278 4 Ways To Repurpose A Client Meeting Into Content

This one goes out to that person that wants to make content or is maybe blocked on ideas. What do I talk about? Or that person that will never make time for where they're like, I got a million things to do today. How am I going to. Am I going to make content? Here's the thing. These advisory meetings, the calls you hop on with your clients, even the training sessions you have with your team, they are all like just begging to be turned into valuable content. Because if there's one person that needs to hear that thing, like the client, like the person on your team, there are 10,000 more people out there that have the exact same questions. And by putting those answers out into the world with the knowledge that you already have, you're going to attract more people that you can help. These advising sessions are the sawdust of a professional services firm. You're already doing the work of delivering them. Today we're going to talk about how with just a little bit more effort, they can get turned into killer content that will attract even better clients to your firm than the ones you got today. Come on in, let's talk about it. Four ways to repurpose that client meeting you just had or like internal training session into great content. Number zero, gang, get in. Get an AI meeting recorder. As you're sitting in these meetings with your clients on Zoom or something like that, we need to be capturing them. We need to be thinking about how we're capturing our expertise these days. If it's an in person meeting, grab like, man, all the conference talks that I do, one of the big things that I stress is get an AI meeting recorder. Because imagine being able to go back and have like the last decade of meetings recorded and then be instantly searchable. How valuable that would be. You never regret recording a meeting. The whole like, yes, it's not totally normalized yet. All it takes is one conversation with the client to say, hey, we always record our meetings so that when I don't waste any time asking you the same questions, and if they push back and they're like, well, I don't want the things I'm saying being recorded, your response then is, I don't want to have conversations with you that you don't want to be recorded. If I can only ever call you on my burner phone, I may not be the person for you. But in these conference talks, I always stress the value of doing this and starting to do it today. Cause you'll never regret it. And afterwards, people always come up and they say, what about, what if I Have a meeting in person. How are we ever gonna capture that? I'm like, with the same way people have been capturing meetings in person for like decades. Like just have a little recorder and say, hey, we record these meetings so that we don't have to come back and ask you the same questions. So capture these meetings, even internal meetings, because they are like veins of gold to be mined. I don't, I'm sorry, I don't know mine stuff. Okay, number one, first way to repurpose a client meeting into content, just manual review. When you get to the end of that meeting and you were like, man, there was. I made, I said a couple smart things there. Just make a quick couple bullet point notes of from that meeting. What are a few different concepts you could spin out into some little short, little bit of writing or a tweet or something like that? Any given meeting is usually going to have a few highlights or something that the person heard that they were like clearly impressed or surprised by. If one person is feeling that, a whole bunch of other people could feel that as well. So just make a note of that. Sometimes those things will surprise you, may not be what you expect, but just jot down a note and then when you have a few minutes, go back and skim through that transcript because that's kind of your initial rough draft for like, what would a written version of this look like? You've already set it once. It's already in your brain. It's just not in the right format yet to be valuable content. And if you haven't done this before, you might be thinking, well, what does it even look like to like capture this? What am I, what am I trying to do? Am I just going to Instagram making a post or writing a Tweet or a LinkedIn post or something like that? What I tell you what I usually do is I think of these concepts as kind of like little atomic essays. Like think maybe 500 words, which is just a few paragraphs, almost like a memo that kind of runs through a concept. And it doesn't have to be super, super deep. We are talking about social media here. So like wildly deep technical things you're probably not gonna be getting into. So we gotta keep it relatively high level. But think about how can I make a 4 to 600, not even that long, 3 to 500 word little kind of memo describing my thoughts on this concept for a layperson that doesn't understand the concept. So that's kind of the goal of what we're trying to get to now. That three to 500 words, that's probably something that could be posted directly to LinkedIn. This is my approach anyways. It's I write up something that's kind of LinkedIn ready and then from that, as I'm going to other platforms, you know, spin it out into, into some tweets or, or whatever other format makes sense. On that social media platform, you've also then got something that is like super ready to shoot a dedicated video on or record a podcast on. Because even if that's only 3 to 500 words, because this is something that just lives in your head, you're capable of probably expanding that like 10, 20, 30 minutes. And so if you've ever thought about doing a podcast and giving clients a way to go deeper on your expertise, great. You've got a great little starter there to get you going. And I think what you'll find is when you start recording, it's easier to fill in a bunch of details around. And sometimes those podcasts, since many are more long form, they the podcast is the channel where you do a little bit of a deeper dive and maybe get into that technical stuff a little bit more than you would otherwise. So the goal as you're skimming