Leadership Lessons from Business and Church with Jay Owen, CEO at Business Builders

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jay Owen, CEO at Business Builders, about leadership lessons he's learned from both business and church. Thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. For a simple cloud and powerful AI that's built to scale, visit digitalocean.com or just click the link in the show notes. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) One of the things that caught my attention was the fact that you're a leader at a church, but you also run an agency.

(Jay Owen at 00:00:34) Yeah, I wear a lot of different hats. So historically, the main thing I've done my whole life is run a marketing agency. Started it when I was 17 years old, been running it for 26 years.

(Jay Owen at 00:00:45) And then about four years ago, I took a role at a large church here. This is not what they would have called it, but basically to build an agency inside of the church. So, you know, building communication and marketing teams is what I've done my whole life, and so that's really what I have done at 1122, which is the name of the church. And it's been a lot of fun. So it's different, but it's really still the same things, just with different words on them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) How did you find that church?

(Jay Owen at 00:01:14) We've been, our family's been going there for a long time, for quite a few years. And I got a call from the executive pastor who kind of runs things, and he was just really asking for strategic advice. Like, "I heard you go here, saw you at an event. Just want to get your input on website, app, social," you know, all those things.

(Jay Owen at 00:01:32) And I was like, "Sure, happy to talk about it." We kind of went through it a little bit, and then at the end of the call, he just said, "Hey, I got kind of a random question. You ever thought about being in ministry?"

(Jay Owen at 00:01:41) And what he didn't know—maybe he did, I don't know—is that for years before that, I had kind of been discerning this nudge towards, you know, a call of maybe spending more time in the ministry world, not just in the private sector. And so, you know, one thing led to another, and now I've been on staff there for almost four years, which is pretty wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:03) Wow. Has leading in the ministry changed how you lead in business?

(Jay Owen at 00:02:08) It has. I think in a couple of different ways. The leaders that I report to—which is funny because I've never had a boss since I was 16, so that has been an adjustment—like, learning to be a team member who's also a leader in an organization, but not like the leader, you know? I'm used to being in a place where I've only ever worked for myself. So at the end of the day, if I want to do a certain thing, I want to get team buy-in, but that's what we're going to do, you know, unless there's some major reason why we shouldn't. But there, it's a lot bigger team.

(Jay Owen at 00:02:43) So when I say big organization, I mean there's almost 400 people on staff. That's how big this church is. And so, as a result, it's just a totally different world being in a big organization. And having great leaders is kind of fun. Like, it's almost—people, I think entrepreneurs sometimes say things like, "I'm unemployable."

(Jay Owen at 00:03:01) But at the same time, it's almost easier because you kind of know, if you were the leader of the organization, what would you want to receive from one of your leaders? How would you want them to respond to a situation? And you just do that, and then everybody's like, "Wow, this is great." And I'm just doing what I would want somebody to do if they're reporting to me, you know?

(Jay Owen at 00:03:21) And so I've also probably changed—I think the church is very generous with how they care for the staff, both in PTO and benefits, things like that. And I've tried to be more generous as a result of that on my own teams in the marketing agency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) Yeah, I feel you there. I have a similar trajectory to you as far as working for yourself, and I've always thought, like, I'd be the best employee, but I'd also be the worst employee.

(Jay Owen at 00:03:45) Well, the main way that I would be the worst is—and I said this from the beginning, so it was very transparent—I said, "Look, it's not about money. Otherwise I wouldn't be coming to work for a church. But it is about autonomy for me. And so I do want to be able to control my own schedule."

(Jay Owen at 00:04:01) "And if I need to take a day off, I want to take the day off. And if I got no PTO left, fine, don't pay me for that day. But as long as we know upfront, these are my kind of expectations based on where I'm at in my own life and career, then we're good. And if not, that's okay too."

(Jay Owen at 00:04:17) "But let's just be really clear about that upfront." And so that has been the case. They've just been very generous with that and abided by what we all agreed to as the expectations from the beginning. And so that's been really helpful because I really want freedom. I always say everybody works for three reasons: freedom, money, and purpose.

(Jay Owen at 00:04:38) And you want different levels of those. You can never have 100% of each in different seasons of life, but I'm definitely at a place now where the freedom matters a ton. But the purpose matters a lot too. I mean, that's why I'm spending so much time in the ministry and in church versus just in the private sector.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) All right. What's the team size like, if you're allowed to talk about it, at the church?

(Jay Owen at 00:05:01) The total staff is 395 people right now. The team that I have historically led is about 25 people, which is kind of all communications, digital resource, online media teams. And I just recently took a new role as chief of staff, so I'm actually overseeing probably about 250 of the total employees and team members right now, which is pretty wild because I've only ever run small businesses. I mean, the biggest my agency's ever been is probably 22 people—I mean, plus contractors. So we contract a ton of work out.

(Jay Owen at 00:05:33) But from an actual internal full-time employee standpoint, 22 is very different from 250. So it's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) Yeah, it's 10x. So what has been—this is a new role for you. How long, just like this week?

(Jay Owen at 00:05:49) Like a week. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Yeah. Any immediate differences while it's fresh?

(Jay Owen at 00:05:54) Well, the good news is all the people that I kind of took on as direct reports are great leaders. So it's very different when the people that are reporting to you are great leaders and people who you have a high trust level with. Like, all these people have really high trust levels because we've worked together for years now. And so any one of us can go up to another and be like, "Hey, man, that was not good. That was really a dumb idea, and it really did not work out really well, and we got to do this next time."

