Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Basic Business AI, a podcast dedicated to simple AI strategies for businesses who don't want to get an advanced tech degree or hire some marketing bro. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media.
We bring on business owners just like you. Just like me, to discuss practical strategies, ideas and perspectives about AI without getting too far into the weeds of the tech. BBAI is sponsored by Anabots. Did you know companies that respond to customer inquiries in less than 1 minute have a 400% higher chance of closing the deal? Our AI powered assistants have an average response time of less than 9 seconds, meaning you can close more deals without generating more leads. No tech skills are needed, and you can get started in less than five minutes. You can go to Anabots AI to learn more. Once again, that's anabots.
Our guest today is Mister James Brown. Get on up.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Hey there, Josh. How are you doing?
[00:01:00] Speaker A: He stands at the forefront of business operation simplification with a rich 20 year history spanning manufacturing to tourism. Throughout his venture biz tech guru, he introduces business owners to systemology, a transformative approach aimed at streamlining processes, increasing team engagement, and enabling leaders to regain their time. James strategy is simple. Refine operations to elevate both personal and business success. James, welcome to BBAI and your perspective, how is AI reshaping the future of your industry?
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Thanks, Joss. Happy to be here. And one word. Dramatically, I help people get processes out of people's heads and get them documented so that you can leverage the processes, not just at Bull B based on what people remember.
For me, what people don't really think about so much about AI is you've got to program the machine.
You can't just, you know, when people use chat GPT and they give a one sentence prompt and say, can you write me a blog, please? And they have no background about the website or anything about the business at all.
Processes are the programming for your machines. It is a programming for your AI. And so that's really just heighten the need for having processes, rather just the information being stored in people's heads. So that's probably one of the biggest things about what's really why AI's really making sure that we need to get these things out of people's heads. The other one is that it's so much easier to get the information from people's heads to pixels on a screen, right? Being able to use things like chat GPT to speed up the process of documenting, you know, to be able to take a transcript of a conversation with someone and within a very short period of time gets to spit out to a pretty decent draft of what a process is, takes away huge amount of friction from the actual process of, we call it a systems champion, that person who has to sort of do the grunt work of actually doing, getting people, you know, to, you know, impart what their process is and to type it out. So it just speeds it up and makes it so much more accessible for people who may not have been really interested in that before.
But the other thing is, it's so much easier to optimize the process if you think about once you've got these processes out of people's heads. And this is what we're doing today, this is version one of how we do something in business. Let's say it's how we do our SEO or something like that, or how we write a blog, putting that straight back into AI and then saying, what can we improve, given the three top things that I should be doing based on my industry that will go bang, bang, bang. It's really accelerating what you can do with the processes that you have.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: You know, there's so much to unpack there from what you said. But I want to go back to the very first comment about process and structure to something. I had a podcast earlier today where there was a gentleman who ran Dell, like, Southeast Asia. He ran the whole thing for like, I don't know, five or ten years. And he was talking about establishing culture. And I said, well, what does it take to establish culture? And he says, I got a process. And he even has a book called Chasing Greatness. And he had, his process was great, and I don't remember exactly all of them, but it was like gratitude, resilience, execution, like that kind of thing. And it was like, this is how you create culture in a business. This is a process.
I'm such an acronym addict that my team, every time I come up with a new one, they're like, oh, no, not another one. But it's so important that we know how something is supposed to work. And AI is really kind of not only helping us figure that out, but it's shining a light on those who don't have a process, because if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. Talk to me a little bit more about that.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: So we've got this saying in systemology, and when you first hear it, I mean, I'm obviously heavily biased because I'm a systems guy, right?
