How to Use AI for Strategic Planning & Business Advisory Services

I've been waiting all my life for someone like you. Like you.

I would watch the days go by Wasted in blue I was out of use now. Every day, every night, every moment with you I'm walking on air. And every day, every way I feel I can lose.

Shout it out, ain't a living. I wanna shout it out to the world. You got me all.

Crazy for love, Crazy for love. Crazy for love.

Crazy for love.

Crazy for.

Whenever lost, whenever down. You know what to do to do.

There's no mountain I will climb Right by your side.

Right by your side now Every day, every night, every moment with you I'm walking on air. And every day, every way I feel I can lose.

I want to shout it out, ain't a living I want to shout it out to the world. You got me all worked up, got me I'm crazy for love. Crazy for love. Crazy for love.

Crazy for love.

Crazy for love. I found miracle, I found the dream. Living is beautiful with you and me. I found the miracle, I found the dream. Living is beautiful with you and me.

I want to shout it out Ain't a living world. I want to shout it out to the world. You got me all worked up, got me spinning. I'm crazy for love, crazy for love. Crazy for love. For.

You know I'm crazy.

You know I'm crazy. Crazy.

I've been waiting all my life for something.

I've been down the darkest roads and up in the clouds. But I've always felt that something's missing.

That was until I found you right there in the crowd. You came into my life and started a fire. You made me feel like I could touch the sky. Oh there's nothing missing. All that you might desire. Now all I have to do is to make it mine. Cause I know and you know what? We could be like a song like a perfect melody. Baby don't say you don't believe in me. Cause you know and I know we're on to something good. You know and I know we got something good.

I've been waiting for the one forever.

Finally I got you baby, here in my heart. When I'm with you I feel so much better. Oh yeah. Before you I was just a shell. So stuck in the dark. You came into my life and started a fire. You made me feel like I could touch the sky. There's nothing missing. All that you my des fire. Now all I have to do is to make it nice. Cuz I know and you know what? We could be like a song, like a perfect melody Baby don't say you don't believe in me Cuz you know and I know we're on to something good. You know and I know we got something good.

Follow your heart baby don't be shy.

Just follow yours and I'll follow mine. Cuz I know and you know what we could be like a song, like a perfect melody Baby don't say you don't believe in me Cuz you know I know we're on to something good. You know I know we got something good. Something good.

Hey welcome. Welcome to another live stream. We're about to kick off. Although actually we kick off on the hour, but I always jump on a bit early to do a few shout outs. So if you're here early, thank you and let me know in the comments below where are you from and I'll do as many shout outs as possible. Also, what's your experience with business advisory and AI? Have you been using AI for business advisory? Let me know, I'd be really interested. I'm doing this topic because just last month in the AI community I ran a poll to say what would you like me to teach next? I gave a whole bunch of different ideas of how we could use AI, whether it's for marketing purposes, pricing and so on. And by far the overwhelming vote was how can we use AI for business advisory? So that's what we're going to look at today. Let's see, let's see who's who's here then. So far we have. First of all, I think it's Anne, Anne Harper. Of course it's Anne Harper. Yes. Hi there Anne. Great to see you. I know you're from the. From my AI community. From Canada. Awesome. Who else is here?

I don't know where GM is other than Greater Manchester in the uk. But I know you say is this live? Yeah, I think it's live. I'm fairly sure it's live. I think I feel like I'm live. So yeah, we have as well.

And let me know if you've not been to one of my live streams before. Just put new in the comments and I'll give you a particular. I'll make sure I give a shout out. So who else, where do we get to? Shayeen's here from Atlanta in Georgia and yeah, great to see you here. And I did go to Atlanta back in 2019. What a cool place. Went to the Coca Cola Museum and you've got a really big aquarium there in Atlanta. We have Lynn's here from Canada. Hi there Lynn. Great to see you. I know you're on my regulars. That always shows up. Who else have we got here? So Shane says. Shane. I hope I pronounced that right. Is it Shane or Chain? I'm going with Shane, but tell me if I got that wrong. So using AI with budgeting would be valuable. Okay. I don't know if we'll cover that or not. We'll see. I'll see how it. Where it goes, but I will answer questions at the end. If you just joined, we're starting in just under two minutes. I have here. Jonathan's here from South Africa. Welcome to you, Jonathan. We also have. My good friend John is here from Hertfordshire. So he says AI is helping to get much better content and ideas to discuss with clients. And John's a regular follower of me and part of the AI Academy, doing amazing things. Okay. Cash flow forecasting as well. I'm not sure we'll cover that today, but we'll see. We've got a few new people who've never been before to my live stream. So welcome to you, Jonathan from South Africa. Also a big welcome to Angela. Angela Samuels. Great to see you. And you're from Michigan. And then another good friend, Jim is here from Exeter where it always seems to be wet down in Devon in the uk. Oh dear. Sorry about that. Jim, we have Sharma is here from Phoenix in Arizona. We're just about to start in just under a minute. We have Jessica Fox is here from North Georgia in usa. Hope life is good for you. Jess, we have Linda is here from Paris in. I think that's Paris in South Africa, not the one in France. We also have from Basildon in the uk. Mohammed's here from Basildon. Hi there. Great to see you. Oh, of course. GM is good morning. Sorry about that. It's just because I said where are you from? And I was thinking where's that as a location? Because I know in the US people give me the States like AZ and sometimes that tests me, but I know that's Arizona, there's a few I'm not quite so sure on. Okay. And so I'm guessing that you're not from the UK because it's in the afternoon now and for me I'm in Portugal where it is now 4 o'. Clock. In fact, it is 4 o'. Clock. So let's get started. Let's stop the gibbering, let's get into the content for today, which is all about strategic planning and business advisory using AI. So before we dive into that, just a few quick announcements that we always have at the start of these sessions, firstly, a couple of links coming your way. If you've got, if you've got. I've lost mine. If you've got your smartphone, you might want to grab that for a couple of QR codes are about to come on the screen. Firstly, if you are new to these sessions, we are a supporter of B1G1 to help make the world a better place. And what we do is every time you come to one of our live sessions as a thank you, we make a contribution to a project somewhere around the world. And the way it works like this is this. You just hold up your QR code, your. Sorry, your camera to the QR code on the screen or you can wait for Sarah to post a link into the chat, whichever you prefer. And if you just click on that and please do, it'll take you to a page that you can kind like the one the right that shows four projects and all you have to do is click on one of the four orange buttons, whichever those projects resonates the most with you. And when you do that, there's no sign in. All that happens is when you click on an orange button, money comes out of our bank account to that project. So please do that. It's our way of making a difference in the world and you get to choose the project that we will support as a thank you for being here. And I can see that Sarah has now put the link if you prefer the link, it's in the chat. I don't know which social site you're on, but it's definitely on YouTube already.

