How To Grow Your Business In 2024 | How to grow your business 10x

Excellent, Darren. Thank you so much for having me back, and thank you for everyone for showing up. My name is Shaun Whynacht. I own and operate a company called Blue Cow Marketing based here in Coldbrook. We design systems that make growing your business easier and more enjoyable using technology. That is pretty much my most concise elevator speech, and when I give that, it usually gets people to lean in because they want to— they want marketing and growing their business to be easier and more enjoyable. So that's where we leverage technology. When you look at being a marketing company, most people have a preconceived notion that, okay, you build websites or you do Facebook pages or social media. So we're a bit different in that regard. So I'm going to share my screen here. I have two screens on the go. The camera is over this screen right over here. I have notes on this one, so if I'm looking away, If you're watching the camera, that's what I'm doing. I'm not looking out the window at the birds or anything like that. So this workshop today is all about how to grow your business in 2024. If you're keeping track, that's this year. Now this can obviously carry through to other years, but the reason I do it this way is because whenever I do a presentation, I build it 2 days prior to that presentation, uh, because technology is changing so fast. And you know, if I did it a month ago, it's going to be different today. So that's the idea of this. So what we're going to look at are several different things to consider in your business. Now I know each and every one of you have a different type of business. Some of the things in here may apply to you and some things may not apply to you, and they might apply to different people. So the goal with this is to take some notes. I do I do have some exercises in here that I'll want you to do. It's not ones where you have to come back and share it with the group. It's just something that I want you to kind of take a moment and start to take some notes and consider it with your business. So let me just get to control the presentation here. So what are we gonna cover today? I've broken it down into kind of 7 different sections here, looking at your message. Your audience, your offer. We're going to talk a bit about AI, how to use artificial intelligence in your business, because it's something that is very relevant in this day and age, and it's not going away, and it can actually make you more productive. And I'll show you examples of it, and we'll actually go in and do some live examples of it. And then we're going to dive into some of the marketing and sales type of things and customer engagement. And then lastly, any questions you have at the end. So when we look at how do you grow your business, it really comes down to 3 things. Number 1, having the right message, right? And by that, what I mean is what are you putting out there? Does it accurately demonstrate or explain what it is that you do? And that's part of the exercise that Darren's getting you to do with these elevator speeches. And an elevator speech is something that you're always going to be honing and trying out and revising based off the reaction. Is the right message going to resonate with the right person? Is your ideal customer actually hearing your message and is it speaking to them? So you got the right message to the right person and then ultimately at the right time. Now this has been a methodology that has been for years since I've been starting marketing, probably 20 years ago, I think it was. This has been a message I've heard from many different professionals. It's the right message to the right person at the right time. And that's where we're gonna dive into thinking about all these different things. So let's talk about understanding your messaging. And this can be as simple as what's on your voicemail message when people call? What's on your website if you have one? What are you putting on social media? Right? This is your brand messaging. The idea behind this is, does what you put out there accurately make people understand who you are and how you can help them? So whether you're doing lawn care or landscaping or plumbing, or you have a retail outlet, your audience is going to be different from each other business. But are you communicating to them exactly who you are and what you offer, right? Do you know who you are? A lot of times a new business struggles with this, right? Because you're spending so much time in the business, in the field that you're in, you don't take a lot of time to see, does your audience have some confusion around what it is you offer? Especially if you're trying to do something that is, you know, a bit different or off the beaten path from the norm of what that is. You know, if you're, let's say you're a plumber, and but you're going and you're doing this new technology and installing these new type of systems, people are going to hear the word plumber and they're just going to think, hey, this person is going to come change my toilet, fix a leaky tap, or whatever. But maybe you're putting in, you know, like I said, these different types of systems. So there's a different type of messaging that you need to put out there. And then do you tell your story well? We are in an age now where authenticity, being human, being real is sparse, right? There's so much fake stuff going on, right? Especially if you spend a lot of time on social media. Most people don't put their failures out on social media. They put all the, all the, you know, probably 5 to 10% of the, the success that they have. And then we see it and we base a lot of our perceived direction and success, or what we're currently living, against their 10%. So do we tell our story well? Are we authentic and human? So here's the first thing I want you guys to do. And again, we're not— I don't have to share this, but if you got a piece of paper there, I want you to think of 3 words that you would just describe or define your brand. Now, to do this, to get to this, you're going to write down what are the core values of your business. If you've never done an exercise like this, it is what do you believe in, right? Is it, hey, we're, we're, we're always going to be honest, whether that honesty is going to be, you know, perceived as good or bad, right? So, you know, I know when I first started out in my business years ago, I just wanted to make sales. I wanted to sell more of the service I had. So anyone that was willing to buy, I would sell to. And what I found out down the road was it wasn't always a fit for everyone. So that became a bit of a hurdle to overcome. So a lot of times it's like, we will be honest, if we're not a fit, we'll let you know, right? So what are some of the core values that you believe in? It could be stuff in community, it could be stuff in your own personal beliefs. What are you going to bring to your business? Then what makes your products and services unique, right? What is it that you are doing? And, and by doing this exercise, um, and you can snapshots of this presentation, I'll provide it also after to Darren if people want this to, to do this. Um, but what makes those products and services unique? How do you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand? When you can make somebody feel something, they feel like they're in the right place, they feel like you understand them, it is so much easier to either have them purchase from you or even come back or bring other people to your business. If you've ever had that experience where you met somebody the first time and they said to you, or you've ever felt this, I feel like I've known you for like a long time. That's because that person, or you, understand that other person and they feel that connection with them. And then what are the key benefits that your brand offers to that customer? So with this exercise, what you would do is you would write these out. And then from there, what you're going to do is from these notes, you're gonna identify the words that stand out as the central theme or concept from that. So what are some of the words you're using when you're writing this that really stand out and, and pick 3 of those words that represent your brand, the essence, the values of those aspects. Um, try not to, to be too descriptive in the words, but the goal with this is that these 3 words will help act as anchor points to develop your brand messaging as you go forward. So whether you, you come up with a tagline for your business or whatever it is, you can actually use those in everything that you do. And this is one of the initial marketing strategy exercises I do with new clients is to help them figure out who they are with those words. