AI Strategies for Small Businesses with Jonathan Mast

Okay, Jonathan, it’s great having you here today and I’m excited to hear what you have to tell us about AI. You’re one of the thought leaders in the area right now. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing with us a little bit of your backstory, just how you got involved with AI and where exactly you came from.

Sure, no, I’d be happy to. Well, first let me say thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m excited to be here and chat about it. As you know, I love talking about AI. A little bit of my background. So I started a digital marketing agency back in 2010. And after a couple of years of doing that, realized I needed some help. And so I ended up bringing my wife in. And ah together with a team of ah anywhere from about 8 to 15, depending upon where we were at in our journey, we grew that agency up to seven figures had a great time, kind of reinvented ourselves in COVID after we’d done well but found out that the project work was really hard. So we decided to to get into a monthly recurring revenue model where we provided services on that basis instead of just on a project. ah Rebuilt the agency back to seven figures, had great time and then started learning probably towards the end of 2022 that ah my ADD visionary characteristics didn’t necessarily always align well with the needs of the company as we were growing and getting bigger, our processes were that much more important. And while I knew our processes were important, and we were, you know, we did a great job of putting them in place, I’ll admit, I’ve never seen a rule that I didn’t want to bend. And I did a lot of that. And that ended up causing some problems on occasion ah with our team. and And they were very gracious. But last year we said hey you know i really got into a i was getting excited about it and the team can i said hey jonathan you’ve been talking about possibly going off and you know starting a new venture this might be a great time because you won’t mess us up as much anymore and you can go have some fun so um i’m probably over dramaticizing it a bit but.

I stepped away from that agency last summer in summer 2023 and decided really to get focused on helping people understand how they can leverage AI in their day-to-day lives. I’ve seen so many fear mongers and so many people worried about it and then on the other end I’ve seen people that AI ai can do anything. neither are Neither are a good position in my mind. and so Now i’m I’m really blessed, Bob, to be in a situation where I get to work with businesses and their teams, helping them figure out how can we leverage AI. and our Our goal typically is three things. Let’s save some time each day. Let’s use that to provide better value to our clients and our customers that we’re serving. and In the process, let’s make a few extra dollars along the way. and The really cool thing about it is you and I have both been around the block more than once and it’s the first time in my life, Bob, where there’s been a technology out there that allows us to do as businesses all three things, save time, make money and deliver more value at the same time. And I think that’s just super exciting. Yeah, and that, you know, I like your philosophy, create the value and money will come, right? Absolutely. So we’re focused on that for our customers and really for society will be rewarded you know to whatever level, so to speak. so yeah and and And I’ve been following you all over you know Facebook, all over the the socials, podcasts, everything else. And yeah there’s there’s a lot of thought leaders on AI, but I think you have the most balanced, level-headed approach to it versus ah like you said the the two extremes you know the sky is falling and you know there’s gold in them then their hills so to speak but yeah well and i and i try again i being a i guess a ah ah quintessential add entrepreneur um one of the things i love the body is just the fact that it allows me to get things done faster now sometimes that means i feel faster but that’s okay because then i can move on to the next thing and i think there’s a lot of business leaders and entrepreneurs that diagnosed and diagnosed have those add characteristics and, AI just is a tool that allows us to amplify our skill and experience to be able to save time to be able to implement quickly. And then the really exciting thing for me is helping our teams out because that’s really where the businesses can see such massive productivity increases and massive value from AI. You know It’s one thing if I can save myself even an hour a day, that’s cool. But even if I have a small team of five or 10 people, if I could save them 30 minutes a day, now all of a sudden I’m not saving me an hour a day of more productivity. But let’s say on a team of 10 and a half hour a day, I’ll just save five hours a day. That’s 25 hours a week. That’s 100 plus hours every month that we’re adding back into our efficiencies.

And that doesn’t necessarily just have to mean we do more work. Maybe it means we have a better balance at work, because now for the first time, we don’t have more to do at the end of the day than we have time, or whatever, however that balance works out. And so that’s where I get really excited about working not only with the business leaders, but also with their teams, because you can see some really huge productivity breakthroughs there. Yeah, and that, that, it’s crazy, you know, what, what it can do, like you, like you said, I mean, it’s just making AI is can make your life better. um You just got to figure out where, where to take the pain away from your, your customer and for yourself, right? Exactly. So, well, I kind of want to, follow a little bit of an outline here and on some of the things we talked about pre-podcasts in terms of, you know, your, I see your expertise on the prompting side and and a term we call AI framework. um And I just wanted to jump into that aspect in terms of, you know, how do you, how do you approach it, like, in terms of creating prompts, of generating, you know, the right types of responses. um Is there kind of, you know, framework or prompting one on one that you kind of want to get into a little bit?

