Ep 39. The Brand Formula That Creates Exponential Growth with Charles Gaudet
Ever wonder why some founders’ brands explode while others barely move?
In this episode, Charles Gaudet breaks down how combining your founder brand + business brand can create growth that’s more than just “1 + 1 = 2” it’s exponential.
You’ll learn how to:
Turn your personal brand into a magnet for leads, influence, and opportunity.
Align your founder and business brands so both grow faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
Use AI strategically to anticipate trends, sharpen your team, and stay ahead of the curve.
Apply human context to AI insights to make smarter, actionable decisions.
Evolve your brand to match your next chapter—selling, scaling, or reinventing.
Shift your mindset from fear of change to curiosity and opportunity.
If you’re a founder, thought-leader, or entrepreneur ready to future-proof your brand and multiply your impact, this episode is your blueprint.
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Charles Gaudet is a globally recognized business coach, author, and entrepreneur. He’s the author of The Predictable Profits Playbook: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Dominating Any Market and Staying on Top, voted #1 Book on Sales & Marketing by Indie Excellence and host of The Beyond 7-Figures Podcast.
Called “The Go-To Business Coach for 7 and 8 Figure Businesses” by International Business Times and the “CEO Whisperer” by Yahoo Finance, Charles has helped countless founders scale to seven- and eight-figure success. His insights have been featured in Inc., Forbes, Entrepreneur, Success, Salesforce, and Fox Business.
A decorated entrepreneur and thought leader, Charles founded a company recognized by Ernst & Young as “One of the Best Seed Stage Companies” and earned a Certificate of Leadership Development from The US Army War College. Named one of American Geniuses’ Top 50 Industry Influencers, he combines strategic business mastery with a fierce competitive spirit, he’s a 3-time wrestling state champion and two-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gold medalist.
Based in West Palm Beach, FL, Charles lives with his wife, three entrepreneurial kids, and one badass dog, proving that high performance in business and life can coexist.
Connect with Charles:
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00:00 — Why a Founder’s Brand is a Game-Changer
02:00 — The 1+1=2.66 Effect
05:00 — Why Every Business Needs a Founder’s Brand
08:00 — Turning Your Brand Into a Lead Machine
11:00 — Overcoming Fear and Scarcity Mindset
14:00 — How AI is Disrupting Industries
18:00 — Context is King: Why AI Needs You
22:00 — Preparing for Your Next Chapter
26:00 — Creating Opportunities You Never Imagined
31:00 — Building a Legacy Through Your Brand
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Companies that have a founder's brand that work alongside with the business brand lift significantly greater. Instead of a one plus one equals two, it's a 1.33 plus 1.33 equals 2.66. It's actually much, much, much better.
Welcome to the Legacy Branding Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Beauparlant, here to guide you through the journey of selling your business, and building a personal brand that leaves a lasting impact. On the show, we'll explore real life founder stories, expert insights, and actionable strategies to help you navigate the transition, avoid post sale crisis, and create your impact driven legacy brand.
Whether you're thinking of selling, building to sell, or already on the other side, this podcast is your go to resource for making your next evolution, your best one yet. Let's dive in.
Today on the Legacy Branding Podcast, I'm joined by Charles Gaudet. He's a business growth strategist, author of the Predictable Profits Playbook and host of the Beyond Seven Figures podcast. Charles has been called the Go-to Coach for seven and eight figure entrepreneurs, the CEO Whisperer, and even the busiest sales coach in the US for a reason. He helps founders simplify scale and create predictable sustainable growth.
Charles brings a mix of tactical brilliance and high performance strategy to his work and his insights have been featured in Forbes, Inc. Fox Business, and many more. Welcome to the show, Charles.
It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much.
I am really looking forward to our conversation. I've always enjoyed when we've connected, so I'm thankful that you're bringing your brilliance to the podcast today. I wanted to start by asking, so you've helped thousands of entrepreneurs scale beyond seven and eight figures, and in your experience, I wanted to know what do you think the most successful and ultimately sellable businesses have in common?
There's roughly about six things that they have in common. The first one is they have a very strong, unique advantage. On other words, right now the average consumer is looking at about 36 different sources of information before making a buying decision. So they go through the cycle of exploration and evaluation.
