NOTE: This title image was created by ChatGPT. Yes, it’s a bit over the top…
In this episode, you’ll hear an AI-generated conversation based on an issue of my Academy Newsletter where I discuss some recent pivots I’ve made in my business, as well as a sneak peek at upcoming projects. To read the full issue, and other issues of the Academy Newsletter, enroll in The Leader Assistant Academy.
I hope you enjoy listening to some AI technology in action, as they summarize these recent updates from me!
CONNECT WITH JEREMY
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- Jeremy on LinkedIn
- Jeremy’s book, The Leader Assistant
- Enroll in The Leader Assistant Academy
- NotebookLM tool used to create this AI-generated conversation based on the blog above – notebooklm.google.com
ABOUT JEREMY
Jeremy Burrows is a longtime executive assistant, international speaker, author of the #1 bestselling book, The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant, founder of The Leader Assistant Community, and host of the #1 podcast for assistants – The Leader Assistant Podcast.
He has worked with CEOs, professional athletes, Fortune 100 board members, and billionaires spanning across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.
Jeremy has had the opportunity to speak to assistants all over the world at multiple conferences of various sizes in Hong Kong, Thailand, Germany, and the United States.
He’s currently Senior EA to the Founder and CEO of Capacity – a fast-growing, artificial intelligence software company.
Jeremy’s passion is to help you lead well, resist burnout, and automate before you’re automated.
Jeremy lives in Kansas City, MO with his wife and 2 boys. To connect with Jeremy or learn more about his training resources for executives and assistants, visit LeaderAssistant.com.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Burrows 0:00
Hey friends, welcome to episode 337 just a quick intro that this is another AI generated conversation using the Google notebook LM tool. It’s pretty cool. I uploaded a newsletter that I published in the leader system Academy to the notebook LM tool on Google, and it created a conversation with a couple of AI agents talking about what’s next and a pivot to quality and creativity that I am I recently announced in the academy newsletter. So I wanted to share that with you today. It’s a pretty fun conversation with these AI agents, pretty crazy technology, and hopefully it gives you a little insight to why I’ve made the recent changes and what’s to come. So hope you enjoy it. You can check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/337 and of course, I would love to have you joined the Leader Assistant Academy? You can enroll at leaderassistant.com/academy
Podcast Intro 1:11
The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing leader assistants.
AI Voice 1 1:28
welcome to the deep dive. Today. We’re really getting into something. I think we all experienced the idea of a pivot, you know, making a change,
AI Voice 2 1:37
yeah, like shifting gears, yeah. Could be a new job or restaurant changing its whole menu, even you know something
AI Voice 1 1:43
personal Exactly. And these shifts, they can be planned, sometimes they just happen, right? Can be exciting, sometimes maybe a bit difficult. But we want to look at strategic pivots today, the really deliberate ones, and maybe the one thing they all share got
AI Voice 2 1:57
to be risk, right? There’s always some element of the unknown when you change direction
AI Voice 1 2:01
Absolutely, and that risk is what we’re going to explore through a really great case study. We’re looking at a business pivot by Jeremy Burrows with his leader assistant
AI Voice 2 2:10
business. Ah, yes, a fascinating example.
AI Voice 1 2:14
Our mission here is basically to unpack the why and how he decided to, well, change things up significantly and maybe see what new things are coming out of it. And hopefully
AI Voice 2 2:22
that gives your the listener, some insight, if you’re thinking about your own kind of pivot, big or small, right?
AI Voice 1 2:28
So like we said, life’s full of these moments. Think about it. Maybe you’ve started a new job recently or seen a favorite local spot suddenly change its whole vibe,
AI Voice 2 2:38
for sure. And while you know changing your coffee order isn’t the same risk as changing careers. That core idea, the uncertainty, it’s always there.
AI Voice 1 2:46
And with career pivots or big business ones like Jeremy’s, the risks can be kind of hidden sometimes, can’t they?