No, I’d love to. I think one of the things that we all run into as as business leaders is, you know, as soon as we start looking at AI, we start getting pop up messages in in social media, we start getting email messages, we start getting bombarded with all of these prompt lists that we can buy, you know, if if whether you’re in the mortgage business, or you’re in the IT business, or you’re in the marketing business doesn’t matter you start into that and all of a sudden you know it’s like, you know here’s 784 prompts that every roofer needs to know or 372 prompts that every marketer needs to use. And while I get the theory and the excitement behind those, I think those are a huge waste of time and money because generally, Bob, if a prompt is specifically good for you, it’s probably not going to be specifically good for me and I’m going to have to make changes. Not to mention, let’s just say on the lower end, the i think the lowest one I saw in the last seven days was 387 prompts. If I’ve got a list of 387 prompts, I want to look through every time I’m trying to find something. It’s going to take me longer to find the prompt than it would have been this to do the job. So I like to teach people a framework and the framework I recommend is is I call the perfect prompting framework.

And it’s a simple four step process that you can use to ask AI virtually any question and get a really good solid response out of it. And so that’s that’s really where I focus and that that steps or those steps are simple. It’s number one, we tell it the type of expert that it is. So if we’re creating an SOP for our HR department, we let it know. It’s a HR expert who specializes in writing standard operating procedures. We then give it context.

We tell it about our business. We tell it about who our audience, who it is that we’re creating this for, and what the objective is. And then we ask our question. And that that third step, the question is generally, Bob, what most people put in as a prompt. Something like, I need to write an SOP for my team to do the following. But they don’t give it any background or anything else. And then the fourth step, which really changes the results more than anything else, is giving permission to the AI in the last step to ask clarifying questions. And we simply end it by saying, ask me any questions you have. Because without adding that, AI is taught to make assumptions. And a lot of times that means we get crummy responses back. But when we give it permission to say, hey, I probably forgot to give you some information, asking me those things you need to know. AI has a checklist for almost any question that it can look at, because it’s been trained on every book and every library. So if I ask you to create an SOP for, again, my my holiday time off, posting whatever I’m going to be doing, it can do that and it knows the the information it needs. But if I don’t give it to that, it’s going to fill in the blanks with assumptions. And a lot of times those assumptions won’t correspond to what I do in my life. And so by giving it permission to ask me questions, it can then say, Jonathan, that’s great, but I really need these three additional pieces of information. When I do that, I get a much, much better response. Yeah, that’s that’s interesting because, you know, I, you know, I got to probably classify myself as ADD in basically um the biggest, I struggle in a lot of areas, but probably the biggest area I struggle in is communication, right? yep And in communication requires you to slow down, which I don’t want to do. Amen to that, I’m with you. and And this is an amazing exercise because from you know what I’m hearing, at that last piece is is a critical communication piece. If there’s anything I had left out, um you know, please feel free to ask. And in my world, it’s like, get it done, get it done, get it done, versus take time to communicate, answer questions. And your framework is perfect in that area. Makes sense.

Well, the nice thing about it is being like you, I want to get things done. But I also know that it’s going to take me more time if I don’t give it enough information. And so it’s kind of a good balancing point. I’m now not having to spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m going to give as far as information, because I know that AI can ask me the questions that it needs in order to fill the blanks in.

The real benefit, again, like you can probably relate somebody that may have those ADD characteristics, is I don’t have to worry about chit chatting about it. eighty or AI is going to literally come back and go, here’s the three pieces of information that I need but to give you a great response. And as a guy with ADD, it means I can go, oh, cool, I’ve got that information. And I know they didn’t need to think about it up front. I didn’t need to worry about chit chatting or talking to somebody that was going to go round robin to get to where we wanted to go. If you’ve ever been in one of those, you’re like, would you just get to the point?

I guess to the point right away and so it’s still a very efficient process and one that I As an ADD brain can still wrap my arms around and go. Okay. This is still saving me a lot of time Yeah, no that that that totally makes sense. It also causes me to reflect on how I work with people and I think there’s a few people saying amen.

Well, and that’s it. We then we save those people the hassle because we get to talk to AI instead of having to talk to them and drive them crazy. Okay, well, you know, and this is um this is kind of where the rubber meets the road because you know, AI everybody’s is been excited about it. It’s obviously the buzz everywhere you turn.

