Strategic Planning with ChatGPT: Enhance Your Business Advisory Services with AI-Driven Insights

Hey, if you're an accountant or a bookkeeper and you want to stay ahead of the curve and become an indispensable advisor to your clients, then you need to be grasping the opportunity presented by business advisory and in particular, how we can use ChatGPT to make delivering advisory easier than ever before. In this video, I'm going to show you something really powerful. We're going to dive into ChatGPT. I'm going to show you an example prompt of something that you can do to, to create huge amounts of value to the businesses that you work with. So hold on, make sure you've got a pen and paper ready to make notes. You're going to love this example.

Hey, it's Mark Wickersham here. I'm a chartered accountant and I love doing advisory. I love helping businesses become more, more successful and hopefully you do as well because this is a huge opportunity for the accounting profession to create more value for our clients to stand out as being different to all those other firms that just add up the numbers and fill in the forms. This is how you can make a real difference to the lives of your clients and how you can build a profitable business advisory service. In this video, I'm going to show you a particular application of how we can deliver value to our clients, how we can do advisory work using AI, using a large language model. I'm going to use ChatGPT for this session. I'm going to show you. Very soon we're going to dive into ChatGPT and I'm going to show you a prompt that you can use to create something really fast that you can then use in a strategic planning session with a client. Why is this so important today? Well, it's so important because the world is changing crazy fast thanks to the huge, huge pace of change with AI. It's 2024 and things are moving so fast in the world of AI. I've done a video before. You might want to check it out. Where I look at my predict, my predictions for the future of the accounting profession. And in not too many years from now, I believe we will not be doing compliance work, we won't be doing bookkeeping. AI will replace all of that when we just look at the speed at which it's changing. And if you want to find out more, go and check out that video where, where I share three things that you can do to future proof your accounting firm. And one of those is we need to start creating more value for our clients, doing more stuff for business owners. And one of the things we can do is we can carry out more business advisory, we can give business owners more advice, more support, more help to help them increase and grow their business, to improve their profitability, to increase their, their cash flow, to help them automate their business, make it more valuable, help them sell their business. So many things we can do to help them build a more successful business. So let's look at an example and what we're going to look at today is let's imagine that you have a client coming in tomorrow to your office. I'm going to use an example for this. I'm going to use a. It's a real business, it's from the uk. They're in the water jet cutting business. It's called Aqua Jet. I don't know anything about this business. I could have picked any URL, any website. Let's just imagine for argument's sake, this is your client. They are coming in tomorrow for a meeting. Perhaps they're struggling in their business right now. They've got some, their business is flatlining, it's stopped growing. Perhaps they've got some cash flow problems and they want some help. And perhaps you've started talking to them about your business advisory service and how you can help them with strategies, strategic planning. They're coming in tomorrow. You have no idea how to start the meeting. But you've heard somewhere that a really powerful process that you can use in biz advisory is SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is a business model. There are many different business consulting models that we can use. It's not my favorite, but it's a very, very powerful business consulting model nevertheless. And what is it? First of all, what is the swot? You've heard of it? It's probably most commonly made, most widely known business consulting model and basically it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So what we do with any business, and you should do this with your business, it's a great starting point. In fact, the prompt I will show you, I recommend you use it for your business first. And so the strengths are the things that the business that we are good at. What are the strengths? When we can identify those strengths, we can figure out strategies to build on those strengths. The weaknesses are the things that we're not so good at. And if we can identify what we are weak at, we can start to figure out some strategies to improve on those. Those are internal things, the strengths and the weaknesses. Then we get the external and the external are the opportunities and the threats. What are the opportunities in our industry right now? What are the things that we could pursue as we build our future strategy. And what are the threats? The threats to us? If I give an example for the accounting profession right now, AI. AI could be seen as an opportunity. It could be seen as a threat. And absolutely, if you're doing strategic planning for your business right now, then AI should be there in your thought process. And it's a threat. It's a threat because it's going to replace the pretty much all compliance work at some point in the not too distant future. Bookkeeping, payroll, tax return preparations, and so on. It's a big threat in that area. But also I see it as a huge opportunity, an opportunity to use it as a tool to deliver more value. Okay, so what about our client that we're seeing tomorrow in the water jet cutting business? What are the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats for their business? Let's look at the prompt for, for that and then I'll share with you how you might use this in a practical way in the meeting. So if I was meeting this business tomorrow, what would I then do? So as part of my preparation for this, I would run a quick prompt inside ChatGPT. Now, I did another video on doing research, which I'm not going to go to now, but I'm just building on that now. Here is my prompt. It says, act as a business strategist specializing in competitive analysis with knowledge in market dynamics. Okay, what's that? That's me just simply giving ChatGPT a role to play, giving it a Persona. What we know from research in the world of prompt engineering is that its default role is a helpful assistant. And if we tell it to play a different role, we tend to get a better answer, a more detailed answer, a more nuanced answer. So that's why that's in the prompt. Okay, so it's going to play the role of a business strategist. And then we've got the task. I want you to carry out a SWOT analysis on topic. And the topic, then this is a variable. I love variables in prompts because then we can make them a template that all we do every time we use it is we give it a different variable. In this case, I'm giving the variable the topic is this waterjet cutting business. So I've just fed it the URL, the website. But why not you put your business there, Just use this prompt. Put your business. Either your. You might just put a bookkeeping business, an accounting firm, whatever you just however you describe yourself. Or you could even put your website Then what I've done is I've specified exactly how I want ChatGPT to lay out the swot. So, so this is really powerful. One of the most