(Jay Owen at 00:06:21) And any of us, either way, would be like, "Yeah, you're right. We got to solve that," and we just keep going. Nobody's going to be upset about it because we just have a really high trust. And the people that I took on as new direct reports are just really great leaders.

(Jay Owen at 00:06:38) So that makes it a lot easier, even if there's more technical responsibility. In some ways, it's easier because leading a team of leaders is different than leading a team of teams or even a team of executors, if you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) What stands out to you about them? Like, why are they great leaders?

(Jay Owen at 00:06:56) I think there's a couple of things. One, they care deeply about the mission and the people that are there. Two, they are strategic and able to think outside the box. And three, they're just flexible and willing to change. You know?

(Jay Owen at 00:07:17) I think a lot of people are kind of stuck in their ways, and the world is moving and changing so fast, you just can't do that. You got to be a little bit more pliable. And I think resiliency and flexibility are two key attributes of any leader in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) I've never worked at a church. I've attended church. I've done some volunteer work at a church. But as far as employees, like full-time employees of the church, I haven't spent a lot of time with them during a work day. Right?

(Jay Owen at 00:07:43) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:44) Do they tend to have—and you have, right? And you've also spent time with people that are just out there in the marketplace—do they index higher on purpose, like on the concept of purpose? Or does that affect their work quality?

(Jay Owen at 00:07:59) Yeah, they have to index higher on purpose. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it, because you're just never going to make as much in ministry or in a church setting as you could financially in the private sector. So if you index super high on money and not as high on purpose, you're just not going to work for a church. So the team members have to index higher on those areas.

(Jay Owen at 00:08:16) And the other thing that's been interesting about working in the church versus business—I think in business, at least for us in a marketing agency, we don't really have a lot of seasonality. I mean, there's a little bit, like beginning of the year, end of the year kind of stuff. But for the most part, we're generally running at, I don't know, call it 85% all year long. I say that because most people are never really at 100%. But in the church world, especially the church that I'm at, it's much more rhythmic.

(Jay Owen at 00:08:45) So there will be weeks where we're running at 120%, an actual unsustainable pace of hours and effort. And then there'll be weeks where I show up and I'm like, "Does anybody even work here?" You know, except for Sunday mornings and Thursday nights. But that's a natural rhythm that's been developed because there's just certain seasons of events. I mean, obviously Christmas, Easter.

(Jay Owen at 00:09:05) For us, we do this big event in the fall that's like, you know, a full week. We do this huge beach baptism that happens kind of in the spring, early summer. Those weeks around those big four things are really, really time intensive and unsustainable if you were to carry them out across the whole year. But they're fine when you know that, "Hey, the week after this, it's going to be pretty chill." You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:28) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's hard to be on worship team during the holidays.

(Jay Owen at 00:09:32) Oh, yeah. And so you got to find your rhythm of what that looks like. But I think that's true for everybody. I mean, some businesses are a lot more seasonal than others. You know, if you're—I've got a buddy who runs a jewelry business.

(Jay Owen at 00:09:44) And so for him, obviously, Christmas and Valentine's are like blackouts. You know, I mean, you make your entire year on those two holidays. And so by the time Christmas rolls around, call it December 5th, I don't know, through basically New Year's Eve, I mean, he just doesn't exist anymore, you know. And he just knows that. And then by January, he needs a good break before Valentine's gets there in February. And so, you know, but that's different. I think every business is different like that, and church just happens to have its own unique rhythms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:17) Real quick, before we continue, I wanted to give a special shout-out to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. DigitalOcean is cloud infrastructure that's simple to spin up, complete with integrated AI dev tools, plus 99.99% uptime SLAs and industry-leading pricing on bandwidth. We all know DigitalOcean. It's super reliable. It's been around forever.

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(Intro Narrator at 00:11:06) Now back to the episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) Leadership can be pretty lonely. How do you approach that?

(Jay Owen at 00:11:11) Yeah. I mean, people say it's lonely at the top. That's a common phrase for leaders, but I don't think it has to be. I think when you say it's lonely at the top, that's a choice. One of the things I always say—not to be overly biblical—but, you know, at the beginning of the Bible, God said he made many things, and he said they were good.

(Jay Owen at 00:11:28) And the first time he said something wasn't good, he says it wasn't good for man to be alone. And I think loneliness is a real problem. I think it's even more exasperated because of technology. We think because we're staring at a screen at somebody else on a TikTok or even on a Zoom that we're connected, and we're not. We're kind of connected right now, but we'd be a lot more connected if we were sitting around having a bourbon together, you know, or a coffee.

(Jay Owen at 00:11:52) We just would be. And so I think one of the ways that I've kind of helped solve that in my own life is by getting in community or creating my own communities. So I run a community called Agency Builders that's a bunch of agency owners and leaders from around the country, and we get together for a huge retreat that happens in April every year down here in Saint Augustine Beach. And then we have ongoing online things throughout the year. But that in-person gathering, I think, especially in the world of AI, is going to become more important than ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) That's where I think we're headed towards. I believe that there will be a premium on in-person gathering and conferences when—and I have a specific timing for it too. It's specifically, I believe it'll happen when the technology gets to the point where it's easily accessible to non-technical people to have deepfakes of themselves.

(Jay Owen at 00:12:43) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:43) So, I know I said a whole lot of words there, but easily accessible for non-technical people to have deepfakes. So you don't know if you're talking to me right now or the AI twin I sent. When we get to that moment—I think three to five years—you'll just see an explosion, because trust will just be gone. You will never be able to know if you're actually talking to the person or the digital twin unless you're in person.