But that every problem in business is a systems problem, right? Which is huge, huge claim to make right. But it's either you don't have a system or the system you're using isn't working. So if you've got a lead generation issue or if you've got a culture problem, you know, there's maybe poor morale or whatever it might be, every problem in business is a systems problem. So either you don't have a system or the system that you're using is not working. And I love speaking about, let's say the people problem, right. Because people treat it differently often. Like I speak to a lot of creatives about implementing processes in their businesses. Like we can't implement processes because we're creative. It just has to flow naturally.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: It's like certain elements garbage right there.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah, but people don't. I mean, do you have a written down process of brushing your teeth? No. Do you brush your teeth the exact same way every single day that maybe unique to you? Yeah, of course you do. And so in terms of how you do HR in your business, right. If you don't have processes to check in and say, hey, how you going? How's your weekend? What if you don't have processes for doing appraisals every, I don't know, 3612 months, whatever it might be for your business, if you don't have those fundamental things like those opportunities for your team to go, actually, I've got some input here. Can I share this with you? Or sitting down with a team for a coffee, like a team member for a coffee and saying, hey, hows things going?
Or if we could take away one thing you do in your job or add one thing in your job, what would that thing be?
If you dont have processes around HR, then dont expect your people to be happy.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah, and thats a great analogy here. And I want to dig.
I am loving everything that youre saying, but it is an AI podcast so I want to talk about that. But I want to make one. I want to put one pin in something that James said here about if you don't have a process, everybody has the best intentions. Like, I care about my people, I care about my employees. Well, when's the last time you just sat down and asked them how things are going with their boyfriend?
How's your mom after that surgery? When's the last time that happened? You want to, but if you don't build a process for it, I would love to do that. But man, I got so busy, I got a lot of other things going on. And then before you know it, another year has gone bye and it's a stranger that you happen to recognize. And if you have a process in place, then those things, everything that has a process gets completed. And I was just really resonating with that, James, because I sit down, it's coming up on Friday.
Every single one of my employees, I sit down and we do a one on one once a month, and we just talk about whatever is on their mind. It cannot be about work. And if I don't do that, then whenever I have to ask them to stay late or whenever I have to ask them to come in on a Saturday because we're doing some crunch time thing, they kind of start to resent you a little bit, you know, because like, well, hey, you're taking too much. You're not giving enough. But if I set a process for how to give, then I'm going to give. And it won't just be a good intention.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Absolutely. So, in terms of, if you don't have this in your business, how can you leverage AI to help you solve this problem? Right? Again. How can you use AI to get you that first system, just that version one. It's not that you need to follow as gospel or anything like that, but we can just start to build out a bit of a mud map for you about how you might tackle that problem in your business. Simply ask, you know, ask AI, how should I, what type of cadence should I be using for making sure I fill the cup of my different team members in my business? Tell it, hey, I've got an eight person business. This is our industry. This is what we've been doing so far. Here's the challenge I have. What would you suggest and at what type of cadence throughout the year and put it in your calendar. I mean, it's not rocket science here.
You dream it up, make it real, make it recur. It's really simple stuff, that. And here's another thing to say.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Here's another thing to add to that. Go ask AI for some guidance, and then take that guidance and look at it and say, well, that's not quite how I would do it. I would actually do a, b, c, fine.
You don't have to listen to the machine. You just ask the machine for an idea. Just like if I came to you, James, and I said, james, I need. I need help putting together a system to run my business. James is going to give me an answer, and his answer may not be the answer that works exactly for my business, but it's going to have the right bones, and then I can modify that based on I have ten more years of experience and perspective in what I do than James does. And so I make that modification. But James gave me that backbone. Same thing with AI here, we can use AI to take that heavy load of thinking off of us, especially since we're not necessarily born systems people. And James, I'd love, we got into like, this super geeky conversation, guys, whenever we did the pre interview meeting, and we should have just recorded that one, man. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on why do people struggle so much with systems? Are we just not built that way?
[00:10:39] Speaker B: I certainly some people aren't.
One of, one of my favorite clients, she is absolutely not a systems person. And she went through one of my group programs that I ran, and her not being a systems problem, sorry, systems person, she recognized that she really needed someone to offload that responsibility to such that they could drive the whole journey of creating a systemized business.
