Niconomics: Within an hour of posting this, I was on a call with a guy who owns a $30 million manufacturing company that produces 75 million units a year, and he was showing me his AI automations. It's freaking mind blowing. It was amazing. So this PhD level chat bot is effectively saving them a bunch of money from going out and hiring these consultants.

There will be an inflection point where this technology work, and if you are waiting where the technology really works, you're gonna be behind the curve 'cause you're not gonna understand how to use it. The people that are gonna leave you in the dust are the ones who are right now figuring out how it works and how to use it so that when the inflection point comes, they already understand how to best leverage this technology.

‍Niconomics: This weekend I tweeted out something. And I think a lot of people have tweeted this out in the past where it's like, Hey, I'm tired of the theory of ai. I want to know if anybody's actually using AI in their business today to make money. And I got a ton of amazing responses. So actually let me read the tweet.

 'Cause it was a little more come at me, bro than the nice way that I've just introduced it, which is something in and of itself, I really hate that I've had to write in the style, but it's just the way that Twitter works at this point, right? Like you have to get eyeballs. On you and there's a certain way to write in order to get those eyeballs on you.

Austin Gray: So question for you. Did you tell chat GPT to write this in come at me bro style? Niconomics: No, I not. I actually didn't. I actually, I probably should have. That's actually a really good idea. No, I didn't. I just have a theory that I can't put my finger on why I think the people know when something's AI generated and when it's not.

I don't like to totally use it for my hooks anyways. I'm tired of the theory. Who can show me how they actually are using ai and are you confident enough to hop on a call and show me? I left it broad because I didn't want somebody who's not using it for their business to think, oh, you just asked business, because I think there's a lot of individual use cases that are interesting and this got, geez, 55,000 views.

So I was like, got a ton of views and I put this link. I ended up putting a link on here. It was like, Hey, if you're confident, schedule here. Show me the way you're using ai. I got 20 people to sign up and within an hour of posting this, I was on a call with a guy who owns a $30 million manufacturing company that produces 75 million units a year.

Austin Gray: Wow. 

Niconomics: And he was showing me his AI automations and it was like, it was freaking mind blowing. It was amazing. It's cool. I've got another 19 or so lined up for this week, and my plan is to create a video series for entrepreneurs just showing them like, Hey, this is how this entrepreneur did this. And give them ideas. So anyways, I'm really excited about it. 

Austin Gray: That's incredible. So what were some of those ways?

Niconomics:  It ranges from, and the reason I left it so broad is 'cause I wanted these options. It ranges from, I use it to help me refine my email, right? Like maybe they're writing a really important email and they wanna make sure that it's coming across professionally.

And so they'll put it in chat GPT, and then chat GPT will spit out, hey, here's a recommendation to make this email sound better. All the way up to, I've created autonomous agents that can go and operate on my behalf and execute this command and push this function through yada, yada. It was a whole wide range of things, but the guy with the $30 million manufacturing company he used it for, he showed me only two specific use cases, but he's got many more and he wants to show me more.

So the first use case are for chatbots, and two of the chatbots are for like onboarding and orientation. Which is really cool. So he put all the information about his company in there, and now when people have a question he manufactures silicon in the United States. So when people have a question about silicon or his company, they can go to the chat bot and just ask it, which I thought was a really interesting.

The second use case for the chat bot was a P, like a PhD level chemist for his team. I didn't know this, but when you're manufacturing something and you're dealing with chemists who are creating new compounds. There comes a point in time where they make mistakes and they don't know how to fix it.

So what do you do when you don't know how to fix it? You go out and you hire a really expensive consultant who's a specialist in that particular area, and they come in, they look at, I don't know, the problem set, and then they identify it, but it's really costly for them to come in and fix it. So this PhD level chemist chat bot is a, is effectively saving them a bunch of money from going out and hiring these consultants.

Austin Gray:  I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. In both businesses, I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment.

Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit Go dot get jobber.com/owner ops O-W-N-R-O-P-S.

Niconomics: So they really only go and hire the consultants when it's very necessary because now they have this mega PhD level chemist on their staff. So that was really cool. And then the other use case that he's using it for is to automate his HubSpot update. So he uses HubSpot for all of his sales pipeline.

And I don't use HubSpot, so I don't know necessarily how it works in the backend, but he gets an email every single day updating him on his deal pipeline and any changes to it. And the way that he's written the code is that it will flag. Anything that has moved out of a specific parameters. Let's say a deal is now seven days old.

Once it's passed six days, it's flagged. It's Hey, what's going on? Why is this deal just sitting in the pipeline? There's a flag for when the dollar amount has changed. There's a flag for like when it's been sitting in somebody's inbox. So it pushes to him this notification of these like parameters that he set, so he knows every single day who he needs to go and talk to get the deals moved in the pipeline. I thought that was. Fascinating and we can talk about how we did it, but those were essentially the two use cases, a chat bot and then working his deal pipeline.

