Human-Centric Leadership: Kent Lewis on Employee Engagement

The Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Leadership with Kent Lewis

In this episode of The Human Code, host Don Finley invites seasoned marketer and entrepreneur Kent Lewis to discuss the profound impact of technology on employee engagement, business growth, and personal success. With over 30 years of experience, Kent shares his journey through the digital marketing landscape, the importance of fostering a culture of caring in businesses, and how AI is reshaping the future of work. The conversation delves into actionable insights on leadership, company culture, and the evolving dynamics of the workforce, making it a must-listen for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in the human side of the digital revolution.

00:00 Introduction to The Human Code

00:49 Guest Introduction: Kent Lewis

01:52 Kent's Journey in Marketing and Entrepreneurship

04:16 The Anvil Credo and Employee Turnover

05:25 Employee Engagement and Retention Strategies

10:43 Challenges and Lessons in Leadership

23:45 The Role of AI in Business and Employment

35:05 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Don Finley: 0:00

Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds, Who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you are a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code. In this episode, we're excited to welcome Kent Lewis, a seasoned marketer and entrepreneur. With over 30 years of experience, Ken has been instrumental in driving business growth, through technology, data analytics, and innovative strategies. As a public speaker and thought leader, he has shared his insights on digital marketing employee engagement. Today, Kent and I will share, the critical relationship between employee experience and consumer experience and how investing in a culture of caring can drive business success. How organizations can adopt to the changing workforce dynamics, including the great resignation to attract and retain top talent. The role of AI and digital tools and enhancing business operations and staying competitive in a rapidly evolving market. Join us as we delve into these engaging topics with Kent Lewis. This episode is packed with valuable insights that will inspire you to rethink how you approach employee engagement, customer satisfaction. And the integration of technology into your business. You won't want to miss it. I'm here with Kent Lewis, and we're here to talk about what's happening with the intersection of humanity and technology. Kent has a diverse background as an agency owner and entrepreneur, but Kent, what I would love to understand is what got you here today? what's your journey, my friend? Yes,

