Welcome And What We Do

Dave 0:01

Welcome to the business inscripted podcast. We're here to hear real life insight. We have learned from a code state. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, financial analogy, details, maybe just getting your mindset right. We are here in the right spot for no fluff conversation. So grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. Alrighty, already, already. It's another Friday morning, and well, it's a little bit later than 8 30, but that's right. I'm running a little behind today. Well, it's just me. So as you can see, there's no twine. That's just me, my lovely face, and that lovely voice, whoever you just heard. So yeah, you better have grabbed your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. So man, it it has been a fun, crazy, interesting week, we can say that, right? I don't know if you're if you're feeling that same way, but it's always exciting to just get to another week, get through it, uh, and see what has happened, what's occurred, wins that have happened. So, you know, if you're an expiring business owner, you're in the right spot. So on this and on this podcast, our goal is to share some of the lessons that we've learned going through business, our struggles, our strategies that we've come up with, things that we've helped our clients implement in their business as well. And then bring it to you so that maybe you don't you can learn from what we've done, but then you don't have to make those same mistakes, and you can implement them in your business. So you're in the right spot. Uh, but as I always say, you know, don't just learn from us, find the people that match your your type. You know, I guess we can say that, you know, we can all think of you know, probably people we've we've listened to or videos we watch, we just man, I just can't listen to that person anymore. Great, you know, probably not, probably the same way. I don't like listening to myself at one time speed. I love like listening to anything at one time speed. So uh if you're watching a replay, turn me up to turn us up to to two times, and uh might be a little bit more more fun. But we're here. Uh, if you ever have questions on anything, feel free to drop it down below if you're watching a replay, you're watching it live. Questions regarding business, regarding your operations, your strategy, AI, anything like that. You can drop them down below. We'll either answer them live if you're watching and and you're following along live, or we'll get you an answer if you're watching a replay or anything like that, or a clip, or anything.

Accountability Makes Or Breaks Growth

Dave 2:38

So, uh, but today I wanted to start, you know, it's a conversation I've had with a couple clients so far this week, and and it relates to accountability. And I think it's just something that's out there, and especially as business owners, it's so easy to feel like if you're just starting out, that you have flexibility, you have freedom, you have the ability to make your own schedule and set your own hours. And in reality, this is where you're gonna make or break your business. Combine that with obviously cash flow issues and things that we've talked about in the past. But being able to hold yourself accountable to what you need to do outside of being an employee is gonna be the number one thing that you need to focus on. I've had to have some really hard conversations with clients to really put this aspect back into the front of their mind. Because we feel like we're doing a lot, but if we don't take that, and we've talked about it before, the mirror moment you you stop and you think and you look yourself in the mirror, because you can't lie to yourself, right? You know the effort you're putting in, the hours you're putting in every day. And so if you're not having that mirror moment and you're just talking to other people of like, yeah, I'm doing a lot, you know, I've had all these different processes going, or these different people that are helping me do different things. But in the end, if you're not doing what you need to be doing for yourself to grow, to learn, to do more, and you're not holding yourself accountable to that, you're gonna ultimately fail and you're not gonna grow. And I'm I've seen this so many times. I saw it in myself for the probably the first 12 months, you know, you know, nine to 12 months of going back full time was I was just I just expected it to happen, right? Because I had I had the experience, I had the knowledge, I just expected it to occur and I wasn't holding myself accountable to the to the the decisions that I was making on a day-to-day basis. But the biggest shift for the business, the biggest shift for me, my growth was to begin to hold myself accountable to the time that I was spending. And it it helps to have something that you are passionate about. But if you don't, one of two ways, what either either you're gonna have to what what what one of my clients said it the other day. It was a it kissed a frog, right? You got you gotta suck it up, you gotta kiss the frog, you gotta get it done, or depending on your situation, find a process or a partner to help you alleviate some of that that you can trust, but with the time that it frees you up, you have to still hold yourself accountable to get stuff done that you need to. And if you're just starting out and you don't have a, you know, especially if it's your number one income, right? And you relying on this to be a success, then you don't have a 40-hour work, you don't have you don't have a set number of hours, anyways. And that's a I think a big shift for some people, especially the people that are coming from like the corporate world, uh, because they feel like, oh, I got 40 hours a week. Yeah, you had a guaranteed every two-week paycheck when you worked your 40 hours. But as a business owner, as you're growing and you're trying to find new clients and you're trying to do things, you don't get a guaranteed paycheck. You have every hour that you spend doing something related to your business should be looking to generate income through relationship building, proposals, conversations, all of that. And so if you're trying to limit that to a 40-hour work week, you're already behind the eight ball because your mindset's wrong, because you're you're you're growing. Now, when you get to a point where you're comfortable, yeah, now this is where you start getting some freedom, right? Freeing up some of your time. But when you're just starting to grow and you're starting and you're not where you want to be revenue, you're not where you want to be client-wise, I should never hear from a client or anybody that, well, I work five hours a week, I put five hours a day into my business. I just don't understand. Yeah, because you're putting five hours a day in your business, six hours a day. You literally have no time off as a business owner when you're starting to try and grow something from the ground up, and you're trying to build it organically yourself. There's no time off. And I think that's the hardest part that a lot of people have to get over, and the people around them. Because what is really hard to understand for people that are not trying to grow a business, the people that are not trying to build something that an entrepreneur has that you have listening to this, is they they don't see that you taking an hour off is actually costing you money, right? We had PTO back in right in in corporate world. You got paid for the time you took off. As an entrepreneur, we don't. As an entrepreneur, right? You take time away, you still got to make up that time. You'll get paid, whether it's a you know, if you're doing client work or outreach time, anything like that. Like any time that you take away from your business is time that you're eventually you have to make up, anyways, because nobody else is doing it. The work still's got to get done, and you don't have a guarantee of that every two week check, like people in our lives are used to. And so that's the biggest thing to get over and and to yourself, myself had to get over, right? Was to truly be able and be comfortable with the idea that if I say no, it's not because I I don't respect right their time or I I I don't want to hang out, it's because I'm trying to build something that hopefully in two to three years, I'm gonna have I'm gonna be able to say yes to everything. And so is this limited time, this temporary period, worth the longer term right happiness? And and it's it's gonna be that answer is different for everybody, you know. And sometimes you may say, I only want to work five hours in my business, that's fine, but then don't have the same complaint. Well, I'm just not where I want to be client-wise, though. Okay, well, you're only spending five hours. What if you could give yourself another two hours a day? What could you potentially do on outreach or communication or follow-up or proposals? So, like if you tell me, hey, I'm working 24 hours in my business and you're still not where you want to be, maybe you're not probably obviously you're not, right? But you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. You know, if you're working 12, 13, 14 hours a day, every single day, six days a week, and you're still not where you want to be, then you have to really evaluate, and this is where the accountability piece comes in. Hold yourself accountable to what are those things that you're doing on every single day. What am I doing in outreach? What am I doing in client service? What am I doing in follow-up? What am I doing in content? And really hold yourself accountable.