back through that transcript is how do I get to like a 500 word, 400 word kind of little concept, A memo. And it may track pretty closely with what you actually said in the meaning. It's just normally your vernacular in a meeting isn't gonna be the same as what you would put into like written word. Today's episode, it is sponsored in part by Live Flow. LiveFlow is an extension for your spreadsheet app, Excel, Google Sheets, whatever you use that lets you pull live QuickBooks data from client files into your spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet had a baby with QuickBooks. Now how can you use that? How about to get the client to quit sniffing around in QuickBooks where they don't belong? Okay, stop touching stuff. The moment they start fumbling around in there, you get concerned they're going to break something. But also they're absolutely hopeless when it comes to getting to the information that they actually need. Which by using Live Flow to build like customer reporting, the stuff that your clients actually want to see in a concise view. Super, super valuable. And as I've shared before, can actually take the pressure off of the month end close as well. Because when I send those financials to my client, they're like, this is cool. I guess it means the work's done. But I've Got no idea how to use this information. So instead I'm going to give them like a real time set of reports that live inside of this spreadsheet. I give them access to the spreadsheet. I'm keeping them out of QuickBooks. They're not asking about the monthly financials. Everybody wins, right? Sounds like a home run to me. Learn more about Life Flow and link in the show Notes. Today's episode sponsored in part by the folks at Team up who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Today we're learning more. What's an employer of record? Do I have to hire people in the Philippines through an employer of record? Basically you got two options. You can hire them as a contractor, just pay them directly on contract or or hire them as an employee via an employer of record. Now employer of records, usually you're running like 4 to 500 bucks per month per employee. If you do want to hire that individual as an employee. Got some other stuff there around like benefit requirements from the Philippines. But the employer record, they'll help you handle most of that. The majority of firms I talk to who hire folks directly hire them on contract. But it could make sense to go either way. We mentioned BPOs. Talked about BPOs recently. A BPO is like a company that not not only employs them, serves as the employer of record, but is usually giving those people a place to work, like managing it, managing more of the infrastructure. An employer of record, all they do is the person that works for you is an employee of the employer of record and you pay the employer of record for them to work for you. So it's a bit more direct than a bpo, but maybe not quite as direct as bringing them on board as contractors. So there you go. Good stuff to know that you're probably too embarrassed to ask. Actually wasn't super clear on that until I went through this ad read right now. And if you want somebody to help you through the process that's done this with a bunch of other firms, team up, will go out and find you some awesome hires. You pay a one time recruiting fee, but because they're neither a BPO or an employer of record, you don't pay them anything. Ongoing after that. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out a link in the show notes. So that is method number one of turning that meeting into content number two, the same thing, but the delegated version of it. So delegated review. We're gonna get someone else to do it. And why do we not, I don't know, why do we not think about this much. Maybe where this comes up most today is like you hire an agency to do your social media for you, but we all know that is just crap 99% of the time because they don't talk like you, they don't say the same things that you would. The bar is really, really low for social media agencies and the quality of what they put out, like, it just blows my mind. People will pay a bunch of money to a social media agency who will then go out and tweet for them and put hashtags in their tweets. Do not put hashtag words at the end of your tweets unless you're trying to speak to a specific people group. It's not Instagram, but you have agencies who are supposed to be the most educated on all these social platforms and optimized for engagement, and they. They don't even know the meta on a given platform. That just. That blows my mind. Anyways, the right way to get someone else to do it. Honestly, if they have this transcript or a record of what you've already said to inform how they write this thing, that's a fundamentally better version of that post now, right? This is the value of documenting our expertise. They now have you on record, like, sharing your thoughts about this. And so it's more a game of how do I set this up in a way to be optimized for social engagement rather than how do I create something? You've already created it in your meeting transcript. Like I said, this is the sawdust of a professional services firm. The only difference is we're now capturing it and asking for help from someone else to, like, do something with it. So who could do this? An admin? Could be somebody you already got on the team, could be a technical team member if you want them to maybe go a little deeper on the nuts and bolts of it. I had a couple technical team members who always aspired to do more writing, but were never really given the space and the permission to do so. That always felt, like, wildly unrealistic because they were kind of still living in that paradigm of the billable hours. So who's ever going to give them permission to go out and, and do this thing that's so abstract and how it could ever deliver value to the firm. But if you got people like that, man, use them. An external technical person, same thing for, you know, someone else who's out there hustling, doing work, who would probably be like, ooh, a writing gig like that