Kent Lewis: 2:12

The Human Code's one of my favorite shows. and so I'll say my journey has been across 10 agencies over actually 30 years this fall. I co founded two of the agencies, founded two of the agencies and was fired from three of them. that means right now I'm, um, gainfully underemployed and, much happier making much less money. but in short, I started in PR, public relations, and by 96, I jumped ship to a web development firm, a sister agency to the one I worked with when I moved here to Portland, Oregon in 95. And by 96, I was optimizing websites when I didn't have any coding experience. No official copywriting or production or producer experience. I was just a PR guy that could write reasonably well. So that's when I started optimizing for or 14 search engines. none of those were Google. And so I evolved to getting recruited to different agencies where I moved my way up until I was a co founder of an agency in 99. after a year, under two years, I parted ways. that was number one as a founding member. I had a falling out with the founder and started my own thing, Anvil Media, which I ran for on and off for a couple of years, but since 2003, on completely with full time employees. so for 22 years, I ran Anvil Media, a digital marketing agency. In between there, I did email marketing startup in 02, now called Thesis. And, I Formic Media for five years, starting in 08, to focus on small business while I focused on larger businesses. but the radical thing when you talk about entrepreneurship and business ownership is that when I was making the most money of my life, more than I ever thought I would ever earn or deserve, was 2010 through 2012. And that was peak earning potential in my agency, and I was miserable. And I think you've had a common, shared experience, in, in, March of 2012, I was putting my son to bed and I was staring at the ceiling and he was in the top bunk, his brother's in the lower bunk. I was like, I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I just want to quit, but I couldn't. It was my company. I had 14 employees I had to worry about. And so that night I wrote what became the Anvil Credo. It was a manifesto. In fact, I was inspired by Jerry Maguire's, the character writing that 28 page, manifesto. And I did that. It became 10 truths that I needed to go to work. And from there I asked the team, you're either in or you're out. You're signed to these 10 truths or you're gone. And, that week half my team left, seven people left. And within a year they were all gone. And, that sounds tragic and 100 percent employee turnover two years in a row was not easy. And I don't advise it as a path to profit. but truly within five or six years, I started making money again. It was great, super easy. but I instantly had a plan. I had purpose and I was happier. with a hundred percent employee turnover with a plan to make the company better than making a lot of money on a company I had no connection with, no passion for, a team I didn't respect, clients I was frustrated with. So by 2019, so six years later, I got to a place where I had a new team that was engaged and the credo wasn't even a thing. They're like, I don't even know why that's a thing. Meaning the same 10 truths that got people to leave, repelled them, attracted other people that thought it was not a big deal, it was table stakes. I went from being customer centric in my experience, client centric, for the first, 13 years to the last nine years of my business was employee centric. It was, nothing about the client and the credo. It was all about the employee and who they were and how they performed and what they cared about was really about accountability. And to my former team's credit, a bunch of underachieving high achievers, they didn't want the, I changed the rules. They went from no accountability to some, and they didn't want it. And. Fair. Okay. but I didn't want people that didn't want to be accountable. I couldn't afford it. 2019, I walked away from a deal at the 11th hour and three years later, after doing the last bit of fine tuning to my team, I sold for one and a half times more valuation than three years earlier. And it was because of my focus on the employee experience, keeping them engaged, retaining them, and, the acquiring agency didn't retain my team as well as they retained my clients. So that was good for them. It was a ego and emotionally tough for me. but the journey that's most important to me has it was 14 months as a CMO of an agency that I was acquired by. And, learning what it was like to be an employee after 22 years of being my own boss. And it was like the matrix. I saw clearly what it takes to keep employees engaged. I thought I was going to be the best employee because I knew how to be an employee. And I thought I was going to rock it for that company. And neither of those turned out to be true. And without going into too much detail, and I'm, waiting a couple more years before I write the tell all, but bottom line is, I realized that every entrepreneur, every business owner, every senior executive is not nailing it with very few exceptions that I can't even name. I can name one, the head of employee engagement for Campbell Soup. I know this because I was speaking at a conference in Austin earlier this year and I was giving her here, giving this, 45 people in the audience my culture of caring presentations about employee engagement or retention, how to generate more profitability and more growth that way. And when I went through the top 10 things that companies are least likely to be doing, buddy system, exit interviews, quarterly reviews, instead of annual reviews, she was like, yep, we're doing all these. And I'm like, I'm sorry, who are you? She's I work at a large company, 14, 000 people. And afterwards she said she worked for Campbell soup and that was her job. So she was nailing it, but she is one out of a million. Probably not. It may be one out of a hundred on a good day, but so that's been my purpose the last year Is going around and speaking to business owners and executives on why giving a shit matters But better yet more specifically is why? Showing you appear to give a shit because you don't have to totally care as much as a client. The employees need to feel that you care and you can't just say it. You have to show it. So it's really hard to not care and pretend to care. It's really easy to care. But do it the wrong way. I did not nail it, at my own, agency. It took me years, almost 20 years to dial it in. And I, since then I've learned I was maybe half right, through all the research I've been doing and, talking to business owners and what's working. so anyway, that's my journey from digital marketer, which I'm still doing some of that. I can't not do it to employee engagement and, evangelist. I'm not an HR professional. I'm just trying to evangelize people to care about their employees more and watch the returns, go tenfold. And then we can talk the tail end of that, how is AI, impacting that, which it absolutely is.

Don Finley: 8:41

there's a few times that on this show that I resonate with a lot of the guests and feeling that. But also our story is much similar than we even let on earlier. the moment that you were talking your kids in. I also have a similar moment in which I recognize that oh shit, the problem isn't anything else. The problem's really how I'm relating to it. And so I'm in control. I can make the changes to come about. Within a month, I had figured out that what I wanted from the business wasn't just a clear focus on hey, profit numbers, all the logical things that lay out for the business, but it was that human connection. And can I actually serve my team? Can I be friends with my clients? And that's how it came about. I too wrote a manifesto.

Kent Lewis: 9:27

Nice.