(Jay Owen at 00:13:05) Yeah, exactly. I mean, people even joke with me now because I talk about AI so much. I'll be in person, they're like, "Is this really you, or is this the AI robot version of you?" Or even on Zoom calls, they'll do the same thing. But the reality is we are moving to a place where we will be able to send our digital twin to a Zoom meeting to talk like us, think like us, and respond like us. That seems insane to people, but we are literally maybe three to five years—and that's probably a long stretch.

(Jay Owen at 00:13:47) It might be faster than that. But certainly, maybe even look at something like Sora, you know, the mobile app created by OpenAI where you can create funny little videos and memes, and you can create a caricature of yourself, basically, your own avatar. And they're not 100% accurate yet, but some of them are so close they could trick people already. And give that a little bit more time—music, things we see on social media, videos—none of it's going to feel real anymore. Even music. I say this a lot: I think that streaming music will continue to lose value over time, and I think that in-person live concerts will actually increase in value because people are just going to have this desire to be together. I've been saying a lot lately, I think the future is distinctly two things at the same time.

(Jay Owen at 00:14:18) It's like parallel roads. It's highly autonomous, highly AI, and it's deeply human and personal connection. And that's in person. And so we're doubling down on events, in-person things already, because I just see that's where it's going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:38) Yeah. And to your point earlier, the guests that I've had—we have a studio here in Nashville—and the guests that, like, the probability of someone becoming a long-term friend that we're on a text basis, of them coming to the studio and spending a day with me versus just jumping on a call, it's like 100 to 1. Like, there's so much more likely. And so those are honestly my favorite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) But not all of them could be in person. Some of them are remote, and I get to meet you. So this is great. You know?

(Jay Owen at 00:15:09) We're—I mean, we're building a new pod. I have a solo podcast room that I'm in right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) It looks beautiful, by the way.

(Jay Owen at 00:15:15) Thanks. It's basically a green screen room, and it's great because I come in here. Ironically, I built it right before COVID, not knowing COVID was coming because none of us obviously did, not knowing I was gonna basically spend a whole year in here staring at the screen. But we're building another podcast studio right outside the doors that's super flexible in its look and appearance so we can bring people in, switch them out. We already will bring clients in.

(Jay Owen at 00:15:39) We're fortunate because we live close to the beach. Nashville is a great option too, but it's the kind of thing where I think when you live closer to a destination city like that or location like close to the ocean like we do, we can convince clients to come in. They'll spend a whole Friday with us. We'll record a ton of videos, record a podcast, build deep in-person strategy and connection, then they can spend the weekend at the beach. They're gonna remember that a heck of a lot more than four hours on a Zoom call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) Oh, absolutely. So we talked a little bit about loneliness being a choice. If CTOs are feeling lonely right now or isolated, what type of advice do you have for them?

(Jay Owen at 00:16:18) You know, community is the answer to this. So I always say that all people, regardless of their professional role, CTOs will certainly be one of them, need two types of communities. And one of them, I think, should be a more generalist community. So by generalist, I mean not everybody in there is the same title as you or the same type of organization or the same type of company. The other one, I think, should either be role-specific.

(Jay Owen at 00:16:43) So think like an association or an organization of just CTOs or industry-specific. So let's say I'm the CTO of a construction company. I might want to be at an event with a bunch of other construction companies. So some niche, essentially, a role niche or an industry niche, and then a generalist community. Those two things to me are the solution.

(Jay Owen at 00:17:03) The other thing I really believe in is—and it took me a long time to figure this out, I think women are probably better at this than men are—is I really needed great men around me who I aspire to be like. And there's a couple terms I've heard about this. One of my buddies calls us foxhole brothers, you know, who's gonna be in the foxhole with you of life. Another one, sometimes somebody will call them pallbearers, who's gonna carry your—who are the guys that would carry your casket at the end. But the story that I really love is this idea, there's a story in the Bible where there's this guy that's really sick, and his friends want to take him to Jesus to try and get Jesus to heal him.

(Jay Owen at 00:17:43) And they take him, they carry his mat. They pick up the four corners of his mat, carry his mat, tear off a roof, literally, and lower him down to see Jesus because the crowd was so big, they couldn't get in through the door. And so a question I'm often asking is, like, who are my mat carriers? These are not people who are just here to help me make more money or to grow my business or to further my career. Not that those things are bad. They can all be perfectly fine. But, like, when the crap really hits the fan, who am I calling? You know, when something really bad has gone down with one of my kids or my marriage, who's gonna pick up the phone and not just tell me what I want to hear, but tell me what I need to hear? Or even just sit and pray with me or be with me, who's the person if I called him at three in the morning and said, man, I just need somebody with me right now, he's gonna get out of bed, get in their truck, and drive to me, whether I ask them to or not.

(Jay Owen at 00:18:37) Who are those guys? And I think most men couldn't name four guys like that. And I think we often think about it in the process of career, but the thing that disrupts career and the thing that disrupts business the most is everything else. It's what's happening with my kids, what's happening with my marriage, what's happening with my family, what's happening with, you know, my personal health, my mental health, all those things, all those categories that don't live inside of the career, business, money category. What is happening there?

(Jay Owen at 00:19:07) And it requires intentionality that most of us just have not taken the time to do. It took me a long time to figure that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:17) Yeah. I found that community at church. So our church, they do this interesting thing where the first service, like, we go to the service and then during the second service, the kids are still in childcare, but all the parents get together. So there's like 15 to 20 parents. And so we get to, because we all have young kids between, like, you know, newborn and eight years old or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) And so we get to develop community that way, which was really great because there weren't a lot of options when you have kids, especially everyone doing their small groups at, like, 7 PM. I'm like, my kids are going to bed at 7 PM.

