AI Made You Faster. It Didn't Make You Replaceable.

Collin McKee

Welcome back to the Endeavors AI Podcast. I'm your host, Collin McKee, founder of Endeavors AI. This is where we talk about the intersection of artificial intelligence, law, business, and the new economy being built around all of it. Here's a question I can't stop thinking about: if AI doubles your productivity, but you're still the go/no-go on every single decision, what have you actually solved? My guest today spent 21 years coaching businesses on exactly how to escape that trap. He started in corporate at McDonald's, the grandfather of all turnkey businesses. His book, Your Business Sucks, is a bestseller in four markets. And he's here to tell you why AI might be building a bigger prison for founders rather than a way out. Peter Boolkah, welcome to the show, sir.

Peter Boolkah

Collin, thank you so much for having me.

Collin McKee

So let's start at McDonald's. What did a career inside the most systematized business on the planet teach you that most small business owners likely never learn?

Peter Boolkah

You know what? That they're not systemized in any way, shape, or form. You know what's funny? When I started in McDonald's, I was a sixteen-year-old. I was basically a kid, and I took for granted everything that I learned, because I knew nothing else. So I went through the McDonald's system, and that's why I thought that was normal. That's how the world operated. Sheesh, I was so shocked when I left McDonald's. I actually bought my first restaurant and realized that the owners had run their business in chaos and mayhem for twenty years. And subsequently, after I became a business coach, I see chaos and mayhem everywhere.

Collin McKee

So then you wrote a book, Your Business Sucks, and it's a fable. It's not really a how-to. So why did you decide to go the route of telling a story?

Peter Boolkah

I'll tell you why. There are all these books out there that are how-to. And the thing is, it's fine having a how-to book, but unfortunately no one does anything with it. That's the problem. They do not do the stuff that needs to be done. And I thought, okay, what I like about stories: number one, stories are neutral, so they don't accuse the person. And number two, you can often relate more to a story than you do to a how-to. So I wanted it to be something that hit the emotional note within a human, and maybe made them want to change for themselves, not because a book is telling them to. Because at the end of the day, change has to be lasting. There's no point in just being a temporary solution fixer, and then people revert back to old habits.

Collin McKee

I think it's a great strategy.

Peter Boolkah

You know what, I was really very much inspired by Patrick Lencioni. Him and Eliyahu Goldratt, they were both very much fable storytellers, and their books were so damn easy to read, and actually, to a degree, they were so entertaining to read as well.

Collin McKee

So what are some patterns that you've seen over and over in businesses, since you've had twenty years to watch and counsel people on how they run their business?

Peter Boolkah

Clearly, the biggest one is that most people never build a business; they build a prison. And look, you've got to build a prison from the beginning. Because when you look at statistics in the UK, there's approximately, I think it's 5.7 million small to medium-sized private businesses, of which 4.3 million are solopreneurs. And when you spin up your business, look, you're going to have to work like a pig. There's no two ways about it. Long hours, a lot of dedication, inspiration, hope. You've got to put the hours in. But you're working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, because let's face it, when you're in the business, you're head of sales, head of marketing, head of finance, head of HR, in case you have to discipline yourself. Head of everything, basically. So you've got your day job, and your evening job, and your weekend job, and that's hard. But what you're doing as a business owner is training the business to be one hundred percent reliant on you, which is fine in the beginning. But people get into the habit of acceptance: "Oh, this is now my new reality." And I've seen entrepreneurs live that life for twenty years plus.

Collin McKee

Yep. And then something you mentioned on our first call: when the business does start to grow, it's not a solopreneur any longer, and they really don't train the people that are working with them or for them on what winning looks like. So what happens next?

Peter Boolkah

Do you know why that is, though, Collin? It's because they don't know what to do. They've never systemized and processed their business. They've never learned how to hire and train people, so they bring people into their chaos, on the premise of, "Well, this is what I would like you to do. Go and do it." Unfortunately, we don't know whether the person is competent enough, or whether they've got enough clarity. So they keep coming back to the founder. The founder says, "No problem. Let me help you with that. Let me help you with that." Not only are they training their business to be dependent on them, they're now training their employees to be dependent on them.

Collin McKee

Yep. And in a similar tone, you'd mentioned The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.