You can’t help but open your Facebook or your socials and there’s somebody has some AI solution to something. um So, you know, is there examples? I’m just reading off my notes here, but, um you examples businesses can integrate AI into their daily operations to save time, whose profits obviously add value. um Obviously there’s there’s the main tools. can you Can you speak to that a little bit in terms of what you’re seeing?

Yeah, so one of the things we recommend when when businesses are getting started is keep it simple. The old keep it simple stupid. If you’re familiar with that kiss framework, you know we want to say nobody stupid, but keep it simple. Don’t chase every latest tool and don’t chase every latest glitzy things. Start with a tool like chat GPT. It’s one of the primary tools that’s out there.

It is very good at doing a lot of different things. And when you’re getting started, it’s all you probably need. And the beauty of that is you can go ahead and get started with that and start learning how to do it. And I recommend most businesses take some of those tasks that, especially maybe as business leaders, we know we should do more of, but we don’t want to. A great example for me is typically emails. There’s always emails that I have in my inbox that I know I should spend more time going through and responding to, but I’m in a hurry and I’ve got got stuff to do today. So I throw it. I throw together a quick response and we call it good and we go from there. Use that AI for that. So imagine being able to take that email, go to chat GPT, say here’s an email I just got from Bob. I want to respond and say the following help me and it will literally craft an amazing e-mail for you that will respond giving what you’ve asked for. and Then you simply make a couple of quick edits and I take that so-so e-mail response that may make you go, man, Jonathan, I don’t think you took the time for me. and In actually less time or no more time, create a much better response that can allow you as the recipient to go, wow, he really took time to answer that. I did. I pasted it in the chat GPT, I edited it and I press send.

So you know that’s a great way to start. There’s a gazillion tools out there. And again, I really just recommend people start with chat and GPT. And then after they start using it, then they can start looking at other tools. But the reality is most of those other tools that are out there are just a fancy wrapper on top of chat GPT that costs more money. So why not start with the basic, use that prompting framework, and you’re off to the races.

Excellent. Yeah, that’s to me that, you know, and and right away, my head’s going to ADD, you know, employees or agents that can literally take her email and help you with that. Right. But then ultimately, ultimately get to know Joe Bag of Donuts, who’s been going back and forth with you about donuts and begin to, you know, learn and and then learn how to do the responses, you know, I mean, it’d be a little more intuitive. Yes, absolutely. Right? You know, that, that it could get to that point. Well, and that’s, that’s something we hadn’t really talked about yet, but we can train AI and we should train AI to reflect who we are. And that can be as simple as taking a personality test, such as, you know, ah a Myers Briggs or a Colby, probably in Kirby Bates or whatever Colby does, whatever, any of those, a disc test, we can then feed that information from that personality test into chat GPT or any of the other models. And so when I’m responding to an email, I’m in, for example, on Myers Briggs, I’m an ENTJ. So I can just simply say respond as an ENTJ and chat GPT knows so much about that personality profile that it’s gonna adjust the writing and the response to reflect that as an ENTJ might do so And it’s going to make it seem so much more like me and we’ve done that literally with putting four letters in place Yeah, no, that’s I mean, I’d i’d love that. I mean and and I want I want to talk a little bit more on training because sure um again being more than 80 Mindset when I bring out a new employee um I missed you know, I don’t do that’s not my strength. I mean I trained to the task once I see they’re, they’re good, I kind of let them go. And I don’t come back and retrain, right? Sure. Yeah. I think we’ve all been there. Yeah. So to, to that degree, I think we all want that, that magical pill with AI, where now it’s quote, the the big buzzword right now is AI agents, which in AI employees, ah they, they ah they’re not the same, I know, but, um but, but the big marketing spin is AI employees, which is effectively, just, you know, an AI application, you know, so to speak. But, but it is a good phrase, because it now it gets the business owner in the mindset of, okay, employees need to be trained, and no employee is going to do exactly what you want, for at least 90 to 180 days, right?

Absolutely. If, you know, if you’ve done your job right. So can you speak to the training piece? And what what is the mindset that you need to have as as you as we go through this in terms of the off the dr In my mind, there’s two types of training. So there’s the basic training that we want to do to teach chat GPT how it is that we respond basically to our tone, our style, our brand, that type of things. Super easy to do, but also important so that when we’re creating content, whether that’s an email or an SOP or you know even a social media post, that it reflects our tone and style.