(Jay Owen at 00:19:51) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) So I love that they ended up doing small group, like, during second service.

(Jay Owen at 00:19:56) It's a good idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:57) That's where I found, I would say, the guys that match closest to the mat carriers as you described them.

(Jay Owen at 00:20:03) So how many kids do you have?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) I have three. So I have a daughter. My daughter is eight, and one of my sons is six. And my other son, he's a special little guy with Down syndrome. He is three.

(Jay Owen at 00:20:16) Wow. You're in the thick of it. It's good ages, though, for the most part. Three is tough, but it gets better, I think, in general. I have five kids, but they're all in the upper end.

(Jay Owen at 00:20:24) So they're 13, 14, 16, 18, and almost 21, which is crazy. So two of them are out of the house. So, technically, I only have three kids at home anymore, and that's wild. So, yeah, again, same thing. We think about business, think about community, think about life.

(Jay Owen at 00:20:38) You know, I know this is a podcast for the Modern CTO, but, look, it doesn't matter how well you build your career or your business or your financial stability. If everything else falls apart, who cares? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52) Oh, you're exactly right. And that happened for me too early on in my business career where right after we had our first kid, I was just using the excuse that I'm just gonna grind it out and, you know, burn—work as hard as I possibly can, ignore everything, blinders up. And then my relationship with my wife just deteriorated. And then one day I was on a call and it had gotten to a point, you know, and it had gotten really bad. And I was on a call with my wife and she was at her parents' house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) And I heard my daughter, she was probably three at the time. And grandpa asked my daughter, and I could hear it in the background. He goes, oh, is daddy coming over? And it was, like, Thanksgiving or some holiday or something. And she's like, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:38) Daddy doesn't spend time with us. All he does is work.

(Jay Owen at 00:21:40) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:42) And that cut deep. So that's the day that I made the change. I stopped working nights and weekends. We went and we bought a camper, so I could, because I'm very active—like, I have to do something. So I was like, I can't just sit there and watch Netflix on nights and weekends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) Like, let's go find an activity to do as a family. And then that was about five, five or six years ago, and things have gotten just tremendously better.

(Jay Owen at 00:22:05) Yeah. And it's a—I would say too, like, as both a caution and an encouragement—like, it's an ebb and a flow, you know, because I went through that season, and then I got way better. And now I'm probably a little back at it. Not probably. I definitely am, you know, because workaholics are workaholic, and I am one.

(Jay Owen at 00:22:23) And so, you know, I just—I mean, I literally had this conversation this morning, you know, with my wife of probably time to dial it back a little bit, probably time to put the laptop away a little sooner, probably time to leave the phone in the car, you know. I came home from a men's conference a couple weeks ago, and one of the pastors had said we should go home and ask our wives, what's it like being on the other side of me? And my wife is very—she's just not gonna beat around the bush. She can tell me exactly what she thinks. And she paused for quite a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:51) That's a good sign.

(Jay Owen at 00:22:53) Mm-hmm. And then she said, sometimes it can be really lonely. Oh. And I was like, ugh. And then she's like, and it's great.

(Jay Owen at 00:23:03) And I'm like, I know, but the "and it's great" is totally blocked out because of the first part. But she's right. You know? And so I have to constantly ask myself the question of, like, what is my first love? Is it my business or my career or my title or whatever? Or is it her? And because you can say—people say all the time, what are your priorities? Well, my priority is God, my marriage, my family, and then my work. And it's like, yeah, but that's not what your calendar says.

(Jay Owen at 00:23:32) You know? And that's me. That's me too. You know? I'm not blaming anybody else who's listening or watching, but, like, that's the thing you gotta pay attention to.

(Jay Owen at 00:23:40) And I have to keep paying attention to it because I still struggle with it. Like, once a workaholic, always a workaholic. The difference is, unlike an alcoholic who can just join communities and learn to not ever drink any alcohol anymore, I can't not ever do any work anymore. So I have to figure that out, and I have to find the balance, and I have to have people in my life. Thankfully, my wife is clear enough to be honest and transparent.

(Jay Owen at 00:24:04) I think a lot of people just stuff it down and don't talk about it until it's too late.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) Way easier.

(Jay Owen at 00:24:10) Yeah. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) So have you ever had to fire someone out of church?

(Jay Owen at 00:24:16) Have I ever had to fire someone out of church? I don't think I've actually done the firing, but I have been a part of decisions to let somebody go, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:25) Is it pretty much the same thing, performance stuff as in the private market?

(Jay Owen at 00:24:29) I would say it's a lot slower. And that's even in contrast—like, I feel like I'm really slow in my environment, which is kind of the entrepreneurial small business world. I'm very much the hire slow, fire slower kind of guy, which some people totally disagree with. Most people say hire slow, fire fast, but I figure if I let them on the team in the first place, I should probably be really sure it's them and not me before I let them go. At the church, I would say it's even slower.

(Jay Owen at 00:24:58) We probably over-index on trying to find a new seat for somebody. And I think it's usually in the heart of trying to care for people, which I totally get. But I also think we have to pay attention that we're having these conversations now. We also have to pay attention because sometimes releasing someone is not negative in the long term for them. Sometimes in the long term, it's actually for their benefit.

(Jay Owen at 00:25:26) I would say, at least at the agency, I mean, of the people that I know, still know and have connection to, probably 80% of the people that I've had to let go for whatever reason, it was for their best interest and mine. Because at the end of the day, if somebody's not right for an organization, whether that's a church, a nonprofit, or a business, if they're not right for the organization, the organization's probably not right for them either. And the organization could be holding them back as much as they may be holding the organization back. And I think that's true in church as much as it is in business, but we are very slow to let people go, except in certain situations. If there's, you know, significant massive what the church would define as, like, moral failure, you know, if somebody's cheating on their spouse, they're not on staff tomorrow, you know.