Austin Gray:  I love it. I love it. And I think it comes back to the chat bot comes back to creating a knowledge base for your company and creating a space for people to ask questions instead of bothering somebody else internally in the company.

And I'll tell you a story. So I had dinner with one of my neighbors. He led AI at Zoom for many years before leaving, and he's working on a startup now, and he said they have four people in this startup. And he said, our main premise for this was we were going to build the company by documenting everything in notion and then leveraging AI as an assistant so that we could go ask that assistant the questions that we have.

So rather than Jim asking Tom. Hey, what does the code look like for this? Or what do our, what does our typical process look like for sending, or legal review or something like that. Jim just goes and asks the AI in the knowledge base. That question, and the AI answers that question. So what does this do?

It allows people to stay in productive work mode. I'm a huge fan of the book, deep Work. It's if you can get into this, I've never heard of it. Cal Newport, he talks about like the most productive work that you can do is just like undistracted focused work. And so it's that is going to allow four people to stay into this deep work mindset.

Whereas this AI agent can just answer all the menial little questions because what often happens, like internally and you've ran like multi tens of millions of dollars, companies like internally, corporate structure is literally just people just like bugging each other all day long. And it's how do you actually move the needle forward?

And I think that this is a big way that especially and what I'm most interested in is like service business founders. How can you leverage ai. To one, save money in the beginning, bootstrap. Use that as an assistant and get answers to questions for new onboards or new hires, rather than take you out of deep work mode. As a founder, I'm gonna walk you through one of my, one of my frameworks for the new ai, and I want to see if this resonates with you. 

Niconomics: I think a lot of people look at AI and they're like, oh, it's a better form of Google, but also it's just gonna know what to do. Cool. Now I've got AI go and run my sales process. But the way that I look at AI is it's like a new employee. And what do you do with new employees? You have a very clear Yep. You have a very clear job description. You have very clear onboarding expectations. You train them, you give them the resources that need a new, or to be successful, you have a quality program where you check in with them at 30, 60, 90 days and you have oversight of them.

And I think if you can shift your mind from thinking. If I'm gonna implement AI and it's just gonna figure everything out, two, no AI is effectively another employee that I've gotta train. It will make your life a whole heck of a lot easier. And so to your point, I think if you're a service-based business, especially a sub million dollar service-based business, just start documenting your processes.

Just sit down one day and say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna map out my sales process now. That's a big process, but just start and use CHAT GPT to iterate that way, because once you have the SOP set up. Then you can start either training the AI or figuring out ways to utilize the ai. What do you think of that framework?

Austin Gray: Agreed, a hundred percent. And I would jump in and add, so like people ask me all the time, like, where do you spend your time? Our content manager was asking me this morning, can you break down? Can you give a weekly breakdown of your time? And I was like recently over the, like the last three to four weeks, the most important use of my time is training ai.

Every day. I have just been spending time with chat GPT, and it's if I don't have a process created, I literally just ask chat GPT to create the process, and then I start refining based on okay, gave me the outline. Then I start plugging in what I know about our process. that is training it, right?

Niconomics: Okay. I have an idea. I have an idea based off of that. Have you ever heard of air.ai? 

Austin Gray: No. 

Niconomics: Okay. It was this software. I think it's still used as a software for Macs in particular, where it would track everything, every keystroke. And if you're on a, if you're a Mac user, it'll track your, that's your texts, your emails, your calls, everything.

Austin Gray: No way. 

Niconomics: They can, they came out with this like this is my mic, but it's a wearable pendant called Limitless. And what the pendant does is it records everything. Everything that you do, every conversation that you have now, it doesn't record your keystrokes, but it does record all of your conversations.

A battery life of like up to three days. So it's great. Chris has started using this and so when he has conversations with people, he's doesn't worry about taking notes anymore. He just will go back and query the limitless pendant because it'll tell him like, oh, yep, you talked to Austin. Austin said this was his business.

This is like his top line revenue and this is how his business operate. Like he loves it. He's using it for that. Do you think there's a way that small business founders. Of small services companies maybe could use a limitless like pendant or even the air.ai technology to track what they're doing for a week and then start going to the AI and be like, all right, help me understand where my gaps are.

Where am I wasting my time? Where's my time best spent? What do I, your assistant was like, what do you spend your time on? And then you gotta think through it, right? And be like unless you're actively tracking your time, but could you use that to actively track your time? 

Austin Gray: So yes. And. Do you mind if I share an example here of how I think this to be used? That's the whole point of this. So today this is exactly what I'm going to be doing. So I just hired a new. Field crew member for our business, bear Claw in the wintertime, his responsibility is going to be jumping into the snowplow route that we created internally that we had to fire the guy who was doing it mid-season.