AI Voice 2 2:52
Oh, definitely, yeah. It’s not just about, say, salary. It can affect your network, your your whole sense of professional identity, even financial stability, in ways you didn’t expect. Those subtle risks often need the most thought. Okay,
AI Voice 1 3:06
so let’s talk about Jeremy Burrows. He started the leader assistant back in 2016 and our source material describes it as growing into, quote, an impressive beast of a business. Sounds pretty good on the surface.
AI Voice 2 3:17
It really does sound like a success story. Yeah, impressive growth. But here’s the interesting part. Despite that success, Jeremy had this key realization. He realized he was spending way too much time on what he called busy work, you know, the admin side, managing different online groups, answering the same questions again and again, right? Getting bogged down, exactly, and it was pulling him away from what he really cared about, his core passion, which he says is helping assistants like you become the confident, Game Changing leader assistants The world needs.
AI Voice 1 3:50
Huh? That’s a really interesting problem to have when the success itself almost becomes, well, a barrier to your actual goal. So, okay, things look great from the outside, but, you know, you need a change. What you even do first? What was Jeremy’s first step?
AI Voice 2 4:08
Well, his first move was pretty smart. He called it strategic spring cleaning. Basically, he started consolidating some of the different spaces within his online community, the leader assistant circle, just, you know, tidying up to make things less cluttered,
AI Voice 1 4:20
decluttering. I like that. I bet that meant stopping some things too, right? Can’t just add, sometimes you have to subtract. You
AI Voice 2 4:26
got it? Yeah, a really big step, and probably a tough one, was stopping a weekly zoom call. He’d been hosting,
AI Voice 1 4:32
oh, wow, weekly. That’s a commitment, huge commitment. He
AI Voice 2 4:35
said it was just becoming too much, you know, valuable, sure, but the time drain was stopping him from doing other maybe higher impact things. It was a trade off,
AI Voice 1 4:44
makes sense. So clear out the clutter. Stop the time. Drain. What came next? What did the new structure look like?
AI Voice 2 4:51
So he set up something new called the leader assistant Academy, and this included its own newsletter, and importantly, it was all integrated neatly with. In that existing circle platform he already had so streamlined, okay, keeping it all in one place, right? And he did something pretty innovative too. He brought in AI agents. Oh, interesting, like chat bots, sort of, yeah, tailored for different groups in the community, free members, people enrolled in the academy, Premium subscribers. They’re designed to handle common questions, point people to resources, basically scaling his help without scaling his own time answering the same things. That’s
AI Voice 1 5:25
clever, using tech to free up his own bandwidth. So what’s the bottom line? How does Jeremy actually spend his time now compared to before? What’s changed day to day? Well,
AI Voice 2 5:35
the direct impact is pretty clear. He’s spending way less time on those sort of casual, frequent zoom calls, less time managing lots of different online spaces,
AI Voice 1 5:45
and probably less time on those repetitive questions. Thanks to the AI, exactly that frees him up considerably. So where’s that time going? Instead? What’s the new focus? It means he
AI Voice 2 5:54
can dedicate more energy to more intentional video sessions, maybe less frequent but deeper. He’s focusing a lot more on writing, yeah, newsletters, books, that kind of thing. And this is key. He has more bandwidth now to tackle the really complex, nuanced questions and problems that members bring up, the stuff AI can’t answer, right? Where his personal expertise really shines precisely. That’s where the unique value is.
AI Voice 1 6:20
So if you boil it all down, beyond just shuffling things around, what’s the core strategic shift here? I think
AI Voice 2 6:27
at its heart, it’s a major shift from being reactive, responding to questions, facilitating lots of general interaction, to becoming a dedicated creator, a creator of content. Yeah, high impact original content. It’s less about just being available constantly, and more about creating valuable resources, intellectual property. It’s really a deliberate move towards quality over
AI Voice 1 6:50
quantity, quality over quantity, that applies to the type of interaction the content, even
AI Voice 2 6:54
the medium, yeah, and the frequency, less frequent, maybe, but deeper engagement.
