Episode 244: Fireside Chat - How We Use AI In Business with Chris Ferretti

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

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So with that, let's get into today's episode. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, Create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agent your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital— way more than a CPA firm.

All right, brother, um, let's, uh, we're going to do a quick one today, uh, to be able to provide some value, uh, to some people. So what's a couple things you got on your mind, bud?

Hey, I mean, I can't stop talking about it. I can't stop using it. I cannot stop Like specifically best practices, like when it comes to ChatGPT, uh, like I've, uh, I'm not even joking, like I used it every single day of my life. Every single day of my life. Wow.

What's been like one, one particular use case that maybe is out of the norm that people wouldn't necessarily, uh, think about? Um, and, uh, and then maybe I'll share a couple too.

Sure. So I, I have a, I have a team of people. With ChatGPT. What I mean by that is like, you know how ChatGPT has different chats? Like, you can have multiple chats going, right? So each chat has a, has a job duty. So like, I have VO GPT, video GPT, UX, uh, UX/UI designer GPT, um, I have CSM GPT, I have life coach GPT, travel agent GPT, My prompts, prompt engineering, it's a real thing. My prompts are probably 2 to 3 paragraphs long to give it as much context as possible. And the answers and the things that I'm able to get out of it are just next level. Yeah, it's just like next, next level. And it's so detailed. It's so detailed, it's so thorough, and it's so applicable to me because how much context I've given it. That's one thing that I'm doing. And for example, for each of these positions that I'm talking about, to get the conversation started, like what I'll do is that I'll say, like, for example, for UX/UI, I have it right in front of me right now. I said, "Describe the qualities of a UX/UI designer and developer that creates effective websites and applications that turn visitors into customers." meaning that they create high-converting websites. And then boom, it gave me a list of like the qualities that that person would have. And then I was like, okay, you possess all these skills, create a document that I can use to build a website for a virtual accounting firm that's modern, sleek, and converts a majority of its visitors into clients. And then boom, it gave me an outline of everything that I had to do. And the reason I did that is because of the fact that I am actually building landing pages for Club Capital for the different lines of services that we have going. And yeah, like that's just one use case scenario. But for example, the fact that I first told it like what skills it should have was great because of the fact that now it knows, okay, I gotta give a person an answer that incorporates all of these skills rather than me just saying, create a document. If I just started with create a document that I can use to build the website for a virtual accounting firm, it would have just been some general, you know, website.

So one thing I really like the way that you've done yours, cause I had not really kind of thought about it that way, is organizing. I thought about the chats as like individual chats based on one particular thing. And you're saying what you're doing is you're actually organizing that. You're almost curating everything around, say, travel as an example, stays in one chat, right? So that makes sense because it, it's my understanding it does not learn from all of your chats in your account. It's only in that one chat, correct?

Correct. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's actually right. And like, for example, I recently took a trip, say, a little, like a trip in town in Mexico, and I just told it like, hey, this is my— like, I can't even give you the prompt I gave it, but I mean, it was incredible. I mean, just the fact that basically I said, hey, I'm going to Let's see, I'll tell you right now. Come on, where is the worst travel agent? I literally call it travel agent GPT, by the way. Like, whatever I want. And actually, I'm not even gonna waste time, like, with the prompts right now, but let me tell you, like, my thought process behind ChatGPT. And by the way, ChatGPT is not the end-all be-all. Yesterday I was at a conference in Mexico City that talks about all the tools in AI and then the what could potentially be the next step, which is general artificial intelligence, which is what we have today. Like, it's like being able to put intelligences, technically speaking, from different aspects, you know, like, uh, like text-to-speech, text-to-code, uh, text-to-image, text-to-text, which is what ChatGPT is, uh, and having one super intelligence, okay, like a general intelligence Yeah, um, that can put all that together. So, but anyway, so whenever I think of artificial intelligence, I think of it as, hey, what, what's my end goal? Do I have the skills to get to that angle today? If I don't have the skills, what am I missing? And if the— and if what I'm missing is, for example, like a CTO or a UX/UI designer, then make AI that position that you're missing. Like, that's why I have the different chats, uh, and each chat has a job function, uh, and I would say that it worked out great so far. And I've been operating like this for the past 2 weeks, and in those 2 weeks, like, I built out business plans, like, I've built out, uh, literally directions for a commercial, uh, like scripts, like not just the script but then a document that said like, this is what I want the piece to look like and everything, uh, and that's for a, like, another, um, another new business that we're launching at Echo Capital. Built all of that. And by the way, when I was like, hey, when you're building, when you're building, uh, the script for the commercial, use the Simon Sinek model, which is like the why, how, what. So as opposed to saying, hey, this is Love Cover, we're not offering, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it actually pitches to you in a way that it just hits you at an emotional point and at a logical point as well. And it was just like, I wouldn't have been able to do this, or if I did read a book on Simon Sinek and then decide to sit down and do this, it would have taken me weeks to come up with this script, and I just built it in maybe like 5 or 6 prompts, you know.