So they're looking at you and they're looking at all the competitors. One of the things that they want to know is what makes you different. We inadvertently make it so difficult for the consumer to make a decision because we don't have our unique advantage right out there. Many of us say, well, we have better quality, we have better service, we care more. All these other like nice things. But that's kind of expected. But what actually makes you different? So the first one would be a unique advantage. The second one would be that the company would have to not be dependent on the founder. So in other words, independent of the founder, right?
Yep.
So the more the company is dependent on you, the less valuable the company is. We noticed during COVID that even companies that have been around for a decade, founder got sick. They were gone for a few weeks, they came back and the business had disappeared. And that becomes a very strong issue, a lot of vulnerability when a company is founder dependent. The third one is you look for multiple different sources of leads and revenue. Most companies can sort of get to that one to $3 million mark on word of mouth and referrals. You need to be able to go beyond word of mouth and referrals to create more robustness and predictability. So you need to get beyond word of mouth and referrals. Then we go from there and it would be MRR or a ARR. So monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue. Now we like to see a minimum of 50% of total revenue being recurring revenue.
Okay.
Or I should say industry standard is minimum 50, but we like to see closer to 60. So when you have a high degree of recurring revenue, then you don't have to keep chasing your tail from one month to the next, wondering where the next sale is gonna come from, and you get reduced stress and that really tends to compound. Then you want to have retention. So your churn rate should be 5% or lower. In other words, so if it's 5% or lower per month and you're over the course of a year, that means you're still keeping a bare bones minimum of 40% of those clients. And again, when you have strong a ARR, you have different ways of growing the business.
It helps to compound. See, a lot of people don't understand the impact of that. When they look at their business, and let's say they have a hundred clients and they're like, oh, we wanna grow by 35% next year, which is a very, conservative number, but 35% next year. That means they have to replace all a hundred clients and then add 35 more.
And then if they wanna do it again the following year, they have to replace all 135 clients and then go beyond that. But when you have strong recurring revenue and a high retention rate, if all you did was bring in the same amount of clients this year that you had next year, you're automatically gonna have that compounded growth.
Growth becomes a lot easier. Then finally it would be data intelligence. We say guesswork is a cancer of all business, most people aren't aware of their data enough, so they know the levers to pull and the push and it doesn't really matter the size of the company. It's interesting, I've had conversations with CEOs doing 500 million and they'll tell me things like, oh yeah, I do marketing.
And I'll go back and I'll say, well then how effective are you at creating demand? And they look at me like I'm speaking a different language, right? And they're not aware of that because there's so many different really important levers to pull and to push to get the results that we're looking for.
And some of the questions like, how effective are you at creating demand? Like these are the things they don't teach in business school. That's why so many of the people, aren't looking for that. They're just focused on how many leads and revenue. We keep going down that hole, but hopefully that answers your question, Laura.
Yeah. Oh my gosh, that was fantastic. I loved it, it makes sense your business is called predictable Profits. And Predictable Profits is such an important part of running a business. And I think it's really exactly what so many founders want, especially when they're preparing to sell. The people listening to this podcast are in that position where they've built a successful business and maybe they don't have that predictable profit. So they're thinking about this sale. So I'd love to know, why do you think that predictability is so difficult for so many business owners to achieve?
First of all, you can tell just by your response that you're far more seasoned than the average person. Right, because , it's when you get to a certain level of being seasoned, you look for predictability and consistency before you get to that point, you're chasing the shiny pennies you're looking for the spikes here and there.
Fast growth is much more attractive than predictability, though they don't realize that predictability can also create fast growth.
Right.
When you look at the Inc 5,000 fastest growings companies list, 66% of them will go out business shrink in size or be disadvantaged as they sold because fast growth and predictable growth, they're two different strategies in of
Oh wow 66%
Within five to eight years for us. Yeah, it is crazy.
It is a sobering number really.
It is. And for me and for many of the more seasoned CEOs and founders, those that are like ready to stop chasing everything and get down to business, predictability it's much more coming when you know exactly, within a reasonable parameter what next month and the future months are and so forth are going to achieve and you build a lot of robustness into the organization so that you have something that works, you put a system around it, and now you go on and you build the next one. You're just constantly, building, building, building. And it's a great place to be. It's also allows you a position so that you create economic independence.
Yeah.
