What if the secret to scaling your business wasn’t working harder—but automating smarter?
In this high-energy and insight-packed episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes back visionary entrepreneur Ethan King for a conversation that bridges creativity, technology, and the future of work. Ethan, known for building successful ventures like Zeus’s Closet and Stuff for Greeks, shares how a business crisis forced him to embrace automation—and how that pivot not only saved his company but doubled its revenue with half the staff.
But this episode goes far beyond business survival. Ethan dives deep into how AI and automation are transforming everything—from marketing and operations to personal productivity and even romance. Yes, you read that right. Ethan shares how he automated monthly flower deliveries to his wife, blending tech with authenticity in a way that’s both hilarious and heartwarming.
Topics Discussed:
- The E.A.T. Framework: Eliminate, Automate, Train
- How AI is reshaping creativity, marketing, and business operations
- The future of AI-powered wearables and digital avatars
- Why most business owners misuse AI—and how to fix it
- Personal stories of automation in marriage, fitness, and daily life
- The importance of customizing AI to reflect your brand voice
Ethan also shares golden nuggets on how to simplify your life, automate your health habits, and think differently about what’s possible in the age of AI. Whether you’re a startup founder, a seasoned CEO, or just AI-curious, this episode is your roadmap to working less, scaling faster, and living smarter.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Tune in now to learn how to future-proof your business and unlock exponential growth with the power of AI.
Watch the episode here
How Ethan King Doubled His Business With AI & Automation | The Future of Entrepreneurship
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So you know on television when you see the attorney say, your honor, I reserve the right to recall the witness? Well, today I have a recalled witness. My guest was on the show almost three years ago, like three weeks, shorter than three years ago. Ethan King, how in the world have you been?
I’ve been fantastic and what an honor to be back for a second time on your podcast, Don Williams. As you know, you’re one of my favorite people and your podcast is one of my favorite podcasts. So great to be back.
back at you, you know, I’ve been recalled to certain podcasts and where I, where I felt like, I didn’t do a good job the first time. And so they’re bringing me back. And then others where I was like, I slayed it and they’re bringing me back. And so let me just, let me just clear the confusion. You slayed it the first time and we’re bringing you back this time. So, ⁓ so, so Ethan, I know your business, but tell me, your
Yeah.
Thank you.
⁓ primary business the last 10 years or so has been what business?
So Zeus’s Closet, actually more than 10 years, we just celebrated 16 years for our retail store, Zeus’s Closet. So we do screen printing and embroidery, like a tattoo shop for your clothes, where we make custom wardrobe for the entertainment industry, film and TV, school uniforms, business swag, all of that, but really with a high-end customization focus. And before that, we have another business that’s still going. It’s called Stuff for Greeks.
still in the embroidery space, but that was my first business that started as a school project where we do fraternity and sorority gear and we ship all over the country. So that’s an e-commerce business that’s been around for over 22 years.
Yeah, and you actually started that, if I recall, while you were in college. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So you’re kind of dating yourself by answering that question. because we can do the math. We can figure it out. OK, so ⁓ the Greek business and then the, I’ll say the non-Greek business, that’s an oversimplification. But you got those two going and it’s
That’s right
You and your partner in life, your wife, are partners in the businesses as well. Love that. Not very many people can do that successfully, but 22 years seems like you guys have that part figured out. I’m just put you on the spot. What’s one secret, okay, to operating businesses and having a successful family life and children? I mean, I know you very well.
What’s the secret to that? Because as you know, many entrepreneurs struggle.
Yeah, it’s a tough one, but ⁓ if I had to distill it down to one thing, would be know your respective lanes, know your strengths and weaknesses, and honor those. Allow each person to flow freely in their respective lane. It doesn’t mean they operate in a silo. You’re still there at the sounding board and as a support system. But in our experience, when we try to operate in the same space within our business, that’s when we butt heads.
So fortunately, my wife and I, actually met in college ⁓ during the time that was when, know, Stuff For Greek started as a school project. She was a business major. I was an art major with absolutely no business sense, no formal business training. So that’s why it worked out really well. And she actually majored in risk management. So she worked in the insurance field for eight years before she ever came into our company full time. And ⁓ I hate doing stuff like HR.
payroll insurance, like I would pull my hair out if that were, if I had to do that all day, but she loves it. I love the creative stuff, the marketing. And so we, so we stay in our respective lines that has helped a lot.