So I want to give people a couple, a couple of use cases that I've used it for. So I had, I've had a couple. So a client sent me a Voxer message and said they're launching a new product themselves, and they sent me the post that they were going to make, like a screenshot of the post, and then they sent me the basically the copy. And one of the biggest things that I noticed about the copy is it did not have the problem that the thing was solving that they were launching. And then so the kind of the model, model, you know, this is problem, agitate, solution, right? Like you kind of go through that model. And so I copied their Voxer, threw it into ChatGPT and said kind of that way and said, hey, write this better, more succinctly using Problem Agitate Solve. And I said, hey, you left out this, send it to them. And they were like, what? That's so good. And what's cool about it is that whole communication happened, turned around in like 5 minutes. And it's just a much more well-written post. I could have sent him back that idea to, hey, you need to write this in this way. and that would've been a task. Instead, hopefully I provided more value to say, hey, this is the, this is the structure, the way that that copy needs to be written. And then I just use ChatGPT to turn it around in 90 seconds. So that's one use case. A second use case is my son, I'll give like a total random one, but my son was trying to come up with wiffle ball names. And so he threw all of these different names. We, we threw it into ChatGPT. and, uh, and I said, give us a bunch of different wiffle ball names using the following things. And it sent out some pretty cool ones, you know. Um, so it was, it was, it was creative. I mean, it helped to inspire a little bit of inspiration, you know, put some inspiration into some ideas. And then the third one is I had a client reach out, um, needing a request. And I don't want to get into the details of the request. I mean, it was something totally legal and everything was good. It was just something that normally I would have to go back to the office, get in front of a computer, write it, send it to myself, sign it, send, you know, send it back. I mean, the whole thing would have been roughly 45 minutes. So I took her text, threw it into ChatGPT, took that and said— gave ChatGPT about a 2-sentence prompt that I dictated in my phone while I was waiting in line at Cava to get lunch. It sent it back and I was like, oh, that's pretty good. Copied it, pasted it into a Google Doc, took the Google Doc, saved it as a PDF on my phone, sent it to GoodNotes, signed it with my finger, and I did all of this and turned it around before I even got up to the line to order. And what's cool about that is more so what the customer turned around and said was like, oh my gosh, how did you turn that around so quickly? And so just using some of these tools makes the experience so much better for the clients because normally that would've been like a couple-hour turnaround, or I might even have said, yeah, I'll get that to you, I'll get it to you tomorrow. Instead, I turned it around in like 4 to 5 minutes. And I think that that's some of the use cases that are very practical. Down to earth. Again, there's no reason for you and I to get into this debate. Let Elon Musk and Sam Altman and those guys get in the debate about whether or not AI is going to be good for humanity. That's not what you— like, that's— I mean, I, I'm not going to get into that. I'm just going to say, I've told everybody, I'm going to learn to surf. I'm not going to get dumped by this wave. No way. I'm not going to get dumped by it.