Don Finley: 9:28

Yeah, exactly. And so it's up on the FINdustries website and it's, I think it's seven or nine points right now as far as like how we interact with both our employees and our customers and the community that we see as being valuable. about half of our customers we ended up having to fire because we couldn't. Match on what that value system meant. but basically we, suffered a bit and at the same time, it was one of the greatest things. A good portion of our employees did leave, but the way that they left was because as a consulting agency, our bid was basically pay our people low, and charge high. And so as we changed the model, we went to more partnership focused. And so those members actually left to form their own business. And so now they run as their own separate agency and FINdustries basically operates with partnerships in most places. I'm really curious though, What was one of your other aha moments in that recognition of Hey, I'm not really a good employee kind of perspective, but how that relates to how you now go about the, evangelization that you have for employee engagement and the focus on employee

Kent Lewis: 10:43

so I had told people before I sold in 22 in March of 22, I said I was a terrible employee because I'd been fired twice by agencies where I was a, senior level, if not co founding partner in the company, a director or VP level, whatever. And the reason was I would not tow a line that I didn't believe to be towed. I could not. Carry the party or carry the water for somebody I thought was incompetent. or, it was, there were layers on that, but that was, that was the gist of it. So the difference was this time, I was like, these guys are smart, they're driven three partners and, very gifted team. I still care about that team. I think the difference was, I started out as a good employee because I said, yes. And, quality improv the first six months. I didn't say one thing. I learned from my own advice I gave to other junior employees. What I would tell new employees at Anvil was, if you're seasoned, I want you to take notes for one to two months and understand why we're doing something that you don't like or think could be done better, then absolutely come to me. I will, after three months, I'm going to penalize you for not coming to, to me or the leadership team and saying, here's what I see as a problem, here's a fix, here's why, da da da. For junior employees, I'd say three to four months, just keep your trap shut, take your notes, because by the time you understand why we do it, it's pretty rare after 20 years and 10 agencies that we're not doing something way off. Conversely, when people didn't speak up about something for months or years, I was very upset, even if their solve wasn't perfect. I just, need that trust. I need that input. It's the brain trust. so in this case for the first six months, I didn't say a peep about what I saw as little cracks and opportunities. And, at our six months at our quarterly retreat, I started saying, I had shared some issues with basically a belief system and a marketing strategy and a sales strategy I didn't agree with. And they're, they pushed back lightly three months later at my nine, my month mark. And I'm, we're at the end of the year of 2022 and they wanted to double revenue and we could not agree on how to do it. And I basically said, you can do it this way or this way, and you're trying to do it this way and it will not work. And. I'm just speaking from experience. You said you hired me for my voice and my experience, and I'm telling you, and they said, Nope, you're wrong. Drop it. I said, fine. Within a quarter we tanked, they were wrong and it didn't matter that I was right. The damage was done. And within three months after that, I was gone. And so they're still like rebuilding and they're working hard and they're making smart moves. We just still fundamentally disagree about. If you want to grow big, what got you to where you are isn't going to get you where you're going. The sacrifices they were going to have to make in terms of lifestyle or people or process, they weren't willing to make it and that, that's a price that they took. can they be successful long term? They're smart enough. they're driven enough. I just wasn't a good fit for that. So by being a bad employee, I basically, I would argue two sides of it. I was a bad employee for keeping my mouth shut too long, for not pushing hard enough. And I was a good employee. For pushing back and talking when I did the differences, the senior partners didn't necessarily want to hear it from me as much as they thought they did. when you say you want it, that's what got me to sell was you get to meet all your goals for your team has a bigger path, your clients have more services, my wife was operations. She wanted out and it was harder to find somebody then to sell to them and they had operations. And then I just want to be a thought leader. And by the time, and Oh, we value your input. By the time we got there what they intended wasn't necessarily what happened and I felt undervalued, underappreciated. And I had never felt that way. I hadn't felt that way in, in 25 years where I had all these ideas and they weren't being heard or considered. I was a junior level person, an account person in PR last time I felt that way. And mean? So it was totally demoralizing. And

Don Finley: 14:29

how has that shaped your, the advice that you're giving to companies, the thought leadership that you're showing and engagement around,

Kent Lewis: 14:36

Yeah.