I love that. Thanks for sharing that secret. saw a good friend at a post today and he said, hey, I write a couple sentences, an abbreviated love letter to my wife most days of the week and place it on her pillow. Two or three sentences, he said, it takes me about five minutes. And ⁓ they’re both great people. And I would not say he’s terrifically romantic and he would admit the same thing, though that I think is like over the top. mean, like that’s a big grand gesture. And so…
When he was sharing that with me, I was like, you know, here’s the one thing I’ve learned. Love is not a noun. It is not a person, place or thing. Love is a verb. It is an action word. Okay.
Yeah. 100%. Fun, fun, ⁓
fun story that that reminds me of. I admire your friend for doing that. That would require a lot of effort for for me to do that, ⁓ to express love needs to be expressed, right? Appreciation, gratitude needs to be expressed. So funny story. And this ties into automation, because that’s what we’re here to talk about today, ⁓ which is a big part of my life. ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah.
At one point in time, this was several years ago, my wife said, you know, Ethan, I wish you were more romantic. I love getting fresh flowers all the time and you don’t ever do anything like that. I said, you know what? I went onto one of these flower websites and I figured out how to put it on autopilot so that every month flowers would just appear on my doorstep. One click, I was done for the whole, I had a whole year subscription to flowers and she loved it.
But she knew and I was transparent. She knew I had put it on autopilot because she knows me, but it still made her feel good. And we had fresh fresh flowers around the house. So I was able to check that box. So I believe that automation can help you in every area of your life as long as you fuse it with authenticity, because I was still being authentic and I got the job done. But if I had to remember to go and do it or to stop by the store physically every time, it just wouldn’t get done.
and I wouldn’t be able to express that emotion.
love that. And you said something, automation fused with authenticity. Okay. That is amazing because as we know, you know, and I wrote a book on romance, romancing your customer and, you know, so I think I’m an expert on romance. but, ⁓ and other people do too. ⁓ but you know, romance is, it romance is an action and, and, and if it’s a surprise.
Almost all great romance has an element of surprise. so even if you set it up on automation, she doesn’t know what day is coming. then you don’t either. There you go. There you go. ⁓ So, so, ⁓ stuff for Greeks, Zeus’s closet, and then just about, I guess just before your first episode on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Yeah, I don’t either.
this little company that nobody had heard of called OpenAI came out with this free tool called ChatGPT. And some people I know said, my gosh, this is the second coming of technology. ⁓ so tell us, I know that you spend a lot of your time doing keynote speeches all over the world on
AI. so tell us how, how did we go from being in the clothing business? Okay. To being in the AI business.
Yeah, that’s the great part of this story. I’ve actually been immersed in automation since way before ChatGPT hit the scene. So we need to go back to the early 2010s, like between like 2011 and 2014 is when I first got introduced to the world of automation. And now, mind you, I’m not a tech guy. I was an art major in college, as you know. So if I can figure this stuff out, then you can. But the reason I figured it out is because my back was against the wall.
We were going through a nasty lawsuit in our business that almost forced us to have to shut things down and consider losing it all. And I was faced with either fight to keep the business alive or give up and lose everything that I worked so hard for. And I chose to fight. And in order to do that, at the time, I didn’t have extra money. I didn’t have extra staff. Either people had resigned and we didn’t have the money to replace them or we had to lay people off.
So I had to figure out how to do more with less. And as you know, no business can survive without marketing. So that’s the first thing I needed to figure out how to do. How can I keep the marketing going without needing humans to do it? So I went to a three day workshop, learned marketing automation. And first thing we did was program all of our email drip campaign sequences so that just one hit, the customer gets tagged and they get these endless emails from us all the time.
Then we learned how to automate our social media. And our customers thought we were this huge company. And here we were tiny. We were smaller than we were before with headcount. But by the time we got to the end of this situation, we had not only saved our company, but we actually doubled our revenue with half of the staff that we had before. And it’s all thanks to automation. So when OpenAI released Chatchi BT,
Endless emails. I love the endless emails.
We’d actually been dabbling around in AI a little bit before that because AI is just another form of automation. It just happens to be super advanced and now in the public’s eye and all the buzzword over the past three years. But we weren’t new to it. So we just layered it on top of everything we were doing in our business. Because at this point, we had we’ve adopted an automation first mindset throughout our whole team. That’s how we’re able to run so lean and scale without having to hire more staff.