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yep. So once you understand who your brand is with this, the second phase of this is understanding who is your audience. Who are you serving? Commonly you'll hear this as coming up with a customer avatar. If you're doing any kind of marketing online research around this, it's like you gotta come up with your customer avatar or your ideal customer profile. And the reason for that is it's a great exercise to go through to figure out who is the best fit. Now there will be people who will be variants of that or a little bit not as good a fit, but ideally you wanna put out your message to the ideal profile. Now I've worked with clients who have, you know, 2 or 3. You know, in my case, if I'm selling to, you know, a consumer, then, you know, they want to do a lot more research in the stuff that they're buying. Or if I'm selling to a busy CEO, they just want the facts. I want it quick. How much is it going to cost? What am I going to get from it? So I have different avatars for that type of stuff because they're not going to sit through an hour webinar, right? They're going to need a one-page sheet. So I have to build content for those type of different people, you know. Why, um, so why, so do they need you, right? So why would they come to you? And then why you, right? Especially if you're in a competitive field or a, you know, a commodity type business. You may be able to do lawn care and things like that, but if there's 5 other people in your community, you need to differentiate why you. And it could be as simple as you give back to an organization, right? Maybe you give the SPCA, we'll use as an example. Well, now you're tapping into dog people and cat people and people that love animals, right? And it could be as easy as just that to anchor it off of. But also, in knowing who it is that you are serving in your audience, you're also going to start to identify who's not a fit. And when I started to implement this, the easiest way to do that was I always had a free consult on the website people can book, and it got a lot of tire kickers who would be like, okay, well, you know, I need help with growing my business. And the next line was, but I don't have a lot of money, right? So, okay, we're not a fit. And it's not that we're overpriced or anything like that, it's just that in order to get started with marketing and all this stuff, it takes time, right? And you need to make sure that people are, are okay with investing some time and money to get going. So what I ended up doing was implementing a form that took at least 30 to 45 minutes to fill out and asked a ton of detailed questions about their business, what are their goals, what are they struggling with, what's their current sales process, all this kind of stuff, knowing that if it was a tire kicker that just wanted something cheap and fast, then they weren't going to go through that process. And just by putting that one step in place, we were able to get higher qualified leads coming through our business. Now to do this, and this is something that I would suggest to do later, is, and you can just write this down, our website bluecowmarketing.ca/mycustomer will give you this Google Doc here. And these are just lists of things that you can start to go through in your mind and think about when it comes to coming up with your ideal customer profile. You know, like what's their age range, gender, location, education level, you know, what are their interests? A great example of this in a sales process was a financial advisor that I worked with in the past who on their website, when you filled out a contact form, there was a question there and it said, if you could take a vacation once a year, which of the 4 vacations would you choose? And it was Disney vacation, a cruise, a trip to Europe, and, and the other one must have been, um, I don't know where the other one was, but there was like 4 different completely opposite ones, and they just chose one of them. And then as they started to send out marketing material, one of the items they mailed out was a postcard, and they had printed 4 different postcards, each of them with one of the images that represents those answers. And this came several months down the road, but the idea was they know what that person was attracted to. So if it was a golf vacation, then they got a picture of a golf course in their mailbox. They know that would stand out to them. So it's just understanding who that person is and what resonates with them. If you got people that come into a store, this may be something as just learning more about who they are, right? Maybe they have pets, maybe they have the kids. Make the time to start to learn who they are so you can follow up with them as they come back over and over again. And then the last part in this here is your offer. And this comes down to what is it that you're selling, how are you selling it, and is it easy to buy? So if you've got a retail outlet and people come in, pretty easy to buy. If they come through the door, they can pick up the item, they can come up and pay for it. But if you're selling a service, it may not be as easy as that, right? It may be, okay, we're going to get a call or somebody's going to email us, and do we have a process for how soon can we come out to quote on the project? And if we're there, do we have a way of getting them to commit versus, um, okay, I got the information, I'll send you a quote in a couple days. Well, the problem is usually in a service type business, the quicker somebody gets back to them, the easier they are to, you know, get that business. So, you know, having tools there to be able to maybe quote on site and say, hey, you know, we can be back tomorrow or whatever, would you like to go, let's, let's, you know, Let's process the payment now if it's pay before. Do you do mobile payments? All that kind of stuff. So a lot of systems that can come into place with this. The idea is how easy is it for them to buy and to say yes. So when it comes to our offer, how do we do that? How do we craft this offer? Well, once you know who it is that you're speaking to, what are their problems, what are their pain points, what we want to do is we want to solve that for them. So why are they coming to you? Why are they even becoming aware of who you are? And why are they either going to your website, calling you, coming to your business, messaging you on social media? Why, why are they doing that? And then how can we fix that problem for them? So we need to identify that core need or that problem. And when doing that, the more precisely we can identify that, the easier it is for them to say, I want to know more. And that's where that elevator speech comes in too, because if you can be intriguing enough that somebody's like, yes. So when I said we build systems to make it easier and more enjoyable, I'm trying to target people that are like, you know what, I'm trying to market my business, it's frustrating, I don't know how, I'm confused. Those are the type of people that I want to work with. So by saying easy and more enjoyable, Yes, they're aspiring for that, right? You know, if you've got, I'll come back to landscaping again. If you're going out marketing, there's a lot of pride with people and their lawns, especially in like a subdivision. So if you've got a neighbor that's got a really nice manicured lawn and yours got weeds all over it, you're like, I wish mine looked like his, right? So some of your marketing would be like, you know, be the envy of your neighbors with a weed-free lawn, right? Versus, hey, we'll come take the weeds out of your lawn. It's just a little bit of the messaging change that's in there. You have to identify what it is that they're aspiring for. So once we identify that, we need to define what is unique in your offer. And you can have more than one, but we're gonna do one at a time here. So once we do that, what is making it unique? And this is gonna come into looking at what else are other businesses doing? You know, what are other people in your field in the area doing? And also, let's look outside of your area because you can get a lot of ideas by looking, you know, maybe in the US, doing some Google searches in different cities for your service and see what other people doing out there. Um, a best example I've had of this was I was traveling, well, over 15 years ago, uh, to Florida, and I saw this real estate agent that had a billboard. And what they were offering to stand out in the real estate field was on your move-in date, if you buy from me, we will come to the driveway with a mobile food truck or whatever, and we'll cook a home-cooked meal for you on your move-in day. Because they know that day most people just buy fast food because their kitchen's not set up. That was their unique selling proposition with their offer. So they clearly figured out what the pain point was, and they solved it, and it was working well for them. Other things that you can do is you can bundle different products and services to add more value. So maybe there's 2 or 3 different things that you have that you can say, okay, we can do all 3 of these, you know, cheaper. We're very familiar