I jumped back in. I took over the route for the last several months. Now we're rehiring for it. What I've been trying to think about is like, how can we document this process so that we only have to do this once, so that if we keep this route of 30 snowplow accounts from here on out. For the life of the business, no matter who is doing it, can we document the process so that the instructions, the SOP, how I've been delivering five star service on every single account is documented in a way that can be referenced from here on out.

And the answer, my answer is yes. And here's how we're going to do it. I have a GoPro set up on my truck. I'm going to click GoPro. Now what I'm going to do is go research Limitless. I'm gonna. Buy this pendant and probably redo this whole process again. But in the meantime, here's what I'm going to do As I record, I'm gonna drive up to each driveway.

I'm going to record myself talking through the steps of how the driveway should be plowed. I'm gonna stop record on the GoPro. For each of the 30 accounts, we'll go upload that video into Google Drive. I will use a transcription software to transcribe my text. I'll take the transcription and then I'll pump it into chat GPT and I'll say scr, right? Please create Descript Just gonna use Descript. Exactly. And Descript is a tool that's plugged into, it's just a audio transcriber. 

‍Niconomics: Do you know, I don't know the answer to this. How much, let's say the lowest tier of Descript. Costs a month. 

Austin Gray: I don't know, but I think I have several members on and it's but they're all part of the podcast, so it's 70 bucks. So anywhere from like 20 to 30 per user, I believe. 

Niconomics: Let's say it's $20 a month. Yeah. I just wanna hit on this 'cause I love that math didn't work out. Whatever. Let's just say it's 20 bucks a month. I freaking love descript for this reason because you can record something and then it will transcribe it. And not only that, I can copy and paste YouTube videos, links into Descript and it will generate the video and the transcript. And so now if I'm trying to learn something and there's a video, if you've ever tried to get transcripts from YouTube, it's a fricking pain in the butt. Now I can get the transcript generated from YouTube and then I can use that transcript to then put into chat GPT.

So I think if you're a small business owner, finding something that generates transcripts like this, for me it's Descript is really important. 'cause what you're describing, in order to use the LLM, you have to have the text, you have to, and you have the text unless you have something that can generate the transcript.

Austin Gray: And it's very good at it, and it's like literally upload it to Descript click into the text command A, if you're on Mac command C to copy it. Then command V to paste that into chatgpt So go. What we're going to do is take the transcript. Paste it in the chat GPT. I'm going to coach chat GPT on what it is an expert in, and I'm gonna tell him or her, or whatever it that it is.

An expert in creating SOPs for a snowplowing business, doing $1 million of revenue per year. Your job is to create a very detailed description from my audio transcript that I will pace below and create a step-by-step process that anyone with a high school level education can read or use third grade level or whatever you wanna read and chat.

GPT is gonna take that transcript that you post, and it's going to create a step-by-step instruction for each account. So then what I'm going to do is I have a Google sheet for all of our snowplow accounts, and I'm gonna just create. A link back to that Google Drive video, and paste the description in there so that somebody can pull up Google sheets on their phone and they can access the video.

They can also access the SOP at any point that they are plowing no matter who is sitting in that truck seat. And this is how I believe that you just one way that you can use AI as a small local service business owner to document processes and scale in the future.

Niconomics: I'm gonna, can I share my screen? 

Austin Gray: Yes, please.

Niconomics: Okay. 'cause I think this, one thing that I loved about our podcast last week was how you were like, can you show me? Fantastic. Let's do it. Alright, so I'm gonna share my screen. As you were talking, I was thinking through the process of I, you own a small business. Many people don't even know what an SOP is.

They're like I don't know what that is. Standard operating procedure. So this is a standard procedure that you can document. So that as you scale, you can just hand this to the new person who's hired and help them understand like what their job functions are. Okay, so I wrote this prompt. I'm a small business owner who's growing.

I would like to be able to scale my business quickly, but in order to do that, I need to have SOPs for every function that I currently do myself. Can you gimme an SOP template that I can use for every job function that includes software needed communication expectations with the team who I am, the process off to where I get the job from.

That's all I have so far. Is there anything that you would add to this SOPs for every function? Sorry, I'm just thinking on the fly here. So what I'm trying to do is just create a template so that when Austin is ready to hand off the snow plowing, scheduling, whatever it is, yeah. You can go to chat to between, be like, Hey, here's the template that I have. This is the job function. Help me write it. You know what I mean? It's like you have a starting base. Agreed. You're not just going from square one. 

Austin Gray: Software needed to use communications, go in the process where I get the process from. Yeah, let's just kick it in there and see. See what it kicks out, and then we'll make edits on the fly.

