Why Entrepreneurship Is the Ultimate Hedge Against AI

AI is transforming the job market faster than many of us realize, and that’s creating both challenges and opportunities. In this episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, your host Jon LaClare breaks down why entrepreneurship is becoming one of the most future-proof career paths, how to validate a business idea, and how to leverage AI rather than be replaced by it.

Through decades of launching products for hundreds of companies, the team at Harvest Growth has developed a simple framework to identify profitable opportunities and build businesses that withstand automation and technological disruption. Join us now to discover the framework and how you can use it.

In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover the following:

• How AI is reshaping tech and traditional jobs.
• Why entrepreneurship offers ownership and security even as automation takes over tasks
• The Perfect Launch Framework for launching products successfully.
• Skills to develop today that AI struggles to replace.
• How to turn your professional experience into a niche business or product to stay ahead of disruption.

Ready to take ownership of your future and launch your next business? www.harvestgrowth.com/perfectlaunchsystembook to get a copy of The Perfect Launch System.

To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!

Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands totaling over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!

Transcript

Announcer [00:00:00]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.

Jon LaClare [00:00:18]:
Welcome back to the show. Today I'm talking about how AI is reshaping the job market right now and why many of you may want to consider entrepreneurship now more than ever. The topic really is personal to me. I've got four kids in their teens and 20s and I think a lot about their future and the future of work. As the owner of Harvest Growth, I can see how AI is changing marketing operations, even product launches. And I want to preview something. I'm going to talk about tech layoffs, but also other jobs that we used to think were safe, really may not be safe anymore, and why entrepreneurship is the most future proof path and really how to validate an idea if really you're going to start down this path of entrepreneurship for the first time. In recent data, 112,000 tech layoffs have happened over 218 companies. That's just in 2025, Amazon alone cut 14,000 corporate jobs. Meta has cut 600 just in their AI division. And I just read today about Verizon cutting 13,000 employees. That's 13% of their workforce. They're now down almost half of where they were 15 years ago. Tech productivity has gone way up, over 30% over the last 10 years, most of that driven by AI. What that means is each employee can do a lot more than a previous employee could do just a couple years ago. So what that means is you need fewer employees and tech companies are going to be the first type of company to start to lay off. We've seen a lot of that happen so far. This is really the biggest shift we've seen in over 25 years. We've one more example is Shopify came out recently, just a couple of months ago and announced that they are not going to hire anybody unless they can prove that the job can't be done fully by AI. Some analysts will say that AI isn't the only cause, and that's true. But it is a major driver and if the tech industry isn't safe, it really signals broader disruption for every sector in the time to come. There's a common belief that plumbers, electricians and surgeons will always be safe. The reasoning is that manual skill, precision or life and death judgment is involved in their day to day jobs. But that may not always hold true. Robotics is advancing rapidly. So think of Tesla Optimus. They've made announcements recently on how they can make advancements even in the surgery space, to take learnings from thousands of surgeons, the best in the world, across the world, and put them into their own technology and then have micro adjustments as they get better. It's not ready today, but it's getting closer and closer every year. They can combine that precision and learning and perfect memory. And even these high skilled jobs that are manual based could be automated in the future. A key shift is if robots start to do the plumbing, when someday that may happen, someone still has to own the plumbing, robots, he still has to own the business. That's where entrepreneurship comes into play. And if robots assist or even perform surgery, someone will own the surgery tech center and also the robots themselves, the business behind the technology. Entrepreneurs truly become the owners of the automation. Now, that may be far off in the future. We don't know how far it is, but start to plan ahead and get ahead of what may happen in your job market by being an entrepreneur of some sort. So many jobs and tasks can be automated even today, and certainly in the future. But ownership can't, not in the same way we think about it. If AI performs the work, I can be the one who owns the AI or the systems or the technology behind it. So I tell my kids, think like owners, not just task doers. Now, consumer product entrepreneurship