Time Studies And A Full Calendar

Dave 9:59

And so if this is impactful, right? Hopefully you can take something away and do a time study. That's one of the things that I tell a lot of people is just do a time study. Plan out your ideal week. What would you want to do from sunup to sundown for an ideal week? And then that same week, the next week. So, like if this is you, you're walking away from this, this is your channel, right? Over the weekend, what is my ideal week? Monday through Sunday. What's your wake up time? What's your go-to bed time? Where, you know, where are you spending time, you know, on the business? Where are you spending time personal? Where are you spending time if you have kids, doing kids' events, all of that? Plan out what is that ideal week. And then when you get to Monday, start actually tracking it down. Did you wake up on time? Did you do the things that you wanted to do, you know, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday every day? And then look back at that at the end of the week and say, okay, now I know where my variances are. Now I know where my time is getting sucked away. Now I know how I need to adjust. And the biggest thing you need to do with that is to don't leave blank areas on your calendar. You know, if you leave blank time on your calendar, one, it's so easy to just say, oh, well, I'm just gonna go off on like this little tangent here, and then I forget about it, right? Or I'm gonna go and I'm gonna add, you know, this extra task here that maybe isn't even an emergency or a priority. So in your calendar, your calendar should be booked fully with what you plan on doing throughout that entire week. And people say all the time, what do I use AI for? That's perfect, right there. Put out your task on a Sunday, tell it to find all your open slots on your calendar for the next week and book all of those things. I mean, there's other, there's softwares that will help you with that as well, right? You know, I know there's one motion I've tried before where it'll fill in all your open your slots and move it around as you as you need to. There's things out there that can help you do that. So that's the number one thing that I would say for that is just really review, do a time study and and get used to that. But then really look at what are those hours that you're spending and how are you spending them.

Contact People During Golden Hours

Dave 12:13

So this is another conversation I've had with multiple people. Is you know, if if you're B2B, if you're a B2B, you have to understand when are my potential clients, the people I want to talk to, when are they active? Right? Typically they're gonna be active during the workday, right? Whether that's you know eight or nine to five or six p.m. And then if you're working across the United States, right, you you can adjust it depending on what time zone you're in. But if you're trying to do outreach or follow-up with your ICP, right, with your ideal client during hours that are outside of their ideal hours, you're essentially wasting your time. Because what you're doing is you're gonna communicate, they're gonna respond during their ideal time, and then you're gonna wait till the next day when it's either before or after their ideal time. And so you're adding this extra time delay that doesn't necessarily need to be there. If you just use those golden hours, use those hours in the middle of the day, right? To be in contact with your ICP when they're active. If you're B to C, well, they're probably working during the day, so maybe your ideal time isn't necessarily communicating during eight to five, but you could communicate from like, you know, 11:30 to 1:30 when people might be on lunch, or set some time aside from like four to six when people are on their way home, they're out of work, or put some time on the weekend. Like this is where knowing your ICP, where they are, where they're active, and and and when you need to communicate with them, that's gonna help you immensely when it comes to your time and your accountability. And it's something that you know, I'm not gonna hark on too much longer for everybody, but you know, it's it's important to know and then have those sort of like check-in meetings with yourself. End of the month, end of the week, you know, look at yourself as a manager, would look at an employee and evaluate yourself. You know, am I happy with my employee version of their effort? Or would I be coaching them up to try to get more out of them? And if you could start having these simple conversations with yourself, these simple check-ins, these reviews, the value for you is is immense. And again, people talk about how do I use AI right there. Have AI be that partner to ask you those questions of how was your week? What did you do? What didn't you do? And then it can go back and say, Well, you said you wanted to do this at the beginning of the week, why didn't you do it? Those are the things that you can use to really hold yourself accountable and be impactful. So, with that, you know, the next one I want to kind of go over. Uh we won't talk about accountability anymore, but it is important, so take it with you. I wanted to to kind of, you know, as as Dwarne mentioned, he wasn't here today. I was like, oh, okay, I'm gonna scramble it. It kind of puts together some topics for y'all. Because you know, Dwarne and I just flow off of each other, and uh that's what I kind of love about having having a partner like him, right? Where we're we're both into it, we both can just kind of continue to have a conversation. It doesn't feel like it's an hour, and then all of a sudden it's an hour. But with that, so you know, I want to talk about five kind of flows, five processes as a business you should start to

