How to 10x Your Business’s Productivity Potential in 4 Hours

44% of hours worked in the US today are now “automatable” with AI, per McKinsey.

Another 13% are automatable via robots.

With TODAY’S tech.

Tech that’s currently the worst it’ll ever be.

Think about that.

We certainly are. But we’re trying to DO something about it, too.

And below, we want to help you do the same.

Okay, Here’s How to Reinvent Your Business With AI (And Have Fun Doing It)

IDEA #1: Find Your CAO

Everyone’s either excited about AI or thinks it’ll steal their job.

We used to be on the fence.

Then we hired a guy just to integrate AI into everything we do. To be our Chief Automation Officer / Head of AI Transformation / Supreme Leader of Tech-Enabled Productivity.

Whatever you want to call it, that’s him. Our guy doesn’t really care about titles.

His job?

• Find every unfair advantage AI gives us… and leverage the hell out of it
• Build cool, useful AI tools across our business
• Evangelize AI across our team

He’s so great… we now have a whole team of AI-first employees.

Whether you’re already a business owner or if you’re coming to Main Street Millionaire Live to learn how to buy a legacy business, this is something you need to be thinking about.

Maybe it’s you.

Maybe it’s someone who already works for you.

Or maybe it’s someone you need to hire.

But it’s a role someone needs to play, and you’ll likely fall behind without it.

That’s the biggest opportunity billionaire Mark Cuban sees for young people right now.

Not “AI.”

Helping small businesses use AI.

Lower middle market businesses often…

• Aren’t big enough to justify custom enterprise solutions or consulting
• Are manually process-heavy, with lots of “drag and click” work
• Have some budget to spend, but little to no AI expertise to spend it on

They sense change is coming, but they don’t know where to start.

Right now is a great opportunity to help them.

Maybe in another piece, we’ll show you how we’d build a business around that.

But for now, let’s focus on you.

IDEA #2: Run an Internal AI Hackathon

This week, we did.

And it was (potentially) one of the most transformative, highest ROI things we’ve ever done.

Not because of the immediate results.

But because of the immediate “awakening” across the team.

And you’d better believe we’ll be doing it again.

In a moment, we’ll show you exactly how we organized it, so you can too.

But first, you should really see this…

It’s not just young, scrappy businesses doing this.

Take Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick.

Wharton was established in 1881.

Right now, Mollick is teaching them to throw generations of conventional limitations out the window and focus on AI “vibefounding.”

What he’s seeing makes a lot of traditional assumptions about business education now look… antiquated:

1. The Pace of Learning Has Changed: “I have taught entrepreneurship for over a decade. Everything they are doing in 4 days would have taken a semester in previous years, if it could have been done at all. Quality is also far better.”
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2. The Syllabus Has Flattened: “Give people tools and training, and they can do amazing things. We are using a combination of Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT. The non-coders are all building working products. But also, everyone is doing weeks of high-quality work on financials, research, pricing, positioning, marketing in hours.”
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3. Implementation > Instruction: “People with experience in an industry or skill have a huge advantage as they can build solutions that have built-in markets & which solve known hard problems that seemed impossible. (Always been true, but the barriers have fallen to actually doing stuff).”
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4. Intelligence Is No Longer Scarce: “The hardest thing to get across is that AI doesn’t just do work for you, it also does new kinds of work. The most successful efforts often take advantage of the fact that the AI itself is very smart.”

“So many assumptions about how to launch a business have clearly changed,” he says. “The students really see how big a deal this is.”

Now, back to that hackathon…

USE THIS TEMPLATE

How to Plan an Internal AI Hackathon for Your Business

It’s really quite simple.

Step 1: Get your leader

This person needs to be the person who is most genuinely interested in AI at your company.

Your CAO.

Someone who uses the tools for fun.

An evangelist.

They should also plan a fun, brief presentation for the beginning of the hackathon, to get everyone on the same page and see the larger picture.

Ours was all about the history of AI.

Step 2: Send your team this message

In advance, the leader should send a message with the game plan to the team so everyone knows what to expect coming in.

Below is the actual message our in-house AI expert sent our team.