is still incredibly strong and is for the foreseeable future, even as robots start to do more and more in our daily lives. Marketing, creativity, storytelling, innovation, these are harder to automate meaningfully. Now, you may be able to replace some tasks in an agency, for example, some creative work today, absolutely. But the ideas behind it, the running of the business, the true creativity to bring something out that hasn't been seen before in the product space or whatever it might be, that is true entrepreneurship. And that cannot be replaced, not in the near future, by AI. Now, if you're thinking about entrepreneurship, but not sure what to do or how to get there, you can always start on the side before you lose your job to tech or to AI. Now follow up framework. We've been doing this for over 20 years, launching products successfully and profitably for hundreds of companies across different types of categories and platforms. But one thing stays constant. It's the process. And I lay out in the perfect launch system, my perfect launch framework, which is in simple terms, prepare, produce and profit. So prepare means market research and competitive research, learning about the company and how to make it grow, make it successful from the get go. Produce, create effective video and digital marketing strategies, and you can use AI for some of that and then profit convert, drive sales, optimize your business, improve it scale, grow your average order value, build reviews, and plan the exit for your business. Now, market research is arguably the most important and really most overlooked stage of this entire process. I want to dive into how to do this research if you're thinking about implementing entrepreneurship in your own life. Over the last 20 years, we've done over a thousand surveys for different products, all types of categories. We've had a lot of learnings along the way. And one learning we've had is if you do research the right way, it doesn't have to be crazy expensive, it doesn't have to take very long, but if you do it the right way, you will save tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on failed launches or mistakes along the way. You don't want to launch the wrong product, and you don't want to launch the right product in the wrong way. So let me talk about market research and how you can use it to make sure you market your product better. So if you're thinking about entrepreneurship, or maybe you've started on that journey, but you want to make sure that you're successful with your marketing efforts, follow this approach. The first step is to survey at least 100 people who don't know you. These are not friends and family. Now, getting over that 100 person hurdle means that your responses are quantitative. Your answers mean something. You can now say, 45% of my audience is likely to buy the product. And if you survey five people, 10 people, it's just not going to be quantitative. It doesn't mean anything. It's very subjective. But get over that hurdle, you keep your cost down. It doesn't need to be crazy expensive to do these surveys. And then you look at the responses and what we found over 20 years of doing this, leading from survey to launch and either success or failure, we know what the answers mean. One of the answers we look at is that purchase intent, the percent of people that are likely or somewhat likely to buy your product. Now, if you get that over 40% in a general audience, a wide audience of men, women, all ages, demographics, et cetera, then you've got a home run in your hands. Next, you want to look at your purchase intent, those that are either likely or somewhat likely to purchase your product after revealing the price point. If that's above 25%, again, you confirm that you've got something Here, now you still have a road ahead of you. This means you've got to talk about it the right way, you've got to price it the right way, you've got to lead to a positive consumer experience. So in that same survey you want to look at three key metrics. Your audience, your offer and your messaging. I'll talk about those individually. First, it's your audience. Okay, which age, gender, income showed the highest purchase intent? Who's most likely to buy your product that will help you when you get to market on TV or on Facebook or wherever it might be, you know who you're talking to. Next is price. So what do you expect to pay? Is the first question we ask in a survey before we reveal any price points. Later on we will add in a price point and then we ask how likely are you, are you to purchase at this price point? So leading first with an open ended pricing question, it's all over the map, right? They're going to tell us by answering that question or something we might be selling for $50. They come back and say, you know what, I'd be able to pay maybe $75 or $100 for that. Or are they going to tell us this is worth 20 bucks? So if it's lower than what you need to sell it at, you've got a value issue. You've got to change how you talk about it. You got to change the messaging, the benefits that you provide to them. So the first question you get to is your audience, who's buying the product? What age, gender and income showed the highest purchase intent. Now this helps you