On the AI employee side, what we’re really doing, and and again, there’s so many terms that get thrown around. Like you mentioned, there’s agents and personas and you name it. Essentially what we’re doing is we’re just training a custom version of the AI model, often referred to as a custom GPT with data that helps it do things that we want it to do. Just this morning, I created one to help me create courses. I do AI courses and that and through the process, we went through a couple of different iterations and they essentially hired and trained a new employee this morning. I say employee and air quotes probably, but it’s ah a custom AI model that’s now been trained on the best practices in how to create an online course.

The best way to follow the style that I want, which is a storytelling style. Be trained in how to take an entire course and through multiple lessons, tell a story of that that literally builds on itself so that as the people are taking the course, they’re not hearing about Bob, and then Amy, and then Sally, and then week and then but they’re hearing about, okay, Bob and his business did this and it literally carries throughout the whole lesson.

So there was training involved in that. And that training took hours to do, many hours to do. But the benefit it now is that tool is available to both me and my team. I’m not replacing any team members, but my team can now use that. So my video production crew is able to go in and when I say, all right, here’s the lesson, here’s what we’re doing. I need a video script so that I can record that, or maybe we can have AI record it.

They can go in and I know that they’re going to be able to get a response that is aligned with the goals and objectives that I have following the methodologies that I want so that it’s not like I’ve got this rogue employee doing something totally different over here when I really wanted to go in this direction. Right. And those AI employees, I want to caution people while it’s a great concept and it’s very, it’s buzz worthy. Oh yeah, I want to do that.

It’s like having an employee that that AI employee needs attention, just like an employee that you hire. You know, you made the example, if I bring on a new, let’s say I bring on a new video editor. I’m just talking about that right now. So we work on a new video editor.

If I don’t teach them how I want videos created, if I don’t teach them my brand and my style, if I don’t teach them those basics about my organization, who we serve and all that, that video editor may be very talented, but is likely not gonna be able to figure out and deliver what I want because I never train them. And if every day goes by and I never have a standup meeting with this employee and I never tell them what’s on the agenda that I want done and I never say, hey, let’s do some additional training in these areas, that employee isn’t going to be a lot of value and the AI employee is the same thing. Much like another employee, if we don’t manage that a employee, it’s going to sit there at its desk all day long and do nothing. Right, right. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s a whole and nother level. I mean, it’s not a double edged sword, right? Because we We want to get involved with AI to help our employees, but now we’re adding more employees. it’s like you know But but it the payoff is worth it, obviously.

The key in my mind is that if we keep in mind that the AI should be used to amplify skill and experience, that means we can use it to amplify our skill and experience, but we can also use it to amplify our team’s skill and experience. So again, maybe I can take that team member of mine that does a great job, but you know I’d love to essentially replicate them and boy, if I could clone you, Bob, that’d be great, because I need two or three of you. but AI kind of lets me do that because I can create models or AI employees or agents or personas, whatever we want to call them, that will help that employee do twice as much work, amplifying their skill and experience. And now that employee is more valuable to me. So it’s good for them. And they’re able to get more work done, provide more value. Everybody wins across the board. Yeah, well, and and what I wanted to do is shift gears, um, you know, do you have, do you have any examples, you know, that you can case studies or anything like that, that that you’re aware of, that, you know, people kind of are using AI? because Because I feel the big, the big deal in small business. Now, larger businesses with a lot of capital that can invest and have been investing in AI for, you know, probably five, 10 years now.

Uh, cause they have a bigger payoff. I mean, are you seeing for small business AI is starting to take traction in certain areas and, yeah you know, where are those areas with me specifically? I mean.

I think there’s a couple of different areas where I see it. Obviously with my marketing background, AI is a great fit for marketing agencies to be using just because it it can help with that. But it’s a good fit for anybody. I don’t care whether you’re a roofer or you’re a chiropractor, an IT company. There’s so many areas you can use AI. And what I recommend and where we probably see the biggest gain is in sitting down with businesses and helping identify what are those things that your team’s doing every week or every month that are repetitive.

Right. What are those repetitive tasks? For example, um maybe I get a sales report that comes in every Friday and the sales manager is opening up that sales report. working through that report, trying to get the right numbers for the Monday morning management meeting to put everything together. What about if instead of having the sales manager who’s very highly skilled and needs to be leading our sales team, instead of having them do that data analysis, how about if we could send that report over to chat GPT, we teach it how we want it to use use that data, what data we want, and we now have it create that dashboard summary report for the sales manager that he needs for his Monday morning meeting.