(Jay Owen at 00:26:14) Yeah. That's just what it is. Now we would then try and care for their spouse and help them get into counseling, but they don't work here anymore. So there's certain things that are, like, immediate triggers. But as far as performance, like, they're just not doing a great job, it's very slow.

(Jay Owen at 00:26:28) For good or for worse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) It takes a lot of time and pain to learn that lesson about figuring out when the right time to let someone go is.

(Jay Owen at 00:26:35) Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And it's hard, man. I probably sometimes have waited too long. No, not probably. I definitely have waited too long at times to the detriment of probably the rest of the team to let people go. But I'd rather err on the side of grace. I would rather err on being a little too slow than being too fast.

(Jay Owen at 00:26:57) And so that's where I've settled, and everybody else can choose their own adventure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:01) Nice. What's your experience like with vibe coding?

(Jay Owen at 00:27:05) Done a lot of vibe coding. For people not familiar with this term, it's basically using AI to build applications, websites, autonomous agents to do work for you. And we've been doing a lot of this at the agency for our clients. I'll give you some examples. So a lot of times in the marketing world, we're talking about something like a lead generator.

(Jay Owen at 00:27:29) In other words, somebody lands on your website, they're not ready to buy from you. What else could we give them in the short term that they might exchange their email address for or their phone number so we could follow up with them? Because you can't sell to somebody that you don't know. Same thing's true in the church, ironically. You can't disciple who you don't know, and so sometimes you're gonna create resources.

(Jay Owen at 00:27:47) We wouldn't call them lead generators in the church, but it's the same thing, respectfully. Call it whatever. We call it a discipleship resource, but it's the same thing if we're being honest. And historically, that might be something like a PDF, some kind of a downloadable, maybe a video that somebody could get access to in exchange for their email address. But now we can create tools.

(Jay Owen at 00:28:08) So we have a client the other day that one of our teams built a pretty high-end, complicated ROI calculator to show their prospects what the value would be of working with them and kind of run this audit that would have cost the client thousands of dollars for us to produce, and we just provided it as a value add on for the marketing retainer that they already had. We could have never done that before. The product, what we created for them historically would have been worth more than their entire retainer for that month. And so we're able to produce things that we never could before. I'm building tools internally to replace other tools that we're spending money on that are kind of off-the-shelf products, but now we're building custom products exactly the way that they want.

(Jay Owen at 00:28:52) Tools that previously might have cost me $50 to $100,000 and six months' worth of work to do, even as somebody who knows how to do these things and has the teams to do them, I can now produce in a week for a couple $100, you know, plus the experience in the space. So it's incredible to think about what that makes possible for all kinds of businesses and all kinds of roles where we're just gonna be able to produce custom reporting, custom tools that previously we had to squeeze into an existing product. So it's one of the things I'm most excited about in this future of AI is being able to build custom tools and solutions for internal management of companies and organizations that just wouldn't have made sense, you know, five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:37) Yeah. I think the way I use it—I've had some very technical, practical approaches to help me manage some things. But the thing I use the most, I would say, would be the workspaces in Grok or where I can train it and say, hey. When I come to you and start a new message, I want you to—and then just a bunch of stuff. And then I basically have this team of people around me that can think in different unique ways that can help me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) Like, I've got one for helping me write headlines. I've got one for helping me do different types of things. I've got a parenting one that helps me with asking questions about, you know, the children and what their perspective of certain events are. And I guess that would be kind of considered vibe coding, but not really. More like configuration of the AI.

(Jay Owen at 00:30:25) A little bit. Yeah. I mean, when I talk about vibe coding, I really mean building actual functioning applications. And what you're talking about is actually super valuable, and most people are not doing this. Everybody's been focused on — not to get too AI nerdy — but everybody's been focused on prompt engineering. In other words, how do we write a prompt to get the outcome that we want?

(Jay Owen at 00:30:47) And I actually think that's the entire wrong focus. I don't think it's going to matter because I think the AIs are going to be so good at interpreting our prompts, we don't need to write well-structured prompts. What I do think matters, though, is what you just described, which is providing the right context for it to understand from. So, for example, whether it's Grok or ChatGPT or Claude, all of them have some version of setting up a project.

(Jay Owen at 00:31:11) They all call them something a little bit different, but same idea, where you can give it files and information. So, for example, in my ChatGPT project, I have a health and nutrition one. It knows everything about me biologically. It has my blood work. Do I want to share all this stuff with them? I don't know. They're welcome to look at it if they want to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) If it—

(Jay Owen at 00:31:27) Gets leaked on the internet, I'm really not that worried about it. So that's my own privacy policy. I'm not that concerned about it. Some people may be. But it has all that information. So I can go in there and go, "Hey, here's what I'm experiencing," whatever I might normally tell a doctor, and then it can give me an outcome for this. In fact, this happened a couple weeks ago. My wife was dealing with some issues, which I won't go into the details of, but I gave all the information and a couple of photos to ChatGPT. We just come back from this long trip, and she was kind of debating on what she needed to do about it.