Okay, next thing very quickly, again if you are new to these sessions, if you would like to get on our VIP list and get an email on our Monday, Monday newsletter that tells you about all the live training that we've got coming up, all the free training that we've got. And also we ask our question of the week around pricing or marketing based on the most common questions we get from accounting firm owners. And I also share my prompt of the week. So either hold up your phone to the QR code or Sarah will put it in the chat in a bit. I'll look out for that. In fact, while I'm looking out for that, couple more shout outs very quickly we have. Michael is here from Sacramento. Beautiful place, lovely train museum. Sarah and I loved that when we went there. Randall's here. Hi there, Randall. Randall is our number one person in the AI academy.

And we have.

Okay, we have someone. Oh of course, it's Michaela. It's Michaela, New Zealander from in London, still working on AI. We have. Nina is here.

Randall still eating his breakfast. Definitely not in Portugal. He's over in the US somewhere. Right. We have as well, just on LinkedIn. I can't get the comments from LinkedIn, but Sarah's helping me out, so. Hi there, Debbie on LinkedIn. Hi there, Kim on LinkedIn. Hi there, Lundy from Virginia. And there's the link if you don't want the QR code. Right.

Okay. And the only other thing is, please do ask questions during this session. We've got a Q and A towards the end. So if you've got any questions about AI business advisory, all I ask is put QQ into the QQ into the chat. Two big Q's before the question. Just because sometimes it goes a bit crazy and I miss the chat at this point. Sometime soon, Sarah might post a question, the right format. While I'm waiting for that, just a couple more people that I know very well is Jimmy from my academy. Hi there, Jimmy. Great to see you. From Texas. And also Shabir is here from Canada. Who asked a question if I get chance. Shabir, you asked about coming up with a strategic plan off the back of a mind map. I've actually did some work for you about half an hour ago and I've got a. I might show it later if I get some chance, a little prompt I've created to come up with a strategic plan. Okay. So if you've got a question, just put two capital Q's in front, just as Sarah said there, just because it'll then jump out at me. So questions we'll deal with at the end. But please do ask questions. I'm here to help you as best I can. We have if you're brand new, we have a hard finish on the hour. I'm In Portugal, so 5 o'. Clock. That's 5 o' clock UK time we finish. So I will answer as many questions as I can and I answer in the order they come in. If there's too many questions, I may not finish them. So please, please do ask questions as soon as it pops into your head, put it into the comments and with the. In that format and I'll do my best to answer. Thank you, Shabir. And my good friend from Canada, Leslie is also here. She's on LinkedIn right now. Okay, what's new with ChatGPT? I always just start off these sessions just with a quick update if anything's new. And there's two new things since we last did a live stream that are not overwhelming because probably a good thing because over the course of July, August, September, OpenAI were just releasing new thing after new thing after new thing with Agent mode. In July they issued, they launched GPT5 at the start of August and then almost the same time their amazing GPT os, their open source model and then a whole string of stuff has come out over the last couple of months. But I often, every day I go and check out what is new on their site and just a couple of things that you may or may not be aware of that happened last week, they're just small things, but they might be useful. So one of the things that you, you can do is you can set your custom instructions.

Which is a powerful feature. And custom instructions, it always said that they would come into effect with all new prompts coming going forward, but not your, sorry, your new chats. But now what they've done is if you set custom instructions and even personality, which is relatively new, then if you go back to an old chat and carry on, it will take into account your custom instructions. So that, that might be useful, particularly if you have a habit of going back to old chats and continuing the conversation. The other one which I think might be a little bit more useful is if you are doing things like deep research, then as you probably know, if you've used it, deep research, it's really powerful and because it goes deep with the research, it can take 5 minutes to 30 minutes to come up with the answer. And sometimes I would find that I'd set it off going and thought, oh, I wish I told it this, I wish I wanted it did this. Well, now you have a little update button on there, which means that you can interrupt it as it's doing its deep research, you can update it and it will take that into account. So if you're a fan of deep research like I am, I think you will find that useful. Okay.

Let'S, let's get started. I will say quick, quick shout out, hi there Neil, good to see you. And Fabio is here as well. Right.

So AI Power Strategic Business Advisory. What are we going to talk about in this session today? We're going to, we're going to look at what I believe is, I think it's the most powerful use case of chat, GPT and other large language models. I think it's really powerful for strategic planning and we can look upon this as from two different perspectives. Firstly, if you're an accountant in practice doing advisory work, then this is really Powerful for adding value to clients, for doing business advisory. I love it for business advisory.