Her role to play was highlighting the importance of it, and then she just handed over the rest of it. And so you don't need to be a systems person to see or to derive the benefits of having processes in your business. Right. But you do need to lead the charge. You do need to drive the importance. You need to connect with why do you care about it? Such that you can make your team, or help your team connect with, why should they care about it? It's really important to make that leap, because if they don't recognize the, what's in it for them, then they're not going to be remotely interested in having to follow another system or process.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. And if we were to just bring this one more time back to AI, if you ask a machine for the answer to a question, it's going to answer the question. Like, my job is to answer your questions. Even if I don't know the answer, I'll make it up.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: That's basically what happens. That's its job.
Human beings, our job is to exercise discernment. Our job is to make judgment calls. Our job is to demonstrate empathy. These are things that a machine can't do right. And so we have to kind of get the things off of our plate that are difficult for us to accomplish, so that we have more energy and more capacity for the things that people really need us to do. And in my opinion, and what I've seen for me personally, I mean, I'm working a lot. I'm spending a lot of time. I have like 17 podcasts a day. It's hard for me to think about a whole lot else other than the cool conversations that I'm having. And so I need those systems in place. And anytime I can take the mental load of some kind of manual labor task or like a, just like a heavy grind type of task, and I can give that to a machine, I'm going to do it because that frees me up for those higher value tasks.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I use regularly, we're talking at least several times a week, is I use AI a lot for brainstorming. There's a lot of really, really nuanced things that I come across. Let's say maybe it's about a training program I'm running where I'm like, well, I really want to convey this, but I also need to try and factor in this. What am I missing here? I have maybe a 2000 word prompt that is been iterated many, many times. That is a brainstorming prompt. It's got everything to do with my background, my bio, how I like to help people, the type of people I work with, everything around that just to give that baseline knowledge and a lot of it to something like chat, GPT, and then they go right now, you know about me, at least to a bit like a small degree.
How would you help me solve this problem? If you were in my shoes, what would you do here? And the caliber of answers that you get as a result from doing that versus putting in a one line sentence, it's great. So I put that huge prompt in, then I might do a conversation to myself recorded that goes for five minutes about really going in the ins and outs of this challenge that I'm trying to solve. I dump that transcript in and then I listen to what AI has to sort of brainstorm with me because I work in my own office here and I don't necessarily have people next to me to go and brainstorm these ideas with and other people I collaborate with. It's not necessarily easy. Hey, can I just jump on a five minute thing with you? Because I don't want to fragment their day. And so just doing that with AI really accelerates some of that initial brainstorming process because it's so much quicker and easier to do it with someone right in front of you. That's AI, rather than having to sort of cut time out of your day.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's so smart. And especially like it's, you know, I'm well into the evening here in the states and I think you're just starting your day there in Australia. So sometimes it's just difficult for human beings to be able to connect.
And so if you can add a little bit of nuance, and I'll go into this just.
Actually, I'd love to hear kind of your process for building that prompt. But for those of you who are just kind of figuring out how chat GPT works, a prompt is basically a set of instructions that is going to adjust the kind of output that you're getting. Okay, this better inputs are going to get you better outputs. And so the basic idea of a prompt is you need to tell it who it is. Here's my process. I use the word real. I make it real. We give it a role. We give it the education that it needs. We tell it the actions it needs to take, and then we provide the location of any resources or materials it may need. So there's my acronym for everybody to eye roll.
And if you can create a prompt that is real, it gives you a more authentic response. And so I'd love to hear. James, could you give us just a bulleted list of what would you include in a prompt to really create an authentic experience for chat GBT?
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the things, one of the lenses I'd use to consider, what you might want to include is think about past, present, future.
What is the background, what is the history of the situation that brings you to where you're at, what is the current situation, and what's the desired result for the future. So be looking through that lens with anything you might be doing using AI.
