081 | The AI Playbook Every Entrepreneur Needs (Before They Get Left Behind) with Jonathan Mast

Patrick: [00:00:00] What if you could save hours every week, double your marketing output and build systems in minutes? All without hiring a single new team member. Welcome back to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast, the show where we help entrepreneurs like you master cash flow. Minimize taxes and maximize your impact.
I’m your host, Patrick Lonergan, and today’s episode is going to completely shift the way you think about AI in your business. My guest is Jonathan Mast, an AI prompting pioneer and seasoned digital marketing expert who’s been innovating since the days of dial-up internet. In this episode, Jonathan and I dive deep into how AI is transforming how business owners operate from generating revenue, driving marketing copy to building out standard operating procedures in minutes.
To creating an entire virtual board of advisors. Jonathan doesn’t just talk theory. He brings actionable, proven strategies that you can implement [00:01:00] today to save time, make more money, and deliver more value to your clients. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the speed of AI advancement, or you’re unsure where to start, Jonathan lays out a clear, simple path that will help you shift from stuck to scaling fast.
And if you stick with us to the end, you’ll walk away with tools to start installing AI as a force multiplier in every part of your business. Now, before we dive in, if you’re serious about putting smart strategies in place to reduce your tax burden this year, make sure to check out vital strategies.com/tax.
That’s where we can connect and develop strategies to help you keep more of what you earn and build a tax strategy that actually works for you. Now let’s jump into this conversation with Jonathan Mass. You’re not going to wanna miss this one. Jonathan Mast, I’m so excited that you are here today. This conversation is so relevant to where we’re at in, uh, I’ll say just technology and the, um, entrepreneurial landscape.
Uh, we’re gonna be talking about [00:02:00] ai. Mm-hmm. And you’re an AI prompting pioneer, transforming business and marketing with actionable AI strategies. And, uh, I’m really looking forward to, to getting into these because I think. In all of the entrepreneur circles that I’m, I’m wandering in, I’m seeing people have these, uh, these questions and are really dealing with the problems of, Hey, how do I keep up with ai?
You know? Mm-hmm. It seems like every day there’s a, a new and exciting tool, and then there’s, you know. I’ve got so much going on in my business, how do I, how do I spend the time and energy to, uh, keep up with the AI revolution and don’t let it like overrun me? You know, like, uh, yeah, absolutely. Uh, and then, then finally, I think there’s the sort of the philosophical problem.
Like it’s not right that all the work I’ve put in, you know, could be for, for not, if I don’t adopt this technology. So I think this is great and thank you so much for, for joining us here today.
Jonathan: Oh, I’m excited.
Patrick: So, if it’s okay, Jonathan, can you give us a, a little bit of your, your background. I know [00:03:00] you’ve been a, a digital innovator for, um, you know, probably since the internet, uh, be, became a thing in, in 95, combining both marketing experience with emerging technology.
So can you just tell us a little bit about Sure. Uh, your background?
Jonathan: Yeah. So, uh, as you mentioned, I’ve been involved in digital marketing for a long time. Uh, my background sales and marketing sold my first website in 1995, was actually working for a a IT company at the time. And the boss, uh, we had an opportunity come in.
Nobody knew how to build a website, but it came in from a regional airport and they were like, we need a website. And the boss is like, if you can sell it, I’ll hire the people to do it. And so we literally mocked it up on a PowerPoint, sold it, and then I walked into the boss’s office and I’m like, so I got the contract, you gotta go hire some people.
And that’s kind of how I got started in the whole digital marketing world. Uh, I had a couple of stops and starts along the way. I worked for some other people. In 2010, my wife finally got sick of me saying, I wish they’d do it this way. And she said, why don’t you go do it yourself? So we did. Mm-hmm. And, uh, [00:04:00] I, I left and started my own agency.
A couple years later, my wife very wisely realized that if I didn’t get some help, uh, it was gonna be me and two people that wanted new jobs. And so, uh, I was able to talk her into joining me. She’s an operational genius. I am the a DD visionary crazy guy. And so I need that operational genius. And we built a, an amazing agency.
Had a team of about 15 people. And, uh, as that grew and got larger and we started exceeding seven figures regularly and, and that, um, I started realizing that I sometimes wasn’t the best fit for the agency any longer because I just wanted to get things done. I’m a people pleaser and it’s like, look, okay, you call in, I’m gonna take care of it.
And then I. Six weeks later, they’d call back in and the team would go, what, what happened six weeks ago? And oh, Jonathan got involved and they’d have to undo what I did and redo it and fix it all. And ’cause I’m just about, you know, let’s get it done, let’s move forward. Mm-hmm. And, uh, so AI came out about that time and [00:05:00] I just fell in love.
Uh, when I saw. The capacity that AI provided is a tool for me to get more stuff done. Keep in mind that I kinda live by the mantra of, you know, speed to implementation and rules. Mm-hmm. AI obviously worked really well on that. And then I also saw, combined with that, I saw my team at the time, they started to have some trepidation and fear about AI because they’re like, hang on, this, this may not be good for us.