But also if you're a business owner, you should be doing this yourself. If you're, if you're the owner of an accounting firm, then you are your number one client and so you should be doing strategic planning in your own business. So everything that we're going to talk about you could think about with two different hats on. One as an advisor advising business owners and one as being a business owner yourself, wanting to build a more powerful strategy. So we're going to talk in this about a bit of an overview as to why is advisory a big opportunity, what does it really mean? And then we're going to dive into how we can use AI for advisory and we'll look at some practical prompts, we'll go into chat, GPT and I will try and do two or three, perhaps four different prompts examples as we run through this session. Now, I know some people are listening on the podcast and hopefully you'll take loads away, but there'll be some visual stuff later. So if you're on the podcast, you might want to hop across to my YouTube channel later and catch the visuals. But let's start with just a quick definition of business advisory. To me, business advisory is all about how do we help business owners, clients build more successful businesses, how do we help them increase their profits, grow their business, increase cash flow, etc. And when I'm thinking about advisory and when I think about how I was doing it in my accounting firm many years ago when I was a sole practitioner, when I did advisory work, I really think of it as being six, six things, six core things that we could do as part of a well rounded advisory solution. So to me they would be goal setting because how can we help a client be more successful if we don't know what success means to that business? So if I was doing advisory work with a client, I would always start off with the first session being all about what are their goals, what are they trying to achieve? So that's goal setting. And then I would be helping them with strategy. And strategy is simply all the possible things they could do to get from where they are today to where they want to be towards their goals.

Advisory may also consist of an element of forecasting, looking into the future, looking at projections of profits, sales, cash flow, etc. Then there'll be an element of reporting, which is the comfort zone stuff. For most accounting firms it would be producing, for example, monthly management information, monthly profit loss account, monthly balance sheet and then talking about the trends of how the business is going. And then the ongoing advice is having a regular meeting. And this is the bit that is where the real value lies. It's in the relationship that you have as an advisor with your client. It's giving the advice, it's having a monthly meeting to interpret the numbers in the report to see if they're on track to achieve their strategic plans. And then finally, there should be an element of accountability where you hold the client accountable to do the things that they say they have agreed they're going to do between the last session and the next session. So just like a coach helps people be accountable to do their homework, to do the things they say they need to do to get to their goals, we would do a similar thing. Now, that doesn't mean you have to do all those six with every single client. It all depends. And I talk a lot about pricing and having different packages. And it may be if you're creating, let's say, a bronze, silver, gold of different levels of advisory packages, those bronze silver gold might have a different mix of these elements. It might be the entry level is simply a strategic planning day where you do some goal setting and some strategic planning. It may be that then the next level is the ongoing advice and the reporting and the accountability. And then for our premium clients, the larger clients, it may be we do more forecasting and what if analysis and budget setting and those sorts of activities.

So that would be what I see as being the main elements of advisory. But what we're going to talk about is, well, how can we use large language models to help us with advisory and particularly, how do we help, how do we use it to help with delivering the service, doing the strategic planning, giving the advice? And I talk about large language models.

I'm focusing today on ChatGPT, as I normally do, simply because, firstly, Most people use ChatGPT and secondly, because in all the benchmarks it regularly comes out as number one. But if you're not a ChatGPT fan, if you prefer Claude or Gemini or something else, Grok, for example, everything I'm going to show you today would apply just as well to any of the different large language models.

So what are the sorts of things that we might do if we are doing advisory work with a client? What different activities could we do using a large language model? Well, firstly, we could use it for research. We could use it to research the client, we could research the industry so that we can speed up our homework process so that we have some preparation before we start that first initial session with the client, we want to make sure that we understand their business and understand their industry. And we could spend hours doing research, but with ChatGPT, we could cut that down into just a few minutes. And we'll look at a prompt for doing that in a second. We could, of course, also use it as part of the numbers side of things. We could use it for financial analysis. And again, we'll look at an example. In a short while, we'll look at a prompt that you might want to use for the numbers side of the advisory. We can also use it for creating strategy. And I think of this in a couple of levels. Firstly, we can use. When we think about strategic thinking, one of the things that we can use is business consulting models. So what do I mean by that? Well, when we're coming up with, when we think about strategy, and a definition I love is strategy is all the things you could possibly do to get from A to B, where B is where the client wants to get to. What are their goals, what do they want to achieve? What do they want to achieve? Next year they might want to, for example, double their revenue next year, they might want to increase their profits by half a million next year, what are their goals?

And then we need to figure out, where are they right now, what's their point A? And today, where they are right now is all the challenges they're facing, all the frustrations, the pain, the issues in their business, the issues coming their way because of changes in their industry, for example, and these are all the things that are bogging them down, getting in their way, that stopping them from getting to their point, their point B. So strategy is everything to get from A to B. So we need to make sure we understand, first of all, where do they want to get to? What is their point B, what are their goals? But we also want to understand that, understand where are they right now, what are the various issues right now, what are their strengths, what are the various products they have, what are the strategic marketing alliances, what are the opportunities in their business, and so on. Because that's the starting point, understanding that. And then that'll help us. That'll be, if you like, a springboard to come up with ideas or strategies to move them towards their goals. And so that's why we use business consulting models. We use those models to help us come up with a picture, if you like, of what the business currently looks at, like. And we'll look at an example in a short while. And then once we've done that. Once we've used a business consulting model to understand their business right now, we can then work with the client to come up with strategies to come up with a strategic plan or strategic action plan. And there are lots of great prompts that we could run to do exactly that. And then a specific type of strategy that certainly I would always work on when I was working with clients is then growth strategies. Because every business owner that I talk to wants to grow their business. Nobody wants to go smaller. They want to grow the business, they want to increase profits, increase sales. And one of the things we can do is help them to do exactly that. But Mark, I'm just an accountant. I'm just a bookkeeper. How do I do that? How do I help people grow? I'm not a marketer, I'm not a sales expert. It doesn't matter because we now have the access to AI that will create the strategies for us and help you be seen as an expert in your business community. And then what we can do with AI is we can then take things to another level entirely, which I call implementation. So normally advisory or coaching consulting is largely about asking the right questions, being a facilitator and the client then coming up with a plan because you've opened up their mind through different questions and ideas, and they come up with a plan with your help as a facilitator. And that's really powerful. But we can take things to another level because we could, if we wanted to start to help the client to implement. And implement is the highest level of value when we do it for them. And again, AI tools, large language models make this so much easier. So examples of things that we could do at that level, it could be that we, as part of the implementation, we help them to create a business plan. It could be that they, they want to grow their business and we come up with a growth action plan. But they don't know how to implement that. They don't know how to create the social media plan, for example. Well, you could do that for them. You could use some carefully crafted prompts and you could create social media campaigns for them.

