My Good Woman
Ep. 36 | Business Planning Made Easy: How AI Can 10X Your Strategy
Dawn Andrews:
Hello, friends! Welcome to another episode of the My Good Woman podcast, where we help female entrepreneurs grow businesses that make a big impact to the world. So I'm going to be straight with you guys, I got a little cold today. My voice may not sound quite like you recognize it, but I'm going with it because I love you and I'm showing up and I want things to go well for you and your business.
And today it's super exciting because I am sharing my Boost AI Business Strategy Framework. You may not know, but I have a deep love affair with chat GPT. It's true, I know some people think it's the antichrist, some people think it's the beginning of the end. I don't know the true answers to any of those things and we can all only guess at that at this point, but today we are going to make friends with ChatGPT and the robots to help reduce the amount of time it takes to go from idea to sales in our businesses.
Buckle up, get ready to take some notes and do a little bit of homework. And by the end of this conversation, you will have a business marketing and communication strategy for the next three years for your business. Sound exciting? Let's do it.
Hello, friends, welcome to My Good Woman, the podcast for new and future female leaders. I'm your host, Dawn Andrews, a happily married hockey mom, and the founder and CEO of Free Range Thinking Business Strategy Consulting.
Grab a seat at the table with me each week for candid conversations with culture shifting, glass ceiling busting, trailblazing women leading impactful enterprises. We discuss what makes them tick, how they get it all done, and actionable strategies to help you lead with confidence and grow the visibility, reach, and revenue of your business.
We're classy ladies, but we don't bleep the swear words. Listener discretion is advised.
Well, hey there my good woman. I am guessing you started your consulting business with a bang, a song, and maybe a little dance, and hopefully in your PJs. But let me guess, somewhere between your fifth and hundredth client, you found yourself tangled in a web of what am I even doing?
It is a classic jam, and not the kind you spread on toast. And here's the unfiltered truth, even the tiniest ventures need a master plan, a comprehensive business strategy. Think of it as the secret sauce that takes you from spinning your wheels to strutting your stuff. And if your strategy's not clear, you're just leaving money and your sanity on the table.
So, here's where the magic happens, artificial intelligence. AI is not just for big companies with big budgets, and it's not just a robot. It is your unsung hero waiting in the wings. And you might be thinking, please, for the love of Pete, not another tool for me to learn. Or, maybe you're like me, and you've downloaded every clickbait article promising six AI prompts that will change your life, maybe so.
Either way, we've put together a clear, simple, straightforward action guide to help you leverage the power of AI to up level your business strategy and your whole business without tons of time and effort. So, are you ready to dive into the pool of strategic certainty? If you haven't already, create your free chat GPT account and let's get started.
Today, I'm going to share with you my Boost AI Strategy Framework. I created it because I really wanted to help people that were at the beginning of launching their businesses, close the gap between having a great idea and getting to sales. And there's so much stuff that's packed in there and if you're coming from a corporate environment, for instance, you may not necessarily have that entrepreneurial mindset yet that allows you to wear many hats and still make a lot of progress.
You might be used to a particular set of tasks that you're completing each day. So I created this framework to help business owners walk through the foundational basics of what it takes to build a strategy so that they had their plan and strategy for the year and could check things off the list and know that they were headed in the direction that they wanted to to grow their business.
So let's talk about BOOST, B-O-O-S-T. Here's what it stands for; B is Brilliance Strategy, O is Optimized Brand, the second O is Open Communication, S is Strategic Pricing, and T is the Transformative Power of AI.
Let's talk about each one and why they matter, and then we'll get into what you do about it to build your strategy. So B, brilliant strategy. Why strategy matters? Because running a business without a solid game plan is like trying to dance on a slippery floor.
It is clumsy and unpredictable. But if you do have a brilliant strategy, you can lead with clarity and confidence. And if strategy is not your jam, then AI can help fill the gap between what you're trying to create and what your knowledge base is right now. So we'll walk through that today.
O is for optimize brand, why it matters. Because brand is not just your logo, it's the entire vibe, emotion, experience, the magic spell that you cast on your audience. And if it's optimized, then you become the most enchanting sorcerer in your field. And you guys know I'm a Harry Potter fan, so who doesn't want to be the most enchanting sorceress? Actually.
Okay.
Third O, open communication. Why does it matter? Because imagine a relationship without communication, it is dry. There's no exchange going on there, there's no growth, and the same goes for your business. Clear open communication builds trust, loyalty, and a fan base that might even get a tattoo of your logo someday. Wouldn't that be something?