(Jay Owen at 00:32:00) And it literally is like, "You need to go to the ER right now." And I was like, "I mean, do we really? We just got off an airplane for ten hours. Could we go tomorrow?" This is literally me talking to the robot. And it's like, "I understand you're trying to get out of it, but I'm just telling you, based on this, this, and this, you really need to go to the ER right now." And so we did. Got in the car, went to the ER, get there. The doctor's diagnosis was — I didn't tell them about the ChatGPT diagnosis, by the way. I just let them diagnose it. Their diagnosis was identical to what the robot put together. Then I showed it to them, and they were like, "That's incredible. That's actually a little better than my diagnosis." Yeah. And they're like, "And it's really good that you came tonight and didn't wait till tomorrow." And it's like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) That's brilliant. Hey, have you seen the study they did where they had three sets of information? They had doctors, doctors with AI, and just AI, and they gave it known patient case files?

(Jay Owen at 00:32:49) I've not seen this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) Okay. Well, let's have some fun. Who do you think got the most accurate? What group do you think got most accurate on this diagnosis?

(Jay Owen at 00:33:00) I want to say the doctor with the AI, but it's probably the AI by itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) You're right. Yeah. The AI by itself was the best, then the doctor, and the worst was the doctor with AI. What they found was when the doctor gets it from the AI, they don't trust the AI. So the AI will advise the doctor in one direction. The doctor will choose to go in another because they don't trust the AI.

(Jay Owen at 00:33:27) So interestingly, I did see another study that Mayo Clinic had done not that long ago. I don't remember the exact numbers, so I'm kind of making stuff up a little bit, but they're close. And in their particular case, it was in the cardiac unit, and they have three major Mayo's — I think three or four — around the country. One of them, they left as the control group. In other words, it just used the traditional methods, doctor only, no AI. The other two used an AI diagnosis ahead of time. But I guess how you train the doctors ahead of time probably matters a lot too, like train them to trust it a little bit. So the one that was the control group without AI had a 72% positive outcome. The one with AI had a 95% positive outcome.

(Jay Owen at 00:34:13) And it's like, I mean, holy smoke. I mean, a couple months ago, I was sitting in an urgent care clinic with one of my kids who I thought had broken her wrist. They take the X-rays. They actually texted us the X-rays before I even got the reply from the radiologist. I'm sitting there waiting for the radiologist to review the X-rays. I literally copy them into ChatGPT, ask it to diagnose it. And it's like, "No, it's not broken. It's probably this, this, and this. It could potentially still be broken, but it would be very hairline if it was. Probably nothing you need to do about it." Wait another 45 minutes. Radiologist comes back to us, exact same diagnosis. And it's like, yes, what a world, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) Radiology is unique. Mathematically, that was one of the earliest ones too that they were collecting training data on — is all the radiographs and the outcomes. And man, are they really accurate with that. And it's becoming more of — I think that'll become almost consolidated. You'll just have the person who has the skill who will read it. And just kind of, you know, we don't have people out there doing lifting super heavy things. We have hydraulic machines now.

(Jay Owen at 00:35:23) Exactly. And it's a little bit — you know, that's a great example. I mean, think about when they built the pyramids. I mean, nobody's quite sure how they did it, but the ideas of how they built the pyramids on the backs of many people — many of which ended up not going very well. But now we've got tools and equipment to build all this stuff. And I think what we're going to see is exactly what you said, which is we probably need less people doing some things, but those people are going to have to be highly versed in AI. It's true for us in the marketing world. It's going to be true for CTOs too. I mean, think about roles that, you know, CTO might have in an organization under them — IT management, cybersecurity, all those kind of things. A lot of those pieces of the puzzle are going to be automated. And so whoever the leader is is going to have to be really well versed because a lot of the junior roles are going to get eaten up in the short term by AI once people feel like they're at a place where they can trust them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Yeah. I don't even know what's going to happen. This is actually, I think, one of the most exciting times to be alive in technology.

(Jay Owen at 00:36:23) But that defines your personality based on how you feel about it, because I always say it's kind of like going down a roller coaster with a really steep hill. Some people in the roller coaster have their hands up and they're like, "Woo! This is the best." And other people are like — they got put on that thing at the last second by somebody that doesn't really love them that much, and they're just holding on for dear life. It's the worst day of their life. That's what we're currently experiencing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:45) Yeah. Yeah. People are going crazy. That's why I try to stay off the internet a whole lot. The comments will just drive you nuts. I'm like, here's what I — here's my philosophy. The way I have sort of the mental model I use to operate in this new crazy world — I was like, the concept of humans exchanging value with each other will not go away. So as far as jobs to make money, as long as you pay attention to what needs are in the marketplace and understand some basic economics, you can always position yourself to do the thing that humans exchange value for. That thing will change. It has changed. If you look back, it's not the same as it was in the 1920s, '50s, or today. So understanding how value works in a marketplace and understanding how people work and desire and all of that — I think those fundamental things let me sleep at night. Whether or not digital twins are going to come out tomorrow or in six years or in five years or whatever it is, whether or not certain things are going to exist — I mean, that's just the fun. You get to wake up every day and see it, you know?

(Jay Owen at 00:37:53) Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that there's two kind of people, and it really is the roller coaster thing. They're either terrified or they're excited. And interestingly, a lot of the root feelings of both of those are the same. It's just kind of the direction of where we're headed with them. Is this anxiety or is it excitement? I mean, maybe it's both. I don't know. And a little bit of anxiety about the future isn't bad. It makes you pay attention, you know? It's a — anxiety rightly placed is like a fire is like a smoke alarm. If anything's going off, you should stand back and look and see if there's any smoke anywhere, you know? And there is smoke right now, to be clear. In most of our jobs that currently exist, they will not look the same ten years from now. Certainly, any of us who touch technology in significant ways, our jobs will not look the same ten years from now. But that doesn't concern me as long as I'm willing to stay up with how things are going. And I love change. For those that don't, they should get comfortable with it because they're going to — or they should get good at, you know, I don't know, being an electrician because we need a lot of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) We are. I mean, they've got ten years at least until we start rolling out exoskeletons that'll replace some high-skilled manual labor.