Don Finley: 14:37

us as small business owners can treat our

Kent Lewis: 14:39

Yeah, so I'll give you an example like, listening tours. the acquiring agency flew out from the Midwest to Portland to listen to the team. They also did, per our advice and other, on the board or the senior leadership team, to do a town hall so that the employees could listen or they could share their concerns and leadership could listen. my lesson was, You cannot do a listening tour or town halls or anything that's about hearing the feedback unless you're able to truly listen and then you're willing to act. It doesn't mean you do everything they say, it means I hear you, I feel you, here's what we can do, here's why we can't do these other things, or here's why it will take a certain amount of time. None of that really happened without going into too much detail. So it ended up being more harmful than if they had done nothing at all. So if you're going to say you're going to listen, you have to listen. they did some great stuff. they had a buddy system. I had never had a buddy system at Anvil. I thought it was a great idea. It was. Reasonably well executed if it was fine tuned even more just, diligence and meeting process all that It could have been exponentially better But it was good and I had never done it before and I thought I will definitely recommend this to Any company is having a buddy system whether it's trailing like a senior mentorship to a junior new hire Or it's two people in different departments learning each other's business and personality, just team building It's a massively powerful tool but I also show the best intentions can have little to no effect. So for 15 years, I met with every single employee once a month at Anvil. So at our peak, we were like 16, 17 people. at our peak, it took me two days to get through 15 minute meetings with non direct reports and half hour meetings with direct reports. It was a day and a half out of my month. And I would have said it was well, spent. In terms of going through the motions, 100 percent accuracy. I went through the motions, unfortunately, without having total trust and transparency. The employees weren't telling me what I needed to know. In fact, I remember at least three times where I had a really, what I thought was a insightful monthly one on one walking meeting around the neighborhood, and within a week they gave notice. And nothing in our one on one gave me any hint that they were going to give notice. So they were going through the motions and I was going through the motions. And the whole purpose was for them to have access to the owner once a month, minimum, and literally forced, this is your time. What do you want? I didn't even have a fixed agenda. So I was deeply disappointed. I still, I tried different ways, face to face, taking notes, no notes. People were like, what are you taking notes about? I tried every little thing, structured, unstructured. it really comes to trust, and I thought just those meetings alone were enough. They turned out to largely not be effective for what I needed, which was real deep insights. Towards the end, they were helpful. My team was happy, and they were transparent, and they, there was a level of trust. They could tell me things that I wasn't gonna, I never jumped down anybody's throat. I think there was a perception, that would be the case, only because I got mad when people didn't tell me things, not when they did. So You know, that's a classic example. So those are just examples going to quarterly reviews instead of annual reviews. annual reviews are a joke, than maybe once you're doing 360 feedback from a larger community, not just co workers, but clients, vendors. But you can't course correct in a relationship like a marriage, only talking about relationship once a year and saying, let's make a couple of changes in the feedback sandwich. This is good. This sucks. This is good. That does not work in a relationship. Why would that work in a working environment?

Don Finley: 18:00

And I feel like that's one of the things that corporate America has missed out on. I know when I was growing up, just getting into corporate America, they were like, don't make friends with your coworkers. And it created this divide where you basically had your work life and you had your personal life and the two of them shouldn't touch. But again, it also created inauthenticity in the relationships that you had in the office. And exactly what you're touching on today is that we've had this Corporate culture of trying to treat the human like a machine, you fit a cog, you are that cog in this wheel, do the task, be exceptional at it, and if something comes up, bring it to your employer, but at the same time, we don't want to hear the whole story. and you miss out on that entire human dynamic that you're

Kent Lewis: 18:47

Well, and that's a tightrope I learned early on because when I first started, I was only a couple of years older than my employees. In some cases, they were older than me when I first started managing people in 97. And, what happened is we were all friends. So The High Wire Act is, be a leader when you need to be a leader. Be a friend when you need to be a friend, but you can't be both. At the same time, So I went to Vegas for a party with one our clients, and my team got me drunk on purpose. And I was just a goofball. I wasn't mean, I wasn't, nothing terribly embarrassing, so much as they set me up, and the ride, plane ride home that night was terrible. but, I realized then when I had to have the next day a hard conversation with somebody like, whoa, you were just wasted yesterday. What do you say? I was like, okay, I can't do that again. Like I wasn't intentionally getting drunk. They were giving me shots and I was like, I got to show them I'm tough lead from the front that could have been done better. But yeah, it's a high wire act of be, as you said, get to know them enough. I'm still a big fan of team building and getting to know people. But as a, once you're like 10 years older, I think it's less of an issue. yeah, we're friends. They expect you to be a boss. but I thought I was building a family when I first launched Danville. And even my number two to her credit said. This isn't the family you think it is. They're going to last three years if you're lucky. Don't get too attached. it's like being a lieutenant in Vietnam, you got to do your job and they're here to work. Now, the last point I'll make that you touched on is the old structure of corporate, that I took, business school. I read all the antiquated books about it, but it's this structure where you're supposed to Extrinsically motivate people with money and expect they'll do it right. And versus intrinsic motivation, which is we share a core purpose and we're going on a journey together. That's the biggest learning I've had is how do we communicate that? and I'll leave you with this. I recently took over president role of a trade organization called SCM PDX short for search engine marketers of Portland. I found it co founded. It was the first president back in oh six. I took however many years off. And I now, as of this month became president again, to tighten it up and fix it. get it reinvigorated and refocused. And so I'm going to use all of these tools we just talked about that I'm learning for this culture of caring thing I'm doing. You can read about on the Googles or KentJLewis. com. But, I'm taking that and applying it to a volunteer board of digital marketers who are all independently successful in their own way and trying to rally the troops to build a better organization. as an incoming guy, two of the board members have been on there since the day we co founded, 18 years, they've been on the board. Others I brought in, they're brand new as of this month. So I have that much of a span that I have to motivate and inspire people with somewhere between almost 30 years experience and three years of experience in their role.