What, what does this mean? I believe it is good for the teams. I believe it is good for us. And so I decided it was a perfect opportunity for me to step away from the agency, which I did back in 2023, and really begin to focus on helping businesses and their teams learn how to leverage ai. And we have really three things.
We try to do one, uh, save time. Two, make more money and three, provide more value. And our big thing is I’m not a theor or theoretician, I probably should say that properly. Mm-hmm. I’m gonna mess that up, but I’m [00:06:00] not into the AI theory. I’m into what can we do today or tomorrow with it in order to add value?
And thankfully that’s worked out really well. It’s been a great business. I’ve managed to, we’re at a point, we talked about half a million people a day about ai, and I am blessed because I love what I do.
Patrick: I love that. Uh, and, and Jonathan we’re on similar, similar paths. I recruited my wife into our, our business at one point too, ’cause she was the operational genius.
And uh, uh, now she manages a team of 400 people and, uh, you know, I’ve got my, my team of about five that, uh, you know, I think most of them manage me. So that’s, um, that’s the way it is with my team. I absolutely, yeah. Yep. I, I, I resonate with the, the comment around, you know, my a DD brain, it’s like I, I just got off a call from with one of our team members and she was like, yeah, I love all the ideas you, you have and create, uh, but we at times we just need to focus on, you know, what the right next step is versus, you know, doing 12 things.
So I love her. Yes, I [00:07:00] know. I’ve had that discussion many days. Yeah. This is great. Um, and I also love just hearing a little bit of your story, the. You’re willingness to say yes to the marketplace. You know you need a website. Yes, we will. We’ll figure it out. Uh, you need help with AI and figuring out how to implement it.
Yes, we will. We will help you with that. And so, uh, I think that’s a, a fantastic. A trade of an entrepreneur can drive some of our teams crazy. ’cause we, we come back and we’re like, all right, here we go. We’re gonna do this thing. And they’re like, what do you mean we’re gonna do this thing? We’ve never done it before.
Yes. That’s how innovation happens. So this is, um, this is wonderful and I, I’m just gonna share a little bit of my experience. I, we found AI really valuable. I, I think it’s a tremendous collaborator for me. Yes. You know, I have a question I can start with. You know, in chat GPT and start, you know, uh, having it explain and then I can keep asking it questions.
And now I’ve also found I need to go verify some of those answers to make sure, oh yeah, it’s given me, uh, uh, a correct feedback, but it’s allowed me to create [00:08:00] clarity much quicker than if I was trying to, you know, I would Google a question and then I’d have to go find, uh, it would lead me to another question.
And then, you know, it just, it was really hard to sort of dig through all the, the. Uh, the websites to get the answer where chat did a good job helping me come up with those. So I’m excited. When we think about how to bring AI into our, our business. Is there, is there some first steps that we should consider?
Like, here’s, here’s what we should do to, again, do those three things that you outlined. I think those were, were beautiful. Um, can you remind me what those, those three were? Yeah, absolutely.
Jonathan: So save time. That’s an easy win. Make more money. It happens naturally if we save time. Then the part that’s probably most impressive to me is the add more value to your clients.
Mm-hmm. Because AI lets us do all three at the same time.
Patrick: I love it. I love it. Great. So when we’re looking to save time, make more money and add more value, is there a, how do we start? Because I feel like it’s overwhelming between, you know, I’m, I’m reading [00:09:00] articles about, you know, Gemini and all the cool, you know, uh, rendering it’s doing.
And then chat has got, you know, a new, uh. A version that comes out it seems like, you know, on a weekly basis. And so where do I start with all of this? How do I, how do I get this moving in my business?
Jonathan: Great question. And I think it’s a very common question. First is try not to overcomplicate it. And I know that’s hard, but the best way not to overcomplicate it is to give up the search.
For the perfect AI tool. I think as entrepreneurs and business leaders we’re always like, I want the perfect tool. I want the best tool. No, AI is such an amazing tool and it’s new enough. Mm-hmm. That whatever AI you have access to, if you’re a Microsoft shop that may be copilot. If you’re a Google shop, it’s Gemini.
If not, it may be, uh, chat, GPT. Whatever you have will allow you to make leaps ahead of where you are today. Don’t waste time searching for the perfect tool. Many of them, by the way, are REBA [00:10:00] versions of chat pt. Anyway, just use the tool that you have and learn to use it well. And my recommendation when you’re getting started, don’t try to make it perfect.
Just try to save 30 minutes a week. Mm-hmm. I should say 30 minutes a day each week. So find something that you can do throughout the week that lets you save 30 minutes and then do the same thing the next week and the next week. And by the time you’re at week four or five, your brain was thinking of all kinds of ways.
And what we notice happens is somewhere between week five and week eight, most business owners start going, I’m now thinking of how I can use AI first to do this. Instead of, oh, I could’ve used ai next time I will. And that’s when the real productivity hits.