Because AI makes it so much easier. But if you do implementation for a client, always remember that's the highest level of value. You should charge premium prices for doing that. If you are running their marketing system for them, then you should charge premium prices.

And so I'm going to focus on some of those things in this session today. But also another thing that we want to do as well is if we are delivering Advisory services to clients. So all these things so far you could do with your own business. And that's why I'd recommend you start all the things we'll talk about you should do yourself.

Come up with strategies, strategic thinking and so on. But if you're going to offer this as a service to clients, then you're going to want to figure out, well, how are you going to package it up? I mentioned earlier, think of it as a bronze, silver, gold, offer three different choices. How might you package it? What would you do as part of advisory? How would you value, price that and communicate the value? How would you go out to the marketplace and promote that service as part of that, to build your positioning, your branding, you would perhaps want to do some content marketing and write, for example, blog posts, ebooks, perhaps do some webinars based on to position you as an expert in helping business owners and all of those things, packaging, pricing, marketing, content marketing, all of those things. Again, AI can really help. I'm not going to talk about that in today's session. We're going to focus on the delivery of IT first. But bear that in mind. So let me just quickly, just, just recap. We can use our large language models, our chatgpt to do research, financial analysis, do business consulting models to identify where they are now, their challenges, their issues. We can then build strategies, strategy building, we can come up with growth strategies, we can help with implementation, and then we can also use it to build our own packages, our pricing and marketing of advisory work.

And so we're going to go into. I'm going to show some prompts in a second. The reason I think this is such a huge opportunity for the accounting profession is a couple of reasons. Number one, AI is moving so fast that we are seeing already now we are seeing that compliance work is being more and more automated. And so we need to figure out ways to create more value for clients. More than ever before.

We need to help our clients with their biggest problems. And so advisory is one of the highest levels of value that we can create. And we have to do that because we cannot keep relying on compliance work if AI is going to automate much of it. But also if we understand value pricing and know how to price based on value, then the other thing about advisory work is that it's high value. We can charge higher prices than compliance work. But also with the use of AI, as you will see, the time to deliver it is relatively low. And so it can be a very profitable service. Whereas in comparison, the value of compliance work is Less and the time taken to do compliance work is much higher. The margins are much, much smaller because it's takes time to fill in tax returns, it takes time to do bookkeeping and clean up work. These are time consuming processes and relatively low margins compared to, let's say tax planning or advisory where we can make bigger differences to the lives of our clients but do it in less time. So I believe that this is the way, this is where the profession should be focusing more and more. Right, let's go and look at a few.

Prompts. And I don't know why, but ChatGPT just shut itself down on me. Perhaps I just hit the cross button by mistake. Okay.

Let'S see.

We'Ve got that back.

Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, it's come back. Right. Sometimes when I do live demonstrations, obviously chatgpt sometimes goes slow. It's working relatively okay at the moment. A couple of weeks ago it was very slow. So we're going to grab a few prompts, we're going to look at. Let's look at.

Some research first. Let's imagine that you have just met a brand new client, you've just met a business owner and you've had some conversations with them. Perhaps you met them at a networking event and you've had a conversation. They've got some frustrations, their business is stagnating, it's not growing the way that they'd like it to grow and you've identified that you can help them. So I'm going to use a case study for this. I'm going to use a real business. I don't know who they are. It's a restaurant, it's a restaurant in the UK it's a steak restaurant. In the evening they have steak on the stone, it's a cafe. By day they're called KASMCs. I think they're in Dunstable in the UK. So I'm going to use that as my case study. So imagine this is the business that you are about to. You've just met and you've been talking about how you can help them get their business back on track, grow their business and so on. And you've got a meeting with them, your first strategic planning session, let's say tomorrow. And you need to do some research, you need to understand this business better so we can do some research. So if I go across to.

Here, this is a prompt library, by the way, and those of you that have been using my prompt library already, you may notice it looks a little bit different. That's because this is the new version coming out in just a couple a week or so.

And so I'm just doing the final testing of it just to check it works. So let's look at research and I'm going to go across to this. I've got these are all the various prompts that owners of accounting firms would want to use as part of their to speed up their use of AI. And I'm going to look for my business strategy prompts and specifically I'm looking for business website context report. So I have a prompt here, here's the prompt. All I need to do at this stage is in my library of prompts. I'm going to copy that to the clipboard, I'm going to go across to chat GPT and I'm just going to go into my demonstrations project and I just paste it in. So there's my prompt. Now I'm going to switch the model from GPT5 to the an older model to 4.0. The only reason for that, if you've used ChatGPT since August, you'll know that GPT5 is better, but it can be slow sometimes if it does a lot of thinking. And because I'm doing a demonstration, I'm going to go back to the old GPT4O just because it'll give me a quicker answer for the purpose of today. So I have my prompt here. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the prompt. Also when I create these prompts, if you're new to these, I always put variables in. So all of this prompt I could use for every single client, every business I want to, because it's got, if you like, placeholders, but they're variables. So I only have to put in the, at the end of the prompt the variable in this case, it's asking for the website. So let me just grab that website of Kasmix, paste that in so that here's the website.