When you build a robust organization, you don't look at economy as good or bad. You look at 'em as different and it allows you to succeed regardless of where the economy is going.
Yeah absolutely. So you mentioned something about a business being too focused on the founder. Right. They are the business, and I want to go back to that because that is definitely something we work with. We help from a different perspective. We help build a personal brand for the founder.
And tease them apart from the business brand, because what I see is that quite often the founder and the business, like you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. And especially if they want to sell or grow and stop being the bottleneck, they have to stop being everything in the business.
I see signs from a brand perspective, but I'd love to know from your perspective, what are the signs that the founder is too involved and what is the way for them to pull back? So they are not so much the driver of the business without losing momentum.
So if you think of an org chart, often times we see it kind of looks like, a pyramid. You've got the CEO at the top, and then you've got leadership all the way down. That's how an org chart, should look like. But the reality is, from a small business owners, it looks a little bit more like a target. The CEO is right in the middle, and then everything then points back to the CEO. So every decision has to be passed through the CEO. They create all the strategy. They have the marketing strategy, they're the CFO, they work, all the delivery is somehow involved with the CEO and so forth.
They spend so much time working in the business rather than on the business. A lot of people, they know that growing a business is hard and they think the hardest part of growing a business is a startup. But there's two really hard parts. There's a startup part, and then there's this part around that 1 to 3 million when you realize that hard work, word of mouth and referrals isn't enough to get you beyond to where you're at. Now you gotta put some strategy behind that becomes another really, really hard part. But this is where founders, they have to change the way that they've grown their business because from startup to about that 1 million mark everything was really dependent on 'em. They had to be very resourceful. Actions plus resources, equal goal, right? They ended up having to wear every hat, bring the business to where it is. But now in order for them to break from that 1 to 3 million, they have to be able to delegate. And if you're gonna delegate, you have to also make sure that you have the right systems in place to create consistency. Like Laura, if you think about the work that you do. To be able to hand that off and have the same level of quality that you're able to do, yourself, processes, systems. Like, there's so many things that have to be put in place in order to make that happen. And that becomes very difficult or break in free from founder-led sales. When the founder is responsible for all the closing and then being able to go get away from that closing a lot of times they turn around and they go, well, to do this, then I'm gonna write a job ad, I'm gonna go to LinkedIn. I'm gonna put the post a job ad, look at people's resumes. Maybe they have industry experience, maybe they have some sales training. I'm gonna bring 'em in, hire 'em, and then hope they close.
And seldom does that work. Because sales and hiring is far more than just a resume and sales training. For most of us, for you, and for me, like it took me well over a year to figure out how to actually consistently sell myself, right?
Yeah.
We wanna know what are the stories, how to handle the objections and so forth. Yet we think that we can bring somebody on board and just automatically, they'll be able to do it for us.
Right.
That doesn't work. Then again, the business has mostly grown from the founder's network, word of mouth and referrals and their friends. Once you then start to hit everybody you know, again, it's like it gets very, very difficult.
So there is an important part of a founder's brand. Every business should have a founder's brand because it that founder's brand helps to elevate the business, helps to tell a story. That part is essential. And we've run the data and we've seen that companies that have a founder's brand that work alongside with the business brand.
That both of them lift significantly greater instead of a one plus one equals two, it's like a 1.33 plus 1.33 equals 2.66. Like it's actually much, much, much better. And you'll usually see more leads coming in in the founder's brand at a lower cost than in the business brand when the same ad is run simultaneously. That part is really, really important and, essential to both creating, capturing, and nurturing that demand, having both of 'em. But just because you have a founder's brand doesn't make the business dependent on the founder. All it does is it, it tells a why, why you're in business. How did the company even, begin. Like nobody expects if you take Tony Robbins as an example, nobody expects when you call Tony Robbins office that you're gonna get Tony Robbins on the phone.
Yeah.
But he's got a really, really powerful brand that allows, his brand and the company or Richard Branson. Nobody expects that when you call Virgin Airlines that you're gonna get Richard Branson on the phone. That doesn't work. But everybody knows Richard Branson, and I know there's a a lot of controversy around Elon Musk, there's Elon, and then there's Tesla, and there's SpaceX. If you think about all the greatest brands in the world, you're gonna notice that those that have a higher retention rate and a loyal following, have a founder associated with the brand.