Five Workflows To Systemize With AI

Dave 16:30

be thinking about if you haven't already to implement in your day-to-day. You know, and the first one is a social media sort of content generation, ideation, creation process for your business. And so what we've done right with TBS is knowing how Claud works and everything like that, and this is going to give the kind of the examples of what we've done in these areas so that you can kind of hopefully get some ideas here. So we're we're developing what we call our command center. And the command center is for myself like an executive assistant, and it houses all of our emails, all of our different kind of aspects of you know, meetings, follow-up, helps us generate you know tasks and things that we need to do, as well as follow-up emails, et cetera. Part of that is our social media content generation. You know, just like you, I only have 24 hours in a day. I don't have unlimited time, but I need I know I need to be doing all these different things for awareness. And part of that is right, frequency. And I get this question so many times, and you know, I'll jump ahead from what I was gonna talk about later was how many times do I post, right? What is my what's the ideal consistent, and and and there is none. There's there's no golden rule when it comes to that, when it comes to social media content generation. A lot of people claim one way or another, but really it's what can you do? And if you think about it, you can always do more because of the rate. Look at your analytics on your posts, right? You may have four, five, ten thousand people in your network, okay? And your post may get two, three, five hundred thousand typical impressions. So if you have 10,000 and people you're only getting 500, that means you could do a post about a topic 20 different times for your entire network to actually see it. So you're never actually posting too much, right? You just feel like it because you're the one seeing all the content. So you can post three, four, five times a day on a on a platform, and yeah, what the people who are following you, they're gonna see more of that content, but that's good because they're the ones that want to see it. You know, as long as you're not just reposting the same post over and over and over again, and you're and you're changing it up, and it maybe you're you're talking about it in a different way and you're adding a new sense of insight, though that's exactly what's going to get people attention, increase your awareness. So, for our social media engine, what we've done is instead of just kind of saying, like, hey, you know who we are, you know what industry we're in, I've actually trained our system with Quad and everything to learn from like these transcripts from our podcasts, learn from transcripts of meetings that I'm having with clients on strategies that we're talking about. Not specific, right? We're not including the client name or or or the industry, but it's like, what are the strategies that we're talking about with clients on a regular basis, and then turning that into social media content. And so our engine will take all this information and kind of draft a week at a time, four times a day on the main platforms, to create the copy, create images or carousels or infographics that go along with it, and then send it to our command center and I review it and approve it, or send back revisions that I want, or if I don't feel like the copy or the article that it's referencing from research of news, things like that are impactful to my ICP. I train it and I and I send it back, and then it sends it back to me to be approved. So these are things that are available to you. So a lot of people say, Well, I don't want it to just post things without me. Great, you don't have to. It can post and if you want it to post automatically, you can. But if you want to have the control, you can have the control. You can develop all these things. And I say this to everybody all the time. Nothing I'm telling you right now cannot be done by you. Everything I'm saying right now, you can go out and do yourself by talking to Claude, prompting Claude, all of that. But then but in the end, like we talk about, you know, when do you want to work with like somebody like TBS or a partner? It's do you feel like they're going to save you time, money, and anxiety? Right? And and maybe not money, but you know, depending on how long you may take to develop something. But for sure, if they're gonna save you time, stress, and anxiety, right? That's when it becomes maybe worth it to consider working with a partner who already is doing some of these things. So the idea with your social media would be draft up something that's based on things that you've done, right? So if you have a podcast or if you have video content you've been doing, grab those transcripts and kind of generate it into you know a trained system for yourself and your business. And then it's generating the content based off that. Plus, you can have it do, you know, the next thing that we wanted to talk about, which was like research, right? You can train it to every week or every three days, three or four days a week, do research on specific topics that are impactful to your ICP. And then that research can feed different areas. So it could feed your social content, it can feed maybe you know, an executive summary of news things that you want to learn from at the beginning of the day, like you know, a daily prompt. But a lot of people try to do the research themselves, or they don't even think about doing the research themselves. So that's number two would be creating this research engine that can help you pull things together that are within your ICP's ideal informational, you know, knowledge that they want to know from your perspective, and then add your perspective on top of that. Combining it with social media, one of the things that we've we built on it was hey, find the articles, but then just give me the article and ask for my opinion, and then go back and incorporate my opinion into the copy, just like a typical marketer would do, and and that's ultimately what. You're trying to do. You're trying to how do I replicate a marketing individual within my business through an automation or process that we're developing? And kind of on the research realm, the second thing I kind of put here is like a tab on the research was you know, using it for lead gen. A lot of people say, How do I find more individuals like myself or my ICP in my area? What's the quickest way to do that? Well, the quickest way to do that is to go to AI and to build a lead gen research module. You tell it where you want it to look, how you want it to look, you know, direct it to a specific source, whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook, etc., but have it go create a list of all the people that are in your realm. And then that now you have your lead gen list. Because more often than not, people have their emails public, their phone numbers public, whether it's on their profile, their business page, their website. And then now you have all the initial steps to create a good lead lead gen for yourself. Now don't go spamming people with your email, make it impactful, share education, right? If they don't respond to you, mark them off. But the idea is that you have the ability to do these different things quickly than you ever had before. And you sometimes don't have to now pay an external source to get the information that's really at your fingertips by just typing into AI and giving it, you know, that the direction. Hey, you reached out to Jane today, it's June 12th. Your follow-up is in three business days, so you're gonna follow up with her on Wednesday next week if she hasn't responded to you already. And then what the system would know is that if Jane does respond to you before Wednesday, it marks off that you don't need to follow up with Jane because she responded to you. Because it's gonna be checking that for you so that you don't necessarily have to always do that. So creating that sort of that process in your head of what do I want to do for follow-up, and then training an AI to help you with that and track it for you so that you don't have to do it all the time. Now, next level to that, right, would be you know working with a CRM like a Go High level, which Claude integrates with and can easily begin to you know kind of develop all this stuff with, to do that on your behalf at a higher level, right? But again, if you're just starting out, even having it, giving it a Google Sheet link or giving it a spreadsheet within its folder to say, here's my follow-up spreadsheet. Continue to update this spreadsheet for me and keep me updated when I need to create follow-ups. And the beauty of that is that then you can say, when it is time to follow up, I want you to draft me the follow-up based on my voice, based on how I want you to say. And using any particular method, you know, we've talked about NEVQ multiple times on this podcast of neuroemotional persuasion questioning. Train it to know how to write in that particular style. And then when it creates the follow-ups for you or it creates the emails for you, it's already there at your fingertips. Now, here with TBS, like this is also something that we built into the command center. So when the the inbox is pulled in, right? It reads the emails, it knows who's who are who our clients are, who our prospects are, who our partners are, and it's able to analyze what the email is. If we want to do a follow-up, we can hit a button and it crafts a follow-up in our voice. We're able to edit it, review it, see everything that we do is at least reviewable on our end. So we can make edits or or tell it to make an adjustment with a different tone, different meeting times, whatever it is that we're looking to send out. We can do attachments. But the idea is that you have the ability to just save that time. So many people, I heard it yesterday in our alignable meeting, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, where people are trying to just save time by either retoning an email or just putting an email draft together in the first place because they don't know how to say it. That's what something like this would save you time, would save you that anxiety of trying to figure out is this worded best? When really in the end, wording best is not, you don't know what the other person's gonna think anyway. So it's just how do I just formulate this in the same way to every single person that I know it's comfortable with what I want it to be? The the fourth area is then like your messaging, whether it's DMs or you know, continued follow-up messaging with your clients, your team. This would be something for you to kind of develop as what is that process of doing the outreach, especially now with like cowork or these, you know, all these other platforms are bringing out something similar. What do I what is my process for actually managing the people I'm having conversations with? Because we all know if you're doing it and you're trying to do it multiple times, your list is going to become astronomical. And somebody who may respond to you, you know, maybe way down on your messaging list if you're doing it on a platform. So having a process through your AI in your business can help you manage that more effectively to stay on top of it, to draft the message for you, to give you the context behind the message so that you don't necessarily have to always be on every single platform throughout the day. So in the outreach portion of what we've developed for ourselves internally, right? And then also, you know, externally for others, would be our outreach engine. So it knows anytime that either we've got a new connection, somebody's responding to us, we're out we're responding to somebody else. Anytime that a message needs to be created, it drafts it again in our voice, in our, you know, sort of following along our rules. It drafts those messages and then sends it to the command center for me to review and approve. But in there, it specifically says, hey, this person's on this platform. This is the stage of conversation that this client or this prospect is in. Here's a history of what has been said, here's who they are, and then it gives me the draft message. And I can request or request a revision if I feel like we want to tweak it a little bit, depending on where I feel the conversation should be heading. Or I can just hit accept and then it sends it back and it goes out and it gets posted. And then so the beauty of that is that it saves, it saves me probably that probably alone saves me five to ten hours a week easily of checking, drafting, you know, all that different stuff. And that's just the standardized process. Another, you know, sort of awesome thing that you can do just on the fly, an example, right? We've talked on I'm an alignable ambassador. So one of the things that I did yesterday, first time doing this, we had an event yesterday. I told Cowork, I said, we have our event this morning. What I want you to do is I want you to look at our last three events that we've had, look at who attended those events versus are they registered for this event? And if they aren't, I want you to send them a personalized message to invite them to the event and it as a reminder that we have an event today. Right? That's the first step. The second step was then I said, then I want you to go to the event registration list and I