Niconomics: And is there anything else that I need to add that I am not considering or thinking of that will make this SOP as comprehensive as possible? 

Austin Gray: So I love what you're doing here and I want listeners, especially if listeners of my podcast are listening in that like zero to 1 million phase don't overthink this process, just jump in and click it and tell chat GPT to give you what you like. See what Nick did there. It's like anything else that I need to add that I'm not considering your thinking. To make the SOP as comprehensive as possible. That's gold right there. 

Niconomics: Yeah. 'cause you think oh, I have to know everything. No, you don't have to know everything. That's the point of having this assistant and you just ask it. Is there anything I'm missing? What do you think? Is there something that I'm not seeing that One of my favorite roles to be before, and this is before AI came out, was to be the first bad idea, and I should say this all the time. When I was in a group and we're trying to figure something out, I'd be like, Hey, first bad idea.

What if we, I don't know, bio-engineered chickens to have cameras on their head, right? And everybody like, that's the dumbest idea. No. That, here's why it's a dumb idea. And then all of a sudden the ball will get rolling. It like does two things. One, it just gives people an opportunity to get the juices flowing, but then two, it like it's somewhere for them to start from.

They can actually contrast it with, oh yeah, I don't like that because of this. Actually what it means is this. And so that's how I think of right now. I. Utilizing ai. All right, so here's what it's spitting out for me. The SOP template title of the template makes sense. Prepared by makes sense. Day created purpose.

Great job overview. Oh, okay. Yeah. Briefly describe the task, software and tools needed. All makes sense. List all the softwares needed. Procedure steps. Clearly find each step of the process. Great. Source of job process. So like where does it come from? Who do I communicate with? Process, hand up troubleshooting, FAQ. Performance. 

Oh, this was good. I didn't even put this. Performance management. What are the key metrics or KPIs to measure the success of the task? Like you want to know whether or not somebody's doing good in that role. So for your snowplow guy, what's the key? What's the KPI? What's the key performance indicator for them On what?

Austin Gray: Five, five Star did we get a five star review? 

Niconomics: Perfect. So now your employee knows here's all the things I'm supposed to be doing and here's whether or not I'm being successful is because now I have the five star review. 

‍Austin Gray: Oh, and by the way, now that chat GPT gave me that performance measurement, I know that I want to compensate and add a bonus structure for every five star review that we get to pay that person $250 every time that we get a five star review.

Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com.

 Austin Gray: So I'm gonna go back to chat GPT, I'm gonna highlight that and I'm gonna be like please add a bonus, $200 per five star review bonus structure to the performance review. And then it's to your point, like chat GPT, especially as a creative entrepreneur, right? If you struggle with ADD like I do, like this is a gold mine. Like this is the solution to my past problems, right? I couldn't ever focus long enough to create this, but chat GPT is doing it now. All I have to do is just like work with it. Alright? 

Niconomics: So now what I can do is I can go to this chat and I can say. I actually wanna save this chat. Where do I wanna go? Here? It's, I wanna add it to a project so I can go anywhere in here and I can say AI series, right? So if I add it to this project, now this chat will save and I'll have that template anytime that I want to go and create a template for my business. And. It's not great, like it's not the perfect template, but it's a starting place for you as a business owner to now start writing these SOPs for every one of these job functions.

Austin Gray: Oh, and guess what? Now you also have something to ask other people within your business to follow as well. It's okay, we're gonna start crafting SOPs and documenting everything as a company. Oh, but Austin, like, where do I start? It's whoa. Here you go. Just use this as a framework. I got a question for you though. My chat GPT looks like a scattered mess. I want to ask you how you've set up the organization of yours and projects. 

Niconomics: Oh man. I have a full-time assistant. So she's my executive assistant, Kelly, and she keeps me organized. But I'll walk through this so you can do these things called projects within CHAT GPT CHat Gpt didn't used to have this, but now you can actually create folders to go and save things.

So the newest project that I created is this product. It's the AI series, and you can actually come in here, you can add files to give it context. Lemme just take a step back actually. Sorry, I'm gonna go to this. So this is content creation. This is my content creation project. And in content creation, every episode that I have, I go and upload the transcript to this content creation folder.

This episode came out last week. I did it with Jack Carr. He's the co-host of Owned and Operated, I think is the end of the podcast with John Wilson. And so you can see here at the very top, I copied and pasted, this is the actual transcript. And then I gave it a little prompt. And then from there it spits out.

This, here are the key takeaways here at the business model Insights from our conversation. Here's the tactical guides and frameworks. 'cause I, those are what I like to post about. This is about his entrepreneurial journey. This is how we overcame barriers industry specific deep dive, et cetera.