Yep,
For example let's take the opposite. Do you know who the founder of ExxonMobil is?
Not a clue.
But if you found gas that was, 5 cents cheaper across the street, would you just go to get gas there?
Yeah, it might depend on if I get points on my card or there's some perk or something, but yeah, I have no particular loyalty to a gas company.
Zero loyalty.
Yeah. Whoever's cheapest
But for many people like Apple, like they become very loyal fans of Apple. And they were for a long time because they knew the story behind Steve Jobs.
Yeah, I talk about that often. So we're definitely on the same page in terms of the value of a founder brand and the business and how it can elevate it. I've got stats too that show how much more reach they get, how leads convert greater. And so I think there is huge value in that. So I'd love to know, You worked with some top performers in the world and really high value companies, and I'd love to know what mindset shifts that you find are essential when it comes to scaling and predictable profits and even stepping away from a business.
So that's a, great question. It's interesting. I started the Beyond Seven Figures podcast with this idea that I was gonna get some of the greatest strategies from the most amazing thinkers on the planet. Now we've got over a couple hundred episodes, something around there. So many of the conversations, the majority of 'em, it came down to mindset. They're all saying mindset was really the big differentiator between success and failure. There's discipline, which is a big part of it. There's consistency. There's being able to push forward when things get tough and things get hard. That is a mindset shift. It's like going to the gym. You're gonna see those people that just want to take it easy and they'll grab like the 10 pound weights and they'll just do their motion and they're not straining. Then they put the weights down and they wonder why they can never get anywhere. And then you see the other people that are really kind of pushing themselves, and then when it starts to get painful, they're getting that one more rep and one more rep, and then they start to get a lot more of that growth and that strength. The same thing happens with business. There's this underlying theme that embracing discomfort. They don't see fear as something bad. They see fear as more of an opportunity. They're constantly leaning in and trying to push themselves more and more and more. But then there's also this understanding, and this is a mindset too, that virtually every single guest that I spoke with and the most successful clients that I work with, it's not about making money. Which is my company's Predictable Profits. You would think it's all about making money, right? But it's understanding that you get paid in a direct proportion to the value that you provide others. So if you deliver an exceptional experience and exceptional value, then you are gonna be able to get paid more.
And so there's this mindset of saying, okay, what is it that my clients want? And how do I create such an exceptional experience and value for them? That they wanna just stay with me and just keep working with me and tell their friends and all this other jazz. So that is another important part of mindset.
And I guess just finally, as we're kind of talking, it's that they're extremely curious. Extremely curious. In fact, the more successful they get, the more curious they are. It's like the more successful they get the less they believe they know.
That is an interesting perspective. Yeah. Do you think that's a trait of all entrepreneurs? Like, is that a commonality you see?
The successful ones. You are gonna see the people that believe that they have all the answers, the people that stop learning and that stop asking questions. They're usually the first ones to struggle and then no longer exist.
I love your analogy about the gym too. One thing I've learned is that the growth comes in the discomfort. It comes from doing the hard things. It doesn't come from lifting the lightweights. It comes from straining and lifting the heavier weights. And I think that is also life and business. And when you practice doing those things, it makes the next time something challenging comes into your life, whether it's personal or business. You're better able, equipped from a mindset perspective. I believe, to handle kind of whatever life throws at you. Because you've already done, you've laid that groundwork and you're like, oh, I've been here before. Maybe not this situation, but I know how to deal with this.
Think about like problems when you started your business that you were dealing with. Like back in the day, I probably felt huge. Now you probably deal with these things on a regular basis and you don't even think twice about it. It's just like, oh, this is what I do, and no big deal. And when you think about the problems that you're faced with now.
Like that might seem big then a year from now or three years from now, you're gonna look at it and be like, wow. I remember when I thought that was a big problem.
Yeah.
I I
I was actually with Tony Robbins in Whistler. Tony he was asking me about the problems that I had and I'm like. Well, I'm working through this and I'm working through this, but I can't help but ask like, where's this coming from? And he is like, I'm sizing you up. I'm like, huh? He says, big people have big problems. Little people have little problems. Little people tend to run away from their problems, but big people will create big problems for themselves, and you can tell the size of the person by the size of the problems that they have. So I'm just trying to figure out. What are your biggest problems? As I shared it with him, he was like, do you think Richard Branson would lose like one 10th of a second of sleep over your big problems? And I'm like, yeah, probably not. Probably not.