(Jay Owen at 00:39:06) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) So if you're looking at like — I was looking at this, like, where do I go? What do I do? You know what I chose, Jay? Comedy.

(Jay Owen at 00:39:14) Yeah. That's a fun one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) And people always need to laugh, you know? And we want to do it in person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:20) Well, and it's got a 20-year time frame because there's no way that we're going to get robots indistinguishable from humans that people want to go see at live events in the next ten, 15 years.

(Jay Owen at 00:39:29) I don't think so either. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:30) I was looking at it, and it was the path I was looking at earlier on in my life, and then I took the safer route. And then I was talking with my wife, and I said, "Look, I think that this might be a great route." And so we ended up doing that. But to your point of the roller coaster people, the hands up terrified or excited, I think the root commonality is the change. And then whether their hands are up, excited, or down and terrified, I think is what they're predicting the world will be like post-change. Right? So the people — it's all that nervousness, that excitement of the change, but some people are pumped up for it because they think the world's going to be better, and some people are terrified because they think the world's going to be worse. And I think everybody is right. I think it's going to be worse in the context that it's not nostalgic how it used to be, but it's also going to be great because things are going to be cheaper, better, faster work. You're going to have a high-quality experience for a low cost.

(Jay Owen at 00:40:28) Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, you think about the project triangle of old, right, which is, you know, time, cost, and quality. And the old adage was you can pick two. It can be fast and good, but it won't be cheap, you know, or any combination. I think we are entering a season where it can actually be all three. It can be low cost or affordable — let's call it that, sort of low cost. It can be high quality, and it can be fast. And we've never been in an environment where that is true with a lot of the work that most of us do who might be listening to a show like this. And we are entering that season. I think it is actually the season of the generalist as well. We have to learn to become better at orchestrating, not just executing. And interestingly, over the last, I don't know, at least decade, we've been hyper-focused on how to create specialists, and the more specialized, to some extent, the more valuable. And that is rapidly changing. So I think the generalist who's the idea person who's willing to be continue — I would say some of the key attributes of the future or I call it a future-focused leader are somebody who — they're certainly problem solvers. They're unreasonably confident. They are continually curious. They're high effort, low drama. I mean, those are a few of kind of the attributes I think are going to be required. Anybody who doesn't fit those is going to have a real hard time, and they should brace for impact.

(Jay Owen at 00:41:58) But the roller coaster thing is funny because it is interesting to think about some people are scared because their bodies and their brains are actually telling them you're going to die. Like, that's why they're afraid. Where other people are like, "I'm safe. I'm fine. Many people have ridden this roller coaster before. They all got off of it. At least 99.999% of them did, you know?" And so I'm not worried. I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the ride. But it is going to be a wild future. It's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) I like that. I like high effort, low drama. I'm going to have to become a specialized generalist.

(Jay Owen at 00:42:32) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) Check all of our comedian. Got it there.

(Jay Owen at 00:42:38) Oh, no. That's — you know, I was out in Texas this past week, and I was thinking about humans and technology and automation. And I hadn't eaten in a Taco Bell in forever, but I needed protein. I needed a chicken quesadilla thing, and it was late. And I'm not usually up late, but when I do the comedy shows, I end up being up late. And I walk into a Taco Bell, and I was like, "Yeah. This is why we've replaced the people with the order kiosk." Like, I instantly understood it. And I've never was like, "You know what? We need less robots. We need more robots. We need fully autonomous, ultra-high-quality food stations." I don't — yeah. It's like, that's what we need, you know?

(Jay Owen at 00:43:19) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:21) Yeah. So that's what I'm looking forward to. They have a couple of them. Have you heard about the fully autonomous vehicles?

(Jay Owen at 00:43:30) Been to one, but I've seen a few of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:31) Yep. I haven't been to one either. But I did — I remember maybe three years ago, we did an episode with a company that was actually oddly enough in Texas, and they build the technology that McDonald's and the other chains buy from them that make fully autonomous locations.

(Jay Owen at 00:43:46) Well, it's kind of like those Amazon grocery stores that they had — they have in some places — where you go in and fill up your basket and you just walk out of the store. Although, there was a funny story that — not funny. It was a story that came out later. They realized that — I don't know if it's still like this, but at least in the early iterations of these Amazon stores, they weren't as autonomous as they made people believe. They literally had, like, basically a call center in India that was watching the videos and watching what you took off the shelf and then just putting it in the cart digitally, and that's why you didn't get the receipt till later. But I'm convinced that what they actually were doing in that — I don't have data for this, but this makes sense — is what they were actually doing was training the AI to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:26) Oh, for sure.

(Jay Owen at 00:44:27) In the same way that right now, they're literally paying people in some areas to be video doing all kinds of normal things like folding clothes and, you know, doing the dishes and load the dishwasher and home activities. And they're filming them at high detail so they can then use that to train robots and train the AIs to do those activities for us, which is wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:48) Monkey see, monkey do. Literally. Yeah. And there's a lot of money. And there's three companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:53) I mean, three that I know of. There's the one European company that has the one that's got the cloth all over it, the humanoid robot.

(Jay Owen at 00:45:01) They just, they're selling those now. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:03) Yeah, they are. They have a ship date of '26, but they're selling them now. They got those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:07) You've got Figure. Yeah. And they've got deployments in BMW factories that are actually operating on a day-to-day basis. And then you've got Tesla's Optimus. So I've been watching those three pretty closely, and we're getting there. We're getting there.