sounds really fun. That could be an awesome change of Pace or a marketing partner. I think AI, we've talked about this before. I think AI is going to make marketing partnerships much more valuable because they can now get access to your expertise, to things you have actually said, right? Rather than using like vanilla re skinned articles that are the same thing and a hundred different people are posting them or them pretending to be an expert. And the quality of that from a technical standpoint, never being as good as what you would say and also just not being true to your own voice. Right? So because you captured that meeting, that marketer is now going to be able to do a much better version of writing that little 400 word memo. And that's something these days, frankly, you can get onshore, you get offshore. It's not a particularly expensive service. Now ghost writing, there's lots of different flavors and approaches to letting someone else write something for you. But in general there are versions of this where they will just write it for you and like blindly post it under your identity. But I don't, I don't recommend that. That doesn't feel true to you. What I would recommend is getting help with drafting it, with putting it together. And the goal is you want to get that thing like 80% of the way there and then you can come in and change what you want to change and post or even like delegate the posting. Because how and when it gets posted, like you don't even necessarily need to be in the middle of that. As long as you understand if I'm posting on social media, I have to be engaging with the people that engage with me. It's not just a one sided thing where I toss it over the fence and that's it. Social media is a community. It's about the people that you meet and like the human relationships that happen there. That is the value of social media. I digress. Getting someone who can get it, you know, and maybe on day one they only get it 40% of the way there, but if they can get it 80% of the way there over time and then you come in and you're like this or that doesn't sound like me. I'm going to move these things around. Boy, that just saved you a whole ton of time. If you compare that to sitting, sitting down with a blank sheet of paper or sitting down with a giant transcript and having to do that yourself, it is almost certainly worthwhile to pull somebody else in to help you on that process. Now option number or method number three, using like an AI chat tool for this these days, probably either chat GPT Or Claude. Claude AI. If you're plugged into the AI space much the hottest language model out there right now is Claude Sonnet 1.5. It's really, really good. It's, it's a decent amount better than GPT4, oh, OpenAI's current best model. But the one thing Claude has always been really good at is using documentation to inform what it writes. And so if you're using a AI chat tool, be it ChatGPT or Claude, we're going to provide them with that part of the transcript and then instruct it on concepts that you want it to focus on, the tone of voice, the format you want it to write in, that sort of thing. So let's say you yammered on with the client for, you know, 2,000 words on this subject, Claude is pretty darn good at giving you a first draft. That's something that you can at least massage into something useful. Not unlike, you know, going out and hiring somebody to do this writing for you. It's probably not going to write it exactly like you. If you go out and hire some random, some random writer for you and they get it 40% of the way there. We're more or less doing the same thing with an AI tool here and your skills in prompting the AI tool and all of that may be what makes the difference between it getting it 30% of the way there versus 70% of the way there. But we're still doing the same thing. We're just using an AI chat tool for this step in the process. Obviously, chat tool is going to be less expensive than hiring somebody to do it. In my experience, it's not going to get you as far, and it can be in some ways harder to get an AI chat tool to learn than by like building a relationship with a human over time and kind of getting better aligned down the road. Now, who knows how, how quickly this changes because the AI chat tools keep getting better, quote, unquote better. But that doesn't actually mean that they're going to more align with your intentions. In this sort of application. Oftentimes what we don't like is not anything about correctness. It's more about does it align with my expectation and what I wanted it to do. So even if language models get better, that doesn't mean the output's going to more align with your intentions of what you wanted. So using a chat tool, not too unlike going out and hiring somebody, it's just not going to have that kind of ongoing feedback loop that you would have with the person. This episode of the podcast is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. Hey, the age of AI, just like the cloud accounting transition is going to create lean in arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage, it's the word of the day. Opportunities where tech gives us a wildly better way to do something overnight. We stumble into these things still with our clients that have awful back office procedures and we just get them on a better tech stack and it like cuts the necessary headcount to do all that work in half. That's why I loved doing our managed accounting service where we just come in, find super unoptimized back offices and be like, hey, we'll come in and do this for more or less what it was costing them to hire a team to do it. And then we just automate the heck out of it. As we're in this very transitional period with AI, I think the first example of a AI driven arbitrage opportunity is frankly going to be accounts payable makers. Hub is one of the providers now using AI vision models to take extraction, like automated extraction to a wildly different level than has ever been possible before. You know that old chestnut, the whole notion that your tool is going to do bill extraction so well that it'll completely eliminate