when you get to Facebook ads or TV ads or however you market your product to know who you're talking to. It changes everything. Next is the price. Okay, first we ask an open ended pricing question. What do you expect to pay for this product now that it's been described? We've shown either a picture or a video of it. They come back with their answer. Let's say we're playing planning on selling for $50. Now if they come back on average and tell us, I'd pay a hundred dollars for that product. Well, if they pay more or they're willing to pay more than you're charging, you've got some potential increase in your profits. You can raise your prices. If they come back and tell you on average that you know a 50 product they're only willing to pay 20 bucks for. Well, now I've got a value issue. I can't afford to make it and make enough profit at 20 bucks. So that means I got to change my messaging so that they are willing to pay more, that there's more value in the product. Okay, next, after we ask the open ended question now, we reveal our price point that we're expecting to start with. And that might be, let's say $50. So we say, okay, our product is $50. How likely are you to purchase this? And again, and we get back to that question. If we've got 25% or more of the people that are saying I'm somewhat likely or likely to purchase the product at 50 bucks. Okay, we're in, we're in good shape. We've got a good price point here. The last piece is your messaging. Okay, messaging is really about how do you talk about your product now that we've figured out who's buying it and what they're going to pay for it, how do we talk about it? So we convince them to purchase. One of the best ways to do that is to list out all the features and benefits or the primary features and benefits of the product. And then we have them pick their top few. Depending on how long the list is, this might be their top three or their top five. And we find out by asking 100 people at least. Okay, which ones really rise to the top? Okay, those features and benefits are now top of the list. Those are the key messages that we need to share in our marketing. Sometimes we get surprised by these. Some results come back and like, I did not think that was going to be the number one or vice versa. Right. And that can change how we talk about our messaging or our product on the packaging, on the website and ultimately in our scripting or video marketing that we put forward. Really it's how do we communicate this? By learning first what consumers care about, what messages are most important to them. Now this is an important process. If you want to learn more, you can always go to my book and learn the full detail. But really it comes down to answering, proof of concept, and then your audience, your offer and your messaging. So what do I tell my kids when they come to me and say, dad, what should I major in? I'm going to college. I've got one that's going in a couple of years, a couple that are in college right now and they're trying to figure this out. So my advice to them and to you is don't just pick a job, pick a path. Now this may apply to you if you're just entering your career or maybe you're pivoting. Maybe you're seeing the writing on the wall that you know, I don't know how much longer my position is going to be here in my company. So pick a path that's going to work. Develop skills that AI struggles with. Some of these are creativity, problem solving, communication, leadership, storytelling, and marketing. Now, I can tell you how to do a lot of these things, but to execute on any one of those measures right now, at least it really comes back to, okay, can you have a path where you're providing value along the way? Learn how to use AI, but don't rely on being the one who just executes tasks. They're easily replaceable. If you do lose a job to automation, don't think I was replaced. Think, all right, what can I build or own? What's next for me? Turn your professional experience into a niche product or a business. Really, ownership is the ultimate buffer against automation. Wherever you are on this path, if you're starting to think about entrepreneurship for the first time, or maybe you have a business and you're looking to grow it, we can help. I would encourage you to Visit our website, HarvestGrowth.com to get that help. Set up a meeting. You can talk with one of our team members or check out our book, the Perfect Launch System. It's available on Amazon, on Audible, and you can actually go to perfectlaunch.com and get a free electronic copy. All right, where do you go next? We've been doing this for a long time. We've built a business here in Harvest Growth, but we've also helped build hundreds of other businesses for our clients over the years and really help them to be successful, to support their families, to support their employees, and really grow their businesses. If we can help you, please go to HarvestGrowth.com get in contact directly with me or a member of my team, and let's discuss your business and how we can help. In the meantime, feel free to check out my book, the Perfect Launch System. You can get it on Amazon, on Audible, and you actually get a free electronic copy at PerfectLaunch.com. Here's to your profitable product launch.