Stop AI Overkill! Here's All You Need

AI FOMO, Overload, or Regret?

Do you have AI FOMO? Maybe you have AI overload, or maybe you have just AI regret —” who knows. But on today's episode of Underestimated, I'm going to share with you the top five tools —” just five —” that I think you need most. And you can pick and choose from them, you don't need all five. But I'm going to share with you the five most important ones for small business. And at the end, I'm going to give you a link to all of these resources for free, so you can just do all of these without having to get a master's degree in computer programming or anything like that. So let's dive in.

Tool #1 —” Your AI Board of Directors

I'm going to start with the number one tool that has changed my business. I learned about this about a year ago, I was an early adopter of this, and I want to share it with you. It is my AI Board of Directors.

If you have heard of this and you haven't done it yet —” oh my god, you have to do this. If you do nothing else for your business, do this one thing. And as I said, there's a done-for-you version —” all you have to do is fill in a couple of boxes and then follow the instructions, and you will have this in, I'm not kidding, five minutes. And it will change your business.

So the AI Board of Directors —” it's kind of like what it sounds. You get to pick as many famous people, thought leaders, industry experts, anybody in the world who has a body of knowledge that lives anywhere out on the internet —” whether it's a blog, or they've written a book, or they have podcasts that they've been on, or maybe they host a podcast —” anything that AI can access.

For my AI Board of Directors, I probably have —” it changes all the time depending on what I'm working on —” but probably a dozen different experts from different fields. So if I'm working on a new speech, for example, I would have an expert speaker, an expert in writing, an expert in that topic that I can bounce ideas off of. And I can bring anything to my Board of Directors and say I want to have a meeting —” I only want it with these three people, or I need the whole board's input on this.

And the AI Board of Directors responds back, and they are not a bunch of yes-men and yes-women. I have embedded instructions to challenge me and to challenge each other. What they do is they search the internet, so if you have Simon Sinek on your board and you're asking for advice, it will search his entire body of work and respond as if it is Simon, in his voice, in his style. And it will do that for anybody that you can imagine that you want on your board.

So think about what industry experts you wish you could have access to at any time to answer your questions —” well, now you can. This is, as I said, the number one thing that has changed my business.

I suck at finances, I suck at anything number-related. I have two right brain lobes, just full of creativity, and no left brain lobe to make stuff happen. So I have a finance expert who is like my CFO whenever I need to talk numbers. I have an internet marketing expert who can check my marketing reasoning and give me feedback. I have an ADHD coach that helps me stay on task. You can populate this with whoever you want.

I'm so excited about this because this has given me so much clarity, great advice, and helped me build things in ways I would not have thought of without their expertise. It is still you and your business at the end of the day, and you have to train it on your goals, your challenges, your opportunities, your ideal customer.

I will provide the resource that will help you do that —” you just fill it in and then I will go through step by step how you upload this to ChatGPT to create your own custom GPT. This is going to be easy, pain-free, and I'm going to help you make this happen.

And once it knows you —” your goals, your business and your challenges, your marketplace, your ideal customer and all those things —” you're going to get what corporations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, to have people sit on their board of directors. You're going to get that for 20 bucks a month.

This does require a subscription to ChatGPT —” $20 a month if you don't have that yet. This alone is worth $20 a month to get all of this advice. But the other things I'm going to help you build —” you install these once, set it, forget it, and then you'll be able to use them.

Tool #2 —” Your AI Director of Operations

Okay, so that is the first tool —” the most business-changing for me. The next tool in your AI stack for your small business is kind of an operations manager —” it's somebody that's going to help you handle all of the tasks that you hate most throughout your day.

For me, that is responding to emails, doing proposals —” I love what comes at the end of writing the proposal if I win the business, but I hate writing the proposal. So it'll help you draft contracts, generate estimates, any employee policies, anything writing-related that you need for your business and you hate creating it —” this is your AI Director of Operations who is going to have your back in all of these things. And what used to take you hours is going to take you three minutes.

The way this works is you just have to train it a little bit. I will instruct you on the types of things you need to upload. If you want things to be in the same voice, the same style, the same template —” if that's not important to you then you can just bare-bones this. But I recommend at least giving it the basics about your business so it can respond intelligently, keeping in mind who your exact right customers are and the structure of your business.

With any technology tool, especially AI —” the better the input, the better the output. A few minutes of setup on the front end is going to pay huge dividends on the back end. So basically you're going to get back at least an hour a day. What could you do with an extra hour in your day? You could sleep in, actually spend a full hour at the gym, take a midday siesta, leave early to go to your kids' play. Holy cow. That doesn't have to happen anymore if you can just sacrifice a little time up front.