S stands for strategic pricing. Why does that matter? Because if you price too high, you might alienate potential clients. If you price too low, you will be eating a lot of ramen for dinner. And we're going for that sweet spot where value is actually being exchanged, where your clients put some skin in the game and feel like they're growing and learning and getting what they want out of your work. And you're well taken care of for providing something that only you can provide. So, when you get strategic with pricing, you win hearts and coins.
And then T, the transformative power of AI. Why does it matter? The genie is out of the bottle, you guys. AI is happening, it is everywhere. It was everywhere to some degree, just not quite as visible and and user friendly and accessible as it is now. So if you've been hesitating on AI, I hope that this primer, this guide that we're going through today will help give you a little bit of a hug, wrap you in some support, so that you sit down and you start to play a little bit with ChatGPT to find out just how easy it can make some of the more challenging parts of running a business.
The transformative power of AI, using it will help you create the future. It fills in your skills gaps. It's like having a crystal ball because you're able to leverage the entire body of knowledge of the internet up to 2022 now, and it can help you make smarter business decisions. With some caveats, but we'll talk about that in a minute.
Now you have the whole boost AI framework, let's talk about building your strategy. So there are a lot of AI tools out there in the world all ready to use. For the purposes of our conversation today, we're going to use ChatGPT. I also use Claude, I've used Jasper, I've used MidJourney, I've used Dall-E. There are a lot of different tools, but ChatGPT is the best known, it has a free account option, their ChatGPT 3.5 version works well enough to be able to help you create what we're looking to create. Because by the end of this conversation, what I want is for you to have a business strategy that you can use for your next year in business.
If you haven't already, go to OpenAI and create your free ChatGPT account. Links to open your own account are in the show notes, so if you haven't done it yet, you can find it in the show notes there and get that started. And let's talk for a second about the interface. When you open up ChatGPT, there's a big workspace. At the bottom of the screen, there's a chat box, and to the left is a column that will show your list of chats.
For today, we're going to use ChatGPT 3. 5, and you're going to start typing the prompts in that chat box in the bottom. I will tell you, personally, it is worth every penny for the $20 a month to get a Pro account. If you love AI and you start using it, I use it all the time so I use the chat GPT 4 version when I'm doing a lot of the creating that I do for my clients, but 3.5 works perfectly.
There you go, get yourself set up and we'll go on to the next step. So some of you may be well into your ChatGPT journey and really familiar with the tool and familiar with the parameters of AI. Some caveats that you need to know, not everything that ChatGPT delivers for you is true, it's just not. There are plugins now that help improve the accuracy of the tool. But anything that it gives you, I'd like you to think of ChatGPT as your collaborative partner and like a junior partner. A partner that isn't more of an expert than you are or more of an expert than the mentors, coaches that you might refer to to help you with the growth of your business.
But it will give you excellent information and advice to be able to push off of as we go through this process. The second thing you need to know is that you always need to fact check no matter what it is. And then the third thing is to get the most out of this process that we're about to go through, you need to prep your robot. Because ChatGPT is like an open blank slate, it doesn't know anything about you or your business or your services or who you serve. To make your business strategy uniquely yours, let's start with some personal touches.
Here are five questions to stir up your genius, and for the best results, open a Google Doc and answer these questions on your own before you partner up with the robot.
Number one, what industry does your business operate in and what's your specific niche?
Number two, what products or services do you offer and provide a brief description of each?
Number three, who's your target audience? And please include demographics, psychographics, and geographics. The more detailed, the better.
Number four, who are your main competitors or what businesses are similar to yours?
And number five, in the next 12 to 18 months, what's your main business goal? What do you want to accomplish?
So the more personal and specific your answers are to these questions, the more detailed and useful the strategy that you create with ChatGPT will be. If you're in the early stages of creating your business, just make your best guesses. However, I'm about to give you a little trick. If you're really struggling and you need to create some raw material to push off of and edit from, choose a well known business that's similar to yours and start using ChatGPT like this.
First put the prompt in, Are you familiar with (X) business? Whatever the business is. So if you're in the coaching space, you might put in, are you familiar with Brene Brown? Or are you familiar with Marie Forleo? Or if you're in the lifestyle, like a health and wellness lifestyle business, you might say, are you familiar with Goup?
So the reason I'm asking you to grab these well known businesses is because we want there to be enough of a body of information on the internet for it to help you pull some of these answers. So when you type that in the chat, are you familiar with X business and you hit return, it will give you information confirming that it knows those people or that business that you've used to compare to your existing business or your future business. The next prompt that you're going to put in is the questions that I gave you previously.