Outreach Automation For Real Events

Dave 30:40

want you to send each one of those a message to say, hey, I'm looking forward to seeing you at the event today. Right. And then when it got done with that process, it identified that about 10 of the people that were registered I wasn't even connected with yet. So I said, okay, step three, go and connect with those 10 people. And here's the message I want you to send. Hey, it's Dave, you're your Cleveland, Ohio ambassador. I just wanted to say I saw you were registered for our event today. I really look forward to hopefully meeting you at the event. You know, we'll see you in a little bit. And that's it. And it did all of those, but the caveat now is that after it was done, I told it to create specific skills so that it's repeatable. It remembers what it did in each one of those steps. So the next time I say for the next event, hey, go do the same process, it has it step by step what it needs to do. So those are the things that save a ton of time. It's just manual. Could you imagine how much time it would have taken me to go through and click and kind of have side by side the last three meetings versus the current meeting registration list and then type up a message? Yeah, you could have copied and pasted it, but you know, type up a message to every person that wasn't already registered versus sending in the message, click through the 40 people that were registered to send a personalized message to them. I mean, it probably would have taken me my entire morning. And here it took me maybe five minutes of prompting, you know, the cowork, and then maybe another five minutes to kind of check in on it after it was, you know, it asked me about the people that weren't connected. So 10 minutes, I was able to do a few hours of work just by thinking of something I wanted to do, talking to it, telling it what I wanted it to do, and then watching it for a little bit to make sure it did what I wanted, and then I let it go off on its own. But I gave it the direction. It was my voice, it was my message. This is things that you need to be thinking about in your business. Like, this is why I say like anything that we talk about, anything we're doing, is not something that you can't do yourself. You can do it yourself. The question is, do you want to do it yourself? Do you have the time to like you know put in and figure it out? And if you don't, that's fine. You have you have your passion, your your purpose of serving your clients and doing your business however you are. I am finding a passion in doing this and helping clients in this way because of the fact that I love it. Like again, I said I said it to Duarn a couple weeks ago. I said, you know, seven months ago, if you'd have told me this was kind of where we are evolving to, we're still helping with on the finance and the profit first side and the cash flow side, but evolving to make that even more impactful, I would have told you we're crazy. I would have told you, you know, what are you talking about? You know, but I love it. Like this is there's so many opportunities to have a great impact on people's lives long term. It's awesome. Man, it's also awesome when you have an amazing supportive partner when for your business, especially one that sends you sends you fun texts when you're in the middle of a thought process and she makes you lose your thought process. But love you, honey. So finally, the fifth sort of process and flow would be your onboarding process. I think so many people try to do this manually. They feel like, um, and this is what employees or you know, new clients, or you know, I've talked to a couple of nonprofits, volunteers as well. Like your nonprofit, your sorry, your onboarding process should be turned into some sort of not even necessarily like AI, but it should be turned and informed into some sort of process where it takes the human element, the majority of it out, right? 90% out in terms of like documents and follow-ups and set and setting, you know, meetings and making sure

Onboarding That Removes Manual Work

Dave 34:34

that the paperwork's done, all of that, like all of those things, if you don't and you aren't doing it manually right now, and you are doing it manually right now, you need to think about how I can turn this into a process, into a workflow, because it's gonna save you that much more time. And as part of your onboarding, you have AI analyze it and figuring out, you know, what can we do to make this better? How do how can we make it easier right on our clients? But on top of that, making sure, especially on the client side, how can we put into our onboarding process that like first win that our clients are gonna get or our customers gonna see if that's impactful? Like, how are we gonna make sure that it's as easy for them to get through the onboarding so that they don't have any hiccups along the way? So that's the fifth process. So those are the five, right? Look at your social media, look at your content. Number two, look at your your research capabilities, whether it's you know on news, on topics, on lead gen, create some sort of research tool for yourself. Your follow-up and email management. How can you do that a little bit better? Having your spreadsheet for tracking on your follow-ups, your proposals, etc. Messaging. So if you are doing any sort of outreach on social networks like DM, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn with DMs, that's your fourth. And then your fifth is your onboarding process. You know, analyzing what you're doing, how can you make it more efficient, taking the human side out of it as much as you can to begin to make that streamlined? That's your fifth process. So I hope maybe you heard a couple things from today that you know, maybe you'll be able to take something with you. We're not done. But this is that part of the podcast where I get to talk a little bit about sort of the sponsorship, right? Because, you know, we gotta we gotta be sponsored by me, Triumph Business Solutions. So if you don't know, right, we're a strategic partner for our clients. We have different ways to help you add more time back into your day. We're we're talking, we talked a little bit about those now. So again, if you're in that situation where you don't necessarily know where to start, you don't necessarily know what to do, how to create a platform, a dashboard, a KPI, anything like that. We're your we are your trusted source for that to help you develop that, create it, put it in place. And essentially, one, there's two things. We talked about it with the two lists, right? But you're gonna save time on what you're already doing. So you're gonna get some hours back, but you're also gonna feel like you're adding hours to your day because you're gonna be able to do the things that you didn't think you had time to do as well, like creating these workflows and doing all of these different things for your business that will allow you to one, accomplish more for your clients and for your customers, but two, help you do those things that maybe you got into business to do, like get some more free