Leave it to Tony Robbins to give you a bit of a reality check, right?
Yeah. So, but it was nice because then he encouraged me to really lean in more and think bigger and create bigger problems.
Yeah, it is interesting. I remember years ago I don't remember how it came up, but somebody said, I guess I was struggling to like hit a revenue target that I had set and they said, this revenue you're hitting today. That was what you could only have wished for a few years ago.
Yes.
And it was like, oh yeah, that was something that I was like, I couldn't even imagine doing that. And now here I am, kind of beating myself up because, that next ceiling seems to be, eluding me or that next level. I was like, oh yeah, you do have to reflect back and look at the places you've been before and it gives you such a different understanding of your own journey. Oh Yeah. this too shall pass. I can move through this and I will get to that next level. And it's also about enjoying that place where you're at when you're there, not always wanting to be in the future.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think there is a, this part though of entrepreneurs that one of the struggles is that we need to be able to take a step back and be, just be grateful for what we've accomplished and how far you know we've come.
Yeah.
Actually is really difficult because we're builders and we're creators.
Yep.
we know that the moment we stop leaning in and trying to grow our business, that's when market share starts being taken away from us. When we get comfortable, it just, next wave gonna be struggle. When I look at where I've lost the most amount of money in my business. I've always had my own business, never had a quote unquote real job, right? In my entire life and anytime I've lost over a million dollars, it was always after a period of being comfortable every single time. No question. Because I just, things started to go really well after I worked so hard, I finally was like just, lemme just relax a little bit. Enjoy,
Take your foot off the pedal.
off the pedal and just enjoy. Then it was almost like my competitors are just waiting for me to just finally be like, oh, good. He's taken his eye off the ball. He is relaxed. And then I would end up, going through this period of struggle.
I'm sure you're not the only one who's experienced that. I'm sure there's somebody listening that's like, oh Yeah, that's exactly my story too.
Yeah, we get to that point where we just learned to just keep, leaning in. Though as we become more resourceful, we're able to then pay people to handle our headaches so that we can focus in on doing more of what's in our zone of genius. That allows us to lean in, but without, the same amount of hustle necessarily that we've had in the past and enjoy it a little bit more while we still lean in.
Yeah, let's hope we can all enjoy the journey. It shouldn't all be struggle. I think it's a mix of the two, right? There's the struggle is where you learn. You grow. But if it's all struggle, then that's not super conducive to an enjoyable life either.
You burn out because you can only red line for so long.
Yep.
right. We're like intellectual athletes. So if you think of an Olympian, is just as important as training. So you can train real hard, but then you need to be able to have that recovery. And the same thing, like we can work real hard, but we still need the ability to sure the company is not dependent on us. We can work hard, but then take that two week vacation or work hard, but then maybe take some time to focus on designing a new strategy, a new product offering a new whatever, and just be alone for a little bit and be in that space of where you begin to tinker. Just let your imagination go wild.
Yeah. I call that filling the well, right? You can't, it's like you can't give from an empty cup. And so if I'm full from whatever that might be. Whether it's a physical thing that I need to do, a mental thing, a vacation, that's when I find my creativity and my ideas and the expansion often happens in some of those quieter moments when I'm away from my desk, not when I'm here doing the work. And yet we're sort of in that grind and just stay sitting, stay at your desk. But for me, it is actually that getting away and then coming back renewed and refreshed. That is when I can bring my best to my team, to my clients, and to all the work that I do.
My COO had this conversation with me a couple weeks ago and he goes, what needs to happen for you to spend more time by the pool? And I'm like.
Oh, I like that.
What happened? And he is like, no, because when you're able to do more of that, that's when the company grows. Because you come back with ideas and strategies and insights that we can apply and we do better. But when you're working in the business, he is like, we actually don't grow as fast. You're breaking things you are getting in the way you're bottleneck. So he is like what do we need to do to get you to spend more time by the pool?
I love that he's coming to you with that and just like telling you how it is and realizing that when you're too in the business, you're kind of meddling a little bit and getting in the way of things. So yeah, go spend more time by the pool.