Here'S the prompt and let me just move that out the way. So what this is going to do, this first one is I've asked ChatGPT to act as a business analyst. And what I want to do is I want to analyze every publicly available page on the business website because I want a report that I can use as my preparation for my strategic planning meeting. And the report is going to give me the contextual foundation for things like business strategy, growth plans, financial advice, strategic recommendations. And then I've given it more specific instructions in the prompt. I want it to use the website at and with. And this is the variable. So it knows from below it will go and pick up here. Website analysis is defined as the URL for the website. So everywhere that appears in this prompt it will just knows we're talking about Kasmics. So it's going to use that to complete the report. It's going to review every page and summarize what it finds. And it's going to also open up a canvas. So if you don't know what that is, it's one of the tools inside chat GPT. I love canvas. It's really powerful. And then what I've done is I've been in this report, in this prompt, I've been specific about what I want that structure of the report to be. This is where prompt templates are really powerful. Anything that you might do frequently creating a report, for example, we can then specify in the prompt the exact structure that we want. I want to have something about industry and market context, the business models and operations, how do they make money? For example, what are the products and services, what's their pricing model, what's their brand positioning and messaging, what's their marketing and lead generation. And even we could ask what is the website user experience?

I've got a few rules. And then we have the variable which in this case is Kasmic. So let's just run that prompt to see what it does. And I'm just going to close the sidebar. So it's pausing for a bit because it's obviously going to read the website and that might. And I've asked it to read every single page of the website. So it's analyzing that, searching the web, as it says right now, searching for Kasmics. And now it's writing the report and it's doing it in a separate canvas. You know, it's a separate canvas because.

It will, which I hope it is. It might not be in this case. Sometimes it doesn't always follow the instructions. It's not. Anyway, here we go. So we have industry and market context. It's telling us a bit about the industry and the sector that Kasmix operates in. What are the typical customers they have? They have daytime customers for their breakfast and light lunches and cafes. And then in the evening it's diners looking for more special outings, steaks, cocktails and social dining experience. We've got some information about the market trends and analysis, some information about competition.

And so on. We then got in section two, we have something about the business model and its operations. How does it make Revenue. What's its delivery model? How does it deliver its services? Well, it's a physical location. It's a restaurant, in this case with eat in and take away. We've got who its dependencies, who its partners, like suppliers for steaks.

And so on. Then we've got section three, which is what they sell, what's the products, the services. We've got a cafe menu by daytime and so on. What's its usps, what's its pricing structure? We've got brand positioning and messaging and we also have some marketing.

And then what's the website like? So that, that took seconds to do. That took seconds. And if you've got, if you've got a prompt in your prompt Library, it takes 30 seconds to grab a prompt, put it in there, copy and paste the URL to the website, run that prompt. Within two minutes, you have a really powerful report which is a complete summary of that business, which is going to give you huge amounts of information, ready for your first strategic planning session. Without tools like this, without those sorts of prompts, I guess you could spend easily two or three hours doing research into a business, at least an hour. And we've cut that down to just a few minutes and the time it takes to read it. So that's for doing research. So let's move on to a different type of activity we might do. So we might do financial analysis. What might we do as part of financial analysis? Well, we could of course analyze its past financial statements and look for trends and so on. That's one thing we could do. We could also start to look at what might be the most useful ratios. And another one that you may want to do if you're working with another client is identifying what are the key predictive indicators, the KPIs, really important measures that a lot of small businesses don't measure. So you might want to have in your, as part of your strategic planning session with the client, you might want to have a conversation about what are they measuring, what are they measuring and what else could they possibly measure. And then what you might do as part of your advisory service going forward is you then might want to offer to help them create the measures to even perhaps pull together measures every month and create a report, for example, showing the Trends in those KPIs. So let's do exactly that. I'm going to go back to.

My library of prompts and I'm going to look for one called KPI Creator. I can see it here.

And I'm just going to grab that to the clipboard. I'm going to go back to ChatGPT and paste that in here. So let me move out the way. So here is our KPI creator. Again, it's a long prompt and that's because as we know from prompt engineering, using these models, the more specific your prompts are, the more specificity, the more clarity in your prompts, the better the outputs you'll get, the more predictable they'll get. So anything that you want to do frequently, like a particular report for a client, like the report just shown you, if you want to report on financial statements, if you. Anything you want to do frequently, then think. I think of these as little mini systems that are going to save you huge amounts of time going forward. So this one creates KPIs and if I just scroll to the end, you'll see there's lots of variables here, placeholders, if you like that. We could fill in the gaps here. But it's much better just to go straight to the end. It saves us time and it's asking for three variables. What is the client's name, what's the website and what's the industry they are in? So I just need to answer those three and then I can run the prompt. So it's Kazmik's restaurant and they're a UK restaurant and there's the website and I always put variables in the prompts like that because it's, it saves so much time. Now in this particular case you might say, well, do you need to put that in? Because we're continuing the same chat and as you know, with, with tools like ChatGPT, within a chat it will remember details from the previous one. So it already knows we're talking about Kasmics. It's already done a plan for Kasmics, it's analyzed the website. But the reason I put these variables in is because it enables you to use each of these prompts standalone. I could start a brand new chat and run this prompt and that's why I'm putting these in. Hope that makes sense. Okay, let's actually, I'm going to run this one quickly and then while it's running, I'll just walk you through just a few of the things in this prompt. So I'm changing the role in this case because one of the things we know from prompt engineering is that we get better results if we give chat GPT a specific role to play. And so now I want it to play the role of a performance analyst. And what I want it to do is the task is to analyze the industry and identify the most appropriate KPIs. So more specifically, identify the key KPIs relevant to the business and then create a table. And I've been very specific with this example built into it because I want the table in a very specific format. Again, because when we specify this, when we give examples, for example. For example, we can. When we give examples, we will get a predictable outcome. We'll get exactly the table and the information that we need. So this example here is telling it exactly what we want it to look like. So it's quite long. The example is quite long because I'm being very specific. And then we have our variable. So, interestingly, ChatGPT is still thinking about this one. I have no idea why. Sometimes it does go a little bit slow.