Peter Boolkah

Love that book.

Collin McKee

So could you explain that to the audience for those that haven't read it?

Peter Boolkah

The purpose of that book, really, is how to identify when the people you have employed actually end up giving you the work you're paying them to do, and you take it on board, being extra helpful. And in the end, you're paying them to watch you do their job. It's bloody great. Not only did you have your day job and your evening job to do, you've now got their job to do. Look, I laugh about it, and it is actually quite serious. But the reason that happens is because you don't know what you don't know. Most people that go into business for themselves don't have corporate training. They have an idea, some passion, a lot of courage, and off they go. But how many business owners do you know, Collin, that actually learn about business?

Collin McKee

It's not as many as it should be. Let's put it that way.

Peter Boolkah

And think about the core components of business: the sales function, the marketing function, the finance function. You've got to be fluent in business, especially today, because business today is probably the most difficult it's ever been.

Collin McKee

Yep. And so when someone does it that way, and they're managing all the processes and the work that they're paying other people to do, where does that leave a business when the founder goes to try to sell it someday?

Peter Boolkah

It's not sellable. Owner dependency, that's what we call it. Owner dependency is one of the biggest discounting factors when someone goes to sell a business. Can you imagine? Let's say that I want to buy your house. I come and buy the house that you've lived in for a number of years, but there's a caveat: you're still living in the house. Now I've got your house, which has become my house, and I'm starting to remodel it. My taste and your taste are going to be totally different. As I start remodeling, you're going to be thinking, "Well, I don't think you should be doing that. I'm not sure about that colour. Why would you do that?" Why would somebody purchasing someone else's business want that headache? And actually, statistically, in the UK, and I'm sure it's the same in the US and the rest of the world, eighty percent of businesses will never be sold because they're not sellable. And founders think their sweat equity has value. No, it doesn't. No one cares about your sweat equity.

Collin McKee

Right. Even if it succeeds, right? Because we know the statistics when it comes to people that start businesses. The majority fail, unfortunately. So even if you get to the point of being successful, it's got to run without you, and that's what your book talks about, right?

Peter Boolkah

Yeah, and I like the fact that you brought that up, because that's an interesting statistic. There are approximately eleven thousand businesses started up across the globe every hour. Eighty percent of them will fail within the first five years. That's just absolutely horrific. Can you imagine that, Collin? The thing that was meant to give you more life, give you freedom, ultimately is the thing that takes it all away from you.

Collin McKee

Right. So there's the trap, even before AI. Now people try to add AI to it. The majority of my audience is law firms, and you said lawyers are great at law, which they are, obviously. They go to school for a long period of time. But not that great at business. So what happens when you hand someone like that a tool that makes them twice as fast?

Peter Boolkah

See what happens, especially as the principal tends to be the business owner, and they're the ones that tend to have the biggest workload, both from a law perspective and a business perspective. So what do they do? They start using ChatGPT to write a clause, or whatever AI agent they want to use, chatbots or whatever. They use all those tools to make their life easier. But now they're the manager of the tools, and the keeper of the tools. So actually, they haven't got any more time back. They're not leveraging their team, and they're busier than ever. They're just doing more work because the tools are more efficient. And I see that all the time with business owners, where they're using the tools, and very often a lot of the team that they have on board are not necessarily progressive in their thinking. So there is a lot of resistance to change, especially with new technology. And I get it. Look at AI; it can be quite overwhelming. I'm getting overwhelmed all the time using the technology, because it's forever changing. For me to be able to keep up with it, it's damn hard.

Collin McKee

That's a full-time job right there.

Peter Boolkah

But you need people that can grow with you and can adapt to the changing times. You and I both know that AI is not going to go anywhere. But the people that don't adopt it will be going somewhere.

Collin McKee

Oh, a hundred percent. So the founder gets faster, but the team doesn't, and AI makes the monkey problem you mentioned even worse.

Peter Boolkah

It amplifies it. Yep.

Collin McKee

So we all know the phrase garbage in, garbage out. You like to use a different one when it comes to AI.