We as entrepreneurs, we've got two parts to our brain, right? We've got the visionary part and there's the execution part. But for most of us, the visionary part is, it's very big.
Yeah.
It's great because we see all these opportunities and we can take in these opportunities and create something really marvelous. But our ability to execute for the most part is small. It's very hard. And when we try to execute, we're really not as good at it as we think we are. That's, we tend to bottleneck and mess things up a little bit. So in an ideal world, as companies are able to afford it and become more resourceful, the most powerful companies will have somebody who's the visionary and then somebody who's the executor.
And that would be me and my COO. Like I'm the visionary, and my CEO, my COO was just like, okay, all right, give it to me and then let me run with it. That is an awesome dynamic. Progressively as these companies began to move from founder led everything to then, okay, what do we, let's break free from founder dependence to create founder independence. It's not just, technologies and systems and whatnot. It's also gonna be people.
I think that idea of the founder and the visionary and the executor is such an interesting place and I think a lot of founders, we all start as both and then it's not outsourcing the visionary piece, it's actually outsourcing the execution.
I've never seen in 15 years since I've run, Unpredictable Profits. I've never seen a situation where somebody outsourced the visionary part and ended up with consistent success. When I say visionary, there's a difference between creativity and visionary. Like it's okay to outsource creativity. When we say visionary it's like, where's the business going? Where is it going? One of the important conversations that everybody should be having right now is, how is AI gonna disrupt my business and my industry within the next 6, 12, 18 months?
Yep,
Every business, hands down is going to be disrupted. Few people are actually prepared for that level of disruption 'cause they're not having the right conversations. As long as you know what's coming, you can start preparing for it. These are conversations you have to have right now because you can build for it while you have the time. So it's like, okay, let's build for it. This is where I think let's go, let's go, let's go. If you wait six to 12 months, you're gonna be taking on water and you're gonna be waiting for a life raft. And at that point there's gonna be a lot of like scarcity mindset, and fear that goes on. We have to ask these questions. And the beautiful thing about the way that AI works is AI will also tell you how to compete against itself. So you can go very simply, go to AI and say, please visit my website, familiarize yourself with my company, my services, the competitors in the industry as a whole. How do you believe that AI will disrupt my industry within next six to 12 months?
And it'll go ahead and it'll say, this is where I think it's gonna be disrupting it. And say, okay what skills and abilities do me and my team need to develop in order to maintain and build upon our competitive advantage within the next six to 12 months? It's like, okay, well this is what needs to happen.
And then it's like, okay, all right, now I understand, at least the direction that I need to go in. That's gonna really a really critical thing that, needs to happen sooner than later.
Yeah. I definitely see that. That's why I've been so heavily, involved in implementing AI in my business, building tools, seeing how it works, playing with things, and really keeping on understanding how it's going to impact my industry, which I know it will in a huge way in the branding world, from a language messaging and design, a lot of things are shifting. I'm like, I need to be at the forefront of this, not trailing behind otherwise, we will be eaten alive. And so that's why I've been very active and keeping on top of everything that is happening. And I think that's a great advice and I think from what you're saying too, anybody who's thinking of selling their business down the road, I mean, AI could totally disrupt that plan.
You're right.
if you don't have something implemented, and I think buyers are going to want to see that you have some level of AI integrated into your business.
Yeah,
Would you agree?
I mean, right now, if you have a software program that doesn't have any element of AI, like, it just feels like it's antiquated.
Yeah.
Fallen behind. We're getting and more and more accustomed to using AI. As it stands right now. Within reason. You can't give me a situation where AI can't already do it. I can't think about a current situation right now that AI can't do it. But the reason why it hasn't disrupted all industries across the board is because not enough people know how to do it yet. So exists. They just don't know that it exists. So therefore it's not disruptive. But six to 12 months from now, more and more they're gonna start realizing that it does exist and then they start to use it. As humans, it's interesting because we're wired to survive. So while we see AI might be taking things that we're currently doing away from us. What it's also doing is it's also creating opportunities many of 'em, which we never would've imagined or fathomed existed right now, but only became possible because of the AI. When people say, well, Charlie, I mean, you know, business coaching is gonna be disrupted, right?