Suggested content piece. So it spits out all of this stuff based on a prompt that I created for it to spit out, but now it's saved in this content creation folder, and I can go back to it anytime to look at. So you can also tailor the content creation folder, so you can add specific files so that it has context so it understands what you're asking it, and you can give it specific instructions.

So that it understands again what you're asking of it. And so I have, when my assistant, when I finish a podcast episode, my assistant goes up here, I've created these custom GPTs, and she goes into this content strategist and it's very specific. I created the GPT myself has a lot of context. She just enters in the transcript and then it spits out.

What I've asked it to spit out. She then copies and paste that and puts it into the content creation folder so that spit out what you saw really came from this custom GPT that I created. That's probably a better way to do it, but that's just the way that I do it. Then I have a folder for podcast intros.

Again, I'm just looking for good quotes and it has it. Anytime that I come in here, right here, I can enter a new chat. It will create a new chat. So I'll, you don't have to do anything crazy each and every time. This is what I use for preparing for podcasts. So if I'm doing prep work or trying to do some research on things, and then I have other folders in here for my family.

I have a church folder. I teach a youth class, and so when I'm preparing for that, it gives me ideas on how to teach them posts, business plans, a scaling workshop that we're working on, videos for economics. So if I'm ever working on something over here that's really good that I want to add to one of these folders, I'll just click into the three dots and add it to a project. 

Austin Gray: Okay. So I have two ways, two ways that I could ask questions from here. And I'll start with one and I'll ask you, do you want to keep it higher level or do you want to dive deeper like we did on the last one? And be very tactical. 

Niconomics: I wanna dive deeper, but I don't necessarily wanna dive deep on my like content stuff. Does that make sense? I don't know. 

Austin Gray: Yes. I think what's really interesting to me that we just skimmed over here and what a lot of listeners I think are going to ask is like, how did you train that custom GPT? What were some of the prompts and what was some of the information? You fed it to kick these out so that Oh, that's great. Let's do that. Could create this to where we yeah. Could just publish the transcript or copy and paste the transcript into these, to kick these things out. 

Niconomics: Business plans prompt. Okay. So this is something that I was working on. This is a little meta. I used chat GPT to create the prompt for business plan. So business plan. Alright, so this is the chain that I used. I'll walk you through it before I even get to creating my own custom GPT. Think of the custom GPT as helping you ask the perfect question every single time I. One of the things that has come out of Chat GPT and these large language models, and you saw it when we were doing the prompt for the SOPs, is you have to get good at asking questions.

There's a whole job now called prompt engineers. Their whole job is to figure out the best way to write prompts for these large language models. And I know that I'm not a prompt engineer, but I need help writing the right prompt. So I go to chat GPT and I said. I need your help writing this prompt because I wanna take my episodes that I've had and create business plans out of them that are actionable and tactical for people.

So I went to it and I was like, let's pretend I'm an wantrepreneur or entrepreneur wanting to get into a specific business. What research would I want to do in order to make a decision whether or not to get into that business? So that's my Target demo. My Target demo are entrepreneurs or wantrepreneur who are trying to make their first million dollars and they wanna understand how other businesses work.

Okay. So then it spits out the, this sort of outline, market research, business model evaluation, competitive landscape, legal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which I liked it. It was great. And so then I said, all right, I interview entrepreneurs for a living, and I put content out for people to learn. How would you templatize this structure templatize, meaning I can use it over and over again with different conversations.

So that I can release this in conjunction with a specific intro interview. Great. So then it releases, then it gives me the template. Cool. Here's the template. Great. And then there were some things that I didn't like, so I was like, oh, I like bullet 0.3, but I think I wanna change it to this. So I'm like going back and forth now, and I'm ideating with it.

We're creating this new business plan template together. And I know I'm scrolling through this, but I hope you can understand what I'm doing and I'm still giving it some edits. Great. Wonderful. Here's some more things that I want in it yada, yada. It's spitting things back out to me, and then I get to, I'm getting to the section where I say, I want this to be written.

Here we go. So I've gotten to the place now where I'm like, cool. I like the template that it's created for me. This is great, but I don't want to do this every single time. I want you to create a custom GPT and use this template as a prompt. But I want to tell the GPT what info it should pull from the conversation and what info it should pull from the open web.

How would I do that? So there are gonna be some things in the conversation, which obviously the entrepreneur's gonna know about their business. If I'm talking to you about land clearing, you're gonna know all the mechanics, all the operations, et cetera. But you may not know how fast is it growing in the United States?

What is the economic outlook look like for it? What are the key economic indicators that I should look for that correlate with land clearing, right? Maybe it's. Maybe it's actually countercyclical. So in recessions, land clearing is great, but in booming times, land clearing is not right. You're not gonna necessarily know that I'm gonna have it go scrape the open web and find those things and pull it into this business plan.