Our first, and I think I may have talked about this before, but our first approach when we have repetitive tasks is first evaluate, do we need to eliminate it? Or can we automate it? And if we can’t eliminate it or automate it, we train someone else to do it. E-A-T, eat every task, eliminate, automate, train. So that’s our company-wide mindset. So automation is a big part of that in my personal life and in my business life, and AI has just amplified it. Now,
Love that.
I teach entrepreneurs all over the world. It actually came out of ⁓ me doing a presentation in Cape Town when we were down there to the other marketing chairs for this volunteer role that we were doing as board members. And since it’s a volunteer role, I needed to figure out how to do this quickly and efficiently and authentically at scale without it consuming a lot of my time. So I created all of these custom GPTs and apps.
so that all you have to do is just plug in the name of the event, the speaker, and their bio, and it spits out all of your social media content, your email copy, your website copy, all in one thing in about 30 seconds. And I thought, what’s funny, Don, I thought everyone was already doing this type of stuff in their businesses, but that room of 100 entrepreneurs or so, maybe 200 entrepreneurs, they were blown away by my 20 minute presentation, and they were like, can you teach me this?
Yeah.
Do you teach businesses how to do this? Do you teach EO, YPO chapters how to do this? And I’m like, yeah, sure. So now over the past three years, that has turned into a new business, Simple Success. And I published the book, Chat GPT to Double Your Business in 90 Days. And it’s just been a fun, fun, passion project to help entrepreneurs scale the way that we did by leveraging AI and automation.
Love that. I do, you know, a lot of my main business is consulting, not podcasting actually. And so as, as my clients begin to use AI, it’s almost like taking them to the magic show. They’re just blunt. They’re like, my gosh. And you’re like, yeah. And people have been doing a version of this for a couple of years now.
And so giddy up, let’s, let’s, let’s every, everything we can do, ⁓ we should do, you know, in an automated and I love how you say automation and artificial intelligence, just a form of automation. You know, one of my personal beefs with the term AI is that it’s not really intelligent. It, it, has massive computer power. It’s had massive amounts of data.
Very true.
and it’s spectacular pattern recognition. ⁓ so, but is it really thinking? No, not really. It’s recognizing patterns and delivering back the best response that it thinks. Okay, so I’m gonna ask you a couple AI questions, okay, because you are the guru. Okay, here’s tough question one. Ethan King, will AI ever
Exactly.
replace human charisma, human creativity, or human connection.
charisma, creativity, and connection. ⁓
I’m going to address those three separately. I do not think that AI can replace human charisma. I think it can mimic it. In fact, in some of my workshops, I’ve encountered people who are genuinely freaked out because they thought chat GPT was in love with them. And it sounds funny to you and to you and me, but like if it’s really just a big.
Calculator it’s like a language calculator is what I have to explain to people it is it’s been trained on Trillions and trillions of documents has read every book ever written it knows every quote by every famous figure living or dead real or fictitious so if you have all these quadrillions and quintillions of characters in its brain then it can synthesize that with whatever you request of it
then it’s probably gonna know exactly what to say mathematically to trigger your emotions. And yes, so it can mimic charisma, but it’s not genuine. And that’s what I teach people is AI cannot replace our unique human energy signature. That is what’s AI will continue to improve and get better in knowledge, even PhD level knowledge. ⁓
rocket science, engineering level knowledge will become ubiquitous. All of us will have that knowledge in our pockets. We already do kind of, mean, everyone has access to even the free version of chat, GPT, clogged, perplexity. If you know how to pull out your phone and use it, you have this level of knowledge at your fingertips. mean, there’s been no other time in history where we’ve had this, the explosion of this, ⁓ probably the closest thing is like when we had the internet and the iPhone in our pockets.
But now we have top level knowledge at our fingertips, but the ability to synthesize that knowledge with context that you give it unlocks realms and the power to execute. Because now we’re going into the world of agents. ⁓ And an agent is AI that can not just spit out text for you, but can actually do things on your behalf. Go into a web browser, book flights for you, book hotel rooms for you, make the…
reservations at the restaurant on your behalf, answer phone calls and have a conversation with people. And people don’t even realize that they’re talking to a robot. What a world, what a time to be alive. So I don’t think that it will replace those things that you mentioned, but it can very closely mimic ⁓ the charisma, the creativity. Let’s come back to that one. The connection, it cannot replace it, but it can mimic it. ⁓ But creativity.
Let’s unpack that for a minute because I think what caught everyone by surprise, including me, is that AI came for the creative jobs first, right? The image creation is mind blowing. You know what? There was a big, and I want to date this, we’re talking about this on May 20th, 2025, ChatGPT about a month ago put out an update to their image generation software.