The data is still there if he needs or she as a sales manager needs to dig into that. But they don’t now need to take two hours or even 30 minutes, whatever time that takes every week to put that together. The same could be done on our customer service. We can take a look at all of our customer service responses. And instead of one by one going through and going, okay, happy, happy, happy, oh unhappy, what happened here? AI can go through all of that and diagnose that and then give us alerts.

We’ve got a client right now that’s using AI. They have live callers or call staff, you know customer service and that. and What’s happening is, so they’re not live AI is not live listening to the calls, but those calls are being transcribed as they’re happening. so When the operator hangs up, the sentiment analysis has already been done by AI on the transcript of that call. Was the caller happy? Was the caller unhappy? Whatever the case may be. you know Last night I called Comcast, for example, to cancel some service. and In typical Comcast fashion, Comcast made it a difficult process to do, to say the least. yeah you know um But at the end of the call, the the person on the call said, did I solve your problem today? Yes, you did.

Did I make this process easy? No, but it got it done. I answered all the questions because I wanted to get off the call. right But had you listened to me throughout the call as they tried to sell me new updates, at one point, Bob, I love it. They even said, well, you know we’re moving, so that’s why we’re canceling, so we can’t take it with us. And they said, you know would you happen to know a friend or family that would like to take advantage of your discount? And I said, discount, you already told me I’m on the full price plan. What are you talking about?

Of course, that call that part of the call never gets to anybody in management. I know nobody at Comcast is ever going to listen to it. But if they had AI that was actually now rating the sentiment of that call, yeah literally within seconds of that call being done, a call center manager could be looking at that and going, okay, hang on. We had a frustrated user here. This should have been really simple. Now, Comcast will never do this because I don’t think they care. I’m sorry, no soapbox. okay Remember, I’m the guy that believes if we want to solve the drug problem in America, all we need to do is put Comcast customer service in charge of distribution and we won’t have a drug problem. um and so Again, I’ve got a little soapbox when it comes to Comcast. Sorry, I know that’s not what we’re talking about.

Yeah but again, we’re we’re using AI in situations like that to evaluate that, and now imagine that that call center manager could immediately go, okay, over the course of tonight, we ended up not with one caller like that, but we ended up with 487 callers out of 500 callers that were like that. and Then AI can actually analyze that and identify the trends. what was it What was happening when the user just got frustrated and said, could you just please do what I want?

And it they go, Oh, it was the 715th time we tried to save the call. You know, and, and so we, then management can learn, or sales managers call whoever, and we can help train our employees to do a better job, better serve our clients. We don’t have the capacity to do that in real time now, because we’d need so many humans to do it, it wouldn’t be practical. But if we, now we can leverage AI, we can do those things. So that’s just one of many, many examples that could be used. But ah any type of analysis like that, AI can do effectively and really, really quickly that we can do that. We’ve got one client right now that’s looking at doing it on their on their second level help desk for actually identifying calls in progress that need a manager to step in. so Instead of the customer having to go, I’m, I’m ticked off. Can I talk to a manager that a manager could literally hop onto a call and go, hey, Bob, I i’m i got to notice that you’re a little frustrated with our process here. What can I do to help? I’m a manager. Imagine how that customer is going to feel in a proactive environment like that. That’s brilliant because you’re, so if we’re, we’re describing this, there’s actual, there’s a human operator, right? Yep. And, uh, obviously there’s, there’s a client on the other line.

And AI is monitoring the conversation for escalation in terms of customer. And to your point, it just auto routes to the manager. And obviously that, you know, if that software comes out, it’s going to be, it’s going to probably escalate too many calls or no calls, obviously, just like, you know, we talked about. There’s a tuning process that we go through, absolutely. Right. right and but But absolutely brilliant.

Um, and I’m, and I’m just trying to get a ah handle on the landscape because, you know, there, there’s small business out there. And and if you’re the, the, uh, if you’re at church on Sunday and you’re preaching to all small businesses and what are you, I mean, what are you saying like, okay, if you’re, a if you’re a small business, let’s say in your business owner and you have eight employees, you know, good idea to go home.

You know, at night and hang out on chat, GBT, just going to feel for this technology, what it’s capable of doing, and then try to implement, you know, as you can. But, but is there a ah middle ground for, let’s say, medium-sized businesses where you’re saying, Okay, you are the sharpest person in this company, you are now the AI czar. Your job is to task to figure out how to use AI in ways to make our company more efficient, profitable, everything else. I mean, what what would your you know what would you tell the the landscape of business today, you know how to how to approach AI? Because we’re going to be selling AI tools in the future as an agency. Absolutely.