So now it's creating the prompt for me. We work it, we iterate it, and we get all the way to the end where this was the final prompt that it gave me. Okay, and so now I have this prompt that I can copy and paste into a custom GPT. I don't think that I created the custom GPT with this prompt. Lemme look over here.

No, I didn't. So I'll show you how to create a custom prompt right now. If you have chat GPT, you go here, explore GPTs, and if you've ever messed with this, you can see there's a lot that you can go and choose from Dolly, which does pictures for you. There's a data analyst, there's writing help, all this stuff.

We're not gonna do any of that. We're gonna go up here to create. Now we are going to create our own GPT. So I'm gonna take that prompt I would like to use to create this custom GPT, and then I paste it in. So now you can see I've pasted in this full prompt. Okay. Has everything that we were just talking about.

And now it's working. I don't know what is working, but it's working where it's creating this custom GPT, but I don't want to just have the prompt. I want it to sound like me. And so now what I'll do is I'll go and find some writing that was my writing that I want it to spit out so that it actually looks or, and, or sounds like what I wanted selling.

So I will go, lemme go find something. I did this big breakdown one time of valuing your first business. So I went just now and I copied and pasted that whole thing, and I would say I would like for this GPT to sound like me and to help you understand what that means. Here is a sample of a long form post I wrote about valuing any business.

So now I just copied and pasted this long post that I had about valuing a business. I would do more, honestly, I would put a little bit more, I would put some more writing, I put some more context. I probably would do some more with the prompt. But for purposes of this, I just wanna get through it so I can show you how it works.

But this will be good enough. And so now what we'll do is we will say, after it's updating, we're just gonna hit create. And I am gonna go get a transcript now. So that we can copy and paste a transcript into chat GPT and show you what it actually looks like. Okay, cool. So I'm gonna hit create, we'll do anyone, ah, anyone with a link, I don't care.

And we're gonna save it. And now it's gonna be called Business Research Assistant. And I'm gonna go pull the same Jack Carr episode transcript. We'll go to review GPT and I'm gonna say. Please write me a business plan based on this conversation with Jack Carr.

So you can see it's a 40 minute conversation and we'll see what it spits out. I, with Jack, I didn't get into the full nitty gritty of hvac, which is his business, but we did talk a lot about it. We talked more about Hey, how did he buy his first business and how did he scale and all those things.

But we'll see what the GPT spits out. And you can see it's already spitting out some good stuff. Company overview. Jack has an HVAC plumbing company based in middle Tennessee. Grew up from sub 1 million to five to 6 million in 2024. 17 employees. He wants to achieve 20 million by 2030. Their growth strategy.

Target small mom and pop HVAC companies. Yeah, it's perfect. Actually focus on under undervalued acquisitions, operational excellence. This is what he did to be operationally excellent. The financial strategy. Let's see if they went. And actually, so this is what it spit out for me. And so from here I can go and actually mess with the GPT and be like, I didn't pull anything from the internet, so I wanna go change that up so I can actually, I'll come back out here.

Business research assistant, how do I get back to it? I can go and edit this GPT, so this is awesome. Yep. So it already has everything that I said and I could say Hey, I would like for this GPT to pull industry specific. Information from the open web and before you click enter. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: So those, for those of you who are just listening to this on audio chat GPT gives you two options on this screen right here create and configure.

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‍Austin Gray: You're within a custom GPT right now. Would you be creating, or would you be configuring when you're updating? 

Niconomics: Yeah, so configuring means, let's see what it is. I don't know the answer to that question honestly. Okay, so well let's try with the create and see what it does First I like to see to pull specific information from the open web.

Each time there is a new chat about a new I overview. Yeah, my language isn't great here, so hopefully now what it will do is actually pull. Information from the Open web that talks about industry size, growth rate, key players, whether or not it's consolidated, whether or not it's fragmented, et cetera.

Austin Gray: And I know you're moving quick through this but what he just said verbally is something else you could put in the GPT as well if you're listening to this. 

Niconomics: That's true. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: If you want it to be that specific and coach it and give it a framework. 

Niconomics: Industry growth rate, projected growth rate, industry headwinds and tailwinds. If you don't know what headwinds and tailwinds are, those are like forces pushing you forward or forces pushing against you and regulatory viral not. All right, cool. So what's update this? We'll let it spin for a second and then I'll go back to that same. Prompt with Jack, and I'm just gonna reenter the transcript. Cool. So we hit update, read GPT, and then analyze this transcript and we'll see if it updated at this time. 

Austin Gray: And so theoretically, whenever you have a custom GPT created, each time you go in, you're not having to specifically tell it what you want to do because you've already done it once to create the template. So hopefully it kicks out what you need it to kick out by just saying, please analyze this transcript. 