Peter Boolkah

Yeah, one hundred percent. It's stupid in, stupid out. And it is true. Everything is contextual. It's all context. If you don't have the context, it's never going to give you what you wanted it to give you. But you know what? Maybe that's the mirror for business owners, because the way they use AI is often the way they interact with their employees, and that's a good feedback loop for them. Because if they're not giving the AI the right context, I promise you this, they're not giving the employees the context, and they wonder why they have the prison that they have.

Collin McKee

So in that context, what would you say is the first system that you'd want businesses to have in place before they put AI in as a force multiplier in their business?

Peter Boolkah

It's not the first system I would like them to have. I'd like them to learn systemization. So the first thing I would like them to do would be to watch the film The Founder, which is the McDonald's story, available on Netflix all over the world, and also read the book The Checklist Manifesto. Because you've got to get the core concept. You've got to understand the concept of systemizing and process, because you cannot systemize and process when you don't have the logic behind how to do it. So those two resources are fantastic. Which is interesting, because a lot of people have made the mistake where they go to ChatGPT and say, "Systemize my business," without understanding it. So it sounds like garbage, and then they try to put the garbage into the business. It doesn't work, and then they think it's just rubbish.

Collin McKee

So let's turn it around on you for just a second, just to be honest. It's fair to point the finger outward and inward. You set a goal of a thousand podcasts in twelve months, and you're running a coaching business, an agency, a publisher, a speaking agency. You mentioned that you're a little behind on that goal. For you, where's the bottleneck in your own business today?

Peter Boolkah

Oh, definitely. For me, with the podcasts, unfortunately it's time and energy. And yeah, I think I was a little bit ambitious. The thousand podcasts actually came from the guy that wrote... not The 4-Hour Workweek. It was The Miracle Morning. It took him a thousand podcasts before he finally got traction on his book, and by the time he got to his thousandth podcast, he hit a million copies sold. So me being me, I thought, okay, well, what took you ten years, my friend, I'll do in one. Of course, I totally underestimated how difficult that would be.

Collin McKee

Three a day, every day, right?

Peter Boolkah

It's every day, even weekends. Which, four months in now, you start to feel the grind a little bit. But I'll probably get to about seven hundred within twelve months.

Collin McKee

That's not bad at all.

Peter Boolkah

I'll have to take the other three hundred into year two.

Collin McKee

Yeah, and that's the thing that you can't replace, right? You can't systemize or automate Peter being on a podcast. I guess you could, but it wouldn't be authentic. So you probably wouldn't want to do that.

Peter Boolkah

I was asked this question the other day, actually, about AI: what is the one thing you wouldn't use AI for? I actually just said human relationships. Times like this, when we're doing this together, the whole point is that we have proper, meaningful conversations, where you come at it from your perspective and I come at it from my perspective. And if you actually try to AI that, it's never going to work.

Collin McKee

All right, so let's talk about how people actually get off the hamster wheel. You have your clients do something I am a big proponent of: they record their entire day and then dissect it. So how does that work? What do people actually find out?

Peter Boolkah

I make everybody use either Plaud devices, or some use Granola. I don't care what it is. Everything you do, client conversations, team conversations, record everything. Then you just upload all your transcripts. After three or four weeks, you can get either Claude or ChatGPT to start doing a full analysis on your workload, looking at exactly what is repetitive, what's good, what's bad, and actually start coming up with a strategy: how do we start breaking this? Of course, recording alone is not going to be enough. You've got to do the reading. So alongside the recording, I get all my clients to read and learn, so they can actually skill up alongside the analysis that's happening at the same time.

Collin McKee

And you've done this yourself, right? You've recorded all of your coaching sessions for the last four years or so.

Peter Boolkah

Yeah. I feel really blessed, but I think I did get lucky. When we went into lockdown and we all transitioned over to Zoom, which at the very beginning was totally appalling, one of the first tools that came out in the app store was Read AI. And I was absolutely fascinated: okay, we can transcribe your session. That could be interesting. So I purchased it, and four and a half years later, I've got all of those transcripts. Back when I first started, there was no AI tool to do any of the analysis. But the one thing I've learned is that the data over the last four years is all the same data. What's interesting is the ability of the tools. The tools are now becoming so sophisticated, they can take the old data and do wonderful things with it.

Collin McKee

So how did all those recordings turn into a book?