manual entry, which people have been saying for over 10 years. But I don't know if you're like me, you're doing AP for a client. All it takes is an extra digit somewhere and you just, you just burn a whole lot of the client's cash and that's going to be an uncomfortable phone call. So that's a little easier said than done. 2 who like blindly trust invoice extraction when it comes to bill pay. But we've done some demo days on my channel now with Maker's Hub showing off like just the level of detail that it will pull off of invoices, especially complex accounts payable use cases where you're doing like inventory and receiving and matching numbers of widgets to products in your system and all that. I had clients that had multiple staff doing like detailed receiving and all that matching with purchase orders. An insane amount of like manual work in these systems that Maker's Hub is now like automating to a level that it's never been automated before. If you're looking for tech enabled opportunities where you can, where you can use AI to deliver super like high leverage, more profitable work to your bookkeeping clients, Makers have a really interesting example to look at. I'm actually excited for more of this stuff. I feel like it's Kind of like the cloud accounting transition, but with even, like, even more promise, potentially even higher leverage. You want to Explore that for AP, check out MakerSub. Put a link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Tech Guru. Gang. We live in confusing times. We've got artificial intelligence, all sorts of technological marvels happening all around us that we're very excited about. But how do we wade into this stuff responsibly? How do I know that I'm not giving up my lucky charms to just whatever new hot AI thing just cropped up? Gang, you need a team of smart, attractive, well educated IT professionals that are on your side because you got better things to do than fixtina's laptop when it doesn't boot up on Thursday. You're better than that. Okay. Tech Guru's got everything you need to help your firm navigate what is, what is a tricky time. You know, boy, managing tech with a, like, even in an office, but across a remote team, too. Not fun. It's a lot of work. Tech Guru, they just work with accounting firms so they know all the stinky old tools you gotta use. If you're a tax firm, they know the weird cycles of your business and they're learning from every other firm that they work with. And you know, who's gonna, who's gonna benefit from that? You? You? Okay, so go swipe the link in the show notes, schedule a call with them. You got nothing to lose. K, that's Tech Guru Last method number four. Going to specifically call out the tool Delphi. This is the tool behind Jason Bot that we've built that has trained on every single episode of this podcast. Everything I've ever said. I think it's 30 bucks a month to use Delphi. D, E L, P H I AI. You can connect it to a podcast feed, you can upload a pile of files to it, give it whatever you want. And it, the technology is fundamentally the same as what you're asking ChatGPT or Claude to do in the previous method. You give it some documentation and ask it to write about that documentation. The big difference with Delphi is I can keep giving it more and more and more and more and more documentation. So if you look at this in the short term, if you've never done this before, you're like, I just had this meeting. I want to make a LinkedIn post about it that's very small and concise. But what about when you've done that for a month or three months or 12 months and you may forget? Well, you had this Other conversation that kind of filled out this a little more and this other conversation over here that filled out this a little more. Wouldn't it be nice if all that context kind of got rolled up and combined into something more cohesive or more complete? That's the value of a service like Delphi. And there are other services that do this right now, from what I've seen, Delphi does it better for me than anything else that I've seen. It's also really quick and easy to set up and not very expensive. And then we're going to prompt it more or less the same way that we would prompt ChatGPT. We're going to say, I'm writing an article around this concept. Here's, you know, I want it to be X number of words. I want you to focus on X, Y and Z. And it will, will write that for you, but it will also provide citations to everywhere that it pulled context from. So it'll say, you know, these couple sentences came from this conversation you had with Steve three months ago. And, and this bit of the conversation came from a meeting with Sheila a month ago or whatever your, whatever your sources are that you uploaded to it. It's pulling across a library of things now rather than just a single thing. And so if we are using meeting transcripts, we do have to be mindful of, of redaction. So depending on the, the, the security of, you know, Delphi or whatever tool you're using for this, you gotta think about, do I actually want to put the real conversation in there or not, or do I want to put a redacted version in? Man, I am so bullish on the power of language models like GPT to redact things. You take a meeting transcript, you cannot write a, a script, a bit of code that will perfectly redact everything in that meeting transcript because we just talk about things in a very loose way. Like you say part of an address or part of a location or part of a person's name, or call them something slightly different, that sort of thing. If you're trying to redact that with code, it's like, well, it can look for anything that's an email format or a phone number format, but that's not how we talk in transcripts. Language models today, not even the best frontier ones, are so, so good at simply saying redact all sensitive and personally identifying information from this whatever transcript and instead put in, you know, bracket redacted or, or substitute names and substitute addresses so that if you do refer to a specific person several times and that needs to be maintained. It can just change it to a substitute name. Language models