I'm like, yeah, absolutely. No question. For sure it's gonna be disrupted. And they're like, well are you worried? I said no, because the thing that I bring to the table is context. So you could already go to AI and say, Hey, create a marketing plan for me for blah, blah, blah business. But then, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. Because it's still context. It's knowing the right questions to ask, and then knowing the difference between a good plan and a bad plan, and then being able to implement it and execute it in the right way. I couldn't do your job in the same way that you do your job because you've got years and years and years of experience that you'll be able to look at something to know whether or not it is right or wrong and give it some feedback. 'Cause all AI is, is an intelligent employee and just like any employee. You don't just say, go do it and never check in and never offer any feedback and never, instead, it has to be this dialogue that goes back and forth. You're still the painter, AI is then the paintbrush. But you're still the painter. So you still have to know what it is that you're painting
It's also the quality of what you put into it. It's the questions you ask, the prompts you use, the challenging it. I do that on a daily basis and I'm teaching my kids how to do that because whether they're not allowed to use it in school, that I'm like, use it as a brainstorm partner as a way to help you study for things as a way to, there's so many ways that we can use these tools and have it add to our lives rather than take away.
If everybody uses AI the same way, then there's no competitive advantage and nobody's gonna benefit. My son, he's gonna University of Florida next year. When we talked about college, I said, kid, you don't need the answers anymore. Much different than anything throughout history, you don't need answers. He is like what are we talking about? I go, Branson. The most important thing you need to know is how to ask the right questions and the competitive advantage of the people that are gonna exist tomorrow. Are gonna be those that are the most curious and can ask the questions that people don't even think to ask. So in college and wherever he is, I want him to remain curious. I want the more curious that he can be, the better. And part of building that curiosity, you do need knowledge for context to ask more questions. We also talked about earlier that the most successful people that I've met and worked with over the years. Those are the people that realize and believe the more successful they are, the less they actually believe to know.
Yep.
Because it only comes up with more questions, more possibilities, more this and that. It's that curiosity. It's the questions. That's where the leaders are gonna dominate, not by having the answers, but having the right questions.
Yeah, what a gift that is to your son to arm him with that knowledge going into university. I've loved this conversation. I feel like we could talk for hours on all of these topics. I do have one last question. So this podcast is called Legacy Branding and legacy is a big theme that I like to ask people about. So I would love to know what legacy means to you and what the legacy is that you want to create for yourself.
That's a really great question. As soon as you said, what does legacy mean to me? I just got a picture that kind of came to mind, and that is I want to be the shoulders for the next generation to stand on.
Beautiful.
For me that is legacy is, how do you create the advantage for the next people. That's where I want my legacy, to be able to help the next group become more successful than I've been able to achieve.
That's a beautiful legacy and I believe that you live it every day in the work that you're doing and the way you're helping your kids and so many of the entrepreneurs that you work with.
Well, they make it easy because I just, I love what I do with the people that I work with. When you enjoy the people you work with and the work that you do, you want people and everyone around you to succeed as much as possible.
Yeah.
Everybody do well, even more important to me than just the money itself.I don't do this for the money, I do it because I just, I love it when somebody just is able to reach one of their goals. Do something awesome. That is so cool.
Yeah. Absolutely. So on that note, where can people find you? How can they learn about working with you? Get a copy of her book share. Share the best way for people to connect with you.
So predictableprofits.com is where they can find me. In fact, on predictableprofits.com, they can actually under resources they'll see book and they can just grab the book for free. They can also go to Amazon if they wanna go to Amazon and get it, or they can get the book for free@predictableprofits.com.
Of course, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, and so as long as they connect with me telling everyone that, or telling me that they've been on this podcast, will accept it. So that would be at look for me at Charles Gaudet on LinkedIn and again, predictableprofits.com and that's how they could find me.
Amazing. We'll make sure to add all of those links in the show notes. Charles, thanks again for being here for all your amazing insights. I really loved our conversation.
📍 📍 Thanks for tuning into the Legacy Branding podcast. I hope today's episode has inspired and empowered you on your journey to building a brand that truly matters. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with other founders who you think would benefit from listening.
And if you're ready to take the next step in building your legacy brand, visit our website, labcreative.ca to learn more and book a call. Don't forget to join us next time for more conversations that will help you navigate your transition and create your legacy. Until then, I'm Laura Beauparlant.