Yeah.
And you probably saw online or you’re still seeing where people are creating their action figures that you can upload a photo and say, make an action figure of me or make me look like a Pixar character or, you know, a Spider-Man. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I Pixar for myself, too, and all the Ghibli styles. So that’s fun and cool. And it will create these images in about what, 30 to 60 seconds? Well, guess what, Don, now
I like Pixar Don. I like him. He’s cool.
Mm-hmm.
you can go to crea.ai, that’s K-R-E-A dot A-I. They have a real time image generator. When I say real time, I mean by the time you finish typing the first word in the prompt, the image is already there. So if I type Batman, Batman’s already on my screen, and then I can say working, then the image changes and he’s doing work. And then I say in a Starbucks, then Batman is serving coffee immediately.
Mind blowing. This is how fast AI is changing because people are still getting over the major release with ChatGPT with the image creation, but now it’s instant and it’s only going to get better from here. So the creativity, to answer your question, I think the creativity part, that can be a close one where we can get, we might be replaced on that one. We might just appreciate what AI creates for us, even with music.
You can go to suno.com, S-U-N-O.com and create a song in 30 seconds based on a text. You just type in what you want the song to be about and it creates the full track for you with lyrics and everything in 30 seconds. You can create video with just a prompt. There’s several solutions out there, but if you have chat GPT, then you have access to Sora, S-O-R-A, where you can just describe the video you want.
and it creates a photo-realistic cinematic quality video. They do still have some flaws, but it is mind-boggling. So creativity, ⁓ much to my surprise and to the surprise of others, is the first threat.
Well, I totally agree. you know, it started out with words. Okay. You know, it’s, it’s words are easy to pattern recognize. And so for an entrepreneur, maybe to generate a blog post or a sales landing page or, you know, meta or Google ads, you know, you might invest up to a thousand dollars with a copywriter.
and maybe up to a couple weeks before you would get something back. And of course, you know, even in the very early days, it was given back to you in five seconds. And you’re like, okay, I’m saving a bunch there. Okay, question number two.
If you were starting today, you were not an entrepreneur, not a business owner, but today you’re going to start a business.
and you were going to use AI. What’s the fastest way to build that business from cold, dead nothing to flourishing?
for this scenario, am I able to retain all of the knowledge that I have in starting up? Okay. I would go into educating and consulting businesses on how to leverage AI and automation, which is kind of what I’m doing. But that’s what I would do. You know, it’s a weird thing, ⁓ I think about this from time to time. I don’t know if all entrepreneurs think about this, but sometimes I think about worst case scenario.
Yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine.
What if I lost everything? And like literally living under the bridge, how would I get it all back? And you know what, if I lost everything, the first thing I would get, I would make sure all I need is an iPhone and to be able to afford to pay my phone bill. And I can make it all back with this now, today. I don’t need a computer. I don’t even need a roof over my head. mean, thank you. Thank you, God, for shelter. I’m so appreciative of it.
But what a time we live in to where with this device, you can make a fortune, not ⁓ just getting by, but you can make a fortune because of the power that’s within it as long as it’s connected to the internet. So that is what I would do. I would leverage AI and automation to consult with businesses, teach them how to leverage it, and also ⁓ creating content on their behalf because so many people are still
either dismissive of automation or fearful of it, or they just think it’s a passing fad. This is a mistake that I see people make. They’ll try ChatGPT or any LLM one time and not like the results. that sounds too robotic. That doesn’t sound like me. But do you realize, because even when ⁓ the writing tools first came out, before ChatGPT, do you remember Jasper and things like that that you could use? ⁓ Well, it…
Yeah.
That never really stuck with me because I was like, this is cute. It can write copy, but it didn’t sound like me. And you could tweak the way it sounds a little bit, but it still, it wasn’t all the way there. But with the modern LLMs, you can customize it to sound exactly like you and to mimic even your thought patterns by training it and on your background, your values, your interests, your hobbies, your goals. My ChatGPT knows.
everything about me. If you look at my custom settings, every field is filled out. It knows my writing style. Here’s a tip. Have ChatDBT analyze things that you have said and things that you have written, transcripts from podcasts you’ve appeared on, articles that you genuinely wrote yourself, books you’ve written. Have it analyze all of that because it can then decipher your unique writing style and use that to create copy for you so that
Your AI, your generated output doesn’t sound like AI, it doesn’t sound robotic, but it actually sounds like you. Because it’s all about context windows and how much context you give it. So that’s what I mean when I say marry the authenticity with your authentic influence is the real AI. And you marry that with artificial intelligence, the other AI to get explosive results.
that.