So let's just go back and let's see if I've missed anything. Let me explain a couple of things here. So I've got action steps and then. Yes. So I want a table of my KPIs, and then I want to have a detailed description of each one.

And then I've got some more broad instructions. So replace the variables in the curly brackets. This is Instructions. Now for ChatGPT, I wanted to fill out the KPI table and expand the detailed descriptions.

Okay. I don't know why it's going slow. I'm going to. Sometimes hitting the edit message and then sending it again sometimes works. If it doesn't, we'll come back to in a bit.

Or I might just change the model.

So this is the problem with live demonstrations. Here we go. It's woken up. Okay, that's good. So here we go. It's now producing for this restaurant. It's coming up with some possible KPIs that we could measure. And you can see it's a really, really good report. There's our table. Then we've got more detailed descriptions, which includes what it measures, why it's important and some tips on how to measure it. So while it's doing that, let's go back here. Let's pick a few. So it's a restaurant industry, so revenue per cover. Yep, that's a really good one. For restaurants. We could measure that. There's the calculation. That's what it measures. This is why it's important. And then we've got some tips on measurement. In our table. We've got things like table turnover rate, probably the labor cost percentage will be a good one. Food cost percentage. These are all great KPIs for a restaurant. Business. So if you're having a conversation with business owners about what KPIs they should be measuring, this is really, really. This is a really powerful prompt with more details here of exactly how to measure them.

And.

That took. Well, normally that would take probably about 10 seconds to produce it. But as we saw, ChatGPT wasn't behaving quite right. But sometimes, as I said, just resending the prompt sometimes fixes it, which he did this time around. So we could use it for financial analysis, we could use it for creating KPIs, for example. How else could we use it? Well, we could use it for.

Then for strategic thinking. So one of the things we could do is we could run a SWOT analysis. Let me just show you that very quickly. And if I go back to here, I've got a prompt here for SWOT analysis which I can copy to the clipboard. I can go. This is. Once you've got a. Once you've got your prompts all in a database or prompt library, it saves you so much time just grabbing them, copying and pasting. And in this case, I just have one variable I need to put in, which is the name of the business, which it already knows. I'll just put that in there. Oops.

And so this one's just telling it to create a SWOT analysis. If you've never used SWOT before, it's really, really powerful. And one of the things I always used to do with business owners is in this first strategic planning session is go through swot, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Threats. And so what it's doing is based on everything it now knows about this business. It's coming up with what it thinks might be some possible strengths of kasmc, five of them. It's coming up with five possible weaknesses. For example, a brand identity split, because it's a steak restaurant by night, it's a cafe by day. So that's two different identities that causes a branding issue. From a marketing point of view, that could be a potential weakness. We've got opportunities in the industry or opportunities it could do. Like it could leverage its hot rock experience in its marketing. That's its stake on the Stones. And it's got some threats.

These are really powerful. And what I would do is I would do this as part of my homework. And then when I went to, to see KASMCs tomorrow, I would, as part of the strategic planning, I would then say, let's do a SWOT analysis. And I would go through these and say to the client, do you agree, these sound like strengths. And if they agree, great. If they don't agree, cross them off the list. But then say to the client, so what else? There's five things that I think could be strengths. What do you think are your strengths? And we get the client to come up with the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threat. But what I used to find is if I just went to the client and said, what are your strengths? They would look at me blank. But if I went with a list, if I did some homework and came up and said, look, I've been thinking about your business and I've been based on what I know about your business, I think these could be the things you're good at. A it demonstrates that you understand the business, you care about them, you've done some homework, some preparation and it also then starts to, it helps to the conversation from that point onwards becomes much easier because the client's now got some examples. When you say so what do you think are your strengths? This will then trigger them to think, yeah, actually also I think this is something we're good at.

But then the question is, so what do we do with SWOT analysis? And this is the same with any business consulting model. Whether it's swot, whether it's pest, whether it's pestle, whether it's the business model scorecard, whether it's the whatever, whichever one it is, these are just a starting point to identify where are they. Now what we then do in our advisory work is when we know where they are. Now what we now do is and we've got their goals now we use that as a starting point to work with the client and brainstorm Based on this SWOT analysis, what could we possibly do? What could be the strategies to get from here to there? And so the real power of this is when we then run a follow up prompt. So if I go back to the prompt library and I'm now looking for swot.

I'm looking for.

Will it jump? Let me just type in swat, it'll be quicker. I'm looking for SWOT follow up. I can't do it on that one. I'm testing this one still and that's that prompt I have not got available to me. No worries, let me just go to the earlier version of the software. SWOT analysis follow up. So I just go and get, I just grab the cup that to clipboard, I go to chat GPT, I paste that in. There's no variables for this one because I'm just following up on The SWOT analysis, I just copy and paste send it and what this one does is chat. GPT now will take each of those five strengths, five weaknesses, five opportunities, five threats and for each of them come up with three possible ways to leverage the strength or the opportunity or to mitigate against the weakness or the threat. So if you do the math, that's going to give you 60 possible strategies, as you will see. So for the strengths, if we take its signature hot rock experience, it's giving us three possible strategies that we could use to build on that strength. If we take a weakness, if we look at the brand identity split weakness, it's giving us three possible strategies that we could do to mitigate that branding, positioning, weakness. We could redesign the website homepage with two clear entry points and so on. Loads of great ideas in total. 60 ideas, you don't need 60 ideas, your client's going to think you have spent hours doing research on this and it took you probably two or three minutes and you've got 60 ideas. Does that mean all the ideas have to be good ideas? No. The whole purpose of this is to start a conversation with a client to get there, to get their creative juices flowing. You probably won't even go through 60. You might take to the meeting what you think are five, ten great ideas and then say to the client, I've been thinking, these are some ideas I've come up with. And do you like these ideas? What else do you think you could possibly do? What else could you possibly do to capitalize on your strengths? And the client will come up with the answer. Every business owner knows the answer to their problems. The trouble is every business owner is so stuck in the day to day business, they don't take that step back. And that's the value of you as a business advisor, a business consultant. You get them to take some time out of their business to meet with you, to look at the bigger picture. And what you also bring to the table is an outsider's perspective. And one of the things I've talking to accountants over the years, they often say, I can't help my client in this industry or this industry. I don't understand engineering, I don't understand manufacturing. I've never run a restaurant before. That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. The strength you bring is the outsider's perspective. You come at it from a different angle. You'll see things that they've never seen. It may, because you're a customer in the restaurant industry, you'll have seen things from A customer's perspective that they won't see because they're too much in the business.