AI Voice 1 6:59
And what I find really compelling is the self awareness involved. He apparently realized he’s actually a better writer than he is, say, a constant live video person,
AI Voice 2 7:08
exactly. And that’s huge, isn’t it? It’s not just about efficiency. It’s about knowing your strengths. He assessed himself, realized, okay, my biggest impact comes through the written word, and then he structured his pivot around that, doubling down on his strengths. Yes, spending less time on the Zooms he felt less impactful on and more time crafting written content where he feels he can deliver more value. It’s aligning his work with his actual gifts.
AI Voice 1 7:33
Okay, so we’ve got the why, getting back to the core mission, escaping the busy work. We’ve got the how, the spring cleaning, the new academy structure, the AI. Now, I bet you’re wondering, what’s the what? What’s he actually doing with all this freed up creative energy, what are the new projects? Right? The exciting part, first up, there’s something he’s calling the detach book, at least for now. Now he’s talked about confidence, identity, self worth quite a bit before, right? Even in his first book,
AI Voice 2 8:02
yeah, he touched on it in the leader assistant, his best seller. But this new project is diving much deeper, and the catalyst really was the feedback from assistants, from assistants all over the world. Yeah, he got such an overwhelmingly positive response whenever he spoke or wrote about identity and self worth, specifically detaching it from the job title. It clearly struck a chord.
AI Voice 1 8:23
I can see why that theme, detaching our worth as humans from our specific work role that’s powerful feels relevant to almost everyone, not just assistants. It
AI Voice 2 8:32
really is universal, isn’t it? So he envisions this book as practical, kind of therapeutic, maybe lots of self assessment, really a personal professional development tool.
AI Voice 1 8:44
Sounds ambitious. How’s he planning to build it?
AI Voice 2 8:47
Interestingly, he’s gonna build it out essentially with his community. He’s starting it exclusively for the Academy enrollees, putting out pieces in the academy newsletter first. Oh, so getting feedback as he goes, exactly, an iterative process, letting the community
AI Voice 1 9:00
helps shape it. Very cool. Okay, so that’s one big project. What else? And then
AI Voice 2 9:04
there’s something that, well, it kind of took us by surprise. Initially, he’s working on a children’s
AI Voice 1 9:09
book, a children’s book, okay, that is a pivot from leadership for assistance. What’s the story there? His kids are older now, right?
AI Voice 2 9:16
They are middle school, I think. But he just loves children’s books. He mentioned, you know, the simplicity, how they’re short, how the illustrations carry so much
AI Voice 1 9:23
weight. I know kids always say, read it again. Uh huh. Yeah, that too.
AI Voice 2 9:28
He sees power in that format for distilling big ideas, maybe even themes like identity or self worth. But in a way, that’s simple and memorable. And you mentioned illustrations, right? He also said he’s a very visual person. So the idea of designing visuals, working with an illustrator to bring ideas to life, that challenge really appeals to him.
AI Voice 1 9:47
So another creative outlet that plays to different strengths, and is this also being built out for Academy members?
AI Voice 2 9:54
Yes, same approach, yeah, exclusively for Academy enrollees. Initially, he actually specific. Specifically mentioned, hoping that you, the listeners who are in the academy, will comment and share feedback on both these projects as they develop in the newsletter, so he can see what resonates. Yeah, what lands, well, what doesn’t. He feels that feedback loop will make both the detached book and the children’s book much stronger in the end. It’s like co creation, almost.
AI Voice 1 10:18
Wow. So looking at this whole story, Jeremy’s journey really shows the power of these strategic pivots, doesn’t it? Finding that core passion, again, cutting out the noise, it leads to really exciting new directions.
AI Voice 2 10:30
It really is. It’s a fantastic example of how understanding what truly matters, like what’s your unique contribution, your zone of genius, and then having the guts to shift away from just more stuff towards real quality and deep creation that can be incredibly transformative
AI Voice 1 10:47
applies to any field, really, any part of life. Absolutely, it’s
AI Voice 2 10:50
about intentionally building a future or even just a workflow that lets you operate at your best. So
AI Voice 1 10:56
maybe something for you to think about as you go about your day. Is there one area, maybe in your job, maybe personally, where a bit of spring cleaning like Jeremy did a little strategic pivot, could free up time and energy for what you really love doing, or what you’re truly best at.