And I want to back up exactly what you said. So, you know, I’ve written nine books. have thousands of videos on social media. I speak from the stage. have, I don’t know how many of these podcasts, episodes we’ve done, but a lot. And so my…
GPT sounds really more like me than me. I’m kind of shocked sometimes at what it delivers. I’m like, man, that sounds a lot like me. And so ⁓ if you’re not getting the results you want, probably like anything else, might be better to spend a little more time and effort on it because it will deliver it. You the thing that was eye opening to me is I have
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’m a very well-read person. I’ve read thousands of books. In my 20s, I did not own a television. I would read four or five books a week. Very fast reader. Kind of person who picks up a book, reads 300 pages and then puts it down. ⁓ And so, of unusual that way. But out of all those books I’ve read, at this point, maybe I have recall of…
I have single digit recall. There’s no way to remember all of that. But then you take something like ChatGPT and it’s read everything that’s ever been published and has a hundred percent recall. And it will hallucinate from time to time, okay? But that’s even occurring less and less. And so it’s amazing the power that you have.
in that, in that I’ve, you know, you want to learn how to build a rocket booster that’ll get you to the moon? It’ll tell you. You may not understand it, but it’ll tell you how to do it. Okay, next question.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen AI do for a business owner?
craziest
My definition of crazy changes. You keep moving the flag post of what used to blow my mind. A week later, it doesn’t blow my mind anymore. But what I’m starting to see get better and better is digital cloning of ourselves. And what like I’m talking to you, we’re on the web right now. I could not be a real person. It could be my AI.
interfacing with you right now. We’re almost at that quality, not quite yet, but we are, if you go to like, Heygen, H-E-Y-G-E-N, you can clone yourself. You can clone your voice using 11 Labs so that your digital avatar sounds like you. You can put a bunch of text documents into the backend brain of your avatar so that it thinks like you. And now you can even put your digital avatar, have it appear on Zoom calls on your behalf.
So it’s getting to that point where we all will have the ability to be in a thousand places at once. I think it will be normal for someone to say, oh, I can’t make that zoom meeting, but I’m going to send my AI. We’re getting warmed up to it because how many zoom calls have you been on where you see all these AI recorders? There’ll be more AI recorders than there are humans on the call. And we’re used to it. At first, it was a little bit creepy. And we’re like, I don’t know if I want these AI recorders in here, but now we’re used to it.
Well, pretty soon, Bob, it will be Bob AI, Bob’s AI avatar and Jill’s AI avatar. And we’ll be fine with that because we know that information will get back to the human. And we trust that whatever Bob’s AI would say is probably what Bob would say. Just like I could probably talk to your chat GPT Don, since you’ve trained it so well. And what do you think is the percentage chance that it will say what you would say? Maybe what, a 90 % chance or so?
Yeah, it’s really
high. It’s really, really high because I’ve fed it a lot. You know, the more you feed it, the more accurate it’s going to be. so ⁓ it’s like, it’s almost like commercial, it’s fertilizer. Your lawn is hungry, feed it. Your GPT is hungry, feed it. Okay. And, and it will go a long way. And I can remember, I think we were in
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Feed it. That’s right.
Amsterdam, uh, with a group in marketing. And, um, one of the people that are support, I was like, why are you taking notes? Why are you not just recording this on Otter or, you know, one of 50 different kind of like basic AI application? mean, pretty simple stuff. Just I’m going to record it and I’m going to transcribe it real time and I’m going to spit it out. And it’s going to be like 99 % accurate. And, um,
And this person was like, you know, that stuff doesn’t work. And I was like, my gosh. And so I just turned it on on my phone and then an hour later gave it to her and she was like blown away. But, but we took it one step further. ⁓ and you may know Rodolfo, lives in El Salvador. I gave it to him, you know, and in about, I don’t know, 10 minutes, he transcribed it into 10 different.
No, not transcribed. He translated it into 10 different languages and then using a tool like HeyGen displayed it on the screen. And so he said this sentence in Japanese and the next sentence in Chinese and the next in Arabic and the next in Farsi and next in Portuguese. that time the whole room was like, ⁓ my gosh. Yeah. And ⁓ so pretty amazing stuff.
Yeah.