Patrick: I love this. This is, um, this is fantastic and I, I think you’re, you’re onto something that’s just true of, of most things in, in life.
Um, oftentimes we’ll see entrepreneurs, uh, get hung up on, [00:11:00] you know, I need the perfect entity setup. Yes. Before I even, you know, go try to sell my product. And like, Nope, like, just fire up the LLC. We can worry about some of those things. Later, but like, just get the baseline done and start making some incremental progress.
And I think the, the same is true with, you know, we could call it everything from fitness and nutrition to relationship work. It’s like I need the perfect workout before I can go work out. No, you just need to show up to the gym and go walk on the treadmill for a minute and, uh, uh, a steep, keep repeating those, those habits, um, over and over again to build a discipline.
And, uh, I love what you’re talking about. You know, get started. Start finding some time savings, and then before you know it, it starts stacking up. And then you’re using AI as the first stop on how to make efficiencies versus, uh, uh, figuring out like, oh, next time I’ll try that. So Wonderful. Okay, so now that we start to, uh, build some of these habits, we start to utilize chat sort of first, how do we grow on this?
How do we [00:12:00] expand, how do we, I, I, because I think it, we, we’ve seen this even in some of our team. Uh, a little scary, like I get into chat and I don’t even know necessarily how to prompt it to give me good outcomes, you know? So how do we, how do we start to figure some of those pieces out?
Jonathan: Well, my recommendation to everybody there is that again, uh, I’m gonna start with something to avoid, not that I’m a negative Nellie, but something to avoid.
And that’s it. Once you get started, you’re gonna start hearing about prompt lists and lists of prompts that you can buy. And it’s very tempting ’cause we’re like, I don’t know how to prompt this stuff. I’d like to get a list, a library of a bunch of those. There are a few good ones out there, but I say few and I mean very few.
Most of the time. Here’s the problem with a prompt library. You get a big PDF, the prompts. Let’s assume they’re good, which is a big assumption to make. Now when I’m ready to do something and maybe i’s like, Hey, I need to write a standard operating procedure. I’m not sure how to do that. I have to go through this prompt list sometimes of hundreds, or I saw one the other day, literally [00:13:00] 10,001 prompts, okay?
You know, how long it’s gonna take me to look this? That’s not productive, right? So instead of going there, I recommend that you learn how to communicate with ai. Now, AI is not sentient, so it’s not like we are having a relationship in a traditional term, but as we know anytime we’re building a relationship, whether that’s with a human, uh, whether an animal or anything else.
Communication is key at work. Home doesn’t matter. In ai, it’s no different. And I have found that the best way to do that is to have a framework in which I follow when I ask it questions because like so many things, garbage in, garbage out. But I can literally go and I, I do a four step framework. One, tell the AI what type of expert it is.
We need to remember, it’s been trained on everything, so we need to hone it in a little bit to, yeah. We need to give it context. And this is what we almost always forget. We forget to give it context about our question three. I need to ask it my question. That’s what most of us do. And if you’ve forgotten everything else, I did just remember this one thing.
It’ll change the way you work with [00:14:00] AI forever, and that’s just end your prompt. And a prompt is just an a question you asked in ai. End it with, ask me any questions you have. And you’re giving permission for the AI model to stop making assumptions. ’cause we know what happens when we make assumptions. We start resembling the southbound end or the south end of a northbound mule.
We don’t want to do that. So as a result, it now will ask us clarifying questions and go, Jonathan, I can write that press release you just asked me about, but you forgot to tell me who the audience was and you forgot to tell me these three other things that maybe I didn’t know. ’cause I’m not a press release expert.
So just remember that fourth step, end your prompts with, ask me any questions you have.
Patrick: I I love that. And one thing, and I’m curious your feedback on this. One thing I’ve started doing is I ask it to ask me one question at a time. Yes. And, and that’s helped me Yes. Hugely beneficial. It’s helped me because sometimes it’ll give me 4, 5, 6, 7 questions all in like a row.
And I’m, I’m trying to [00:15:00] answer all those and I, I feel like my, my thinking gets clarified. When I have one question at a time. Yes. And, uh, uh, it, it, it seems to gimme really good outcomes from that. So I, I, I love that and that’s a, a trick that I’ve, I’ve learned just working with it and trying to get better.
That’s wonderful. Very good. Alright, I, I, I love this. I think this is a fantastic place to start. I think if we ended the episode right here and people just went and, uh. Did those things, um, you know, tell AI what kind of expert, uh, you’re looking for. I think that’s, that’s great. I’ve done a little bit of this going, okay, hey, I’m trying to create a sales framework.
Mm-hmm. Pretend you’re the, the, the greatest sales person to ever exist. Exactly. Or a greatest marketer to exist. You know, and, and I think there’s even ways to get really specific there. You can not just. Not just the greatest salesperson, but like the greatest, let’s say I’m selling boilers, the greatest boiler salesperson ever, you know?
Yeah. Um, I, I need to create this, this, [00:16:00] um, this framework. So, um, yeah. Does it help to get, you know, really granular with, with these prompts?