are good enough to do this already. And it's really valuable to have a language model today that you can trust with sensitive things. We've talked about ChatGPT a lot here where their business plans. There's no training on the model like that data is never going to go anywhere they have. ChatGPT has what they call temporary chats where as soon as you finish the chat, it's gone, it's deleted off their servers. It is really valuable to have a language model that you can trust with sensitive things. Right now for use cases such as this to be able to toss in a transcript, say redact the whole thing and boom, you've now got a redacted version that you can plug into a tool that may not be as secure or even just to like store it long term. Like the less sensitive version of a document is the version of the document I want to hang onto. Like, unless that detail is important when most of the case, most of the times it isn't. I would rather be sitting on the redacted version of the document than the sensitive version of the document. So as you're doing all this stuff and especially dealing with meeting transcripts, for sure, be mindful of redaction and sensitive things that exist when within those meetings. But I do think we have tools now that can help us with redaction. Even language models that will run locally on your computer though that it is still harder than it seems like it ought to be to install them and run them and get basic functionality like copy paste and run it in a normal looking application. But if it means unlocking all of the wisdom that you're sharing in meetings, man, task a member of your team with doing this. Even if it is a little bit of work to chunk through these documents and redact them, if on the other side of it, the power is you've unlocked like the collective wisdom that you have shared in your advising meetings in a chat assistant, or to be able to turn a marketing partner onto this thing that's trained on all of these conversations that you've had. Like, that's really, really valuable. And this is a great place to start thinking about these tools because I think they're gonna be a big deal going forward in our profession. I did recently did a. I've got a video on the main channel about these tools like Delphi that are designed to kind of mimic a person's expertise. And in the video we ran through a bunch of different contexts in which you could use those tools. But we don't because we look at it and you're like, that's not me, that's not quite as good as me. Meanwhile, you're running a team full of people who also quote, aren't as good as you or don't advise the same way that you do. Like we're used to working with people who don't do things the exact same way that we do. That does not mean they don't have value. And that's how I see these AI assistants now that are trained on your own expertise. Just because it's not as good as you yet does not mean it doesn't have value. Especially if it'll work for you around the clock with a thousand people at once. Someone can turn up your website at 2am and get an answer like there's definitely things we gotta look out for here and wrong ways to do it. But I think there's value in getting more and more comfortable with these tools over time. And a good starting point is, is for building marketing content because it's, it's internal. It's not as risky as standing up something on your website, which is kind of like the spookiest version of this to me. But when you get to the point where you are going to do that someday, if you do like stand up a chat assistant or some avatar of your expertise, you're going to be in a much better informed place to be able to do that. If you're experimenting now, if you're using it for other less sensitive internal use cases. And it's why I wanted to be sure to include this included on this list. Because if the biggest thing we can be doing today is be capturing our meetings, so most people still are not doing, is they're not capturing those meetings, then the second biggest thing we can do is put those transcripts to work. There's amazing ways that we can use them for training our team, eventually for getting clients access to that expertise. But for now we can use it for marketing to make it easier to create content, to make our marketing partners. We're whether it's an admin or an external agency, create better content for you that's more true to your tone of voice and the way that you actually advise that is tech that is absolutely ready today that will help you to attract better clients and unlock new opportunities for you. Now for me, I'd probably start with number one, do it yourself manually a couple of times, review that transcript, learn what it looks like to go through the process of making it before you delegate it. That's usually just a good idea and then go from there, whether you can just never find the time to do it. And this is what gets you over the hump, because it will save some time. It's kind of a byproduct of the work you're already doing or whether you're just running out of ideas. That is one nice thing about running a firm is you have clients throwing questions at you endlessly. That can be a kind of bottomless source of questions and content ideas. Have you got any tools that you're using for this that you love? Man, pop that stuff in the comments. The busiest people that don't have time for content are oftentimes people that are sitting on meetings all day. And kind of the bummer thing about professional services is you have all this expertise, but you have to deliver it in the lowest leverage way possible in private, in one on one meetings, when there's so many people that could benefit from that knowledge. And we have platforms now that will put you on blast and a million people could see that expertise. But if all we ever do is sit on these one on one calls all day long, man, you are hiding that light under a bushel basket, you know, is a great way to put that on blast. A little more than you may be doing today. That's all we got for today. Any thoughts, ideas, man, always drop them in the comments, keep the discussion going and I'll see you tomorrow.