The next chat is, I'm creating a business strategy outline for my company. It's similar to X business. Based on what you know about this business, please answer the following questions. What industry does X business operate in and what's its specific niche? What products or services does it offer? Who is the target audience? Who are their main competitors or what businesses are similar to X business? And what is their main business goal?
And then hit return. So it will use a comparative business and answer those questions. And then you can copy paste that information into your Google doc and start using it to tweak and make changes so that your information aligns with your business and who you are and what you're building. So once you've tweaked and adjusted your answers in your Google Doc to suit your specific business, copy and paste those answers into a new AI chat to season your robot.
And then we'll start building your strategy by following the Boost Framework prompts. First paste that back in and say here is some information about my business. We're going to create a business strategy please wait for more instructions put that in along with all of the information that you've just put together in the Google Doc hit return and wait.
So here we are back in the boost framework that we talked about B for brilliant strategy so the next prompt is based on the information above, please devise a three year business and growth strategy for my business and insert your business name there.
What you're getting at is that you've used the information that you created in advance to help AI refine your unique business strategy. And once you hit return, it will give you a three year business strategy. And from there, what you want to do is copy and paste that information into your business roadmap, because a roadmap always helps.
Always review, remember I said at the top that sometimes AI is not very accurate. We're doing everything that we can to help match it appropriately to you and your business, but you always need to review. It's like trying on a new fabulous outfit. Review your strategy and tweak anything that seems a little off course.
Coco Chanel always says, take one thing off, so... you might need to pull some things out. It's not all going to be perfect. And then get a little feedback from close peers, a coach or a mentor, because they might see things that you've missed. And I really recommend that you take the time to do that with this first rough draft before you dive in further to the next steps.
And I also know from my own experience that CHAT GPT can be very fun and very addictive, so you'll want to move on to the next step. You can completely run through this whole process and then go back through and review if you need to, but I do recommend stopping after B for Brilliant Strategy and reviewing it with advisors.
We finished B brilliant strategy, now we're moving to O optimized brand. Okay, so now you have your tweaked roadmap. You're gonna put it back into the chat or you just continue if you made no changes. And the next thing you ask is, given the three year business and growth strategy above, suggest ideas for a compelling logo, brand colors, and brand messaging. In addition, give me three options for my brand's U S P or Unique selling Proposition.
So, You have ideas for a logo, you have brand colors, you have brand messaging, you have options for a USP. Your next steps are to choose the brand messaging that most resonates for you or to tweak it or to create your own because you'll need this in the next section of our work together. And for all of you brand strategists out there that are listening or people that are in the branding space, know that in sharing this my intention is not to shortcut a true and proper branding process. What I'm looking to do is to help early stage business owners get to that space where they feel confident and comfortable talking to people and they've helped to clarify things in their own mind so that when they have income and they can work with a real true brand strategist they actually have something to push off of. Some way to help express themselves.
Ready to move on to the next step? It's O for open communication. Okay. We've reached the third step in the Boost AI process, open communication. Now, if you're not talking to your people, whether you're not literally talking to them or whether you're not connecting with them through social and email, you don't have the opportunity to build relationships to get sales.
So here's what you do, you've chosen your brand messaging and your USP, and you're going to put the following prompt into ChatGPT, based on your knowledge of my products, services, and ideal client, which was our pre work. So based on your knowledge of my products, services, and ideal client, as well as my brand messaging, and you can write that in there, and USP. (And write in what you chose from your previous step) Please suggest a highly targeted and specific communication strategy to build a connection with and sell to my ideal client. Lay out my action items along the three year strategy and growth timeline we developed previously. And then hit return.
And what ChatGPT is going to do now is put together a marketing and messaging timeline that matches with your three year growth timeline that you've done previously. Copy and paste that into your Google Doc so that you can marry the two strategies.
You have your business strategy and now your communication strategy over three years time and you can put that all together. Then you also need to review and tweak again. Because if anything's misaligned with your brand or audience or plans, you need to make those changes now.
As I mentioned in the earlier stages of our conversation, this is a bit of a dance. It's a creative process that we're going through. ChatGPT isn't just telling you what to do and then you walk away and do it without any sort of alignment or thoughtfulness. We're building this and using this tool as a collaborator.
The last action step in open communication is to talk to your ideal clients. Now that you have some strategy and framework and some things to say to them, see if your communication and content and strategy really resonates with them. And I would encourage you to create regular checkpoints for clients to share their thoughts and experiences with you.