Jonathan: It, it can, but we need to remember their language models and so mm-hmm. Realistically, the, the other hack that I would share in a hack meaning tip is mm-hmm. I rarely type out prompts anymore.
I don’t use the voice capabilities of AI because my a DD kicks in and they’re too slow to respond. But our computers, Mac or PC have the ability to transcribe our voice in real time. So I can literally on my laptop, click in my prompt box, press my control key twice, that’s my hot key on my keyboard, and I can just start talking.
And as fast as I talk, it transcribes that. And because these are natural language models. One, your, your tip of one question at a time is great, but when we talk to it instead of type, we tend to give it more context and more information, and we tend to be very natural about it. This isn’t all [00:17:00] about formulas and programming anymore.
That’s all on the back end. Now we just need to communicate. And it’s no different than if I came to you and let’s say you were that expert in writing press releases. And I said, Hey, I need you to write a press release for me. And you said, great. That’s what I, I’m good at that. I can do that. And then I turned around and walked away and you’re like, but Jonathan, I’ve got a few questions and I’m like, I figure it out.
That’s what we do with AI all the time. Mm-hmm. When what we really need to do was just spend a moment and often it’s less than 10 or 20 seconds sharing information with it so that it has the relevant context. I. That it can give us an incredible response. Yeah.
Patrick: This is fantastic. So, Jonathan, I’m curious where you see the biggest opportunity for the entrepreneur to leverage ai.
I could see opportunities on the marketing side. Mm-hmm. I could see, uh, you, you talked about standard operating procedures. You know, I could see there being. I, I could see creating a board, you know? Yeah. Inside of AI and having like [00:18:00] board meetings with, uh, you know, AI to help it analyze my business and find new opportunities.
So where, where do you see the low hanging fruit for the entrepreneur to start taking advantage?
Jonathan: It’s, it’s like you’ve read my mind because you literally hit on some of those right there. The one that I always encourage businesses to start with is we all have, no matter how small or large we are, we have ideas and things that are not written down.
We have procedures that are not documented. AI is a tremendous way to create standard operating procedures, and it can do so in moments, and it’s even easy for a guy with a DD like me, so it’s super. The second thing is my background’s in marketing, so I’m biased, but it is an incredible tool to use for marketing copy, whether you’re writing social posts, whether you’re creating email campaigns, you’re writing landing page copy, anything like that, video scripts, it’s amazing at that.
So that’s the second part that I think is really relevant. One of the areas that I think most businesses are missing right now though, and I think is gonna be what’s gonna drive a lot of it, is in customer [00:19:00] service and customer support. We haven’t seen it a lot yet, but we’ve all had that experience in the past where we’ve called somebody some large corporation.
We’ve gotten an individual in a foreign country that English is not even their second language. It’s maybe their fifth language, and mm-hmm we can’t understand what’s going on, and worse than that, we know they’re reading off a script and have no ability to actually do anything for us. That is what has become customer service that’s changing very fast, and now with AI models in place.
The AI models, one can be understood, they can be given much more latitude and and restrictions because instead of going, well only do this so you don’t screw up, we can give the AI 17 possible pathways to go down and give it the if then do this type statements and trust, it’ll follow that. I think the area we’re gonna see the most growth in in the next few months and next year is in the customer service side because the moment one of your customers works with any company.
It [00:20:00] gives them the option to have an AI, schedule the appointment, get them the information they need, send them that. The expectation is gonna be that your company’s gonna do that as well. And if you don’t, they’re gonna start looking for the ones that make their life easier. So I think that’s, that’s as a general, that’s a really big, huge opportunity.
But the others are probably a little bit quicker wins.
Patrick: Yeah. This is, this is fantastic. And. Maybe this is a conversation for a whole nother podcast episode, but I’m thinking of this customer service and support, uh, topic that you brought up. Is that something I can just type a prompt into chat, GPT and it helps me create something like that.
How I don’t, that seems so far from what I’m used to getting out of chat. Sure. And I, I feel like I would need. A whole team of people to like help me develop and, and execute on that. There’s a couple d different, maybe I’m not in Yeah,
Jonathan: there’s a couple different levels of it. So at its simplest level mm-hmm.
It’s [00:21:00] empowering your customer service team. With a trained model, and by the way, that just means it’s been trained on your company, your policy, your information, what to do that they then can query. So instead of saying they’re, they’re looking through a manual going, let’s see a, uh, they said this, what? Oh, here’s my my question.
That’s by the way, when they tell you they’re gonna be on hold for a moment and look at your information, that’s what they’re doing. They’re frantically paging through the guide to figure out what they can do next. Now, you can give them an AI model that basically allows them to go, the customer just said he wants a refund.
How do we handle that? The customer just said he needs this. How do we handle that? And based on the database that it’s trained on, you’ll be able to get answers like that, that the, that the customer service rep do. So that’s the easy, simple, literally it’s using chat GPT to do that. We can get far more complex and literally set up an agent.