Yeah, I mean, was the— was the— when people were riding in buggies, was the car a good invention? You know, it was fire a good invention? You know, and then like, it's not even a debate, but let's not even go down— you kind of like go down the rabbit hole. What I will say is do not be afraid of artificial intelligence. If anything, embrace it and realize that it's a tool, and like any other tool, you're only going to get good at it the more that, like, the more that you use it.

100%.

And if, and if you want to be selling and not use this, I can only tell you that you, you will be left behind by competitors who are using it. So whether it's an agent that's listening to this or other business owners, encourage people in your team to utilize these tools. I mean, ChatGPT, like, like, you're only talking about $20 a month. And let's say that you're a brand new beginner, you have no idea where to get started. You can literally ask ChatGPT, I am brand new to ChatGPT, what are the best practices? I am an insurance agent, how can I leverage artificial intelligence to better run my agency? I'm an insurance agent that wants to create an ebook on— to educate clients on life insurance, give like, create an outline that, you know, to educate clients. That, and you can get even more people and be like, that live in Huntsville, Alabama, uh, that are typically like— describe your ideal client into ChatGPT and then be like, okay, like, hey, like, cater the, like, script for this ebook to this demographic right here. Boom, throw it in, it'll create it for you in minutes.

I mean, no doubt.

Yeah, don't get left behind.

Don't get left behind. I'll give you one last one that I've used It's built on the back of ChatGPT. So the, so, so, so the, the, what is it called? The API. So they're using the ChatGPT API. It's called Jasper AI. Have you seen this? Yeah. So what I love about Jasper is it's a browser install in Google Chrome and it follows me around in Docs. And so instead of me having to go into what, Docs and Sheets and, and my email. So if I'm writing, if I'm in an email, instead of having to go to ChatGPT in a separate browser, I can just use, uh, I can just tap, maybe it's spacebar or something. I can't remember. Anyway, it's something like that and it's in there. And then, uh, you're my Notion brethren. Have you seen the Notion AI that's in there too?

Yes, there, man. You're, you're like, you're the Notion king, man. I can talk to you about that.

Oh, I love, I love Notion. It actually helps me. I have these ideas, especially like my solo episodes, Chris. On Fridays, if I have this little, you know, this thing that I want to share, not all of them, because ChatGPT won't have my context, right? It just doesn't have context and perspective of like maybe what happened. But if there's ever a story I want to tell about something and I want to use the story as a metaphor or analogy for business, I can say, hey, write me a general outline about this XYZ story, and at least gives me a couple bullet points to be able to make sure that I share because it actually kind of brings to life maybe a detail that I wouldn't necessarily have known. Like, I'll give you one. People can go back and listen to it, but it was the one called Rembrandt in the Attic. Well, I'd heard that concept before for a long time, and so I just put it in Notion AI. I was like, hey, give me some of these stories where this actually happened. And, and those stories, I didn't You know, I just didn't have to like research it in Google. It was just all right there. So anyway, there's some pretty cool use cases. All right, dude. Is that the pod today?

Absolutely, man. Love this conversation. I'm so excited, as you can tell by the tone of my voice and maybe how fast I'm speaking, but let's definitely make this a recurring theme. Let's definitely make AI a recurring theme because once again, we're talking about a tool, so don't be afraid of it. And let's show people how we are using it. Let's also remember that ChatGPT is just one of many. There's ChatGPT, there's Bard, which Google just launched recently. And what I love about Bard is the fact that you have access to Google, aka the internet, whereas ChatGPT, it stopped learning as of September 2021, so some of the answers may not be as, uh, up to date as they can be. Uh, so anyways, you I didn't realize like I can cross-collaborate between these two tools like Bard and ChatGPT. There's also DALL-E for text to image and a few others for text to code. So bottom line, you can start little by little either teaching yourself and use ChatGPT or whatever or Bard to teach you how to use these tools or simply hire people in your team encourage people in your team— I'm sorry— to use these tools and become better at them.

Awesome. All right, buddy, see you next time.

Awesome, sir. See you. Take care. Thank you for listening. Bye.