So what else can we do? Probably about one or two minutes left. What else could we do with.

These AI models? Well, another thing that we could do is, and I'm going to at this point run one that I did earlier. One of the things we could do is going back to the financial metrics, etc. And I'm just hoping that ChatGPT opens up. Yep.

So one of the things that we could do is.

If I switch across to here, we could create dashboards. With ChatGPT, we can create dashboards and we can do what if analysis. We can look at what happens if their sales growth grows by 5%. We could look at what happens if they increase their margins by 1%. It'll re chunk all the numbers, give commentary and recommendations. So we can create dashboards very, very easily. And I'll be showing how to do that in the AI academy. What else can we do? I said that implementation is the highest form of value. So many things that we could do. For example, we could build a complete business plan if I could just.

Show one that I did a bit earlier. So. So the problem with doing things like business plans with tools like ChatGPT is the limitation of the context window. If you ask it to create a business plan, it will be an okay business plan. But if you want a really powerful business plan, then you want to break it up your prompt into different sections. Let me explain what I mean. And this is the concept of.

What I call workflows. So far I've shown you prompts that are what's called one shot prompting. We give it a prompt and it gives us the answer that we want. But sometimes we need something that is more involved where if I just create business plan, sometimes we need a series of prompts that we run one after another. So if we're creating a business plan, for example, we can do that really, really quickly. But we'll want to make sure that.

We do it one step at a time. So let me show you what I mean. Let's do this. This is part five. This is chapter five of a business plan I started earlier. I'm going to copy this to clipboard, go to ChatGPT and here's my Kasmcs restaurant business plan that I'm building. And I'm now going to do the marketing section. So I just Ctrl v send paste and it's now going to create and write for me the marketing section of the business plan in just a few seconds.

So we just have to wait for ChatGPT. It's got ChatGPT 5 set up. I should have gone to 4.0, but here we go. And this is opening up in a canvas. So if I hit edit, you'll see it side by side. This is now writing the marketing and sales strategy for Kasmix restaurant in a really good business plan. This, it's doing it in just seconds, as you can see. And if I just close that, we can see that we can go to each section of the business plan that we can create one step at a time. These are all the chapters of the business plan. This is a, I think it's an eight step process, nine step process that you could just copy and paste each of these prompts. There's 10, one after the other. Within less than 10 minutes you have a full business plan that could take you several days to create. Okay. Right. I think it's time. I think that's everything I wanted to cover in this session. Although I did want to.

Let me think. Yeah, if I get time I might show one more. But I want to do with some questions because.

There'S a few that have come in. Let me see who was the first question? I'm just looking for the qqs. So if you remember, if you have a question, put two capital Q's in front, I think. Shabir, yours is the first question. You said, are there suggested applications or structures for a firm to have its own prompt library to be shared amongst many staff in the firm?

So yeah. So a prompt library is a database of prompts. You've seen one that I've written myself with my developers. It's a database. You could build a database of prompts in any database tool like Airtable. I've seen people build their prompt libraries in Notion. Mine used to be in Trello. So there's lots of commercial database type software that you could use and build up your prompt libraries.

But you specifically mentioned. Going back to your question, Shabir, what about sharing amongst your staff? So one of the things that. And this is, you're the first to know this.

So the prompt library that we've created, one of the reasons why we are rewriting it right now and it's due for release very soon is. And so the look of it's changed is one of the features that will be unlocking very soon is to have a teams plan. What that means is that if you want, you can invite team members to your prompt library and then if I just close That a second. You'll see over on the right there is a column called Team. In other words, what you can do is you can then once you've got your library of prompts, you can specify which ones you want to made available to team members and then everybody's using the same set of prompts. So that's another way that you could do that. Shabir.

Right, what's the next question?

Someone said can I share the prompts with you? Let me tell you how you can get the prompts. The prompts are part of the prompt library software, so let me answer that question.

And also if you found this valuable so far, please let me know by hitting the like button. I'd really like appreciate that. If you want those prompts that I've shared with you and the prompt library, we make those available to members of the AI Academy, of which I have many people here who are in the academy right now. I can tell. And if you want to join the AI Academy, it's a small monthly investment.

And you get access to essentially three main things and I'm going to tell you what they are. But before I do, the good news is I've just turned on before this session, I've turned on a free trial. So if you want to trial the AI Academy for seven days, then between now and an hour, for now, we'll keep on. We'll have the free trial open. We're going to close it in an hour by the way. But if you join within the next hour, you can have seven days to experience the AI Academy. I'm going to ask Sarah to put a link into the comments right now. So what do you get if you join the AI Academy? Three things. Essentially you're part of a community of currently nearly nearly 550 accounting professionals where you can ask me questions and find out about all the latest things I post in here most days with the latest news in the world of AI, particularly ChatGPT and there are people like Randall who's here. Randall is always posting, he's amazing. In fact, Randall is, if I go to the leaderboard he is the most active person. So thank you Randall. Closely followed by Linda and Sarah who I think are here. Oh and Jan. So there's a community, secondly there's a classroom. And in the classroom I have dozens of courses and one of those that I've created is a 10 part series called Business Advisory AI. This is just an overview of a course I launched in the last few days on how to do business Advisory. There's a Lot more training, there's more prompts there. Other, other video courses that people love are privacy and security, which is critically important. And another one people say they love is creating their.