(Jay Owen at 00:45:25) We are, and I am convinced that Elon's right about it, that it's going to be one of the biggest industries that there is. I really thought it was interesting watching the Neo price release because for that robot, they priced it at $20,000, which sounds crazy, or you could pay $499 a month. And it's like, that's still a lot of money for most people, but it's not when you think about $499 a month for a 24/7 home employee, basically, who can, at some point, probably not yet, but at some point, do all the home activities. That's the dream where you'd leave the house and go, "Can you..." Yeah, there you go. That's the one, Neo home robot. "Can you go empty the dishwasher, clean off the kitchen counter, run a little laundry, fold all the clothes, and then vacuum the floors before I get home this afternoon?" And then you get home and it's all done, and you get that for $499 a month. I mean, that's a pretty good gig.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Yeah. I mean, you...

(Jay Owen at 00:46:17) Can't get a... I don't know if it's true, but I saw that currently, these are not actually AI-driven. They're teleoperated. I don't know how comfortable people can be with that. I'm not sure I want some person in some foreign country walking a robot around the inside of my house. But I believe those are currently teleoperated where Tesla's goal is for it to be fully autonomous. And the thing people don't understand about Tesla is they're not a car company. They're an AI robotics company that just, their best AI robot right now is a car. I mean, I have a Model 3 with the full self-driving, and it's unbelievable how much better it's gotten in the last five years. It's like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) Oh, yeah.

(Jay Owen at 00:47:01) I mean, it's night and day. It drives better. And people are like, "But how do you trust a robot to drive a car?" I'm like, have you driven in an Uber before? Because I've been in a lot of Ubers, and I would say 70% of them, I feel like my life may be in danger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:16) Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I have the Y with FSD. Yeah. That's awesome. People, my Uber driver actually, just last week, he's like, "Do you, how do you trust it?" And I was like, "Well, you start off slow. Like, you have your, you're ready, and then someone does something stupid, and you watch that it reacts just like you would." And you're like, "Wow, okay." You gained a little trust point. And then I've got what, 15,000 miles on my self-driving situation. And I was like, I am fully 100% comfortable. I actually asked Grok the other day. I was like, "Why haven't they turned it off if they have the autonomous taxis?" And Grok said, "Good point." But for the autonomous taxis, the licensing that they have, they actually have someone observing it too.

(Jay Owen at 00:48:00) Yeah. I mean, real-time. When I first bought my first Model 3, like, I don't know, five years ago or something, and the first version of full self-driving at that point wasn't much better than glorified cruise control, basically. Kept you in the lines, kept you from hitting the car in front of you, but it's not really making decisions. The current software that just came out, I don't know, a couple weeks ago or whenever, it is making decisions at a better pace than human beings. It's right at the point now where I've driven it in autopilot enough. If it would let me, I think I'd take a nap and let it just get where I'm going. I mean, I drive 45-minute, hour-long stretches with it driving from neighborhoods to city streets to interstates with zero interruptions at this point and zero problems. It's just amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:49) Well, I know we have a hard stop, so I want to make sure we get a shout-out for your podcast. What's your podcast, and how can people subscribe to it?

(Jay Owen at 00:48:55) Yeah. I run a podcast called Building a Business That Lasts. There's also a book by the same title. You can get a free copy of that book, just cover the cost of shipping. You can go to getjaysbook.com. And, but the podcast is about how do you build a business without being stressed out and worn out and ready to quit. And I've interviewed well over 100 business leaders that have at least a decade of experience or more, and it's a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:19) Nice. Did you get to interview Dave Ramsey?

(Jay Owen at 00:49:23) Not yet, but he's on my list. I did interview John Deloney, who's one of his personalities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know Ken. He came on the show, I think, like two years ago. Yeah. I live seven minutes from their headquarters.

(Jay Owen at 00:49:36) Okay. I was just up there not that long ago. A couple weeks ago, I was up with Donald Miller and the StoryBrand crew.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:43) Oh, those are great guys. StoryBrand crew.

(Jay Owen at 00:49:45) Good. But I spent a ton of time with Dave and his team, the EntreLeadership team, specifically. Yeah. I've learned a ton from those folks over the years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:53) Brandon's their CTO, and he's, yeah. Yeah. He's become a little bit of a family friend now. He's great. Yeah.

(Jay Owen at 00:50:00) His talk... I don't know him that well personally, but his talk that he did on entrepreneurship about giving, like, handling difficult conversations is one of the best things I've ever listened to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:10) That's our most viral clip we've ever had on the show was him sharing that advice on our show. We got almost a million impressions on...

(Jay Owen at 00:50:18) It's so good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:19) Yeah, it was. That's actually of all the thousand episodes, that's one of the ones that I will definitely remember when I'm old.

(Jay Owen at 00:50:29) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:30) Okay. And as we wrap up, we got a couple of minutes left here. I always like to ask, what's the best leadership advice that you received, you put into practice, and it stuck with you today?

(Jay Owen at 00:50:42) Don't go at it alone. It took me a long time to find the right people around me, find a mentor I could look up to or mentors even. I always say everybody needs four people in their life: somebody to look up to, somebody to stand beside them, somebody who's looking up to them, and somebody that believes in them when they don't believe in themselves. And I think if you have those four people in your life, it changes everything about your ability to lead well. None of us were meant to lead alone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:07) I love it. Jay, thank you so much. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Jay Owen at 00:51:11) I feel great. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:13) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.