Peter Boolkah

Well, it's funny. I used the transcripts to start modelling out the book. I had my thoughts in my head, but I needed all the evidence. This is why I waited twenty years as well: for all the evidence to be there. All the transcripts were my evidence, the evidence of all the stuff that I'd done, the evidence of what was going on, recurring patterns. It gave me the framework to write the book, because, believe it or not, the work had already been done. Across all the transcripts, I'd have the best part of five million words recorded. That's a ton of data. In fact, that's enough data to feed all eight books in a series.

Collin McKee

So now more on the people side. That's the process and the technology. You told me that you get resistance, but it's usually not the owner; it's a little further down the totem pole. What does that look like?

Peter Boolkah

Yeah. The owner will try to get people to change. Look, people like their comfort zone. I get it. But the last six years have probably seen the biggest change in markets that we've seen in twenty years, and a lot of the people, especially the older generation, Gen X upwards, there's a resistance to that technology. Not everyone, by the way, but a lot of them just can't keep up. With one particular client, they were about 65 people, so a small business, and even their managers... the leaders of the business are spending more time arguing with them than actually getting the change put in. And sometimes you feel that the evidence is telling us these people are not going to change, and we're paying these people to fight. That's not sustainable.

Collin McKee

So how do you tell the difference between someone who's just struggling with technology and someone who won't learn, who just refuses to?

Peter Boolkah

You see that over a period of time. I think you give everybody the opportunity to change, and the big telltale is, "Well, I haven't got round to it yet." And you laugh because you know it's the damn truth. You've seen it so often. "I'll do it. I will do it." And then it keeps coming up, coming up, coming up. Well, the world around us is changing at such a pace, we can't wait for it to come up. We've got to be fast with the speed at which AI is developing. I think that's the thing people are struggling with. They can do one thing one day and think they've mastered it, then a whole new model comes out, and it can do a lot more. I think they're finding they're exhausted from the pace of change. Whereas the really young people have grown up with AI. They're handling the change no problem, because they're leaning into the change with every single iteration.

Collin McKee

Yeah, that's well put. So we're coming up on time. I do want to get a couple more questions in. What's one thing that a stuck founder, in the hamster wheel, could do this week to try to get unstuck, or out of the wheel?

Peter Boolkah

Okay. The first thing I'll do is give you access to an assessment, and I'll put it in the notes afterwards. It's called the Hamster Wheel Trap assessment. They can do that assessment, and what will that tell them? It will tell them where their bottleneck is. That'll give them a starting point, where to start. But with all of this, I'm going to put in one caveat. If God created man in His image, every founder has created their business in their image. And very often, that unfortunately hurts. Unfortunately, the bottleneck is very much down to a lack of knowledge. If you're going to get off the hamster wheel, you need to look at the feedback you're being given and work out why you're on that hamster wheel in the first place. Then, what is missing from your knowledge? Because just doing an assessment alone will not get you off the hamster wheel, because you're not going to know what to do; you don't have the skill set. And I say, don't try to get off the hamster wheel. It's too much of a big ask. Let's look at it from the prison analogy. You've got to get released from prison, because at least that's a respite. And as you learn and skill up, you'll get two days out of prison, and then three days out of prison, and slowly that's how you get off the hamster wheel.

Collin McKee

All right, great. We'll put that in the show notes. Where can people find out more about you and about your book?

Peter Boolkah

The book's really simple. Go to Amazon. You can find the Audible version, the paperback, hardback, the Kindle. It's all there. And for me, just type my name, Peter Boolkah, into Google. Everything will come up: website, podcast channel, YouTube channel, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook. Choose your poison.

Collin McKee

Excellent. Well, cool, Peter. This has been really valuable. I hope the audience takes some little jewels of knowledge and wisdom with them, and completes your assessment. I think I might do the same myself. Everything we talked about will be in the show notes. We appreciate everyone for your attention to this really important topic of AI and business, because, as Peter says, it's not going anywhere. And if you have any questions about your business and small business AI readiness, where there might be gaps in your business, please reach out to Endeavors AI. We're here to help with that. I'm Collin McKee. This is the Endeavors AI Podcast. Peter, once again, we thank you, and we will see you on the next show.

Peter Boolkah

Thank you for having me, Collin.

Collin McKee

My pleasure.