And an agent is something that would then essentially function within the parameters that we gave it, but function somewhat autonomously. So. It’s like your voicemail when you, when your automated attendant [00:22:00] answers your phone system for work, except that it’s your automated attendant on steroids. Because that automated attendant now has the ability to actually query a database, give answers and all that, and not just by pressing different buttons.
Literally, it can understand language. So when you call up and you go, I’m calling about my cable bill because it just jumped by 50 bucks and I don’t know why. It can sense your tone, your style, your sentiment, and it can then go, okay, this user’s upset because their bill just went up and they didn’t expect it.
And it can then go down the appropriate path to figure out what is the way in which we’ve told them as a client, we want to solve this problem. And it can follow those logic paths. It’s very logical. And that’s beneficial in customer service because we know when we make decisions emotionally, we don’t tend to make the best decisions.
Right. And the people calling in are often more emotional, therefore, we need to be compassionate, but logical. Mm-hmm. And yes, your AI model can embody that empathy even if it really doesn’t have the emotion. [00:23:00]
Patrick: I love it. And, and I think one thing you’re this. Uh, I’ll call it genic ai. Yeah. I don’t know if that’s the right term or not.
It’s, but I, I saw a, and this was a month or two ago, I saw a video and it was a, a guy that owned a sales business, or he was a salesman, a top salesperson in a, in an organization, and he got a phone call. From an AI agent mm-hmm. Trying to sell him on this AI agent as a, as a tool. And it was incredible, incredible how this AI agent was prompting him, asking him questions, responding to him, and he figured out it was AI agent.
He started asking questions and was just like, mind blown on, on how it was able to respond. And so I think that, uh, you’re absolutely on the, the right path, um, with. We think about our antiquated, you know, [00:24:00] phone systems. I, I always get a chuckle when, you know, I call a business and they say, your call is very important to us.
I’m like, you are lying. Exactly. If it was very important you would have a human being answering this phone call and like, solving my problem versus like putting me through the phone. Bingo. So I think this AI agent. Is going to help solve that problem, uh, in a way that, again, saves time, makes businesses more money and adds value.
’cause that adds value to my, my life as a consumer when I, I call a business that has those things. So that’s wonderful.
Hey, real quick before we get back to the conversation, if you’re listening to this episode, there’s a good chance you’re the kind of entrepreneur who’s always looking for ways to work smarter, move faster, and build a business that actually works for you, not the other way around. And while AI can help save time and scale, one of your biggest leaks in your business is still your tax bill.
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Alright, let’s get back to the episode.
Um, good. Okay. So this is, this is incredible. Uh, so we, we’ve talked about marketing copy. Mm-hmm. Uh, standard operating procedures, customer service. Um. I like talking about marketing, uh, because the [00:26:00] reality of business is it all starts with revenue. It does. If you don’t have dollars flowing in, it doesn’t matter how great your product is.
Uh, and so can we talk a little bit about how we can leverage AI to help us with, with marketing?
Jonathan: Absolutely. We can and and it’s one of my favorite areas, so. AI again, has been trained on a lot of stuff, so if you have decent marketing chops already, you can do amazing stuff with it. If you don’t, then it’s just a matter of knowing what the right tools are to use.
I’ll give you an example. One of the tools that I use on an almost daily basis, my background’s in marketing, so I know how to ask it good questions, but I don’t remember what the best. Copywriters have taught on all the right frameworks. Mm-hmm. Well, guess what? We have a custom GPT again, which is a trained version of chat GPT, that’s been trained and we jokingly inside call our dead copywriters guide and it’s literally been trained on the best copywriters that are, are now deceased.
And so I can go [00:27:00] and I can get advice on how to write direct sales copy, which is part of what we do from some of the best people that have ever done it. And it’s literally available in my computer because we’ve trained them on their frameworks. We’ve trained them on the campaigns. They’ve written literally thousands of pages sometimes in documentations, train them.
But now it’s accessible to me. So when I can go, Hey, I’ve got a training next week and I need to create a landing page for that. I can literally give it the link to my, my document that has the information and it will then go in and go, okay, well based upon who this is, based upon who your audience is, we should use this style.
And here we’re gonna craft this content for you. One, I can use that for clients if I still have agency. I don’t, but if I did, we could have written so much marketing copy that was so much better than what we, we could have done on our own right in literally half the time or less. But now as a small business owner, I have that accessible to me, and I can [00:28:00] use that whenever I need it.
So last night I was busy, lots of things happened. It was nine 30 at night and I’m building on a landing page for something I needed next week. My team should have done it, but I wanted it done by this morning and they were all done. So I did it, but I had AI to help me do that. And this morning when my marketing director comes in and saw all the stuff that I’d gotten done.
Her first response was, you just like this AI stuff too much. And I’m like, well, what do you mean? She goes, I saw when you started, I saw when it was done. You did this entire thing. And under an hour, she goes, you realized two years ago that would’ve taken us days to put together. Mm-hmm. And it would’ve, so yeah, answer your question when it comes to marketing leverage.