with this kind of methodology. You know, fast food does this all the time, but you can do this in your business as well. Can you bundle things together to make a better offer for for them. Incorporating scarcity or urgency, right? We do this where, hey, you know what, we got this, the special promo coming up where we're only going to offer this to, you know, 10 households, or we're going to offer this sale until the end of the week. That is scarcity, right? Urgency— if you buy this today, you know what, I'm going to throw in XYZ or whatever it is, right? That's urgency that's there. So these are very some common things when it comes to marketing your business and building your offer. And you can have a really great offer and then, you know, maybe once or twice a year you throw in a more scarce or more urgent kind of offer element to it to make it even more relevant to people or more, more important for them to buy now. And then this one here is one that has, we see more and more of this over the last year than anything. And the reason for this is people are being scammed so much, right? They're worried that maybe the offer isn't what you say it's gonna be. So having a strong guarantee, a money-back guarantee or a promise, right? If you're not happy with how we did this or if you're not happy with this product, bring it back, we'll return it, we'll give you a full refund, no questions asked, or we will fix this until it's right, or whatever that case is. We see this more and more, having that strong guarantee, and that will eliminate that, that potential of, of remorse that people would have buying, which they happen to have immediately when they purchase something. So knowing that they're protected is going to be key in your offer. And then thinking of different pricing strategies. Now, a lot of times the most common thing that people will do in a business is, let's say you've got a, a service offering of $1,000 and you're going to go, okay, you know what, I want to do a push, I want to promote, I want to get more sales, we're going to offer 50% off, right? So we offer this for $500. What you've done is you've reduced the cash flow you have coming into your business by $500. Versus what can we add on to this $1,000 to give more value, right? So maybe you have another product or other services that don't have a higher cost to you that compare and pair really well with this current product or service that you can say, okay, if you buy this in the month of June, you're going to get this, right? So now the value goes up, but you're still bringing in $1,000. Right, so thinking of that to make sure that you're still ensuring the profitability in your offers. And then always with anything that you do, test and refine. Right, so try it out with a small segment of people. If you've got an email list, maybe you're gonna email it to them, or you've got some customers that are coming into your store and you're gonna just say, hey, you know what, I got this promotion, and just mention it to them. You don't have to advertise it to the public yet, you just mention it to them. See how do they react to it, how do they pick up on it. Because that's gonna prevent you from spending all this effort trying to make something perfect, put it out there, and you hear crickets because it didn't resonate. It wasn't the right message, it wasn't to the right people, and it wasn't at the right time, right? So we're gonna test and we're gonna refine. So anything that we do in a marketing sense, we do what are called A/B split testing, which basically means that we take a group of people, let's say it's, you know, 100 people, and we send one offer to one and a variation of that to the other half. And whoever responds the most, that becomes that winning offer. So then we say we either release that to the rest or we split test that new one with another variation and start to keep refining it going down. So that's another way to make sure that your offer is always going to be evolving over and over again. So once you've figured out who you are, what's your messaging, who are you speaking to, and what are you putting in front of them, now how do you make your life a lot easier so you don't have to worry about things? It's like, okay, well, I should be doing social media, I gotta run my business, I gotta respond to these emails, oh, oh, there's somebody that's not happy, which is gonna happen, but I got an emotion around that and I'm responding back, oh, I didn't really wanna send that because now I feel, bad about it, and it wasn't really what I wanted to say, right? How do we use some of the tools that are out there? So this is where artificial intelligence comes in. Now, there may be some people here today that are like, they think artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, it's going to replace everybody, it's bad and everything. While any technology that comes out, there will be people that will use it mischievously, uh, that will not use it for the good, but I can tell you I've been using AI for over a year now, and it has increased my productivity. You know, you hear things like ChatGPT, immediately think, okay, it's going to write a blog post for me. Well, yes, it can do that, but it can do a whole lot more. We're going to show you some of this as we go through. But how do you utilize AI in your business so that you can, you know, not have to work 13 hours a day, uh, you know, 7 days a week. So you can have that time to do what you want to do. So we're going to look at the capabilities and limitations of AI in business. Data, or data, is key. Privacy and security. And then how do you implement this? And we recommend what we call phased implementations. Don't try to do everything at once. That's with anything, whether you're doing social media, but Don't try to replace everything with artificial intelligence in your business. So let's look at that, the capabilities and the limitations. So you need to understand what it can do, and it's crucial that small business owners need to understand that there are different applications for different industries. If you're a retail outlet, you know, maybe you're doing it to write some product descriptions. If you've got a website, you're doing it, you're going to, going to write some product descriptions, or you got a WordPress website and you have written some blog posts and you're yourself and you want to do that, perfect. I recommend you do that. But then there's like, okay, I need to come up with the keywords for that so that the search engine optimization or SEO is better. You can paste that into ChatGPT or meta.ai, which is a free version from Facebook, which I'll tell you is very comparable if not better than ChatGPT, and it's free right now. Um, will actually generate all those keywords for you, save you a bunch of time. Meta.ai. Yep. So, um, it can do a lot of that stuff. Or, you know, maybe you are doing a lot of social media, like, I really— like, I know I need to post some stuff, but I'm just drawing a blank. You can use these tools to say, give me some ideas of what I should do, and it will help you do that. And I'll show you this as we go through. I'll close the presentation and we'll bring it up and we'll go through some of them. So its limitations, you know what it does is it uses large what are called datasets. And this is just information it's learned from the internet that has been fed into these. They call them LLMs, large language models. I don't want to get into the technical side of it, but All these artificial intelligence need to have some information to know from. But the key with this is it doesn't always accurately look at both sides of the picture. If you're giving like, you know, a, a response to say, hey, write me a blog post on, you know, the top 5 products that will do XYZ. Right? If there's not both sides out there, it may not find it exactly accurately. It also lacks emotional and creative thinking. It's getting better. ChatGPT just released another version today, um, is doing a lot better with that. But the more you give it for direction, the better it will be. You need to look at these tools as if they are an intern that's working for you, a human being And the more details you can give it, the better it will give you results. And it will receive praise. It will never, you know, get frustrated with you. And you can just ask it, okay, let's do another version. Let's include this. Saves you a lot of time. And again, the data that you put into it is key. And we do this by creating what are called prompts. Which is just a block of text that you give it that explains what it is that you want to do. And then privacy and security. There's a lot around this where companies have made policies, and it will probably not apply to most people on this webinar, but knowing that information you give it is being stored somewhere, right? It's being stored in its— in your account, in its memory, and which means that the people that own that, either