Feel free to take it and run with it:

Hey team,

Looking forward to our hackathon on Sunday (1/12) from 12-4pm at the office.

Here’s everything you need to know:

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon is a fast-paced, hands-on event where small teams rapidly prototype new tools or solutions in just a few hours. Think of it as a creative sprint where you'll go from idea to working demo by the end of the day.

This is not a presentation or lecture - it’s an active, collaborative exercise where you’ll be in the trenches building something real. You’ll each bring one idea, pitch the idea, then we’ll vote on the top 3 and work in teams of 2-3 people, combining your skills (whether that's technical, creative, or strategic) to solve actual problems we face. The energy comes from everyone working simultaneously, bouncing ideas off each other, and seeing what you can accomplish under time pressure.

Your attendance and active participation is crucial - the magic happens when everyone's engaged and contributing their unique perspective.

Attendees

Host: [NAME]

Confirmed Participants:

1. [NAME]
2. [NAME]
3. [NAME]
4. [NAME]
5. [NAME]
6. [NAME]
7. [NAME]
8. [NAME]
9. [NAME]

📍In-Person Only

Due to the collaborative, hands-on nature of hackathons, this event requires in-person attendance - we won't be able to accommodate virtual participation.

🎯 The Challenge: Come With Ideas for Tools We Need

What frustrates you in your daily work?

• Repetitive tasks that eat up time
• Information that’s hard to find or analyze

What do our customers struggle with?

• Questions they ask repeatedly
• Calculations or analyses they need help with
• Tools they’re currently paying for elsewhere

⏰ Schedule Overview

• 12:00 - Food / Intros / Kickoff
• 12:30 - Present Idea / Vote / Team Assignments
• 12:45 - Quick Presentation on Tools by [NAME]
• 1:00 - Building begins ([NAME] floating / providing support throughout)
• 3:00 - Final polish
• 3:30 - Demos & judging

🛠️ What to Bring

• An open mind and contrarian ideas
• Your laptop (charged!)
• Any favorite tools/accounts logged in (design tools, AI tools, dev environments).

At a minimum, have the following:

• ChatGPT or Claude
• Replit
• Optional but helpful:
  • Adobe Creative Suite (or any content editing software suite)
  • Figma (or any user journey mapping software)

💡 Before You Arrive

• Think about what you’d like to build
• No need to prepare anything - fresh ideas welcome
• Consider what skills you can contribute (dev, design, strategy, content, etc.)

🍕 Food

• Lunch provided around 12pm (the start time)
• Snacks and drinks throughout

📊 Demos / Judging

At ~3:30PM, each team will demo what they built (3-4 minutes each). No formal presentations needed - just show us what works, what you learned, and how it could be used. We’ll discuss as a group:

• Creativity & contrarian thinking - Does this solve the problem in an unexpected way
• Feasibility/execution - How close is this to actually being usable?
• Potential impact for the business - Would this actually move the needle for our team or members?

The goal isn’t perfection - it’s seeing what’s possible in 4 hours and identifying which ideas deserve more development.

Oh, and it helps if your hackathon leader has a nerdy sense of humor.

And then… We did it.

Here’s a nice blurry photo of the crew in action:

Now Seriously, Run the 4-Hour Test

If you locked your team in a room for 4 hours tomorrow and said:

“Your job is to use AI to remove 1 menial task from this business or build 1 cool thing for our team or customers.”

What would happen? Would they be engaged?

As Codie put it:

“A lot of founders are missing the point of tools like Claude Code. Don’t think about who you can replace with it. Use it to create more builders in your org. Give your team ways to make their job easier, more productive, and more fun. Create intrapreneurs in your business.”

The next decade’s winners will be the businesses that:

• Assign clear automation leadership
• Let curious people experiment without fear
• Turn employees into builders, not button-clickers

That’s how you eventually 10x productivity without burning people out.

That’s how you make work more fun.

That’s how small businesses punch way above their weight.

So steal this.

Name your CAO. Run the hackathon. See what breaks. See what surprises you.

Just 4 hours is enough to change how your business thinks about business forever.

-Team Contrarian

The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.

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