Niconomics: Yeah, and it's, we will see. All right, so the background, great. That's business specific. So this is Jack specific. It's a little bit different than the first one that we looked at, but it still has all the pertinent information, what he bought the business for, how big it was.

W2 experience beforehand, what the key takeaways were, the growth of his specific business. We go his own operational challenges, key learnings from the business. Alright, so it didn't include an industry overview this time, so I'd have to go back and start refining it, but this is like the process that you'd want to iterate through when you're creating your own custom GPTs.

Austin Gray: Yes. And this is where I was mentioning earlier, like over the last three weeks I've defined. A very important use of my time is spending time with the GPT, just coaching it back and forth. And so going back to something you said, if you just, if you hired a new employee, you can't expect them just to know everything right out the gate.

And the same is true for ai. You have to spend time with that, coach it, train it. And so thanks for sharing this process. I appreciate it. 

Niconomics: I wasn't planning on doing that, but here we are. Here we are. I think. I really think that, like we were talking about, anybody who's messed around with data knows that you, your data set has to be clean in order for you to get good insights from that data.

And I think the same is true for it's analogous for these LLMs. In order for them to operate well, they've gotta have good questions and they've gotta have good context to operate from. And so it's your job as a business owner now to start thinking about how do I create these contexts and it's gonna make your business better.

Just very frankly speaking, even if you never used ai, but you just went through the process of creating SOPs, your business will be better for it, period. End of story. Even if you never automate a thing, just having SOPs so that you can train and onboard people, your retention will be better, your employee satisfaction will be better, your service will be better, your product will like, everything will be better just because you took the time to actually document this stuff.

And that's something I think that when you're sub 1 million, you don't think you have time to do. Then you're only ever gonna be sub 1 million if you don't take the time to figure this stuff out. 

Austin Gray: That's correct. And just a real world example, especially when you're sub 1 million, it's like you have all this stuff going on in your head and you are so tied into the business, like you have this pulse on it, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone else you hire on board, your team just understands the vision and the mission and exactly like what you got, what you're trying to accomplish.

But the reality is one, you likely, at least for me, I likely had not even communicated that to people who I hired in the beginning. Two, even if I had communicated it to 'em once, it's like that is the, our role as the owners or the founders is to like continually drive the mission. And it's like that has to be revisited consistently.

And so one area that AI has helped me is if I feel like I didn't have the time to document those processes or even just as simple as here's what the mission is for 2025, and here's what our goals are. AI can help you like quickly get there in a way that you can get it on paper and then send it or show it to people who are on your team so that they at least have it in writing to visit, and you have documentation that you communicated that to them.

Niconomics: And here's what, just doing this process that I just did, SOPs, you're creating your first custom GPT. Here's what it's gonna do. After you do that the first time and you've gone through two hours and it's been like a pain in the butt and finally figured it out, all of a sudden you're gonna be like, you know what else I could use this for?

Oh, I could use it for this or that. Like it's all of a sudden the world is gonna be open to you in how you can actually utilize this to make your business better. So I know it's a painful and like awkward first step and you feel stupid and I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a techie Get over it.

Try to just create a custom GPT like I just did. Try to create an SOP like I just did. It's not difficult. You just have to build the muscle. And once you build the muscle, it becomes a lot easier for you to get to the next step and the next step and the next step. 

Austin Gray: Of course, and I don't know what you think about this, but I'm of the mindset that the fastest growing businesses and the best businesses in each market are going to be the ones leveraging AI in the future.

And oh, for sure. There really is no option because there's gonna be somebody in your market who figure it figures this out and they're just going to be able to move faster than you. So I'm of the mindset, it's adopt this early, figure it out, get the kinks outta the way right now and just start building processes for using it.

Niconomics:  his is another theory that I have. You've probably gone into AI or chat, whatever. You're like, oh, agents are here and you mess with it, and you're like, nah, it's not there yet. Nah, it's not perfect. Nah, it doesn't gimme the answer that I want. Alter. Alter. I promise you there will be an inflection point where this technology works.

If you are waiting until the inflection point where the technology really works, you're gonna be behind the curve 'cause you're not gonna understand how to use it. The people that are gonna leave you in the dust are the ones who are right now figuring out how it works and how to use it so that when the inflection point comes, they already understand how to best leverage this technology.

They're not getting up to speed. They're up to speed now, they're just implementing. And so there'll be, this 12, 18, 2 year, 18 month, two year period of time. Where there'll be an outsized return to those who've actually taken the time to understand how this works, and then everybody else will catch up. But how much more ahead will those people in two years be than everybody else who catches up with 'em? I, it I think it's gonna be a massive separator for people. 