AI has been trained on every book in every library. So if we know, for example, I can just ask che B, give me the best direct response copywriter for this type of an audience, and it will then go, well, you should use either Bruce Ogilvy or somebody like this Gary Halpern. And then based upon that I can pick it and it’ll use that tone, that style, their methodologies [00:29:00] to write it.
I could never afford as a business to probably hire those individuals, certainly not on a campaign by campaign basis. But now I can essentially get their embodiment via AI and get just tremendous results. I love
Patrick: this. So I’d like to step up a level, if that’s okay. Yeah. So part of me is thinking about, we’re talking tactically right here, right?
Like, okay, I’m gonna create a sales letter. But one question I have is, and you, you, you touched on this. How do I build the strategy? Mm. Do I, do I need to send, you know, direct mail? You know, because I, I think about marketing in general, and it’s just a bid for attention. Yes. Whether it’s a billboard, a piece of mail, um, you know, social media post or ad, you know, uh, whatever.
It’s just like, I, I’m just trying to get people’s attention for the least amount of money possible so they take action. Absolutely, yes. So, um, so I, when I think about that, I’m like, okay, I need to build a strategy that is effective and. I [00:30:00] could try any number of, you know, the things I just mentioned, plus probably a thousand more, and I don’t, I don’t know what’s most effective in my, my marketplace is chat.
A good tool to help me design a strategy for my, for my target client
Jonathan: chat chit, Claude Gemini, my anyone you want, yes, they’re all very capable of doing that when asked the right questions. And that’s probably the hard part is just knowing what questions to ask. That’s ultimately why I say AI amplifies skill and experience.
Because if you have the skill and experience, you’re better at asking the questions. Yeah. Great.
Patrick: Now I wanna move on to standard operating procedure. ’cause I, I could see, okay, I get a response from some of my marketing now, now I need to turn that, that marketing in that I’ll say lead into something, right?
Yes. And I should probably have a checklist to, uh, to follow, to make sure that they don’t follow through the cracks, fall through the cracks, that type of thing. So. Can you gimme some, some thoughts on standard operating procedure? Because I, I [00:31:00] think about, you know, there’s certain softwares and that type of thing that we utilize and it’s like, well, yeah, I would love to build, you know, a framework, but how does it know what the, the proper steps are?
And uh, again, I think you, you hit on a key point just a second ago. It, it amplifies skill. So if I’ve got some, some general thoughts I can feed in there, it will, uh, help me give some things back. But can we talk a little bit about standard
Jonathan: operating procedure? Yeah, absolutely. Part of what we need to remember when it comes to like standard operating procedures is because chat fatigue’s been trained on so much.
It’s like bringing in that 65-year-old expert who’s been writing SOPs their entire life and that can literally sit down at a table with you and ask you three questions and know everything that was in your mind and create the SOP based on that, even though they’ve never been in your business before, simply because they have that experience and.
It’s just a lot faster in the process, so I can go in as that A-D-D-H-D entrepreneur, who knows the value of an SOP, but oh my [00:32:00] gosh. It’s like, you know, pull my hair out. I don’t wanna write them. Mm-hmm. I can now go in and say, all right, I need to create an SOP to do the following, and I can give it just an outline.
I can just talk to it. I can spend 30 seconds explaining it. Then as you’ve mentioned earlier, ask me any questions that you’ve got. Ask me one at a time. And then when you’ve got enough, give me the SOP, because you know what? I don’t know what questions should be asked, but it does. Mm-hmm. And now that process, it would’ve normally caused Jonathan to go, you know what?
It’s not worth figuring out this SOP. We’re just gonna go forward because it’s gonna take me too long to do. Now I can write in incredibly detailed, very well organized SOP in minutes. And then you mentioned another thing earlier with checklist. We just recently did this with a roofing company. They needed a checklist for their contractors that are their job foreman that go out to residential houses on how to, how to basically announce that they’re there.
What to say to the homeowner. They were getting complaints ’cause they weren’t communicating [00:33:00] that well. Literally on the phone, I had the owner explain what he wanted done. We had chat, pt, create the SOP. He’s like, that’s great. It’s perfect, but they’ll never use it. And I said, well what about if we create a checklist?
And so we literally took the SOP and said, now we need a checklist for the job foreman to be able to complete and submit at the end of the day back with when he is done with a job. And I’m exaggerating. It was not that fast, but it was only about three of those. And yeah, we had an entire checklist that we could use and he was literally able, uh.
Maybe a 15 minute conversation to take this problem that he’s like, I know what to do up here. I know what I want my team to do, but I don’t know how to con to relay that and convey that to them and then make them do that. And we had the entire system put in place and he was able to implement it literally that next day.
And to me, that’s where AI gets so exciting because there’s, it’s not just that we don’t know how to do that, and we know how to write an SOP, we don’t want to write an SOP, I don’t want to take the [00:34:00] time to do it. Mm-hmm. But if I knew instead of taking three hours of arduous pain for me as this a DHD entrepreneur of putting all that detail together and making my head hurt and wanting me to go take a nap, uh mm-hmm.