When I'm trying to get a good result from AI, I'm typically including things like me as a person in terms of my bio, something similar for the business, just to give it that background, that past knowledge. Then I talk about the present. When I'm talking about the type of people I work with, the type of things we're currently doing to impact people, and what solutions, you know, what results are we trying to create for them, what are their pain points, what are their challenges, and often the type of things that's really unique about that type of customer that we work with best. I love working with people with a growth mindset, and I find it almost challenging to work with people who don't have that type of bigger vision for their future. And so, therefore, when I think about the future aspect, about what you include in the prompts, it would be more so along the lines of, if this is the results we're trying to make, I already think a, b, c, what am I missing? What are the gaps? What's the d, the e, the f. What are the other things that there might be possible, or how would you build on what I've already got with a, b, and C?
[00:17:35] Speaker A: I love that. Past, present, future. This is what got me here. This is where I'm at. This is where I want to be. And honestly, here's the thing that, here's what's so magical about what you just said, it actually doesn't have anything to do with AI.
It's just good common sense.
Any therapist would take you through this.
Any business coach would take you through this.
We need to understand AI at its fundamental core. It's just a tool.
If you know how to use tools, then you know how to use AI. If you know how to swing a hammer, you can use AI. It's just a matter of figuring out how to swing AI to get it to do what you need it to do. Past, present, future is something that we should all be thinking about with our relationships with our spouses and significant others. What past trauma brought me to this sort of behavior? How did we get into this weird situation we're in? Where do we actually want to be in the future? You could apply that to a dozen different situations, including AI. So I think a lot of times, the best thing that I can extract from that, James, is let's not overthink this. Let's use good core common sense and the skills that we've picked up with live, and let's apply it to AI in a way that it, it works just for us.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: And I think one of the things that people may overcomplicate is they think that because they're working with AI, that they need to act differently somehow than they would if they were trying to communicate that to a person. But the exact same principles apply. If you're going to communicate, let's say, to AI in, let's say, a transcript, and imagine if a friend was listening to you vent or dump on them all these things that you've got going in your head and you're asking for help versus if you spelt out, what are the big things that are challenging me here? This is what I think about this. This is what I think about that. This is what I think about the other. If you actually break that down into a nice, logical order, you might even have headings in it. The idea of going from one long prose paragraph to broken down into headings such that if you were going to give that to another team member to go, look at they go, oh, I can see where they're going here versus them reading sentence by sentence. Like what? Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, no, they're jumping around here. So think about how you communicate this effectively to another person, and you're probably going to do a pretty good job of communicating to AI.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: So, James, tell us a little bit more about what you do. Tell us about systemology. Who's it a good fit for?
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm really driven to help people stop working in their business, which usually raises people's eyebrows. People who don't run their own businesses go, why would someone want to stop working their business? People who run businesses go, I really want to stop working so much in my business. And we do that by helping people implement processes such that businesses become systems dependent rather than people dependent. And the main way we do that is helping people implement systemology. You can check out their website, but I'm available at biz Tech guru. That's my business. And I run most of the group training programs for systemology because there's a number of different ways we work with people very much. Horses for courses. You know, you can go down a do it yourself approach, we can do a done for you approach or a done with you approach, and to basically help, based on whatever size your team is, to help you start to go on that journey, because it is a bit of a journey of getting your business to become less dependent on the business owner.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thanks so much to our guest, James Brown, for joining us for a practical conversation about AI and its potential for business. For those of you who want to learn more, you can visit his website at biz techguru.com dot. You have strategies around the topic of AI. We'd love to have you on a future episode as well. We interview business owners of all levels of experience and exposure to AI so that we can represent all voices, especially the 90% of us who are curious about AI but not trying to be tech geniuses, you can apply for a future episode by going to basicbusinessai.com. and one more time, if you want to install a sales and support team for less than 10% of the cost of a single employee, get yourself an anabot. You can learn more at Anabots AI. For those of you who are regulars, thanks for coming. We appreciate you. If you liked this episode, tell your friends we'll see you next time on basic business AI. See you later.