ChatGPT, that company, or, you know, Facebook, Meta, it's being stored somewhere, right? So knowing that we're not going to put in credit card information, we're not going to put in, you know, secret recipes for things or privileged information, um, but it's going to be in there. And then the phased implementation is looking at how do we roll out this content or these tools so we don't overwhelm ourselves, right? Instead of just completely overhauling everything in our business, try it out, test it, play with it, right? Playing with AI is amazing. It's so much fun because where we're headed, and I know this because I'm listening to a lot of AI podcasts that are in the, in the know, is right now in Google search, If you go to Google and you type in what you're looking for, it's going to give you links to websites and then you're going to go to that website and you need to go find that information on there. Where we're going to head is search is going to be AI generated. So how do I, you know, increase the, you know, how do I decrease the weeds in my front lawn? Again, coming back to this because I'm looking at my lawn right now. Instead of giving you a list of 5 different landscaping companies in the area, it's going to start to then go and find information from all of them and write content for you to give you those answers, but also then give credit to the companies or the websites it's gotten that information from. That's where we're headed, and we're already starting to get there. If you use the website browser Brave, when you do a search in there, it'll actually start to AI generate the results first and then gives you the websites below. So what do I use in my business? These are the 5 that I use on a daily basis. I use ChatGPT, Meta, Fathom, which is a note-taking tool for any Zoom, Google, or Teams meetings that I do. And what it does, it just attends automatically to the meetings and it summarizes everything that's been going on. The reason I've implemented this is I'm notoriously horrible for taking notes because I want to be present in that meeting and I want to just have a conversation. I want to be writing down notes. So this will actually record the meeting, give me a transcript, give me all the key things. It'll pick out things that I said I'm going to do. It's going to pick out things the client said they're going to do. And within 5 minutes after, it's given me an entire summary of all the action items, what needs to be done, what were all the questions they asked, what were all the questions I asked., and then I can put that into my CRM system under the contact record. So all this stuff is making my life so much easier. Descript. Descript is one I use for videos. So anytime I get a video or an audio file, I can transcribe it in there. I can edit videos for social media by just going through the text of the video transcript and putting little brackets after each paragraph and it will cut up the videos for me. And then another one, Exemplary AI, is a lot of times making social media content for me. So let's look at this and how it can be utilized. All right, so this is meta.ai and this is ChatGPT, very similar, um, in what it looks like. Um, you got the left-hand of all your saved chats, same thing over here. So what we're going to do is I'm going to give some examples here. I just got another screen here. So has anyone in the room— you just raise your hand because I can see all your screens here— has anyone used ChatGPT or anything in the past? Okay, got a couple thumbs up and hands up. So what we're going to look at here are 8 different ways that this can be utilized. So the first thing is business planning and strategy development. Now I've got some examples, and this one here is, help me generate a 3-month marketing strategy for launching a new eco-friendly product line to a skincare industry. So I've got this copy and paste, so I'm going to paste it in here. So I'm giving it a, a prompt. The reason they call it ChatGPT is, is the chat part is the format we're used to, chats and messaging. That's the format. And GPT, is the technology. So, we're gonna enter this in here. Now you could give more detail in here with things like, my skincare brand is for women 45 to 55. Um, you know, we only use natural products, whatever it is. The more detail you give it, the better it'll be. But I put in that one little line, I hit enter, and now it's starting to generate this based off the knowledge it knows. So month 1 awareness, pre-launch teaser campaign. Here's some social media teasers to use, right? Email marketing, maybe send an email to existing subscribers. It's giving me ideas for my business planning and my strategy for marketing, right? So this is the idea month 2. So it just generated all this off of what it knows about a 3-month marketing strategy, an eco-friendly product line, and the skincare industry. From all its learning, right? So we've got all this. Now I could go in here and say, okay, that's great, but focus more on the social media side, and it will just redo it and give you those variations. So that's how that works. If you're an audible learner, at the very bottom there's a little button here says read aloud. It'll actually read it to you back in a voice so you can hear it being said. So there's one example. Now we're going to look at creating a series of social media posts. So in this case, I'm just going to make a new chat for everyone. This is creating a series of engaging social media posts to promote a local bakery, bakery's new seasonal pastry menu. So now it's giving me actual suggestions on the caption. The image that I can look for. And if you use something like Canva, which is great— I mean, my whole website, or my whole website, my whole presentation that I'm doing for you today was built and presented in Canva. I use it all the time. So now it's building all these posts, the types of posts and content that's there, right? And what I recommend with anything is make it your own. If the voice is not how you would say it, you can change that content. A bit more with that. Now here's another one. I've used this, and I mentioned this a little bit, where I've had a, you know, from time to time a client will, will write, um, there's a misconception on something, or they expected something, or they're upset about something, or whatever it is, and they send you an email, and you, you feel it in here, right? You're like, ah, they're attacking me, and you don't— you You're like, I gotta reply right away. And there's so much emotion in it. What I've done is I write that email, but I don't write it in my email. I write it in a text document with all the emotion that I feel at that moment. And then I paste it in here and I'm like, what I want you to do is rewrite this email response, but make it more empathetic. You know, make it, remove all the emotion that's in it.. And it does a fantastic job at doing that. And now you can still get the essence of what you want to have come across, but you don't have all that emotional stuff that's in there. So this one here is, I'm a customer inquiring about the status of my order, or yeah, my order is supposed to arrive, uh, last week, but it hasn't. Can you provide a professional response? So this is going to give you kind of like an idea of what to do. Now it's writing an email. That you can utilize. So a lot of times we utilize this for writing different emails or email sequences. If we're doing kind of, you know, maybe you do a webinar or somebody buys a product online, maybe you want a thank you email to go out to them. This is a great place to start. It helps remove a lot of the writer's block. Another way that it can do things is it can actually analyze financial documents. So I just recently got back from taking a trip to Florida last week. Now I exported all of my expenses I spent there, um, and I made it into a Google Sheet. So here they all are. Now I downloaded this as an Excel sheet, and I'm going to give it a command here. I'm going to upload that document to here, and I'm going to say, um, analyze this Excel sheet and tell me the top 3 most expensive things I, I purchased. I can type. And then give me the average spend overall. So now it can actually take data from Sheets and give you answers. So maybe you're doing like your, your monthly results, uh, or your, your bookkeeping stuff, or your, you know, your income and expenses, and you can ask it for intel onto that, right? So Eric picked out some things that I spent money on. Right. I did what exactly what I wanted to do. I'm like, perfect. Now graph all my spending. So now what it's doing is it's going to take a look at that and it's going to give me a graph based off all the things that were in it. Right. Yes. Uh, in what type of format? Like Uh, yep. Good question. Um, let me ask. And the other thing too is you can ask it, can it do something? Uh, could, right, could you reformat a CSV file? Where is your first one exported from? Like, um, QuickBooks? Oh, CSV file