Then I can do it in 15 minutes. Well, I can endure the pain for 15 minutes. That’s not a problem.
Patrick: Sure. Yeah. No, I, I love that. And I, I’m, I’m very much the same way. It’s like standard operating procedures are not going to enter the top. 25 things that I want to do today.
Jonathan: Yeah. Ever. I will
Patrick: find a new thing.
Right? Right. Yes. I will find a new thing that goes on that list every day before standard operating procedures. And so, um, being able to quickly knock those out and go, okay, cool. This is eliminating some pain in our business. It’ll go allow us to go farther faster is wonderful. So I’m just gonna take a few things that we, we’ve talked about.
Sure. And the, the customer service support, the standard operating procedures, the marketing copy, like I could see all of these things. Marrying together [00:35:00] eventually. Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, I create tremendous marketing company copy. Uh, I’ve got a gen AI that answers the phone, uh, when that person calls in and communicates with empathy, understands their problems, you know, could possibly even take them onto the, the sales piece.
Like, you know, somebody could enter the equation and, and you know mm-hmm. Do the sale. And now we’ve got all the standard operating procedures to deliver on that. Um. That client work. It’s like, this is, this is beautiful. I’m enjoying this. I’m sure my team is probably gonna listen to this episode and be like, oh no, there’s, there’s gonna be so many business opportunities that, more ideas Oh no.
Right. You know, coming out of this. But, um, I think this is, is wonderful and I feel like we’ve only touched on a, a tiny little, uh, corner of what, uh, what AI can do. So, uh, Jonathan, this is great. Is there anything else that we should be thinking about, talking about that the business owner. Uh, could be leveraging AI for that you just see as, [00:36:00] um, just underutilized or maybe revolutionary in, in taking businesses to the next level.
Jonathan: We haven’t talked much about it, but you know, being a leader, it can be very lonely. Uh, sometimes there’s nobody to talk to. There’s nobody to bounce ideas off of. And let’s face it, we need to do that. AI has, you mentioned earlier, board of directors, a board of advisors, and I actually have multiple boards of advisors and I think it’s a tremendous, I.
Tip that most businesses don’t think about. Imagine being able to go and pick your best if, if, if money was no object and time was no object, and you could pick any people living dead or fictional to be on your board of advisors, who would you pick? Well, I’ll tell you one of ’em I picked was a fictional character named Tony Stark from the movie Iron Man.
May think I’m crazy, but I just love Tony and so mm-hmm. He’s on my board of it. My virtual board of advisors with, by the way, 11 other people. I have a board of 12. Yeah. But [00:37:00] now I have the ability, when I want to brainstorm an idea, I’ve got a problem. Maybe I’m just having a crappy day and I’m like, need somebody to break me outta this mode.
I can go to my board of advisors and guess what? Nobody judged me. Nobody’s gonna come back and say, you weenie Jonathan. Come on. Grow up. Yeah. Well actually Tony might do that, but you know. Yeah, you, I can literally have that conversation and then because it’s been trained on all these various personas.
Some alive, some dead. So, you know, my marketing board has Gary Vaynerchuk on it. Gary’s very much alive. Mm-hmm. But I don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, but I want him on that committee. I’ve got other people on that. I’ve also got people that have passed away that are brilliant, like Steve Jobs, and they all bring different perspectives to it.
And so it’s like having a board of advisors that I can sit down with and go, what about this idea? Or what about that idea? And I’ve trained it not to be complimentary, which AI tends to be. To challenge me, and I just, you literally used the phrase, as iron sharpens iron, I need you to challenge me and make my ideas [00:38:00] better.
And so it does. It’s not there to cherry coat things. It’s literally to go, Jonathan, I get your point, but that’s a dumb idea here. What about this and what about that? Or, you’re missing this. And it allows me in again, in very short periods of time, and probably more importantly. Because of this amazing device that I can run AI on.
Mm-hmm. In any situation I’m in, I literally, this morning, I, I’ve started walking because I’m a fat guy and I need to walk more. I need to move more. And so literally while I was walking, I was having a conversation with ai, going through some ideas that I have and getting feedback. It was amazing and I was able to actually be incredibly productive, which made me happy.
While I was moving, which mean it didn’t me seem like I was exercising. It just, it happened. It was part of the process and I was able to make huge strides forward on a project that I needed to do. So the board of advisors in my mind is kind of one of these untold hacks that nobody talks about and is just amazingly [00:39:00] powerful.
Patrick: I love that. And uh, the, when we started talking about board of advisors and you said, dead or alive, I’m like, okay, I’d probably put Jesus on there. You know, he’s. Um, son of God, and, you know, all knowing, all powerful, that that would be a good one. And then the second thing, when you said fictional, my, my thought, the reason I laughed was Tony Stark.
I’m like, Tony, it would be great to have on my list. Yep. ’cause I’ve always, I always thought I could be Iron Man. Not that I’m as smart as Tony, but like Tony really just has the technology exactly strapped to his body that, uh, allows him to fly around and be a superhero. So, um, you know, I’m looking forward to the day when I can.