Tool #3 —” Your AI CFO

Tool No. 3 is built for people like me who hate finances —” it's for anyone who'd rather chew glass than look at a P&L. This is your AI CFO. Now I mentioned you can absolutely have a CFO on your AI Board of Directors, but this is a specific custom GPT. And if you don't know what a custom GPT is, it's just a tool —” a singular tool that has a singular function that you build inside of ChatGPT. Whenever you want to use it, you click on that button, it asks you what you want help with, and you just start talking. It's a beautiful thing.

So your AI financial analyst, your AI CFO —” it can connect to your QuickBooks, it can be your bookkeeper if you want. If you don't use QuickBooks, you just use an Excel spreadsheet —” it can do that too. You can upload P&Ls or it can connect to QuickBooks and grab them for you.

You can ask it to spot cash flow risks, flag unusual expenses, prepare for bank meetings or money meetings. You can basically have any conversation around your numbers that you want. Even if you love finances, this will help you dig in even further. But certainly for somebody like me, this helps me keep track of stuff that I normally hate and ignore. So that is tool number three.

Tool #4 —” Your AI Brand Definer

Tool number four addresses something I hear constantly as a challenge for small business owners —” defining your brand and what makes you really different. So tool number four is the Brand Definer, and it is going to help you so much.

Basically you answer a series of questions about your business: who you serve, what problems you solve, what you do differently, what clients typically say after working with you, where you're located —” anything that will be helpful. And it will then help you with your elevator pitches, a list of words that fit your brand voice. You may have heard my episode on what are your five words that completely differentiate you.

I'm going to upload as a bonus in this tool —” for free —” all of the words that I count as trust-busting, words you should not use in your marketing. So I'm going to make sure it avoids all of those words when it gives you your brand differentiators. I think it's going to help you tremendously to really get an outside view of what makes your brand truly special.

Tool #5 —” Your AI Content Multiplier

And then tool number five is the combination of the Brand Definer —” you can now have an AI Content Multiplier. The way this one works is you upload one blog, or you can even ask it to create a blog. You're going to need to input on the front end your voice, how you talk, how you write —” it needs to understand how to write like you would so that it doesn't sound like AI. Because I see some bad articles these days on LinkedIn —” bad marketing that clearly has every earmark that it was done by AI.

I'm going to build in some guardrails so that yours doesn't sound like that. But then you need to personalize it so it sounds like you. Because as I've told you before, we have to start speaking as if we're speaking to our neighbor —” and not being so professional, polished, and corporate-sounding —” because we can't compete in the same sandbox as big corporations. We have to sound human. We have to out-human the competition.

So your AI Content Multiplier will —” let's say generate a blog. If you have content you've written that you like, that is in your voice, you can upload that. And then it will multiply that into content you will actually use. You define what platform you're on and what types of content you want, and it will help you build quotes you can take from that blog and put up on social media along with a photo —” a personal photo from your camera roll, not a stock photo. You can come up with quote cards, short clips of content that you can then record. It will create all sorts of different content that you can repurpose —” you could even ask it to create 30 days of social posts from that one blog.

This is going to save you so much time, because unless you are a marketing agency, you did not create your business to spend all of your time writing content or looking at your finances.

Wrapping Up & Free Resources

So those are your five tools. We've got your AI Board of Directors, your AI Director of Operations, your AI CFO, your AI Brand Definer, and your Content Multiplier —” so that you can focus on what it is that you love to do, and focus on actually making money rather than doing all of these things that are behind the scenes.

And to access these five free tools, you are going to go to thebuyerinsider.com and click on Vault. You will see an entire vault of tools I've created that are free for small business owners. There are some enhanced versions and more complex tools that are behind a paywall —” in full disclosure —” but there are way, way, way more free things you can just access and use, including a Shawna bot —” a custom GPT I've built where I've uploaded all of my books, blogs, podcasts, all of my latest thinking —” so that you can ask the Shawna bot anything about marketing and it will answer based on my thought leadership.

I hope that helps. Go ahead and check out the Vault and pick at least one of these tools. You don't have to do all five —” start with the one that saves you the most time and mental anguish. My goal is to save you at least an hour a day so that you can do the things you want to be doing in your business or in your personal life. Imagine that. Thanks for listening.

And I will also say that if you want all of these five things done for you, I will come up with a way to make that happen —” that would be a paid thing —” but I will make sure that is an option for you. So if you absolutely hate doing this stuff, you can just have it done for you and ready to go. Thanks for listening. I hope that's helpful.