Don Finley: 21:24

is this a, It's a nonprofit

Kent Lewis: 21:25

It's a trade organization. SCMPDX. org. Yeah,

Don Finley: 21:29

board and volunteer board

Kent Lewis: 21:31

correct. Yep. And I'm supposed to, we have a retreat next Friday. My job is to align, inspire, and create a more profitable, sustainable organization that creates impact for digital marketers in the greater Portland area. And I'm totally pumped to do it, but I used every tool I've tried in the past, but I've learned in the last year. so I've done one on one meetings with every board member. Understand who they are. They've all filled out little personality form. This is one that I did at Anvil. And I found that business owners in Vistage found it really interesting is the first day on the job, you fill out a form sometimes before you even start. And it's all your favorite things, favorite band, favorite movie, foods, snacks, candies, beverages. And so what happens is they forget about that day too. And then on their anniversary or for special events, their birthday, We reference that list and give them something that means a ton to them. It may mean nothing to us. and we may spend 10 on a birthday and 20 on anniversary. It's not a lot of money, but they get, here's a six pack, here's a whatever, their favorite candy, a little sticker, a little mug, whatever it is that they care about and. It blows them away because they forgot they filled out this one. Like, how do you know me so well? So it really builds rapport. So I,

Don Finley: 22:43

I want to, I, would love to share forms with you. We do an exercise called the three most important questions. And so it's basically, what are the things that you would like to experience? What would you like to learn and how would you like to contribute to your community? And every month I go through our employees list and see how they're doing and see if there's any cross between anybody's to try to pair people up. if one person wants to learn French and another person speaks French, we'll make that introduction kind of thing.

Kent Lewis: 23:12

So it's, what do you want to experience? What do you want to learn? And what was the last one?

Don Finley: 23:18

How would you like to contribute? And to community, like your community. So it's not specifically to FINdustries or any of the other businesses, but just to, Yeah, like overall in general, like we want to see our employees grow. We want to see them succeed. And I'm sharing your thought, like if our employees are succeeding, the business is going to succeed.

Kent Lewis: 23:39

that's fantastic. thank you for sharing that. I love that. I want to add that to my mix. It's fantastic.

Don Finley: 23:44

Oh, I love it, man. this is, and these are the conversations that I just enjoy because like we're talking about how we can serve the world. And so what I'd love to get your insights on is how do you see AI playing into this environment of creating these communities and this culture, that we're talking about today?