Buy the suit. But, uh, uh, that’s, well, the good news is, is by tonight Tony can be on your board of advisors. It doesn’t take very long. Wonderful. This is, uh, this is great. I’m gonna be, uh, working on, you know, crafting this board and making sure that, um, you know, both Jesus and Tony are giving me good feedback.
So there we go. Wonderful. Uh, I love it. This is wonderful. So, Jonathan, I, I’m, again thinking about the, the entrepreneur and [00:40:00] so often we, we talk about. Uh, who not how. Yes. And what we mean by that is I need, I need somebody that knows who, uh, no. I’m bringing somebody into my business that is a, who that knows how to do things versus me trying to learn it myself.
Yes. And figuring out how, because it’s, it’s just inefficient. Um, somebody that knows AI knows how to install it in my business is going to be. Uh, more efficient, more effective than me, sort of stumbling, bumbling around, uh, trying to get all of this put in while I’m, I’m running my business. So, can you, can you talk to us a little bit about what it looks like If, uh, I wanna call you up and say, Jonathan, help me, help me figure this out and help me install, um, AI into my business in a way that works.
What does a, an engagement look like?
Jonathan: Yeah. For me, I, I really specialize in group coaching and group mentorship, so. With me. That means typically getting involved in a mastermind that I’m doing, uh, and we do some personalized training. [00:41:00] Sometimes that’s appropriate, but a lot of times it’s working directly, hand in hand with the business owner in that small group setting to help you move forward and, and achieve your objectives.
Uh, the process is really simple. I sit down and I chat with you just like we’re chatting now and go, what are your goals? What are your objectives? And then we get you plugged into our mastermind sessions where you’re around a, generally a handful of anywhere from five to 10 other business owners with similar needs.
And we just help you figure out what to do to implement and mm-hmm. Candidly, it’s less me than it is the other business owners at that point. It’s mm-hmm. It’s learning from your peers, uh, and I’m just there to be a guide.
Patrick: I love this. And, and I think there’s so much evidence that that supports the cohorts.
Yeah. And, uh, growth versus me trying to work on these things on my own. And so, uh, I love the fact that, uh, you’re guiding people along and you’ve got peers to work with and, you know, you’re getting real time feedback on what’s working in the marketplace and what’s not. So, uh, I think that’s, that’s beautiful.
I also think there’s a [00:42:00] ton of value on your website. You, jonathan mass.com has, uh, just the treasure trove of, of fantastic information. So I think if you’re, you’re curious about this topic, uh, that’s a great place to to, to start. And then, uh, I’d also encourage you to book a call with, with Jonathan. I think we’ve, we’ve touched on the success that that comes with leaning into ai.
You know, I, I think the concern for most business owners is if you don’t adopt, uh, you’re going to be, uh, left behind. Yes. Way behind. Uh, because your competitors will be doing all the things you talked about. They’ll be saving time, they’ll be making more money, they’ll be adding more value in the marketplace, which again, you know, that’s, that’s what the marketplace is.
It’s a fair exchange of value. You know, if I can deliver more value, uh, people will, will continue to send dollars my way. So, absolutely, I think. If people aren’t adopting ai, it’s uh, it’s a very dangerous place to be from a, a business perspective. And it’s like, business is too hard to not be embracing these, these new technologies [00:43:00] that, uh, again, allow you to be more efficient, make more money, and add more value to the marketplace.
So I think that’s fantastic. Is there anything else we should be talking about, uh, when it comes to AI that we, we haven’t covered yet?
Jonathan: I’m sure there is because AI is changing so rapidly that. Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that the audience may What about, what about, what about, um, at the end of the day though, you know, I think we’ve covered the basics and I wanna encourage people mm-hmm.
Not to overcomplicate things because it’s so easy to overthink and then we, we do nothing that paralysis by analysis is, is so true. And AI is not a reason to do it. AI’s not gonna bite, it’s not gonna hurt you. Um, it’s, it’s easy and just get started.
Patrick: I love it. I love it. Well, I, I. This has been fantastic.
You know, as, as an AI expert, I almost feel like, I wish there was a, a test to verify that you’re actually, you know, a human being on the other side of this, uh, this camera and not some AI agent. It’s, uh, uh, you’re giving us uh, brilliant insight. Thank [00:44:00] you. But, um, uh, Jonathan, I, I really have, um, appreciated this conversation.
It’s been wonderful and, uh. Uh, I’m, I think we may have to schedule, you know, like almost quarterly podcast, podcast episode to, that’d be great because the, this, this environment is changing so rapidly. Oh, absolutely. The things we’re talking about today, uh, 3, 4, 6 months from now are going to be, uh, uh, are gonna be old news.
So this is wonderful. Thanks so much for your, your wisdom and insight. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I hope you found real value in today’s conversation with Jonathan Mass. I. And that it sparked some ideas about how you can begin using AI to streamline your business scale faster and deliver more value to your clients.
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