How Triumph Business Solutions Helps

Dave 38:20

time or spend some more time with the family, or take a little bit more time away from the business. But you can't do that until the systems are set up, the processes are set up appropriately in your business. So with Triumph Business Solutions, our main goal, not only giving you the insights around financials and better business decision making around your financial decisions and your cash flow, but your workflows. What are your where do you have possibilities for efficiencies and improvements? And how could you begin to build those? Whether it's you know done with you, where you're kind of taking the lead and you're leading it all on, but we're there for strategy and support in the studio, right? In our Triumph Studio, to just be there every week for open QA, or done for you, you know, whether it's already sort of like a platform we already have created with invoicing or our mainframe with with cash flow forecasting or the command center implementation in your business to actually give you this executive assistant that we're building for ourselves. There's there's some way to potentially help you there with your business. So if you're interested in that, you could always either comment down below, reach out to us at you know, support at triumphbusiness solutions.pro, and we can have a conversation with that. But with that, let's jump back into the show. So last night I wanted to kind of, you know, I was thinking this morning when when Doran sort of mentioned that he was having some internet issues and wasn't gonna be able to join. You know, what do I want to potentially sort of share, talk about, all that fun stuff, you know, uh on today? And I was brought back to you know the alignable event that we had yesterday. And so we've we've recently sort of shifted the focus or the the format of the meetings to kind of a round table because of the fact that there are so many things changing in business on a regular basis, and people are facing you know questions that they may not be able to get answered anywhere else. So there's a couple things that that kind of came up in the round table yesterday that I thought I would I thought I'd share here uh because I think they are you know sort of important and impactful. But but the first one was around, you know, the gentleman had asked, and I won't share anything about the business or anything like that, but just asked, how do you get more attention, right? How do you do them the things that we talked about right with social media? And they you know, he mentioned he's like, Well, I try to be consistent and and I try to you know do things on a regular basis. He's but obviously he's busy, he's got another full-time job. Uh his business is part-time right now, but he's trying to replace his full-time job

