How Voice AI Changes the Game with Adrien Treccani

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down how voice AI changes the game. And to drop these value bombs, I have brought Adrian Treccani and EO Fire Studios. Adrian is CEO of the Swiss AI startup Supervised. After scaling Medeco to a$250 million Ripple acquisition, He developed an anti-process philosophy that inspired his shift into voice-first AI. And today we talk about scaling truce, the manager trap, the 30 to 40 person cliff, the power of voice-first AI, and oh, so much more.

0:38John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Adrian and our sponsors. Cape is a privacy-first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, Cape makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off Cape for six months today. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

1:11John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Adrian, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Becoming successful, most people would say is about knowing exactly where you're going and knowing exactly what the future may be like and executing upon your vision. But I must say that I have a different take on this. It's actually very hard to predict the future. And generally, what you realize is that you're not doing what you think is going to happen, but you're working on what your passion is.

1:55And to a certain degree, I would argue that it's even better to not know exactly what's going to happen and to be a little bit ignorant about the future. So you're not too afraid about the worst case scenario and what could happen. You actually engage into it. You work on it. You perhaps fail a few times. But because you don't know all of the trouble and the drama that you're going to be facing, you actually persist and you end up succeeding.

2:16John Lee Dumas:I love that. answer. I mean, I've interviewed over 5 ,000 entrepreneurs to date, and I'll tell you, almost every one of them has said something along the lines of, if I knew what I was getting into before I started, I never would have started. So I'm glad that I didn't because ignorance can definitely be bliss. And today for our nation, we're talking about how voice AI literally changes the game. And I want to talk about the moment, Adrian, the moment of letting go of how you knew it was time to sell Medico, what were the signs that that chapter was actually complete and a new one needed to begin?

2:51I mean, the short answer is that I didn't know, actually. I was not sure at all I should sell the company. And I was not actively looking to sell. I had had a few bids to the company, which did not materialize. We generally didn't want to proceed. And at some point came this amazing potential relation with a buyer that we thought was strategic to the company made an offer which was attractive. And even though it was attractive and, you know, as a first-time entrepreneur, you see all of the potential proceeds out of it and potential to grow your company even faster, but now with a new shareholder, you think about it and you really wonder if you should, because, you know, it also means that you're no longer in control, that many of the dreams and ambitions you had would probably not be executed the same way, if not executed at all potentially.

3:37And so I must say that I'm typically the kind of person that is making decisions quite fast and quite often also making wrong decisions or bad decisions. But this is probably the hardest decision that I've ever had to take. It's the first time in my life that I actually polled a few friends and polled my wife, you know, what they thought about it, should I do it? And somewhat, you know, I decided to do it because a few people I trusted the most, my wife and one of my first investors and very successful entrepreneurs told me that, you know, the life of someone selling his company changes very fast, not just because you make money, but very much because you have completed the cycle.

4:18You have created something, you have scaled that thing, and then you have sold it. So in a way, the loop is closed. And you can be very successful as an entrepreneur growing a business. But unless, you know, you're kind of listed somewhere on a stock exchange, or you're so famous, you're so successful that you actually don't ever need to sell. If you're a little bit in between, you can be very successful, but life does not necessarily get easier for you because nobody perceives you as having closed that cycle. And so I got this advice from a few people in particular that's a very successful entrepreneur.

4:54John Lee Dumas:Well, Adrian, let me break in here because I think we're understanding the point of this. And I think what I really know my audience wants to hear is, listen, I've interviewed the first 2000 people that I interviewed, I asked them their worst entrepreneurial moments. So many of them said, the day I sold my company, I thought it was what I was building towards. I sold my company, I exited. And then I was in depression, despair, of course, not everybody, but it was a high percentage. And it was kind of surprising to for entrepreneurs to hear that. and let's not get into a long answer because I have a lot of things to talk with you about today.

5:28John Lee Dumas:Just really short, quick. Was that what you experienced? You experienced any depression, any sadness after that was over? Depression, I don't know, but I did not really experience joy or happiness. It was actually more of a flat line, a bit like, you know, you're so used to having complex sales where you don't know if you're going to succeed or not. Then when you succeed or when you fail, it actually, you know, your brain filters this out and it remains a flat line. Yeah. And I don't think a lot of people think about that when they're driving so hard as an entrepreneur. They think that it's going to be the most joyous day of their life and everything's going to be amazing every single moment afterwards.

6:02John Lee Dumas:And it's so much better to be prepared for the fact that, hey, it's another day. Like we got to get up, we've got to do something. We've got to occupy our brain with something. We've got to find joy. We have to find progress. We have to find challenges to overcome, which is why I want to talk next, Adrian, about scaling truths. What's the biggest mistake that you see that you feel founders make when they start scaling? And we're talking especially when growth starts moving faster than the systems behind it. You know, you have investors in a board that start pushing for very senior hires that will best know how to structure your company.

