Marc Lafleur

As leaders and managers, we all have that one team member we love. We bring them into all our meetings, we send them all our questions, and we ask them for all the data in a nice, easy-to-analyze pivot table. It’s the Excel wizard. We overlook this individual’s other skills simply because they’ve mastered a tool that has become the cornerstone of every department within your organization. Being proficient in Excel empowered non-technical individuals with the ability to find and analyze actionable insights, project the future success of the business, evaluate risk, and increase the productivity of the person using it by 10x. In 2024, a shift is happening. The opportunity for organizations to take the lead on competitors will boil down to which teams embrace this new skill first. With the rise of AI, prompt engineering is equivalent to being an Excel master in 1995. While everyone is looking at the shiny new AI toys, your opportunity is to learn the skill that powers it all. And, it’s easier than you think. As the CEO of DB8 Labs, a prompt engineering firm specializing in custom AI solutions for SMEs, Marc will guide you and your organization through the best practices of prompt engineering, and how best to adapt and empower your team to work with AI and LLMs. You will learn: - What an LLM truly is. How it works and how they’re trained. - Autocomplete engines. - Token prediction. - Pre-training and training. - Prompt engineering vs. fine-tuning vs. RAG (retrieval augmented generation). - Prompt Engineering. - How to speak, “computer”. - Best practices for writing effective prompts. - Finding use cases. - Use technology to solve problems instead of creating problems by using technology. - How to increase productivity rather than decrease costs.

Being a leader is one of the most difficult jobs in business, and life. Despite what you might think, it’s not something that can be taught. Yes, it can be studied, but leadership is not something that you can learn in a class, ace on a test, and then simply apply to the real world. Leadership is not predictable, leadership is not forgiving, and leadership is not fair. Leadership is problem-solving, people management, and intuition. All things that change from case to case, business to business, client to client, team member to team member. Experience is the only way to become a great leader. It’s starting from scratch and putting in the reps. Leadership is truly the art of exposing yourself to as many scenarios as possible, including some that you might not be ready for, so that you can begin to build your own unique playbook and leadership style. At the age of 25, Marc co-founded truLOCAL and grew the company to 60 employees and $20M in ARR. Join Marc and take this opportunity to expose yourself to the situations and learnings that helped him develop the team that beat all the odds, and develop a culture that saw the first 10 team members still with the company at the time of its acquisition 5 years later.

If you're running a business, there's no doubt that somebody has commented about finding a better work-life balance. But the truth is, sometimes work-life balance isn’t an option. When it comes to being an Olympian who's sacrificed their social life, or a Billboard artist who dropped out of school to spend more time in the studio, even a Ph.D. who is in year 7 of a 10-year specialization. A lot of these people sacrificed their social lives, school and sometimes even family, to dedicate every second towards their craft, but when someone decides to make the same sacrifices in business we say, “You really need to get a work-life balance”. Instead of looking down on the people who have decided to give up a work-life balance to grow their first business, Marc will try and offer some practical advice.

Being told "no" is a way of life as a Black founder, but it's time to turn adversity into strength. Join Marc as he delivers his take on how being told "no", helped him develop the resilience to grow a $16.7M company at the age of 30. From holes in his shoes, to the cover of the Globe and Mail, Marc shares his experience as a founder who was never supposed to graduate high school.