Roundtable Lessons From Alignable

Dave 41:00

in order to you know get away from the full-time and just do the business. Uh but the thing that he'd hit, and this is where it went into the accountability piece, was he was he hit, he's like, Well, you know, sometimes I just get lazy. Well, that's an accountability piece, right? And he but the biggest thing that I had suggested, and and others in the room kind of agreed with was you you you have to set that time aside. You know, he's been doing this for years. So he has the the analytics around what sort of posts hit, right? What sort of posts get more reactions than everything else? And that's step one is is looking back at what you've done. What are the things that have gotten highest engagement? What are the things that you know had the most comments, and then just recreate that style or or that maybe it's a topic, or maybe it's a clip version, you know, of some sort of video, or you know, maybe it's a newsletter type, you know, whatever it is that works for your audience, you have to figure that out and then replicate it more and more, and then continue to analyze it. And that was the first thing he said, well, I just don't have time to go back. I said, but you have to make that time because otherwise you're just continuing to post blindly without the data and the knowledge around what's actually working for your audience. But then, two, right, was find things that are working for other people, not just yourself, but find the things that are working for other people in your specific, whether it's a niche, your industry, etc., uh, that are getting the engagement, the reach, everything you want, and then do something like that to replicate it. The biggest thing that you could do is think that you have to always be a hundred percent unique because if you look at anything that's ever been successful, right, and you look back, you could probably find something that they based their uh style, their imagery on something else. So the biggest thing you could do is look for inspiration on influencers' posts or other people in your industry. In fact, the inspiration piece is something that I love because I actually built it into our content engine as well, where I have an inspiration section where anytime I find a post style, a carousel style, you know, maybe it's an image style that I like, I can screenshot it, share the link. It goes back to our engine, it analyzes it, it creates a new updated plan for us and gives me the sample of like, well, here's how it would look if we did it, right? Where it changes it, makes it look a little bit different. But it then creates that plan, sends it back to me. I approve the plan, now it's part of our engine. So it's going to start creating those types of style posts, those stuff type type of style imagery. So inspiration is huge for you to think you're being you feel like you are being unique because you can be, and make it your own. Like you don't have to try to come up with everything yourself. If you are, you're you're literally you're putting too much pressure on yourself by thinking you have to always come up with everything yourself. So find inspiration in influencers where they're getting the reach, they're getting the engagement. Look back at your own content to see which actually hit. But the third thing I mentioned was you know, a lot of times now, especially if you're B2B on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is is conversation focused. So they want you know, posts that are, you know, people are re-engaging back and forth. And so finding influencers' posts that have a good audience that you can add value to their post by commenting, that's gonna also give you reach that you're not gonna get on your posts. I've had comments recently that have gotten four and five figure impressions on a regular basis. You know, the one I've just saw recently was like 40,000 impressions on a comment on somebody's post. Now, the idea there is that you then have to make sure, especially on LinkedIn, that your headline, which is that, you know, the subheading underneath your name, is impactful enough that when somebody reads your comment, they read those first six or seven words of your headline and it entices them to maybe go to your profile and read more. And then you have to make sure that obviously your profile and all that, that's a whole nother setting that we didn't even get into. But you you have to continually update your profile to match your ICP, to match your updated business. If your LinkedIn profile is from 10 years ago and you're trying to sell your business now, people are gonna be really confused of what you're talking about in these comments. And then they go to your profile and you talk about your full-time job at you know, John Smith Homemaker. Like they're not gonna understand it. So you have to make sure those are all online as well. So with that, on that, it was go back, look at your analytics for yourself, see what's working for influencers, use that as inspiration, and then turn something that they're doing into your own. And then the third one is you know, commenting, store, you know, the conversation, right? Ask things in your post that are open-ended that can get people to comment on your own post that will then continue to full, you know, feed the algorithm because it's like, oh, this post is also generating conversation. Let's push it a little bit more. The the fourth thing here, again, we can go we we went for a little bit on this one was you know, going into groups, having conversations in the groups, find groups that are your ICP, right? Go into those conversations, add value, don't talk about your business, don't try to push your project. Like, like people hate that shit. You and I both hate that. But add educational value, add support, add tips, add strategy. Because when you do, that's what's gonna prove yourself as an ex as an expert. It's gonna get people to want to learn more about you when they see it and it's impactful to them. And from there, you can go ahead and then have a conversation with them when they they reach out to you. It's a slow game, yes. It's not meant to, you know, if you're if you're trying to like, I need to make $10,000 at the end of next week, like this is not the strategy. Social media will never be the strategy for I need to do $10,000 next week. That is gonna be all in your effort, all in your outreach, you know, following up on proposals, you know, outreaching, going to your ideal client, all of that. That's what if you need to do sales quickly, that's how it's gonna be. And then we also got into a little bit on ads with the group. And it it's it's funny how and most of the people in in the in the room were either solopreneur or really, you know, maybe one or two employees. And when I asked the question, you know, how many of you actually have systems in place that you could onboard another 10 people if you started to run ads, nobody raised their hand. Well, then you should not be considering running ads. Ads are meant to be scaled up, ads are meant to, you know, take you from

Why Ads Fail Without Systems

Dave 49:11

maybe 20 clients to 100 clients, right? You don't want to run ads to try to assign two or three people. Like you're gonna be wasting money. So, and as part of that, in order to go from 20 to 100, you have to have systems in place, right? We talked about the onboarding process. Like that's got to be a system that's already set, tested, ready to go, so that when somebody runs to your ad, clicks through your actual offer, right? You can onboard them fairly quickly and you have an entire process for them ready to go. That's how that's when you know you're ready to start running ads. If you haven't done that yet, you're wasting money on ads. And I figured that out the hard way. I spent probably five, six thousand dollars on ads trying to just generate two or three clients, and I wasted so much money because one, I didn't have the onboarding process in place, and two, I wasn't necessarily back then, I wasn't necessarily knowing what the hell the CTA was that I was trying to send them to. That's where Alex Ramosi's, you know, the most recent book, the hundred million dollars uh series, really kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of you know the actual ad spend and the marketing and all that was it changed the focus because you have to realize that your ads have to go to some sort of revenue generating piece for yourself. If you're just running an ad to send somebody to your website, you're just wasting money. Unless you have a really, really hardcore, you know, CTA on your website, but ultimately ads need to be driving people towards a purchase decision right then and there. Because the benefit of that is let's say you you you have a $50 offer, you know, it's an entry-level offer, get somebody started, give them a quick win, right? That $50 offer, if your cost of acquisition for that client is only $25, well, you're netting $25 off every single person. So now you can scale that up because now you're getting paid more than the ad cost to acquire new people. However, if you you're you're running people to a $10 offer and it's costing you $20 per acquisition, you're wasting $10. You can't scale that up. So, but in order to get to a $50 for a $25 cost, you have to have a good process and a good onboarding. So the conversation piece around that was if you don't have a system yet and you can't afford to take on 15, 20, 30 new clients in the next month, everybody would love to do that. And a lot of times they're like, well, I'll just bring a couple of them on at a time. No, no, people are signing on to that ad. They're clicking on that ad because it's a problem they're facing today. They don't want to wait six months for you to catch up. You got to have that ready now. So ads are not your play if you're not in that, if you're not ready for that arena. And it was, it was kind of it was it's interesting to see some of the faces like because they hear ads like run ads, run ads, run ads. But to see some of the faces kind of like, oh, yeah, I guess you're right, you know what I mean in the room. It was interesting to kind of see there. So it was a good conversation around that. And then obviously, just like every room now, I'm sure, has a conversation on it. We we we drafted a little bit towards AI, and there was a topic that we kind of had a discussion on that I think is impactful to share here as well. And that was the old term in order to get what you wanted out of AI was becoming a prompt engineer, right? Developing a prompt that was highly focused and directed towards you know, a specific outcome that you wanted the AI to produce. And you had to be this prompt engineer expert. And that used to be the case, right? That used to be when, you know, even six, seven months ago, but it shifted so much where it's not necessarily becoming a prompt engineer, right? It's becoming how can you just talk naturally to it while giving it the guardrails? And the biggest thing that I've seen and has been impactful for myself and our business, right? Is setting up those preferences and the roadmap guardrails so that when you say, Hey, I need you to go take the meeting notes from you know Jane that we just had on Tuesday, and I need to develop a proposal based on those notes. Can you go do that for me? Great. Now we can go do that. I don't need a big long prompt where I had to tell, you know, before the AI, all right, I need you to go grab the notes from Jane. I need you to prompt me, right, using this specific file format and this specific style in Word document and make sure that you know the signature page follows our typical signature page and the margins are all you know half around the edges, and make sure no sections cut off at the end of a page. You used to have to do that in order to make sure that it actually got there. Now you don't have to. And so you don't have to be a prompt engineer, you know, like thinking that you have to come up with like this perfect prompt. You just literally, one, have to tell it what you're looking for. And then two, once you kind of get that initial result, say, hey, all right, creative skill around this. Create preference, create a preference