important parts of a prompt is giving it templates, giving it some guidance as to how you want the answer. So you'll see lots of hashes and double hashes. This is what's called markdown language. It's understood by things like HTML and certainly understood by large language models. Basically a single hashtag means that this is going to be the heading one style, this is going to be heading two style. And three hashes means heading three style. So we're just giving it. We want to specify the layout, the format of our report, we want an introduction and then for our strengths we want five. You can ask for a different number. I'm just going to go for five strengths, five weaknesses, five opportunities and five threats. And then I want a conclusion. So that's the template how I want it laid out. So let's have quick, let's see how quickly ChatGPT can do a SWOT analysis for this business. I'll just hit this button here and it's off now it's already. Because it's an existing chat I started, it's not had to go and read the website again. It knows all this stuff. But if you're using that as the first chat it might want, it might take, I don't know, 10 seconds to go and read the website. So it's going and doing its stuff. Let's go and have a look at some of this right now and then we'll talk a little bit about how you can use this in practice. So we've got Aquajet Machining Systems Ltd. SWOT analysis. Here's a bit of an overview. They are in the waterjet cutting technology, providing advanced solutions for precision cutting across various materials, etc, etc. So that's a bit about the business and what this SWOT analysis aims to do. Let's dive into it. So our strengths, the strengths of this business are innovative technology. So Aquajet offers cutting edge water jet systems like Omax, etc. It's got a sustainability focus, which is great. It's got a strong market position and comprehensive support services and versatile product offerings. So that's the strengths from the research that it's done and interesting. I'm using ChatGPT4O. The O stands for Omnimodal, which came out in May of 2024. This is an incredible model, the most powerful model available right now and it's interesting how it's given the specific links to where that information is, if you then want to go and check it out. Weaknesses so we've got a number of weaknesses for this business. High initial costs. The advanced technology and comprehensive features come with high initial investment costs. There's a dependence on technological advancements. The market concentration. Their strong presence in the UK market is an asset, but its market concentration might pose a risk if local market conditions change unfavorably. There is a limited global presence and complex maintenance requirements. So. So there's five weaknesses there that we can that will help us as part of our research and understanding that client that's coming in tomorrow. Opportunities expanding. There's an opportunity to expand to emerging markets. Advancements in automation would be an opportunity. Collaborations and partnerships for example, forming strategic partnerships with other technology providers or entering into collaboration can lead to innovative product developments, expanded market reach, green manufacturing trends and customizable solutions. There's some great opportunities there and then we've got some threats. The threats are for this business, intense competition, economic fluctuations, regulatory changes, technological disruption and supply chain disruption. So I don't know about you, I think that's a pretty good SWOT analysis. So the question is then, how would we use that in practice with a client? Well, what I would do is if I was meeting this client tomorrow and I was doing some research for our strategic planning meeting, one of the things I might do in a, in a meeting like this is to use SWOT analysis. It's very powerful. And the way I've done it with businesses is that I would get a big flip chart pad and I take four different flip chart pages, one labeled strengths, one labeled weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and then have a brainstorming session with the client to brainstorm each of those individually, what are their strengths, and so on. But what I found is that very often with business owners when you say what are the strengths? They struggle to think of strengths. Sometimes it struggles to get started with the process. So what I find really useful is to say to the business owner, I've done some thinking, I've done some research into your business and I've got some ideas as to what your strengths might be. Would you like me to go through those and then we can then add to those and take any away that you don't agree with. They'll say yes and they'll think, wow, you've done some research, you care about my business, you've understood it. And so at that point I would go through the five strengths with the client. The five strengths Put them on the flip chart and I'd ask the client if they agree with those things, do they agree they're strong in those areas and are there some other ones perhaps they could add to that list? So I use this as a starting point in the conversation. I would do the same thing with the opportunities, the weaknesses and the threats. Taking one at a time. By the way, a SWOT analysis will take you with a client at least an hour, perhaps two hours. This is really valuable strategic planning work and you should be charging premium fees for this. So what do you do with that information once you've done it, Once you've gone and come up with the SWOT analysis, then what we do is we work with the client to think about strategies, appropriate strategies on how we could tap into the opportunities. What could we possibly do? What could we do to protect ourselves from those threats out there? How could we capitalize on our strengths, for example, some of those strengths, we might be able to use that in a more compelling way in our marketing. Does our marketing really shout about the strengths of the business in terms of the weaknesses? It may indicate need for internal systems, internal team training, perhaps outsourcing, or bringing in of other experts to help us with the areas we're not so good at in the business. So we use the SWOT analysis as a starting point for what ideas and strategies we can come up with to help this business be more successful. It's a really powerful process. And as I said earlier, if you've not done this yet for your own accounting firm, I strongly recommend that you do. Because I'm a big believer in we should always practice what we preach. If we're going to deliver advisory solutions to our clients, if we're going to go through processes to help our clients become more successful, then if we think about it, your business, your accounting business, is your number one most important client. All these things that you might do to help your clients become more successful, why aren't you doing them in your own business? We should practice what we preach. So why not go away, Use that prompt prompt and do a SWOT analysis for your business and then start. See if that helps you come up with some ideas of things that you might need to do different in the future and then start using it with your clients. If you found this valuable, please give it a thumbs up, give it a like button. Please also check out my channel for other videos that you can watch. Please subscribe to it and I'll put below some links to some other resources. Go and check out those links. And there's some free stuff in there as well. Please grab that free stuff. I look forward to seeing you online sometime in the future. Bye for now.