So as you continue to launch and grow your business, put times into your schedule a couple times a year for them to share how they're feeling about your brand and what they're getting from it.
Okay, next step, strategic pricing. Here's what you put into the prompt. Based on your knowledge of my products, services, and ideal client, as well as my brand messaging, (copy paste that from before), and my brand USP, (copy pasted from before).Please suggest five specific products, services, or packages to sell my ideal client. List reasons those products, services, or packages will be beneficial to my ideal client, and list why these products would be beneficial to my business growth and brand. Based on your knowledge of potential competitors, suggest price ranges for each. Lay out my action items along with the three year strategy and growth timeline we developed previously and then hit return.
So that was a doozy of a prompt, but by the time you're done, it will have taken into account your products and services in your ideal client and the marketing messaging. And created products, services, and packages that work for your ideal client.
Now, remember all of this is suggestions. So you have to marry this with your best judgment, with what you know for real from talking to your audience and what you know from coaches, mentors, advisors to your business to see whether it's true or not. After you've combined these pieces together, the next steps are to tweak all of it and then do some market research.
Ensure that your pricing matches market demand and competition. Make sure that what you've planned, what you've put together in your strategy here, actually connects with the market. Work on your value proposition. Make it clear what clients get for each price point because sometimes it's not about being the cheapest, it's about offering the most value.
But you're not going to know unless you marry what you've done with ChatGPT along with real conversations with real people. And then the last part is do some pricing experiments. Create some limited time offers or packages to see how your market or your audience reacts to different price points. Just give some things a try and start talking about them and selling them.
Okay, y'all. Here's where things, I think, get really fun. We're talking about the transformative power of AI, the T in BOOST, B O O S T. And here's the prompt that I want you to put into the chat now. Based on your knowledge of my product, services, and ideal client, as well as my brand messaging and USP, please suggest five specific ways AI could improve my products or services.Reduce time spent on operations or service delivery or improve my connection and communication with my ideal client. Please suggest specific AI tools or integrations aligned with my business goals that could positively impact my business. And then hit return.
It's going to blow your mind. So, now that you have some insights on how to leverage AI, because it will spit out specific tools that will make a big difference for your business.
The next steps are some tech onboarding. So if you've identified AI tools, platforms, or services that can benefit your business, investigate them, test, and integrate as quickly as possible, stay educated and updated. The world of AI is as dynamic as fashion trends. So attend webinars, workshops, online courses, or work with us to polish your strategy and uplevel your AI skills.
You can connect with us using the details in the show notes. You can consider partnering with AI experts or firms, and just to be clear, even AI experts aren't quite AI experts yet. But there are people that have used these tools pretty extensively. Over here at Free Range Thinking, we've been using ChatGPT since its inception, and Jasper for about a year or so before that.
So we're deeply involved in using prompts and using AI for lots of different reasons in our business, which I'll share in another podcast. But consider partnering with people who have been using AI because just like a fabulous accessory can elevate an outfit, expert collaborations can elevate your AI game.
So you just did it. You now have a three year business and communication and marketing strategy for your business. You now have packages and pricing to get you started selling, you have communication and content topics you can use to connect with your audience, and you have enough of a strategy that you can start living into it and make adjustments as you need to.
Now that you've sprinted through the Boost AI process with me, take a moment and bask in the glory of your achievements. Remember to review, refine, test. Implement and always sprinkle a bit of your unique sparkle into everything AI.
And if we moved a little too fast for you, or you want to be able to see this in writing, we have the Boost AI business strategy framework available for download at danandrews.com/AIstrategyframework. Go ahead and download your copy and use it to create your business strategy.
If you're a little bit stalled in your growth, if it's time to plan for a new year, if you're getting ready to launch a business or launch a new part of your business, this will help reduce the time that it takes to go from idea to sales and get you in motion so that you can test it in the real world instead of overthinking it at home by yourself. So go to danandrews.com/AIstrategyframework and grab your copy now.
Keep shining and may the boost be with you, I can't wait for our next chat. Take care of my good woman.
Thank you for joining me this week. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today's episode, visit mygoodwoman.com. And before you go, make sure you follow or subscribe to the podcast so you can receive fresh episodes when they drop. And if you're enjoying my Good Woman, leave us a review on Apple Podcast reviews are one of the major ways that Apple ranks their pod. So even though it takes only a few seconds, it really does make a difference and helps our show grow.
This episode was produced by me and Julissa Ramirez. Thank you again for joining me, Dawn Andrews, in this episode of My Good Woman.