from Wix to then be formatted for Meta. Meta catalog. Absolutely. Please upload the CSV from Wix and I'll help you reformat to the meta catalog. So, so that's the other thing too, is if we, if you start to think of this as not a software, but almost like you're talking to somebody, you can ask it. So, um, some things that we've done before is I want you to do this. What do you need to do? Or what do you need from me? To do the best possible job. And it writes back and it's like, I would like to know blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, gives you questions, you answer them. And it's like, perfect, now I can work with this. And it will then start to generate it. Yeah, it's amazing. Like I use it for website codes. Like sometimes if you're designing your own website and there's like a button that's like a wrong color, I'll say, okay, you know, how do I put in styling stuff to make the buttons blue with rounded corners? Then it will generate all the code I would need to do that. So it can do those type of things as well. Um, here's a— here's another one that we've— you can utilize. So this one here is draft an email to a supplier explaining a delay in payments due to technical issues with our payment processing system. Right? So now it's drafting an email for someone else that's out there. I've done it where it's like, okay, write me a 6-month email nurture sequence on these 5 topics, making sure that, you know, it has this type of stuff in it, and it will generate all these emails for you to start to work with. Um, one of the key things with any of this is figuring out who you are, right? That's why we talked about that in the beginning, is, is who is your customer avatar? Because you could start out one of these chats with, you know, this is my customer avatar, paste it in. This is an example of the style in which I write. So if you wrote an email, you wrote a blog post or whatever, paste in your actual writing. Say, I want you to write in this style and speak to this type of avatar. Now it knows what you want, right? Or you finally, you've been working with it and you've gone many different prompts back and forth revising and it got to what it was. Say, okay, now generate me a prompt that I can use to start a new chat so that you know exactly this style. And it will just— it'll generate it. You copy it to a document, you save it. Next time you start one, you paste that in first, and then you've saved all that time, right? So this is how we utilize a lot of these things. Any questions about, about that? Now ChatGPT has the free version, uh, and there's a paid version. That's what I'm in right now. The Meta one will do the exact same thing, free right now. I'm sure they'll probably try to pay for it later, but right now it's free and it's very much, um, great that way. So any questions? No? Okay. It can also generate images, um, so you can actually go ahead and ask it to, um, generate In the paid one, yeah. It's not great at putting text on images. So if it's like, generate a picture of a building with this slogan on it, the words are a little wonky sometimes, but it can generate images. Um, image of a dog with Yep, yep, yeah. So I'm gonna do this here. I'm gonna— Red Mug working on a computer. I'm going to say Blue Cow because that is the brand that I have. So maybe I wanted an image for social media. We'll see what it comes up with here. And these are unique images, they're generated, so these don't, these don't exist. They're not stealing them off the internet. It's actually generating this unique image for you in this moment. So there's a blue cow with a red mug on a computer. I could use this for, you know, an on-brand type of social post if I wanted. So it saves you a lot of utilizing stock libraries and things like that. All right, let's hop back into the presentation here. Yes. So I'm just going to double check here my plan. Uh, so $20 a month US. If you, if you got team members, they go to $25 per person, but that just means you get to share things back and forth. But this one will have the image generation. Oh, the other thing too, I'll show you this. In ChatGPT, they have these things called other GPTs, and if you explore them, it's like a marketplace. They're all free, but they've been programmed for specific uses. So there's one, let's just see here. Let's just use one for, yeah, email nurture. Nurture. Let's just search here and see what comes up. So now there's like, uh, freelance email copywriter, a 5-day email nurture generator, a law firm email pro copywriter. So, um, you know, sales email. So people have gone in and pre-programmed some of these to be specific for these use cases. So you can just click on them, you read some of the, you know, how many conversations they've had. So the lower numbers, the less it's been used. And then you can either just hit start and it just shows up on the left-hand side. So I did one when I was playing around with presentation. It will actually do a presentation. So make a presentation on the future of AI, right? So if I did that, it's then going to go ahead and start to generate the content for that. And then there's a presentation GPT plugin that'll actually build all the slides for it for you. So, all right, so there it is there. So slide. So I can allow it. And now it's going to start to generate those. I don't have a demo of something I'm going to tell you next of where we're going, but yesterday I had a call with a company that offers AI team members. Seems weird, but the idea is if you're doing it for sales or customer support, and they said, here, go to our website, put in your cell phone number, and we'll give you a demo. So I did it. I put in my phone number. I got a text and it said, hey Shaun, it's so-and-so from this company. I'm going to give you a call in a couple minutes from this number. I picked up the phone, it was a female voice, and she said, hi, can I speak with Shaun? And I said yes. And she's like, okay, perfect, do you have a few minutes? I'd like to schedule some time in their calendar so we can talk about our technology. And I said, sure, no problem. And it immediately said back to me and there was noise in the background like an office. It said, okay, hold on, I'm just gonna check our calendar, see when we have availability. She came back and she's like, okay, Monday at 10:15 your time, does that work? Yes. Okay, I'm gonna send you a confirmation text. We'll talk to you tomorrow. This was on Sunday actually is when I did it. I hung up. That entire engagement was an AI-generated voice bot and I could not detect it was not a real person. It will then actually schedule follow-ups to call me back or call anyone back and say, you know, just want to confirm that we're still on for tomorrow. And you can have a conversation, ask it things. It's crazy where this technology is going. So freaks out a lot of people. Um, I'm of this, of the mindset that it can help, um, as long as it's not using for, using for the, uh, for negative gains, but in making you more productive. It works really well. All right. Presenter view. Canva. Enter full screen. All right. So, um, marketing and sales. So this is really once you figure out who you are, who you're talking to, what are you selling, how do you get it to them, right? It's that right time side of things. So we do this through what we call lifecycle marketing. It's not a one-and-done type of thing where we, we run a sale and we put it out on social media, we put it out on the radio or in the newspaper, whatever works for you, uh, and once it's done, it's done, and then we have to redo it all over again. We look at the entire life cycle of a customer, from the moment they first hear about you to when they become a customer, a raving fan, they're sending people to you. Look at that entire journey. And that is where that customer journey comes into. And this is where you need to think of this in your business, all the different touch points that people have, and then how do we increase the experience they have as they go through this. So we break it down into 3 different areas: collecting, converting, and creating. So there's many different methodologies and namings for these type of things that are out there. These are the ones that I've utilized. So in the collecting leads, this is how do you target the people, how do you attract them, and how do you capture them. So in the digital marketing space, it's usually, okay, you can run some ads. If you do that and you send them to your website, maybe there's a form they fill out. That's the most conventional way. Or maybe you got an email list and you send it out and you say, hey, we're having a sale this week in our store, come on in, right? So we target them, it's our email list, we're attracting them with the sale and we're bringing them in, right? So that's the idea behind it is the collecting of the leads and bringing them in. Once we get them there, how do we engage them? How do we present our offer and how do we