6:35And so you start looking around, you start paying for headhunters to bring that, you know, these superstars. And the reality is that there is a stage for everything. And bringing these superstars to your company that have this very long CV, have gone through a couple of exits, et cetera, is not always what you want to do too early. in particular, the corporate guys, you know, they can be amazingly powerful for your company when you're already at scale and you have all of the processes and your company is almost a corporate itself. But bringing the, you know, the heavy guys too early for me is one of the most horrible mistakes you can make.

7:06I think culture should be the center of the center value that you optimize for when you grow and you should not fall to the pressure that you get from board shareholders, et cetera.

7:16John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, I really think that's an important thing to consider when you're understanding, hey, what exactly are my goals here? What are my aspirations? Am I keeping my finger on my pulse? Which kind of leads us, Adrian, to the manager trap. Because you've actually said that managers today, they become, quote unquote, glorified secretaries. What do you mean by that? And how do we get there? How do we get to that point in this world? So, John, you know, when you start a company, you have a small team, everything is flat, there's no hierarchy, and communication is trivial. We know each other, we trust each other.

7:47But as you start growing, you have no choice but to start putting in place hierarchies and structure and processes. The implication of this is that you end up being in the middle of a huge chain of commands, a huge chain of communication, and everybody in this chain has to understand what's happening in his team, but also has to communicate upstream and on the side, the current context, the current situation of your organization. And look at any company of more than 50 or 100 people, from 100 people to potentially hundreds of thousands, and ask a manager what he's doing on a daily basis. And he will tell you the same thing.

8:21Half of his time is spent trying to understand what his team is doing and communicating information left and right and up and down. And this is what I mean by glorified secretary. I mean, I don't mean this in a negative way. I mean, secretaries are extremely important in a company. However, what the implication of this is, is that a manager is no longer truly managing, he's no longer coaching, he's no longer making true decisions. is operating as a form of information router.

8:47John Lee Dumas:See, I love that. And I really do like that you said this isn't meant to be disrespectful, like a glorified secretary. Secretaries play an important role in companies, but here we have to step back and say, what are managers actually doing compared to what they could and should be doing? And that's why I want to talk about the 30 to 40 person cliff, the power of voice first AI, urgent advice for founders and more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. There's no better time to review your systems than the new year. And one of the most important systems you can streamline right now is your communications.

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11:45John Lee Dumas:When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 days to something execution roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Adrian, we're back. And as I talked about before the break, I want to chat about the 30 to 40 person cliff. This is very fascinating for me. So what is the real reason that you find most startups die at 30 to 40 employees? Why is this such a dangerous stage for founders?

12:27Well, it is the first time that you start seeing people in your office that you don't do not necessarily know personally, that you start having layers of mid-management and that you are in this growth phase where you are also under pressure to hire people you don't exactly know and potentially you have not vetted as much. And so this is generally around 40 people that you start seeing the emergence of politics in your organization, people asking for larger salaries because they have discussed with a colleague that was making better compensation or people starting to fight for a better title and let's say side ambitions within the company that are not really under your control.

13:07And to a certain degree, it is natural because in any chaotic system where you have probabilistic agents, like human beings working together, the more people you put together, the harder it is to reach consensus and to have a single trajectory. So you have to start putting in place processes and controls, as I was saying, to make sure that your company is still moving to the same ambition. And these controls slow your company down. There is no way to avoid them, at least with the current set of technologies out there. And you have to put in place and you get under pressure from your board and for your shareholder to do it.

13:38And you do it and you realize that all that ambition for an agile, flexible company making fast decisions in real time, this is gone. This is no longer true. Now you have a very slow company, which is focused more on putting HR processes, sales processes, delivery processes, engineering and product processes in place, and you've lost your way. And of course, because every big company goes to this, that's generally fine because your competitors have to do it too. But of course, now with technology, you might have new ways of doing that.

14:08John Lee Dumas:See, I love that because I do talk to a lot of founders and CEOs and they say, hey, listen, I was a person to bring this company from$1 to$10 million or$1 to 50 million ARR. But I'm not the person to take it from 50 million to a billion. And same thing goes in numbers. Like I'm the person to take this company from like one person to 25 to 30, but I'm not the person to take it from 50 employees to 500 employees, so to speak. And so knowing thyself is important here. And that 30 to 40 person cliff that you acknowledged and that you've experienced is really interesting, which is why I want to keep talking about like, what do we do in this world that we now live in?

