Imagine if you saw real-time how much value each person created

I think AI will eventually enable this and it will completely change about how we hire and manage people.

I work with a number of affiliates these days for my d2c ecom brand, Reviv.

They promote my products on Tiktok and other social media platforms.

When a new affiliate wants to join it takes me a couple minutes to vet them. I just look at some of the content on their social account and decide if I think they are a good fit for my brand.

If so, i send them a free sample and in a couple weeks they’re creating content.

There is nothing special about how I do this. Thousands of other brands do it more or less the exact same way. Why?

Because their value creation is crystal clear. They either generate sales for you or they do not. And you only pay them a commission when they do.

It’s win-win. Our interests are perfectly aligned.

I now think about how to do this with pretty much everyone I work with. But it gets harder the less transparent the value they create is.

And so I wanted to discuss this today because I think it is very interesting and it’s going to evolve. Especially as AI gets better.

How do people create value?

Different functions create value in different ways.

For example I have a lady that handles customer support tickets. The value she creates is in keeping customers happy by adjusting their orders according to their requests.

If we didn’t have her we’d probably have a lot more order cancellations, we’d have angrier customers, poorer retention, etc.

There is a guy that handles operations for us. He ensures we manage our fulfilment partners well and we forecast inventory needs accurately.

Without him we don’t raise purchase orders in time and lose a lot of sales through stockouts.

We have nother guy that manages all of our marketing. Without him we run performance marketing campaigns that perform poorly and lose us money.

So we’d lose out on sales, waste money, etc.

The transparency of value creation varies

In these example functions that I named above… imagine if you were tasked with putting a number on it.

For example, if i said I want to know exactly how much value my operations guy adds because i’m going to pay him 50% of it.

This would be a very difficult task to do as it would require quite a number of assumptions. For example…. maybe we should calculate his example by comparing against having an automated process that does the same thing.

We just raise purchase orders based on some automated flags and do not manage our fulfilment partners at all. What would go wrong and how expensive would those mistakes be?

It’s difficult to calculate… but possible.

The problem is that if you do it by hand, it requires more effort than it is worth.

But how about AI?

I think AI will make value creation far clearer in time

AI is very good at taking lots of data and making lots of intelligent assumptions quickly.

I could see a dashboard in the future where I literally see how much value each person in my team generated today. Because all of their tasks would be in Clickup and so their updates so those tasks would be ingested into the AI engine, which would then include it in their value creation algorithm.

Think about how cool that would be if it was accurate?

Each person could, themselves, look at their value created today and know that I am going to pay 50% of it at the end of the month (the other 50% would go to the company).

So instead of hiding away from work… they will push themselves to do more.

If they were consistently very low on their value created.. they would not question why I eventually ask to pay them less or part ways.

It would be near complete transparency driven by AI.

If value creation is clear, it simplifies hiring massively

Now let’s build upon this new world a little bit. Imagine I had my dashboard of value creation per each team member and I’m thinking about growing my company.

How would I take decisions about what kinds of new people to onboard? I’ll tell you how…. I will do so fast and without much fuss.

Kind of like the way I hire affiliates today.

Because the value creation would be clear.

I’d just hire a load of people to do all kinds of functions and then give them a couple of weeks till their value creation numbers start to get steady.

Then i would see for each person a pretty accurate view on how much revenue they were generating, how much cost they were saving, and whether they were ROI positive or not.

Anyone that is ROI positive stays. Anyone that is negative goes.

Rinse and repeat.

You can almost just let them do whatever the hell they want. Just bring them onboard and say… “Do whatever you think is useful just follow our system and make sure you are ROI positive at the end of the week.” lol

Closing thoughts

My point with this article is that the whole game changes when value creation is very transparent.

You hire easily.

You don’t even need to really manage people much because they will self-optimize the value they create.

You will grow your company far faster and with less risk.

And all of this will serve to reduce unemployment massively. Despite the fact that AI will do more and more for us.

Because people will need to be ROI positive while leveraging the latest AI technologies. And I think most people will figure out how.

Because there is a rapid feedback loop that tells them exactly how much value they are adding and so they just iterate.

This probably sounds insane to many of you right now. But when you run a company as transparently as we do with Beast Method… it is actually not that far a leap once the AI is ‘good enough’.

Which is probably not that far away.

I know i can say from my perspective with running Reviv… once AI enables me to do this… I am off to the fucking races baby!