close that? That's your whole sales process. So it could be as easy as coupons if you're in that type of business. There was a, I'll tell this story, there was a family-run pizza shop in the US who made fresh pizzas from local ingredients that they got in their community, but they had a lot of chain pizzas around. So the Pizza Huts, the Dominos, all that kind of stuff. So how do they get their more expensive pizza people. So what they did was they targeted office buildings, and they went in and they got permission, and they said, hey, can we give out sample slices of pizza to your employees? Yeah, no problem. So what they did is they gave out a slice with a 75% off coupon. So what happened was they came in, they got 75% off their first pizza. The company actually lost money, $2 or $3 on that first coupon. But when they got their pizza, they gave them a 50% coupon on their next one. Now they're making a little bit of money. When they brought that coupon in, they gave them a 25% off coupon. By the time they ate 3 of their pizzas, they were never going to go back to the place that the pizzas taste like the box it came in, right? So they utilize that to, to use a different marketing strategy with those kind of coupon methods, and it worked really well for them. And then lastly is the creating the fans. When somebody calls me and says, hey, I need to grow my business, I need more customers, I'll ask them, well, what are you doing with the ones you already have? Right? Because a lot of times we, we close a customer and then we kind of forget about them. Right? We're always trying to find, how do I find more? How do I find new people? But how can we sell either more of what we have to the ones we have, sell something different, or even how can we reinnovate what we have to be a different offer for them? Or how do we help them tell people about how awesome it is that we did what we did, or this product or service that we sold, right? We ask for reviews. Hopefully everybody asks for, for Google reviews, uh, to get that out there. Because a lot of people, when they hear about you, they're going to do their research now, and they're going to go online, they're going to look at the reviews, and they're going to believe what other people said more than what you say you say about yourself. So how do we build that sales force? So of the fans that we have. Another way to look at that is kind of like this, right? We have that, that whole, you know, infinite kind of track going around because we collect them, we convert them, we make fans, and then they're either coming back or they're bringing people back around that you collect. So going over and over and over again. Yes. Nope, nope, anyone can. So here, I'll just show you right now. I'm just going to go here. Yeah, so do you have like your Google My Business listing? Okay, so when you— yeah, so what— yeah, so when you do, um, where is it here? Uh, I moved it here. Get more reviews. So when you, when you have it set up on the right-hand side over here, or you'll have a listing, yourself will show up here. When you're logged into your Google account or Gmail account, there'll be a Get More Reviews button And it pops up and you can send this link to anyone. And the moment they click on it, what they're going to get is this experience. It's going to go to the map and it's going to pop up, right? And they're going to have to click stars, write your review, add any photos they want and post it. They're going to have to have a Google account to do it, right? Like a Gmail account or whatever the case is for it. But so that's— I'd recommend those over like focusing on getting Facebook reviews. Just because people just Google everything all the time. Yeah. And you can just like, you can generate a QR code with that URL in it and put it on the back of a business card, right? They scan it with their phone and they can do it right there. So, um, that's going to be key with that. And then it's far better than say, hey, can you email me a review? And then you end up copy and pasting it because it's not authentic, right? Where the Google is attached to their actual name on Google, and there's no way you can— unless you made up fake Google accounts and wrote reviews for yourself, which I don't recommend doing. Um, that's where, um, you know, it becomes more authentic. And then what I've done is I've copied down a screenshot of those reviews as they come in from Google, use them as social posts, put them on the website. From there. So looking at the customer journey, so what this is is a complete sequence of events and experience the customer goes through from when they interact with the company or brand, from that initial awareness all the way through to the post-purchase. So if we look at marketing like a funnel, this is a very common analogy of it. People become aware, so they either become aware that they have a problem, right? So they become problem aware, um, or they become solution aware. So the idea is, um, my roof is leaking or my shower is leaking. Now they're problem aware. Uh-oh, I need somebody to fix that. I need a plumber. So they go on the Google and they type in plumbers near me if they don't know anyone. Or what they'll do is they will actually contact somebody they trust and say, hey, do you know any good plumbers in the area? And that's where that that referral idea of having a good reputation comes into play. But if they don't do that and they come up to you on the website and they bring it up, now how do they contact you? So you have something like, you know, call or text this number, and you have either yourself monitoring it or you're able to respond in a prompt manner because they're probably going to call multiple different people, right? And whoever responds back first is going to get that job. Now that's a very unique case because it's more of an emergency thing versus a store or, or like a lawn care business. But the idea is when they first hear about you, you want to make sure that they understand who you are. So if your website doesn't look great, um, you know, we just got a project with a construction company in the Valley who had Yellow Pages do their website for years, uh, and he's like, hey, we just need something better. And I went there and it was horrible. Like, there was misspellings in the address of the you know, saying Colbrook. They had it in two words, right? The words— it was— they— Yellow Pages outsourced to like India or whatever, and English was not the first language. All the copy was written with imperfections and stuff. So that is not a good representation of this reputable company that prides themselves— their three words are quality, attention to detail, and everything. The website did not speak to that. So that's where that first touch needs to be key. In there. Um, my personal pet peeve sometimes when people have their personal emails as their company publicly promoted email— so it's like, here's my company, contact me at, you know, volleyballdude23@gmail.com, right, or something like that— it doesn't take much. It's a couple bucks a year to get an actual email address that's branded under a domain. Whether you have a website or not, buy a domain for $20, $30 and pay the extra $2 a month for an actual branded email. It's gonna, it's gonna be more professional. So the awareness, that first stage where your customers become aware of your product or service, this is either through advertising, social media, word of mouth, or even by accident, right? They They see you on your vehicle parked somewhere and they're like, oh, that's interesting. You know, like sunshades or whatever. You're like, I didn't know that even existed. I want one of those. So they become aware that there's a solution for something they didn't even know they had a problem with and they want it. And now they go into this consideration phase. So this is like, do I call this person? Do I believe what they say? Do I even need this? So once they know about the product, They start to consider whether it might be meeting their needs or solve their problems. So the more information you can make available to them before they make the decision to contact you, the better. So another exercise that I get clients to do is think of the top 10 questions your customers may have that would prevent them from calling you or coming to your business. If they didn't have the answer to it and put it on your website, put it on your social media, put it anywhere. So when they go and research, they're like, oh, these are the questions, and they answer it. They can see it. You can put in your Google listings now, right? You can put your FAQs on there, put the question, put the answer. So now they're doing their more research because people not necessarily are going to always just pick up the phone and ask you the question. Now it's the decision stage. Of the process. Now this is the stage they decide to purchase that product or service. Now they'll choose from available options