14:48John Lee Dumas:And that's the power of voice-first AI. Adrian, how specifically does voice-first AI actually make managers better? And what problems does it solve instantly inside a growing company? Well, you are a manager, you've been a manager. So what do you do every Monday with your team? You schedule a bunch of one-to-ones and you sit here with your team, with your employee, one after the other, and you ask what they've been doing during their week. And, you know, you feel like it's great because you bond with your team and you understand what they're doing. But the truth is, it's very low value added. The reality is that there would be much better ways to bond with your team to coach them.

15:26And the information that they're sharing with you could have been shared in a very different way and could have been done entirely automatically. So this is not the best way to understand what's happening in your company. The best way would be that you can put in place systems that will connect it for you. And of Of course, a lot of companies have tried in the past. You know, if you use a CRM, for instance, it is a system that tries to collect information without you being involved. But the truth is these systems fail at doing that because nobody wants to be entering information in the CRM. You know, there is a reason why you hire people specifically to be policing people in the organization to update the CRM because people don't want to do it by themselves.

16:04So where voice AI comes into play is voice AI can actually bring a scalable new human in the equation, some form of a human, of course, an artificial human, that understands the information needs of the organization, understands that the manager needs every week this kind of information, understands that the CRM needs to be updated with this kind of data on a regular basis, understands the exact topology of information across the organization. And based upon this, you can literally, John, you know, pick up the calendar, send you an invite and start having a discussion with you. And you will speak about it to the agent.

16:43You will speak entirely with complete freedom of it. You will speak the same way you would to a manager, but you will be guided to speak about the things you need to speak about. And that agent then will have that extremely rich information that he can route across the organization, that he can use to schedule meetings only when needed, to coordinate information, to update the tools like CRM and other ERPs, etc. All of that automatically, simply because you've brought that virtual chief of staff at scale in your organization.

17:14John Lee Dumas:See, I love that. And Fire Nation, I hope that you're listening, saying, how can I improve my systems, my processes, what I'm doing with my team, how I'm showing up every day, every week, every month as a leader. And so here's where we're moving on to urgent advice for founders. For a founder, and let's just picture this founder sitting at about 30 to 40 employees, we're talking about that 30 to 40 person cliff again, and they're there right now, Adrian. What's the most important thing they should do today? To a certain degree, they're already too late. So it's urgent to react. Oh no. Your company is changing.

17:50And if it's the first time you're going through, are you going to be shocked how true this is? I used to think that it was theory. You know, I had again, entrepreneurs telling me about that special number of 30, 40 people. And I thought, yeah, well, it's not going to be the same at my company. It was exactly the same, if not worse. So now is the time to put in place the structure you need to scale. but don't go the old way. You know, don't put Excel sheets everywhere and processes and more meetings. Nobody wants more meetings. Nobody wants more reporting. Just use voice AI with a tool like supervised, like what we do at supervised so that you can automate it in a human way that both employees and managers can benefit from.

18:29John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, hope you're taking notes on this because again, you don't want to be at that point where it's too late to make changes. You want to get to that point ready with a plan in action. And if you could just step back, Adrian, and share one leadership upgrade that a founder can make this week that will transform the way that they scale for years to come, what would that closing value bomb be? I was going to say a triviality here, but for me being a product and engineering founder, I always thought that the key to scaling was having a great product and you would win through that. But the key to scaling is not so much about whether you have a great product, it's whether the market believes you have a great product.

19:14And so scaling is very much about how much you invest and how efficient you are with your marketing and go to market. And AI, obviously, I'm not going to teach anyone anything here, but AI has given us so many new ways to be visible and to create that credibility.

19:29John Lee Dumas:So powerful. So listen, Adrian, we've talked about scaling truth. We talked about the manager trap, the 30 to 40 person cliff, the power of voice first AI, urgent advice for founders. You've delivered so much value to our listeners today. If they want to connect with you, if they want to learn more about you, your company, what you have going on, What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? Please do reach out. You can reach out on LinkedIn. You can reach out to us on our website. You know, because I'm an entrepreneur myself, I'll be very excited to connect with other entrepreneurs, be it to discuss about what we do at Supervised or simply to understand what they're doing and potentially coaching.

20:08So please feel free to reach out.

20:10John Lee Dumas:Amazing, because Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with AT and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, how to connect with Adrian, et cetera, type Adrian in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. That's A-D-R-I-E-N. Adrian, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Adrian for sponsoring today's episode.

20:41John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, don't let another 90 days slip by inside the Freedom Circle, my community. Entrepreneurs are building real freedom with proven playbooks and community support. Claim your spot now at freedom-circle.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. CAPE is a privacy-first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, CAPE makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off CAPE for six months today. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure.

21:18John Lee Dumas:High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com.