without the founder's constant attention.
- It can be easier to run multiple businesses than one, because a single business without leaders pulls the founder into every daily drama.
A five-part cycle replaces the founder as the operating system.
OPERATING MODEL
Multiple businesses stay manageable only when each one runs the same repeatable cycle — align the team, surface risks early, make ownership transparent, run a weekly cadence, and convert that work into durable assets.
- A shared mission statement across businesses is what prevents a multi-business portfolio from fragmenting into unrelated chaos.
- Planning backward from a future-state org chart produces different hiring and structure decisions than growing forward from the current team.
- A nested goal structure — a 3-year target broken into a 1-year target broken into 90-day actions — keeps daily work traceable to long-term direction.
- Teams that surface small 'awarenesses' early avoid the bigger problems that show up when issues are left to fester.
- Full transparency on who owns which numbers removes ambiguity about accountability across a team.
- A repeatable weekly cadence — a small number of named priorities set at the start of the week and checked at the end — matters more for performance than any single big push.
- Structured, named disagreement about whether an activity is working ('locking antlers') surfaces underperformance faster than avoiding conflict.
- Durable assets — documents, books, clean data, formalized culture — keep producing value independent of what the team is actively doing that week, which is what actually lets a business scale.
- Running multiple businesses can be less draining than running one alone, because delegated leadership stops the founder from absorbing every daily operational problem.
Terms worth knowing.
- Future-state org chart
- An org chart built for where the company wants to be, not where it is today — used as a target to reverse-engineer hiring and structure decisions.
- The 3-1-90
- A goal-setting structure covering a 3-year target, a 1-year target, and the specific actions for the next 90 days, used to keep a team's daily work tied to long-term direction.
- Locking antlers
- A deliberate practice of disagreeing with a teammate about whether their current activities are the most effective way to reach a goal, done openly and without personal conflict.
- Key person of influence
- A founder role focused on visibility and trust-building — making content, writing books, speaking, and making introductions — rather than day-to-day operations.
- CAC-to-LTV
- A ratio comparing the cost to acquire a customer against that customer's lifetime value, used as an accountability metric for growth or marketing teams.
Things they pointed at.
08:47book24 Assets (book)
Lines you could clip.
02:36
“Think about where you wanna be tomorrow, and how do you reverse engineer backwards from that perfect future state.”
05:13
“Great companies, they do not wait for issues, they do not wait for problems, they don't wait for things to break.”
08:47
“The reason a business takes on a life of its own is because of the assets, not because of the activity.”
10:22
“It's actually easier to have multiple businesses than having one business.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
I run multiple businesses in multiple time zones with hundreds of people on the team and thousands of clients all around the world. Now if that sounds like hell to you, maybe you're not running your business as effectively as you could because I absolutely love it, and I wanna share with you exactly how I've structured things so it's not that difficult to do.
And a lot of people ask me the question, how do you have multiple businesses? Well, first thing is, if you think about a big business like Microsoft or like Virgin, these are multiple businesses that do operate under one structure, and most of these companies only need one CEO at the top.
Microsoft has one CEO with 300,000 employees underneath. Microsoft has everything from Microsoft Office through to Xbox.
So all of those variety of businesses sit under one structure with one CEO. One CEO can be responsible for the an entire big business like Microsoft. So it can't be that hard in order to run a group of small businesses as well.
That's my mindset anyway. So here's the things that make it work though. For me, I have to have a unifying theme amongst all of the businesses.
So my unifying theme is to develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact in the world through business. That's the unifying theme. When I spoke to sir Richard Branson, I asked him about the unifying theme of Virgin, and he said that they shake up old industries, they champion the customer, and they create a fun place to work.
Now the next thing is that I'm not doing this on my own. Every single business that I'm involved with has leaders within that business. There are people who are responsible for growing that business.
Each one of my businesses has a key structure that we repeat over and over and over again. We've got someone who is the head of growth. We've got someone who's the head of delight.
We've got someone who is the general manager or the Swiss army knife for that business, and we have lots of AI embedded into each business now so that the business has a central brain. My role is really to be the key person of influence for all those businesses. So I'm gonna make videos.
I'm gonna write books. I'm gonna speak on stages, I'm gonna make introductions, and occasionally, I get brought in to do things like coaching or alignment, uh, or to just clarify the vision or the direction for a particular product or service.
So one of the things that I like to do with every business is to create a future state org chart. And a future state org chart is where you actually build out what is the organization gonna look like, and you work backwards from there. So at all times, I'm working backwards from the future state all chart.
Now I see a lot of people making a mistake where they say, well, this is where we are today. How do we grow up and forwards? And I say, don't do it that way.
Think about where you wanna be tomorrow, and how do you reverse engineer backwards from that perfect future state. Okay. The final thing is what I call the five a's.