considering different factors like price, convenience, and preferences. So that's where the whole kind of pricing structure comes into play. A lot of times you can have different options available that aren't public. So let's take, for example, um, myself. So a lot of times You know, somebody will come for a high-end website and they range between $5,000 and $7,500, right? Because it's a long process to build it out and everything. So if they say, well, okay, I really want this, and they have a legitimate reason for not being able to put out the $5,000 this month or maybe next month, I have options to break that out for them. But I don't put that publicly out there on the website. Right, so the idea is, is like, okay, well, what do we need to make this happen for you? Like, well, if you could break it up over 3 months, that'd be perfect. Yeah, sure, no problem, I can do that. So I have the systems to do that, uh, that's in there. Or, you know, you have different options in your products that are available, so you want to make it easy for them to, to make that decision. And then the purchase, right? So they decide, they're like, yes, okay. How would you like to, to get started? Would you like to buy it now, or you want to put on a credit card? What works for you? So making it very easy for them to, to, to make that purchase and make it easy. So a good customer experience. So if you accept credit cards, make sure you use a service that can accept, you know, Google— yes, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Visa debit, whatever, whatever you think is available. Email transfer, that's more common now. People are liking that, being able to do that for people. And usually the most forgotten, like I mentioned, was after people buy, that customer experience. Personal experience with this, I bought a vehicle from a dealership here in the Valley a couple years ago. Now if you've ever bought a vehicle from a dealership, you feel like a fresh piece of meat when you walk in. The salespeople flock over you. You are the most important person at that moment in their entire life, and they will do everything to make you feel that way. Well, that's the way it worked. We got the vehicle we wanted, came back, and they're like, okay, now I'm going to introduce you to the sale— the service manager, because they'll be handling all the service for your vehicle. Went over the counter, the guy was grumpy, he was rude, basically just broken the whole experience from that because I was expecting this to be positive. Came back a week later because I had to get tires put on for the winter. Sales guy didn't even recognize me, walked right by me, looked at me but walked right by me. Again, bad experience that way. So making sure that you make people feel, um, like they're important, that you really care, and that you actually do care for that, and they feel comfortable with communicating with you. And this is where you build that loyalty in the brand. Now there's a misconception a lot of times where the difference between the experience and the journey— you can have a journey that people go through, right? It's like, okay, when they call me, I'm going to go over this, I'm going to send out a quote, or I'm going to do this for them, and then all these things. These are the journey elements that are there. But if the experience they have is disjointed or poor, that's a worse situation to be in because you can have a great experience and a disjointed journey. People will be okay with that. But if you have a great journey and a disjointed experience, they're not going to be okay with it. So we look at the experience. The experience is how that customer feels every time they interact with you and your company, right? From that first moment to every point they contact you thereafter. So if they want to call and you set up a call, or they come in, or you go visit them, whatever that looks like in your business, make sure you have the time for them, right? If the idea is about building personal connections, maybe you don't book 15 consults in this entire— like, site visits in an entire day, because that means you're so rushing to the next one. You're like, okay, I'm going to book an hour for everyone. But you're going to keep in mind, you got to look at, okay, is my price point allowing me to do that? It may be worth the value of building that connection, spending the time getting to know the person, and not them feeling like you're being rushed. Like when you go to a doctor's appointment and they're trying to push you out because the next patient's coming in, right? So that's the whole idea of the customer experience side of it. And it can be, you know, maybe you, you hire somebody You know, to just make a couple calls a couple hours a day every week to, you know, past clients or current clients just to check in, you know, just calling from ABC Company, whatever it is, uh, uh, you know, just seeing how things are going. Is there anything we can do for you? Um, that investment there alone is, is fantastic. Um, I bank with a local bank here in the valley, and my banker Chuck Hennessy, I'll give a shout out to him. He was with Scotiabank for many, many years when I first moved to the valley here, and he was fantastic. Every time I came to the branch, he'd come out to the— if he saw me, shake my hand, how are things going, all this kind of stuff. He switched banks. I switched banks because of him, because he understood building the relationship and the experience. And if you've ever switched banks before, it's not a fun experience. He made it so easy and That is where the power of building that connection comes in. People will do business with you more than they'll do business with a business. And then look at your total interaction. So that customer experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with the company. It includes everything from browsing your website to speaking to your customer service if you have it, or speaking to you about customer service, purchasing that product and receiving that after-sales support. So if you're in a business that ships things, right, a lot of times it's the packaging, it's the unboxing. It's, you know, if you've ever bought an Apple product, they put a lot of thought into how that box slowly opens with the amount of air it traps for that unboxing experience, because that is part of the overall experience that they have, right? Don't just throw products into a, a bag, a sealable bag, and throw it there because it's going to get beat up, right? Try to, to make that experience in every point along the way, you know, setting the right expectations. If you got a voicemail on your phone that's for your business, set the expectation. Hey, sorry I didn't, I didn't get your call. I check my messages at, you know, at noon and at 4 o'clock. I'll respond at that point. Now they're not like sitting there waiting like, why didn't they call me back? It's 10 o'clock. Oh, they check it at noon. I can expect it after lunch, right? It's an experience in everything. Emotional response, right? It's all about those interactions, making people feel something, that good customer experience, leaving them feeling satisfied, valued, and understood. Whereas the poor one can leave you feeling frustrated, ignored, and unimportant. If they feel that and you have identified that you dropped the ball somewhere, please acknowledge it. So sorry, I understand We didn't meet your expectations. Um, you know, what can we do to, to improve that? This is something that I've done years ago with a different, um, company that I was working with, whereas they had a policy and they said anytime somebody's had a bad experience, send them this. What they found out was if they just asked what would make it better, what the person is willing to accept to make it better was actually less than what they were giving away for that, right? So instead of just band-aiding it and throwing something at the problem, acknowledge it, make sure you understand and you want to improve. And again, it'll make them feel better. So it's all about just being human and that long-term impact. So that overall customer experience is going to give you a positive return. You know, when I host websites with clients with a company, and I use a company called SiteGround. The only reason I do it, other than the fact that the hosting is fast, is their customer support. There are a lot of bad customer support companies out there. This one is great because 24 hours a day live chat, and they'll actually go and fix a problem for you versus here's an article, go read about it, try to figure it out on your own. Um, that is the long-term impact of that, and I've referred many, many people to that company. Now let's look at the, the customer engagement. Now what this means is building those relationships, right? All of this, you probably see this underlying tone of making people feel like you understand them and you care about them, because that's what's going to