SOPS systems. You can systemize an individual, entire business with a whole series of prompts. So I teach step by step how to build SOPs really fast, which is something going back to implementation. You could then help clients build systems that would be hugely valuable systems, SOPs. And then also what we do is when you join the AI academy, you also get the prompt library software. Currently it's this version with this branding. Within a week or two it'll look like this. And if you join under the free trial, if you join under the free trial, you will get access to the software immediately with some prompts. You will get all the rest of the AI Academy prompts at the end of the seven day free trial. If you want the prompts immediately, then wait an hour and don't do the free trial. Okay, so just a quick reminder of a few things. I don't know if Sarah's put the link in or not. I'll just check in a second. Has Sarah put the link? Yeah, that's the link you want to go to. So a couple of things about the AI Academy. It's currently an early access member price. We're going to be putting the price up again soon. But the price never goes up for existing members. So today is the lowest price it will ever be. We've got lots of new stuff coming next year. Existing members will get all the new stuff for the current price. So now is the best time to join before the price goes up. The free trial will last for another hour and five minutes and then the availability of the free trial. Okay, it will be seven days but you'll need to start the free trial inside the next 66 minutes and then we close that down and it'll just back to normal. Normally pay people just have to join and pay on day one. But you can get a seven day free trial and you can cancel anytime you like. We use the school platform. It's really easy. In fact when you get the welcome message go to the start here course there's one of the things tells you where to go to cancel your trial. It's really, really easy inside the school academy and then remember when you join and get your free trial there is in the classroom. Let me just point this out. I would recommend start with the start here course and you will find in step two, that's how you register your free copy of the software, and you can play with that for seven days. If you then decide to continue after seven days, you'll then unlock all of the other prompts that you can have access to. Okay, let's finish off with questions. We have five more minutes left. I don't know where that question was. Yes, this one. So that was about how to get the prompts. Yes. Join the AI Academy.

Okay, somebody, a couple of you have said that it's that YouTube has paused or kicked you back to the start again, if that's you. This is being live streamed to my YouTube channel. And so I'm just checking. It's all fine with me.

Yeah, if you're having technical problems, you can catch up at any point in time. It's on the YouTube channel. What else have we got for questions?

And Randall Sundays, I know YouTube is doing some weird stuff lately, and I had a couple of live streams that had two lives at the same time, one in portrait and one in landscape. That's weird, Randall. Okay, so YouTube's doing some strange things today.

Okay, Randall, for the business plan, would you do it all in one chat or set up a project for it? Great question, Randall. Well, what I would do is I would set up. If I was doing advisory work with the client, I would set up a project for the client, which is actually what I did. If I just go back to here, the business plan itself, I created a project called Kazmyck's Restaurant, and I've got a whole bunch of chats in there, including the business plan. So I would set up a project for the client because I would do all the strategic planning in one place. And that's partly because of what I call the Vegas setting. I know, Randall, you're in the. I don't know if, Randall, you've watched the course yet, but the training in the training in the AI Academy, I walk you through how to set up a project ready for advisory work.

So I would. I would put it inside a project. But then what I would do with the business plan, I would just make that one chat. I would. And the way that 10 step workflow works is that the first prompt is the one that gathers all the context about the business. And then prompts two through to nine, create eight different chapters from the company. Overview, the marketing part of the business plan, the operational part of the business plan, and then you just copy and paste, and it will then just build out across eight different little canvases in that chat, the full business plan, and then you can just copy and paste them into a Google Doc or Word Doc and you'll end up with a really powerful business plan. Typically, I think it works out about 15 to 20 pages.

And it does 90 odd percent of the work for you. It does put in the prompts, put in placeholders for information that ChatGPT recommends that you do put into the business plan, but where you haven't given it the context. So sometimes you'll need to add some bits yourself. For example, in the operational plan it had the list of directors, but because they weren't given to it in the first place, it just said insert Director A here and so on. We have two minutes left, let's move on to the next question.

Okay, so if I'm you're a member of VPA Growth, if you're a member of Growth, is it necessary. It's not necessary to join school, but the AI Academy is a separate business. It's separate to the Value Pricing Academy. And whilst there is some AI stuff in the Value Pricing Academy, if AI is really important to you, it's worth being being part of both. I know quite a few people like, I think Randall's answered that. Randall's in both. And yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

The reason it's separate partly is because AI is moving so, so crazy fast. And so I set this up back in March because it enables me on the school platform to very easily keep you up to dated by adding School is a great platform. I know the people who are on school, they love it. It's a really good platform. It's easy for me to put new content and it's easy for you on the school platform to get access to that content, to get notifications of new things in the community. And also.

There'S a calendar where you get to see at a glance all the live events coming up and then you can add them to your calendar. It's just a great platform. It's really, really easy, really easy to use. Right. I'm pretty much out of time. Thank you for that comment from Randall. There's a lot of comments. I think I've dealt with all the questions. It is on the hour, we always finish on the hour. So thank you so much for coming along. If you have more questions, then join the AI Academy on the free trial and then you can post questions over the next seven days. For me, I'm active every single day and answering questions from people in the community. So please ask, please go there, ask me your AI questions, ask me your business advisory questions, anything you feel I can help you with just ask. Anyway, that's it for me. Today I will play out with some music as I normally do just so I can read your comments. If you've enjoyed it, please give me a thumbs up and also let me know in the chat what is the best thing, the key insight you've learned today. I read every every every comment as the music's playing and hopefully I'll see you again on a live session. Bye.

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