We have the five a's of running the company, and these are the five really important things. I'm gonna go through them nice and quick, but you may want a pen and paper in order to capture all of this. You may wanna pause as we go through.
Okay. I wanna interrupt this video so that I can tell you about a game plan session. These are one to one sessions where you can talk to my team.
You can talk about the strategy of becoming a key person of influence. In that session, we're gonna ask you questions about your intellectual capital, your ideal customer persona, your monetization strategy, and your personal brand as the founder. We're gonna bring all of that together under one umbrella called becoming a key person of influence.
We position you as a go to person whose name comes up in conversation, who gets high quality attention, and who knows how to monetize it. It's not something we've recently discovered. It's something we've been talking about for fifteen years.
My team are world class at having powerful conversations about how to execute this strategy. I want you to book a one on one session called a game plan session so that you can start to implement the ideas that you're seeing in this channel.
Okay. Now let's get back to the video. So the first a is called alignment.
Alignment is about making sure the whole team understand where we've come from and where we're going. We do something called the origin, mission, and vision. The origin is the back story.
Where did we come from? What are the values that we're bringing with us? The mission is what are the most important things that we get right every single day?
And the vision is where do we wanna get to in the future? What is the future state that we want to create as a team? So once we're clear on alignment, the next question becomes what does each member of the team need to do to act in accordance to that origin, mission, and vision?
So we like to set up something called the three one ninety. The three one ninety is what is the three year target that you're shooting towards? Where do you wanna be one year from now?
And what are the things you're gonna do in the next ninety days to move us closer to that one year target and three year target? And if we get everyone clear about this three one ninety, everyone starts to act in alignment. Now what I like to do is a special off-site meeting every ninety days.
We get the whole team together, and we discuss this alignment question. We reconnect with our origin, mission, and vision. We reconnect with the three one ninety, and we brainstorm and talk about our issues and our awarenesses and overcome any problems that would get in the way of us succeeding in the next ninety days.
The goal is that at the end of that off-site, everyone feels a great sense of alignment towards that common goal, that common mission. So the next thing is about awareness. When you've got clear goals, you start to have awarenesses.
Awarenesses are where your brain starts thinking about where things might go wrong or what you might need to fix in order to achieve your goals or what capability gaps you've got. Right? All of that starts to bubble up as awarenesses.
Now what I want my team to do is to raise awarenesses. I want them to talk about awarenesses. I want them to have an awareness list.
I don't want things to fester into problems or issues. I want things to be dealt with at the level of new awarenesses. So great companies, they do not wait for issues, they do not wait for problems, they don't wait for things to break.
Surface their awarenesses, they capture their awarenesses, and talk about how they're gonna address them. The third a is about accountability, making sure that each person on the team knows exactly what they're accountable for.
They've got their numbers, and they have to try and hit those numbers. So for example, if you're on our marketing team or our growth team, you might have the numbers of CACTA LTV, cost to acquire a client relative to the lifetime value of that client. Right?
So that might be a set of numbers that you're accountable for, and you're either hitting those numbers or you're not. So those are the big picture numbers. Every single member of the team has got accountabilities.
They've got things that they're responsible for. But not only that, every single person on the team knows what everybody else is accountable for as well. So it's all out in the open.
It's all transparent. We've got our org chart. Everyone can see who's responsible for what thing and what numbers they're being measured against.
Now once we've got that accountability, we now have activity.
Activity is about the perfect repeatable week. It's about doing the right things week in, week out. So on a Monday morning, we wanna have an activity meeting where we identify the three to six things that are the most important activities that each person's gonna do.
One thing I like to do, at the Monday morning huddle, we get together and everyone names the three to six things that they're working on this week, and it's documented in a list. Now you can also do this virtually.
You can have a Slack channel where everyone puts their three to six things up on a Monday morning, and then on a Friday afternoon, we check-in to see how many of those three to six things actually got done. Because ultimately, performance is about doing the right things every week.
It's about weekly activity. So we wanna track, measure, and improve the weekly activities and how many things get done. Now one of the tools that I like around this whole weekly activity thing is a tool called locking horns.
Locking antlers or means that we creatively disagree with each other. When we creatively disagree, and we call it locking antlers, it means that we're on the same team and we know we're on the same team, but we're gonna take opposing sides to see if your activities are the most effective ways of getting things done.
But the key idea here is that if someone's doing something that's suboptimal, we want other members of the team to discuss it. We wanna talk about it.
We wanna lock antlers so that we find the most effective activities week in, week out. Okay. So the fifth and final a is assets.
Every single quarter, we wanna create new assets that make the business better and better and more and more stable. We're running on assets as opposed to running on activity. So when we're doing activities, we're trying to spit out assets as well.