But the last thing you want to do is get educated by a salesperson, right? right I right mean, not that all salespeople are bad, but- No, I made a living doing that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we’re going to have tools and we’re going to design, you know, quick and easy tools that you can throw into small business to to solve problems. So, you know, I just kind of went ah around in a circle there, but what would you advise? What would you preach to small business? How to, you know, how to how to approach it. Yeah. for For small businesses, I think a lot of it again is and where we recommend starting and and most businesses do one of two things, Bob. They either go, I want to do it all today, which is not practical. Or they go, um that ostrich over there, I like that. I’m going to stick my head in the sand and I’m assuming next year AI won’t be a thing. That’s also not a really good plan in my mind to take because I don’t think that’s going to happen.

So I think you know your idea in in almost any business, you’re going to find somebody in your organization who is drawn to the AI technology that thinks it’s cool and gets it. It’s kind of like when we first you know ah you and I probably can think back and remember when they put PCs on our desktops. And I was actually just getting into the workforce as you were at that point in time. and we had But I heard people going, you know what? I’m not giving up my typewriter. I’m not giving up my adding machine. but don’ I don’t care that I can do a word processor.

And for a while that worked. But then all of a sudden what happened is we started going, man, you know Sally, she does OK on the typewriter. But on a word processor, oh my goodness, we’re not retyping documents. where we We can edit things. We can pull them up. We can use a document we sent to Bob and now send it over to Sam and just make a couple quick changes. It became a huge productivity thing. And in that process, some of our team members So this PC stuff, this is cool. And they became our go-to person for every time there was a problem with the computer. And I think that same thing’s gonna happen with AI in every company out there, small or medium, and obviously a big company, they’ve already hired people to do that. But a small company in particular, you’re gonna find somebody on your team.

And what what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna use AI if you allow them to and don’t don’t stop them from doing it, they’re gonna use it to save themselves time and they’re now gonna have time to help you do things in your business that you hadn’t thought possible. And I encourage you as a business owner, if that’s not you, if you’re not the one that’s excited, that’s okay, start opening it up to your clients. Spend the $20 a month and give them a chat GPT pro account.

I know some people are like, well, I don’t want to spend $20 a month. If I’ve got 10 employees, that’s 200 bucks a month. At normal rates here in the US, that’s not a whole lot of hours we need to save in order to cover that $200. Okay. And find out, you’ll find out really quickly, somebody’s going to stand up and you’re going to be going, man, all of a sudden, I noticed Sam, he’s talking to more people, he’s more relaxed, he’s got more time.

Sam, what are you doing? Oh, man, I’m using that chat GPT stuff and I’m saving lots of time. Well, Sam, could you show Sally how to do that? Could you maybe talk to our team on what you’re doing? And of course, they love that. And so they’re going to start sharing. And I think you’re going to find in again, in those organizations, you’re going to find somebody that’s going to get it and they’re going to then help you implement it. The key as a business owner I want to really instill is I want you to be guiding that ship. You don’t have to be the advocate, but I want you the one to be guiding it to one, empower your team to use the tools. right Number two, to give them guidance in the fact that, okay, we’re not going to buy every flashy tool that comes out, but let’s figure out how we can do this with chat GPT.

And then if in 90 days we need a flashy tool, let’s talk about it in 90 days. But let’s not get caught in this oh squirrel break shiny object syndrome and the and but spend all kinds of money yeah because. You can do that. And I believe in that process, Bobby, that the the average even small business with maybe just a so even a solopreneur is going to find the amount of time they can save. I talked to a ah rougher the other day as an example, and it’s just him and some contractors. He doesn’t have any staff members.

And one of the things that he really struggles with is he struggles with, you know, he may be up on a roof when a phone call comes in, but he knows he’s only got five minutes to respond, probably less than that, or that call is going to go to the next person on their Google list. Right. And so instead of what, instead of implementing like an AI bot, what he’s done is he’s implemented a missed call text back system. And you’re probably familiar with that. Yeah. And so if he doesn’t answer the call, he’s now immediately having a system text that customer back and you go, well, hang on, what if they’re calling from a ah home phone? Nobody has home phones anymore. It’s almost his mobile phones. And it’s saying, sorry, Mr. Call, this is Jonathan, I’m up on a roof right now. But I really want to take care of you. Can you let me know what you need? And now that individual in probably 80 plus percent of the time is going to go, Oh,

I don’t have to call the next person on my list because I just got a message right and they’re going to go, I got a leak, I need some help. Here’s where it gets really exciting. An AI bot can read that message and go.