Kent Lewis: 23:59

Yeah. AI can do a lot of things. and part of the conversation I was talking to some agency owners yesterday at we do a, by every other month we meet. one of the guys is like literally, he has a lifelong passion for AI, went to University of Oregon just for the AI program. By the time he got there, they canceled it because people fell out of love of AI in the 90s briefly. And, but he's working on massive, there's all these layers, general, down to, true deep mind, agents and I'm already, can't even there's deep learning in between. they're working on all those levels as a development firm. And he said, it's not the white collar. It's not the blue collar jobs, the low level jobs. There's a difference. Low level white collar jobs are in danger, and with the new iterations, the next CHAT GPT 5, senior level managers will be in danger. Strategy, the thing we think we do best, is in danger of being replicated by AI in a very good way. it gets smarter every day. it's the blue collar jobs that are safe. Electricians, HVAC, all the, construction, what, these, there's training some of'em, like being an electrician. It's a five year deal, right? It's no joke. but you're making six figures when you're done right outta the gate. So those are the jobs that absolutely cannot be replicated by ai. so what I've told people in terms of careers, and we can back it into corporations, is, you know, copywriters become copy editors. graphic designers become art directors and junior level people become mid-level people quickly. They've got to get over the hump of, what I can do is teach people 10 years of experience in, in minutes, months, So that what we have is as more seasoned professionals is it eventually will be in danger of being mitigated by. AI combining our experience and synthesize it in new and really interesting ways, making those connections. So how does that impact what the agency owners were saying? They have a variety of different kinds of surface firms. one guy replaced 15 people with five people, and lightly changed their roles. He's looking at how AI can replace another five people that go in and check, websites for changes in pricing or images. that eventually will be able to be, done by AI more effectively than humans. so as an employee, if you are not embracing AI, you will be replaced. At some point, you have to figure out how AI can make your job smarter and better. conversely, leadership has to show that they're more interested in creating a sustainable business where their current employees and future employees can survive and thrive, through AI by empowering them. Here's how I think you should be using AI. So some of these folks were saying they can't get their developers to use certain apps. They can't get their designers to use certain apps because they think they're protecting themselves when in fact they're endangering themselves. They will eventually get laid off or fired if they don't embrace these, efficiencies and productivity and just enlightening, enlightening tools within the AI realm. As managers or owners, it's a little different. And it's of it is incentivizing and motivating your workforce to embrace AI instead of fear it. but as an owner or, pure CXO leader, and you're looking at the P& L, you're figuring out like, how do I message if these, so again, I think the right way to do it, open, transparent, we're looking at ways to. Create more sustainability. In fact, just what I'm doing with SMPDX as an organization. And that will be, I ideally empowering the true workforce, some cases, redirecting people to new roles. and worst case we have no longer have a fit for certain people that we aren't able to fit into the new organization because they haven't been able to, or willing to learn the new skills or fit. Maybe it's a fit thing. but I think that's where it's going to go because, right now, one of the topics that came up last night is that companies like Apple, and Home Depot are hoarding cash. the one thing they have against startups with AI is cash. And so they're hoarding it so that then they can go to battle, outlast, acquire, out market, their competitors that are pure AI plays, versus like a Home Depot that's got a lot of brick and mortar, a lot of real estate. what's their play with that? it's tricky. I've, I used to work with Borders Books and, they went from 850 stores to zero stores under our watch and that was a, crazy experience. but they, these companies have to understand like how are we rejiggering our organization from the front end of recruiting and organizational development to sales and marketing to, AI will be all part of that. I think it's companies getting ahead and understand. I think a new role will not be prompt engineers. It will be business consultants that help understand the cultural impact of AI on an organization and figure out what that organization needs to do to prepare.

Don Finley: 28:41

I'm laughing because we didn't have this conversation, but you basically just described what we do.

Kent Lewis: 28:47

Oh my gosh. That's very well.

Don Finley: 28:48

yeah. So basically what FINdustries is doing is providing that service of going into companies and working with them at a C level board level to put together a strategy for how they can, implement AI across the business. So you're looking at that, the P& L and saying, Hey, here's where AI can actually help us. But the biggest component of really what defines a successful implementation is being able to get your frontline workers. To be utilizing AI and then sharing that back with the rest of the group for how they're seeing the benefits, because just like you said, we're seeing, the low level white collar jobs are changing into more supervisory slash managerial jobs as far as the work that they're doing, because they're now able to create the product by instructing something else to do it. And so those skills of being able to manage tasks is being developed much earlier in employees than it previously had been, right? and then additionally at the board level, it's creating that culture of adoption. Instead of the fearing or, and also showing employees that they don't need to, dig their trenches around the work that they're doing. We're promoting people as well as providing bonuses for when they find, novel ways to use AI that ends up saving the company either time money or provides a higher quality product to it. I love the insights that you're talking about here because it is creating. a culture that empowers people. How do you think that this is going to shift individuals career paths, if we're going to see the automation away of some jobs and not the trades jobs that we're talking about? Because robotics and grabbing things is one of the hardest problems apparently to solve.