help you grow now, is how do your products help people, how do your services help people You hear this analogy is you don't sell a hammer, you sell— or you don't sell a drill, you sell a hole, right? That's what they want. They want the end result. They don't care how they get there. They just want the end result. So you want that beautiful lawn? Do you want that, you know, your garbage taken away? Do you want this new bathroom installed? Whatever it is, they don't care how it happens. They only care that they get it in the end. I have a plumbing friend who said, I spend so much time doing these invoices to people. I gotta list out all the products that I bought, all the, every nut, every washer. And I'm like, why? Like, put the cost of that job and just list out what you did. They don't need to know the product list of every nut and bolt that you had. They don't care. They care that the job was done and that you did it and now they see the value in it. So saved a lot of time that way. Customer enhancing your brand reputation. So the positive engagement— what I've implemented in my company is I found out about a company in Colorado called SugarWish. And what it is, it started by 3 moms who kids were in soccer and they met every time there was a soccer game. They sat there and they all worked for different office companies where the boss would be like, okay, you got to go out and buy this, this thank you gift to send to, to our client. They'd have to go do that. And they kind of shared these stories like, it's got to be a better way. And then the gift was never something the person really wanted. So they came up with this concept and what it is is you send a sugar wish and there's different ways to do it. There's a way where I can send a link to a client that says, you know, thank you for your business, here's a sugar— they click on it and they can pick candies, nuts, dog treats, whatever it is from it and build this wish. And it comes in little packages and it's all custom branded with the thank you cards that I, I designed for my company in there and any custom message. And it comes into the mail, uh, to them. It's fantastic. Or I can pick the stuff, send it to them. Or they have the option to donate what I paid to do that to Children's Wish Foundation. But I send those out as soon as the client says yes. I don't do it after the project, right? Because we're building the reputation that we are thankful and we appreciate them in the beginning, not after the job is done. So being responsive, positive interactions, having a system that allows you to get all these, these different communication points, right? I don't know if anyone's had a Facebook or Instagram account where you've logged in one day and you're like, oh wow, somebody's been messaging me 3 weeks ago, I didn't even see it, right? Because you don't log in every day and look for it. So having a tool or something in place that'll allow you to see everything come into an inbox is something that if you struggle with that, you want to have that because it's a good brand reputation for engaging with companies. Engaging with your customers. I know these are wordy here. I'm not going to read them word for word, but customer insights, right? Asking your customer for their feedback. You know, a lot of times people will— if you're in the retail space, you have a huge opportunity there to ask your customers, hey, what do you think about this? Or what do you think would improve the store? Or, you know, we're thinking of this product line, we'd love your feedback on if you think it would be valuable. Right now they're feeling invested in what you do and you care about their opinion. This is also done through, you know, you have a Facebook group where you can have some trusted advisors of customers in there to kind of have these focus groups and then give them a reward for it. Maybe they get a trusted customer loyalty card where they get 10% off anything they buy because they're part of this. You're using this customer insight and feedback. Increasing your sales opportunity by having good customer engagement, right? This is great where, you know, you engage in customer through personalized emails. Every email tool that's out there other than just like Gmail or Outlook allows you to have like customized text in there that can, can mention their name and all that stuff. You can also segment your list based off what they buy or what they've bought from you in the past. And then reach out to them on those ways. Have special promotions. So, you know, instead of doing one sale to a list of 500 people, you could do 5 different product offerings to groups of 100 because that's where they segmented into the right list. And then community. I mentioned in, or listened in your intros there, somebody was mentioning about, um, a community. I think it was the lady that did the the recording studio, um, that was there. So fostering community and advocacy, being part of your community, that's important to you, that's one of the core values, bring that through in all your marketing, in your website, in your social media, so people know that, that you are involved in the community. And also, um, you know, you get some PR that way as well. And then Adapting to market change. I can tell you right now, there is— what I'm doing right now is not what I was doing 3 years ago. It's not what I was doing 3 years ago, was not what I was doing 5 years ago. I have changed with what is happening out there, and you need to, right? You need to stay ahead and engage with everything that's happening because, you know, the way that people are engaging is different, right? People are messaging more than they are calling. Right, if you're like, I don't do Messenger, right, I don't do text, you're leaving a lot of business on the table if your audience is that. You know, a lot of times people like, you know, seniors aren't on Facebook. Yeah, they are. They're probably one of the, the top engaged demographics on Facebook right now. So if you want to target seniors, run some Facebook ads. They're going to see it. It's there. They're on that space because they're engaging with their grandkids in that space, or their kids who are now parents of their grandkids. So you got to be open to this, even if your own personal use is different from that. So where do we go and how do we do all this? Well, the best thing I can recommend is start small. I covered a lot in this presentation, a lot of different areas and things like that, but the number one thing that I recommend if you're looking to grow is to start small, stay organized, figure out what it is in your business that you're doing that feels disorganized and disjointed, or you're missing out on things. Try to be more connected with your customers And more importantly, be responsive to them when they message, when they come in. Be present, respond to their needs, ask questions, listen, and try to help them out. So, um, looking at this, so what you need— and I put this list here for, for a purpose— is automate that customer journey, provide consistent customer experience, stay organized so you don't get stressed. Automate your calendar bookings if you do online bookings. How do you create and process your invoices? How do you build your website? How do you schedule your social media? Oh, you got reputation, your reviews. And now I talked about AI. How do we integrate all that right now? This next slide, I'm not here to sell this. I'm just going to show you what I did in my business. So what if all that was in one tool? Well, for 12 years I've worked in marketing automation. I've worked with one CRM system out of Arizona. In the last 6 months, I switched to a different one for the fact that it did all that. And I call it Client Connector. It's my CRM. It's a white label version of another one that's out there. Um, but a lot of the times all these systems are US-based, right? They charge in US dollars. We hate paying in US dollars. The biggest thing I had to overcome was how do I provide all that that clients need but not charge them in US dollars? So when I do my sales, and I'm showing this because this is how I do my sales pitch, is the regular price is $149 Canadian a month. I offer at $97, and I created lifetime access to something I call the Cow Shed, which is a membership community where we communicate together. We talk about how to use the tools even more effectively. If you've got any questions or you're launching a product, the idea is building a community side of it. This was my way of hearing the audience that was out there, figuring out what was needed, and coming up with an offer. And then we do a call, right? I don't offer— I don't offer the ability for people to just go to a link and buy right now. It's, I want to talk, want to figure out what is really the problems that you have. Right. So this is how I've overcome everything that we talked about. And how do I do that closing in the selling. So that's what I have in place there.