Great, as I mentioned, I’m up on a roof, but I’m gonna have Sam, my AI agent, help you a moment, tell give me a few more details. And that AI bot literally will take over and go, great, can you tell me where you’re located? Can you tell me what’s going on? It’s not gonna provide any solutions. It’s just gonna ask questions to make that homeowner, that business owner feel that they can check that off. They’ve contacted a roofer and somebody’s gonna do with it and they end by scheduling an appointment.

Right you both know it’s it’s as easy. It’s as easy as connecting to your Google calendar and going okay You know I can have I can have Tom out there next week Monday. Well that work for you How about 9 a.m.. And boom it adds it to the calendar? This is all happening for less than two hundred dollars a month right and now and and and It’s not something that had to be custom coded. This is super easy and now this is real practical value to that roofer because he doesn’t have to stress the next time the phone rings and he’s on a ladder because he knows that that that customer is going to get a text in less than five seconds and that in all likelihood, most of the time, he’s going to have a new appointment pop up in about 15 minutes on his calendar that says that he’s got a, he’s got a new new meat for them. And if it doesn’t work out, then that AI buy can say, it does sound like you need to talk to to Tom after all, uh, and it can schedule a time to have Tom call them back. And now Tom’s got three calls at the end of the day, instead of 37 at the end of the day. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s brilliant. I mean, it, uh, I’m, I’m excited about that. I just know that alone is going to help, you know, a lot of customers and there are good prepackaged, let’s say prepackaged AI tools like that. Absolutely. There’s tons of little solutions like that that again are not not very expensive that literally you can give your company information and you can give it your link to your Google calendar or whatever and a couple little things like that and probably 30 minutes be set up so that you’re ready to go. Is it perfect? No, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. And and that’s probably I guess where I’d like to to leave the recommendation for the business owner.

Don’t try to be perfect out of the gate. Just try to be good. Provide better service to your customers and your prospects, and they’ll start flocking to you because you made it easy. Right. And in and the nice thing about that tool Uh, I’m somewhat familiar with it, but, uh, if you, I own a couple of businesses. So if, and one of them closes, uh, Saturday at three and doesn’t open again until Monday at 10. And then that course of time, it gets 20 calls. And of those 20 calls, three people leave a voicemail because most people want, uh, they want some kind of interaction. Like, and they don’t want to hit the voicemail. You know what I mean? And AI answers and creates that interaction to your point. You know we could potentially, if you just get one or two of those as customers, yeah know that $200 is more than covered in you know in the course of those new customers. so Absolutely. Absolutely. Pretty exciting. So we’re we’re approaching about almost 40 minutes, well, 38 minutes in the in the call here.

You know, is there, uh, one of the things that I guess, uh, I wanted to cover and and we, if we can, Jonathan, we, we’d love to have you on again in the future. Oh, I’d love to. Yeah. No, it’s growing and you’re, you’re on top of it. And we, we rely on you to, you know, bring, bring us the latest, uh, gouge as they say in the Navy. So, um, but, uh, I’m just going to kind of try to land a plane here and, and, um, and you know, how, you know, how does this work in your personal life? Obviously, this is part of your business, but how are you using AI and in your personal life? What kind of personal task? I mean, is, you know, you talked about email. Are there other tasks that you’re using AI? Are you writing love letters to your wife using AI? I mean, how are you using it?

Great question. there’s There’s a lot of things I use it for because it’s really just become part of what I do on a day-to-day basis. But, you know, an example is I really try to live a life of gratitude and and give thanks to things. And I’m not always good about remembering to send my kids text messages, some who are at home and some who are not, or telling my wife how much I appreciate the fact that she does all the things that I don’t even think about anymore, and they just get done around the house.

And I’ve used AI to help me with that. And so, you know, for example, for me, every Sunday afternoon, I take a moment and I haven’t helped me based upon the that we create a text message that I can send to my family members. It’s not one, it’s it’s individualized for them. And people go, well, well that’s not very genuine. I go, no, no, I thought of it. i I’m giving it yeah information. yeah I just, ah instead of going, man, I need to, I need to text my daughter-in-law.

What do I wanna say? And then then something happens and I don’t do it. Now it’s getting done and I’m building that relationship. Another way I used it is my my youngest is 17 and he’s very much into Dungeons and Dragons. I know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons, and but he loves it and he he plays it with a group and regularly. And so the other day I had to go pick him up. I had the vehicle instead of him. And so I had to go pick him up. And on the way over, I thought, you know, I’d really like to have a better discussion with him about this. So I literally used my phone use the voice mode on chat GPT. I asked it some questions about Dungeons and Dragons, and I said, look, I’m a dad. I’m 55. I know nothing about this. My kid’s 17. He plays it all the time. I’m going to pick him up. I’m going to have about 20 minutes in the car with him. How can I start a discussion with him about D and&D that’ll get him talking, that’ll let him know that I care? And can you give me just enough information so that I don’t look like a total noob?