Stop Prompt Engineering Use Guardrails

Dave 54:26

document around this. To anytime we do an output similar to this, you can write you can touch it and you can hit it and you can come back to it. So it's now about where do you give it the context, the guardrails to refer back to versus, hey, now I need to always remember to create a detailed prompt in the system. And so it's not as hard as it used to be. And before it wasn't even hard before, but just knowing what you needed to say was sometimes hard. But now it's about you know, how do you just have a natural conversation with it? Because the models continue to build right on top of each other. So it's learning from all the reiterations and everything that people have corrected it before, and it's continuing to build and evolve. And they're you're seeing it with like Claude, like these models are coming out so quick. You know, it went from 4.6 to 4.8 in a matter of like, you know, under 60 days because it's learning and evolving that much quicker. So you as an individual learning is one, don't try to figure out the nuances of every single model, right? And what's different, because they're all you know, essentially moving ahead. But your goal is to just realize how can I just have better conversations with it, with the the direction that I want to go. That's kind of the piece that really came out of that conversation. And then finally, the last story I'll kind of share here, and then we'll kind of wrap up for the day and the week. Was there was an organization that was there, they were a family-owned, they got like seven different locations, and the one was like one of the locations that was close. And I'm not gonna give away any of the information about it. However, the topic came up where you know they have a they have a restaurant, right, as part of their their main facility. However, the main facility isn't typically what people would think to go to to get good food and and to eat at a restaurant. And and the question came up about you know that we have a what are they doing for AI? And they said, well, we're trying to we use it, you know, for our marketing, and we try to, you know, make babies edit some pictures. And they brought up the idea that they have this new patio for for this, you know, the restaurant piece of their main establishment, but you know, they can't figure out how to get people. You know, they look across the street at another restaurant that's across the street, and their patio is full, but they can't figure out why nobody's coming there. I said, Is your restaurant branded separately where it's like, hey, this is you know our restaurant at our main facility, right? And so it's got a whole separate, you know, branding, marketing, where people are like, oh, we're gonna go to that restaurant, and then they realize, oh, wait, that's actually here as well. Because now, as a restaurant, people think, oh, I'm gonna go there for food. But if you're branding it as what their main establishment is, people don't think, hey, I'm gonna go there for dinner. And so it was eye-opening because they're like, oh my God, that's you're you're right. And so thinking at sometimes like having that outside eyes, the outside conversation around even a business that's got seven different locations, right? It's impactful to think from a different view for your business. So even you as a small business owner, if you're watching this, right? So being open to have those conversations around, you know, maybe your strategy, maybe your idea of a new program, you know, those conversations can truly help you, you know, think outside the box a little bit, and then even help

Branding Fixes A Hidden Restaurant

Dave 58:08

you potentially like increase your business. So that's the last one I'll share. So with today, I hope you guys have a wonderful one. It's been an amazing week. Look for you know, if you got any wins, share your wins down below. You know, what's a win you had this week? What's something you're looking forward to next week that you got coming through the pipeline or things like that in your business? And as always, we're here live every Friday, do all that fun algorithm stuff. You know, give it a like, give it a subscribe. Is there something in today's episode that you took away? Share it. Share it down below. Let me know what is something that you're gonna take away from today's episode and implement in your business to, you know, whether it's make you more efficient, add more time back, whatever it is, drop it down below. Let's hear it. And then with that, we hope you have a wonderful and amazing rest of your day. Have an awesome weekend, and we'll see everybody here next week. So until then, I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing week. See you in the next one.