Austin Gray: Agreed. Agreed. So one thing you mentioned earlier was, Hey, I have my executive assistant helping me on this, and I know what some of the listeners were thinking at that point. Man, it would be sweet to have an executive position. I wish I had that. And it's guess what? You can right now. And Nick, I'm gonna put 'em on the spot. And it's if you've never hired an executive assistant before, how would you use Chap GGPT to go quickly? Outline a process for Oh, prepping a job description.

Niconomics: Oh, okay. You want, you, you want me to do it or do you wanna do it?

Austin Gray:  I can do it, but let's just even talk about it. It's like. Where does your brain go for, okay, I've never done this before. How would I use chat GPT to like quickly help me hire an executive assistant? I'll share my screen again. It would be cheating if I did it 'cause I've done this four times in the last two weeks. 

Niconomics: Have you really? 

Austin Gray: Yeah. It's crazy how fast you can move with a, with ai. 

Niconomics: So let's start a new chat. And if I'm somebody and I've never used chat GPT before, it's okay, what do I do first? Tell it who you are and then ask the question. I own a Land clearing company and am growing. I need an executive assistant who can, this is good. I've never thought of it this way, but I'm like, okay, who, what? So let's go through like the, the W question. So who am I? I'm a land clearing company growing. What do I want? I need an assistant, an executive assistant who can.

Keep me organized. Why am I asking Chat? TPTI have never hired for this role before. Please help me outline a job description. Give me a recommended step by step hiring process to follow. Let's see what that is. So again, first bad idea. Let's see what the first bad idea is. And at least it'll tell you what you do or don't like about it.

Austin Gray: And at a very minimum, it's gonna give you a structure to work off of as a job description. 

Niconomics: Exactly. All right. Positions, executive assistant, my company, location type. Full-time. I want full-time. I want an hourly. There is something that you're automatically gonna start thinking about us. I don't like the way it described us. What the role is and now you can read about the role. Okay. Oh yeah. Trusted right hand. Oh, I like the way it's said. Right hand person. Okay. Responsibilities. You'll come through this so automatically it's giving you the job. Descrip. That's a really good job.

Description requirements. Like it'll tell you, okay, what's expected of somebody who's been in this role? Bonus qualifications. Great. And now it's gonna spit out what do I do? Like how do I hire this? Step one, you prepare it, create clarity. Step two, you post it. It even tells you where to post it. That's cool. Step three, you got initial screening, phone screening, formal interview with some sample questions, and then even more so it wasn't a crazy prompt. 

Austin Gray: No. 

Niconomics: You know what I mean? It's like pretty simple, but now I have a job description and it's telling me exactly how to go higher for this role. I think that's really cool.

Austin Gray: I think it's really cool because it answers a lot of questions that a lot of people who have never hired before have. It's okay, how do I even create a job description? Or what do I include in a job description or what do I include in an interview? And it's if you have those questions, I would encourage you just to continue.

Keep asking. And then another encouragement I would add here is, what do you. Do on a recurring weekly basis that you don't like doing, or that takes up a lot of your time. Or third, what are you procrastinating in your business right now? And so it's if you wanna be more specific about the hiring description, start brainstorming like three of those things and then just ask the GPT to update the job description with those specific tasks.

Niconomics: Yeah, I totally. Have you ever hired a virtual assistant overseas? 

Austin Gray: Yes, 

Niconomics: I have. And the first 10 that I hired sucked. They suck. They were the worst. They didn't, they like, didn't work. They didn't understand things. They couldn't speak English. And then what I realized is they don't suck. I suck. They not their fault.

I didn't give them any direction. I didn't tell them what I was expecting. I didn't tell them what the KPIs were, what I, whether or not they're, how they would know whether or not they're doing a good job. And so ever since I've had that sort of mental shift. It's gotten a lot better. I still have VAs who, didn't work out, but this process, if you've ever, if you've ever tried to hire overseas before and it didn't work, it's probably because of you, not because of the talent.

And again it's not, you're a bad person or anything like that. It's hard to manage virtual people. It's much easier when somebody's sitting next to you and you go through this process with 'em. It's oh, lemme just show you, oh yeah, there's this, that, and all of a sudden they're picking up things.

You didn't necessarily communicate to them in the job description. So chat GPT can be that person who's there with you, getting those insights out of you so that you can hand it off to somebody that they'll be's successful. 

Austin Gray: Love it. This is awesome. This is fantastic. Thanks again for being guests on the show listeners. Thanks for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Every week we drop episodes on Friday where we talk about building local service-based businesses. Every Saturday we're sending you a newsletter where we summarize the main learning points from the guests on the podcast.

So if you haven't signed up for that yet, go to ownerops.com/newsletter. That's OWNR ops.com/newsletter. We'll see you guys next week. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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