Right and it did and literally he got in the car and you know, we did the typical How was it and of course he’s 17. So I got fine and I’m gonna have a good time. Yeah and i’m like Okay, you know and he’s ready to pull his phone out as happens all the time. He wasn’t in a bad mood but He’s 17. Yeah, and I took what chat GPT had given me as a starter question and I asked him and the most amazing thing happened Bob He put his phone down and he looked at me And he goes, are you serious? And I’m like, yeah, I’m just curious about this. And we drove all the way home, about 25 minutes, and never once did he pick up his phone again, because we talked about D and&D. And it might not, it was him talking to me about it, but I knew just enough, and it was funny, because as we’re pulling in the driveway,

He said, Hey, dad, did you like ask chat GPT about this? so You knew this and I guess I sure did. And he laughed and thought it was awesome. He wasn’t upset because I use chat GPT. He was thrilled, even came home and told mom and my wife, you won’t believe what dad used chat GPT for. And it was so cool. Yeah, because yeah we, he thought it was amazing that I cared enough, which I of course do is his dad to have that conversation. But again, those are things that I’m not going to go buy a D and&D book and try to read it just because I’m my ADD. I’m never going to get through it.

Yeah, but I had that ability in the 20-minute drive over there to learn what I needed to do to ask him a couple quick questions and Instead of you know driving me listening to my audiobook and him on his phone and you know Not listening to what I’m saying. We actually had a father-son conversation and we had a great time Well, and that just goes to where your heart is, right? So, you know, it it’s the spirit the spirit of how you use it and it it goes back to let’s say money is money evil and No, it’s it’s what you do with it, right? You know, so if your heart’s in the right place, and and this might be a good topic on ethics that, you know, for the next time you’re on, that we talk about ethics and in AI and in in terms of that what you just said was the best tip of this whole this whole conversation. It’s awesome. I thought it was cool. Yeah, just literally sitting down and in and starting out with being grateful. And, you know, there’s a lot of times I think we sit down and and uh, life is busy. It has a lot of demands. It has a lot of stress. It’s really hard to be grateful. But maybe if you sit down and you have that grateful conversation with chat, GBT and, and you work on, cause I, I struggled with the same challenges as a father as well. My, my kids are home from college for, for a holiday break. And we’re all in our phones. We’re all in our old little world and you know, they’ve been gone for four months, you know, what the heck, what the heck I should be, you know, I should be engaging and engaging is tough and it is but if you work on it just like you’re working on your gratitude in your heart and you you ask you know those hard questions and chat GBT but you give it a lot of good knowledge get information on your son your or daughter you know, hopefully that that draws you closer to them in one form or the other. And who cares if you use chat GVT? Who cares if you use $5,000 to, you know, buy woodworking equipment so you guys are doing woodworking together or whatever the case is? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if it develops that relationship, it’s so worth it. It’s one of the best investments you can make. Yeah. No, on that, that is just a ah great point to end on, Jonathan.

I know you’re very busy today. It sounds like you have three or four more podcasts and webinars you’re going to have to do today. um Hang in there, man. I hope your voice holds up. hey We’ll do our best. Yes. And I hope to have you on soon. I’d love to have you on regularly and and we’ll be seeing you on Facebook. Oh, one of ah I’m sorry.

um How do we find you? How do we get a hold of you? You’ve got some exciting courses. So if any of you are stuck like me, you’re definitely going to want to look Jonathan up. And he’s got some great courses, great communities. Let’s talk about that before you leave. Would would you mind? Yeah, not at all. If you want to connect, just go to jonathanmast.com. That’s J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N-M-A-S-T dot.com slash Linktree. And it’ll give you links on how to connect with me, my free Facebook group. We’ve got over 310,000 entrepreneurs in there learning about AI and AI prompting every day, all kinds of op resources that are available, some free, some paid. But yeah, head out there, jonathanmast.com slash Linktree. Wonderful, wonderful.

Well, we look forward to connecting again. Hang in there. I know I have a great holiday season and we’ll begin together soon. Sounds good, Bob. Have a Merry Christmas. Bye bye. Bye now. OK, so.