Let me give you some examples of assets. An asset is anything that has some permanence to it regardless of what the team are up to or what the team are doing. So for example, this video becomes an asset because it's gonna sit on YouTube, and people can watch it in a year from now or two years from now or five years from now.
So it's helping to do some sort of heavy lifting, and it's gonna be around no matter what the team are doing. Another asset might be creating a book. I tend to write a book every two years because they're such powerful assets.
Regardless of what I'm doing, the books are out there talking to people. We have a brand guidelines document. That is a powerful asset.
We have a database that is really clean and really up to date, and that's a powerful asset. I've formalized our culture and put together different documents that support the culture and help us to onboard new team members. That's a powerful asset.
We've won awards, and those awards allow people to discover that we're very good at what we do without having to think too hard about it. That's a powerful asset. So every quarter, we're looking for how do we create new assets that make the business easier and easier and easier and almost create a where there becomes some momentum around the business, and the business takes on a life of its own.
The reason a business takes on a life of its own is because of the assets, not because of the activity. So the more you can turn your activity into assets, the more the business becomes easier and bigger at scale. So we wanna create assets.
Now if you wanna have a look at a book that I wrote about assets, it's called 24 assets. Right? And that'll show you the 24 assets that I invest into to make the business work long term.
So this is kinda like the operating model that I use within all my businesses to make sure that we're doing all the right things, that we've got alignment with the team, we raise our awarenesses as to what needs to be done, We then delegate that and turn those into accountabilities. We then break it into weekly activities, and then our weekly activities turn into assets that build the business long term.
And it goes round and round and round and round, and we go into ninety day cycles where we focus on these five a's, and the business starts running with a life of its own. And at that point, all I have to do is become the key person of influence who represents that business, bring in a great team who can run the five a's model, and we can run multiple businesses without too much effort.
You might discover, like I discovered, that it's actually easier to have multiple businesses than having one business. I found that when I only had one business, I used to get sucked into every little drama that was going on in that business. When I have multiple businesses, I only tend to be doing the things that I'm meant to be doing, which is a great way to do things.
Or you might discover that you don't wanna have multiple businesses, but you can still use this framework, this model in your business and just have one business that you run really, really well. So your job as the founder is to become the key person of influence, and to help you to do that, I wanna invite you to a game plan session.
It's a one to one session with my team. It could be fifteen minutes if you're just getting started, or seventy five minutes if you've already got momentum and you wanna be able to talk about the whole complexity of what you're doing. It should be a paid session because it's so valuable, but we've made it free for the next couple of weeks.
There is a link in the description below where you can book yourself a game plan session. I encourage you to do that because in the game plan session, we are gonna talk about your role as the key person of influence. See, the more you can play the role of key person of influence, the easier it is to grow big and successful businesses and maybe multiple successful businesses.
But it does hinge on you playing that role of key person of influence really, really well. So let's talk about it. Book yourself a game plan session with my team, and they will talk you through the strategy to move you towards that outcome.
I hope you're enjoying these videos. If you are, give the channel a like, a subscribe, maybe share this video with someone who you think would enjoy it, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The host opens by naming the exact thing that sounds impossible — multiple businesses, multiple time zones, hundreds of staff — and then flatly says he loves it, framing the rest of the video as the structural reason why it isn't as hard as it looks.
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:09acronym
The Five A's
- Alignment
- Awareness
- Accountability
- Activity
- Assets
A repeating 90-day operating cycle: get the team aligned on origin/mission/vision and a 3-1-90 target, surface awarenesses before they become problems, assign transparent accountabilities with owned numbers, run a repeatable weekly activity cadence, and convert activity into durable assets that keep compounding.
Steal forany founder team-ops rhythm — quarterly off-sites, Monday/Friday huddles, or a company operating manual
04:29model
The 3-1-90
- 3-year target
- 1-year target
- 90-day actions
A nested goal-setting structure that ties a long-range target down to the immediate quarter's actions, used to get every team member acting in alignment.
Steal forquarterly planning docs or an OKR-style team check-in
04:14concept
Origin, Mission, Vision
- Origin — the back story and values
- Mission — the most important things done right every day
- Vision — the future state the team wants to create
The three-part alignment statement recited/reconnected-with at every quarterly off-site.
Steal fora company one-pager or onboarding doc
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
03:21link
“I wanna invite you to a game plan session... book yourself a game plan session so that you can start to implement the ideas that you're seeing in this channel.”
Two-part CTA: a mid-roll pitch (t=3:21) breaking the flow to pitch a free 1:1 'Gameplan Session,' and a full closing CTA (t=9:27) restating the offer plus a like/subscribe ask. A persistent 'Book A Gameplan Session' text overlay also appears burned into the final ~90 seconds of frames.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