Kent Lewis: 30:38

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not quite sure how this, will play out. I honestly do worry about my, my son will be a sophomore in college, and I, he was telling, if there's an AI class, take it. you need to understand. Now, he was a relatively early adopter of ChatGPT. He even found a bug. That he reported to OpenAI and they thanked him for it. So he's a little bit farther ahead than others. but I would say it's never enough. every year for the past 20 years, I've picked a trend that I thought was coming in that coming year in November, December, I'd read up on it. I'd write about it the old fashioned way, not using AI. And then I would speak about it. Then I'd get caught in the press about it. And so my thought leadership cycle was read about it, research it, write about it. Use that to quote the, pitch the media and to build presentations and then, cycle those all three to get to the next level. And eventually those would, if we're lucky, become a service at our agency based on, the way I write. It's I'd break it down. Those would literally be sections of a service, topical elements. And so I did that with, mobile marketing and Amazon and video marketing, all this, 10 to 15 years ago. And This last time I actually retroacted it, retrofit it to thought leadership, not just because selfishly I was looking due to my non compete with my, the sale of my agency. I can't work at another agency, but I could work for a MarTech company. So it's you need a part time thought leader. I need a part time job. And I speak, I write, I could just add your name. It's good SEO. It's good visibility. We can generate leads, yada. that was, didn't get the uptake I wanted. but in the process of forcing it as a topic to speak and write about, I sold it to my, to SEMPDX. I gave a presentation earlier this year, thought leadership is the ultimate AI resistant marketing strategy, post AI Google strategy, which is, you know, AI looks backwards. And tries, no matter how hard you try, it's doing its best to predict the future, but it usually hallucinates a little or a lot. Thought leadership is humans assessing things. They have knowledge and can connect dots that AI yet can't, but will, and they can look forward to new and interesting ways. the easy hacks, secret from an SEO guy to everybody listening is I have a trailer dealership as a client and it takes me a long time using AI and a bunch of other tips and tricks that are top secret to get to generate a 80 percent AI generated blog post that is 100 percent detected as human based on, with AI filters. It it takes a lot of work. In fact, I arguably, if I knew the topic better, I could probably write it in the same amount of time it took me to AI it and revise it and tweak it. long story short. I see that as a metaphor for what's going on in white collar world is you have to stay ahead of AI to have a niche, but you also to stay ahead, you actually keep track. 1 thing I did 2 years ago, roughly a year and a half ago when AI started really bumping with chat GPT, I started speaking about it and writing about it and after about 6 months of that, I gave up. I could not keep up. with the fire hose of information on the new vendors, the new whatever. Yesterday was invigorating to me, knowing that there are these other agency owners trying and interesting things, u. com, make. com, using all these different tools and layers, to take AI to the next level for their company and for their clients. There's obviously moral, ethical, all kinds of issues with AI, but for the white collar world, it is, I need to keep up on AI enough to be dangerous, keep testing it, keep iterating it, that's how I'm going to be valuable. is here's how I see us, me using AI to make my job better, to make my company better. Blue collar is I'm doing HVAC and here are a couple things that saved me time. So for instance, one of the companies built an app for appraisers, home inspections, where they could take photos of the house and historically they had to go home and write it up. And most of them don't have great writing skills. So there was a huge variance in quality of the summaries of the inspections. So they plugged it into ChatGPT 3. 5 and had, they would upload it and ChatGPT would generate the report. They would edit it and they checked all that. And they said 85 percent of the content GPT created was untouched, meaning. Good enough for the job and it saved them hours of time, usually at night when they should be with their family. So these are examples of how it can possibly impact a blue collar worker, we'll call it, out in the field, using their hands and their legs. So anyway, I don't know if that even helped, but that was, that's my

Don Finley: 35:04

No, that's absolutely beautiful. I think that's an exceptional example and also outrun and Ken, I got to say, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today and really appreciate you taking the time to speak to the audience.

Kent Lewis: 35:17

Oh, my pleasure. This has been great. Thank you so much for the time.

Don Finley: 35:21

Thank you for tuning into The Human Code, sponsored by FINdustries, where we harness AI to elevate your business. By improving operational efficiency and accelerating growth, we turn opportunities into reality. Let FINdustries be your guide to AI mastery, making success inevitable. Explore how at FINdustries. co.