Prompting Your Way To Success: AI Strategies For Service Business Growth

Jeffro (00:02.259)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. As you know, AI isn’t just for big tech companies anymore. It’s a game changer for small business owners who know how to use it. And that’s the key. The challenge is most entrepreneurs don’t know where to start. That’s where Jonathan Maas comes in. He’s the founder of Whitebeard Strategies and a leading expert in AI for marketing operations and business growth. He has an audience of over 400,000 AI enthusiasts, and Jonathan has trained thousands of business owners to master AI prompting, streamline their operations, and scale smarter with AI. So in this episode, we’re going to dive deep into those things, AI prompting, leveraging AI for business growth and any emerging trends that small business owners need to be paying attention to right now. So Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Mast (00:43.084)
Well, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jeffro (00:45.704)
Definitely and for those of you listening with audio only you can’t see Jonathan’s glorious white beard and it’s the namesake of his company But it is if you want to go see it you got to go on YouTube It’ll be there but Jonathan AI continues to move fast and small business owners are hearing about it everywhere It still feels overwhelming for a lot of people just because they’re busy doing other things I haven’t had time to look into it obviously chat GPT gets the most airtime so a lot of people have heard of that but I’m also curious to hear from you. What about others like perplexity or clod? Can you give us your thoughts on the different models out there and what we should be paying attention to?

Jonathan Mast (01:20.27)
Well, first I think it’s very natural to feel overwhelmed. We are seeing news. I mean, my goodness, the changes we’ve had already in the first like 10 weeks of the year are just blowing away what most industries get in two years. It’s just, it’s unbelievable. What I want to encourage your listeners is probably don’t worry. Don’t stress about it.

Jeffro (01:30.088)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (01:41.876)
Whatever AI tool you have access to is the right AI tool for you to be using today. And what I see so many business owners doing is that we get caught up and I’m guilty myself. We get caught up in the new bright shiny object. I want this tool. I want this tool. We see this great marketing copy and it’s like, I need that tool because that’s designed for me as a service business. And then you get it and go, well, I don’t know if this was any better or not. Instead of chasing all those tools, you mentioned Shatch GPT. It’s a great one.

It’s another great tool from Anthropic. There’s Google Gemini from Google, which I’ve never recommended until about two weeks ago. Their newest versions are really good. I actually thought Google had missed the boat. Now I’m kind of just thinking they fell asleep because they had some really good technology. There are a lot of others too that we can talk about from Meta such as Llama. There’s tons of models out of China like DeepSeek and Kimi and Quen. And if you don’t remember them, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter whatever you have access to today and if you don’t have access to any I’d recommend you pick either right now chat GPT or Gemini those would be the two pick one of those if you’re a Google fan you’ve got like Google email and you’ve got Google workplace like I do it’s actually included with that right now as of yesterday and if you don’t have yes so as we record this as of if you don’t chat GPT is great if you need to they’re 20 bucks a month so they’re not the end of the world

Jeffro (02:56.158)
Right. Okay.

Jonathan Mast (03:07.298)
You also mentioned perplexity, and perplexity is a fantastic tool, especially if search is part of what you’re doing. And again, I recommend starting using that one for free and see what you think. In fact, all the models, you can begin that way. You just are going to get limited on usage as far as how many times you can use it. And if you need it more, then it’s time to pay the 20 bucks.

Jeffro (03:26.995)
And that’s a good reminder, you can try this risk-free, just to see what it’s like. See if it … Because most likely you’ll try it and it’ll click after a couple of prompts. You’ll be like, I’ve got lots of ideas for how I can use this. And suddenly that 20 bucks a month is like, that’s nothing. If I can have this, do X, Y, Z, okay, totally worth it.

Jonathan Mast (03:30.958)
100 percent.

Jonathan Mast (03:47.342)
100 % and I think that’s the biggest thing is just encourage people that again don’t don’t stress about being overwhelmed don’t stress about falling behind as long as you’re taking some action and you’re starting to use the tools you’re going to be just fine and what I encourage people to do is find one new thing a day to do so today if you’re brand new to chat GPT pull out your phone or pull out your computer and do one thing help it write an email for you Maybe, you know, help it answer a question for you. just literally before this call was talking to a buddy of mine and he and his wife are having a little bit of an out and he’s like, I don’t know what to say. We went to chat GPT and described the situation and I got to tell you what it came back with. He’s like, dude, that’s brilliant. And I’m like, is it true? And he goes, yeah, but I can’t come up with words like that. And I’m like, so put this into your words and you know, tell your wife you’re to buy her flowers. Okay, so the and it.

Jeffro (04:23.058)
Yeah

Jeffro (04:31.602)
Ha

Jonathan Mast (04:38.984)
anything that you can think of. And then each day, just add one new thing. And if you do that for a week, you just try to find one new thing to do. At the end of the week, like you mentioned, you’re going to have so many ideas all of a sudden that start welling up going, my gosh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. You won’t have any problem using it. And then you’ll be in my situation, which is my wife going, what are you asking A.A. about now? Because I’m literally on it, you know, using it to help me do stuff all day long. But the key is as a business owner,

Jeffro (05:01.19)
Hahaha

Jonathan Mast (05:08.258)
I don’t know any business owners out there that have more time than they do things to do. And if they do, then they probably are beyond the need to worry about things. If you’re like most of us and you’ve got more things to do than you have time, AI is a tremendous tool to amplify your skill and experience and to save you time.

Jeffro (05:25.234)
Yeah. It’s a huge time saver and I love it. I’ve fallen in love with it over time and the same thing has happened that you described. Like the more I use it, the more I realize how many other ways I can use it. And to give a quick example, a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking, man, I really haven’t practiced Spanish in a long time. I don’t want to get too rusty. And then I realized, wait, I can talk to ChatTPT and it can talk back to me. Do they have a Spanish mode? And they do. So I had a practice conversation with ChatTPT in Spanish and it was great. I’m like, this…

This is amazing. Whenever I want it, I can just practice. So not really a business use case here, but for somebody it might be.

Jonathan Mast (05:56.618)
It is so amazing.

Jonathan Mast (06:03.382)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (06:04.828)
So what about some of the specialized AI tools? the ones we just mentioned are kind of the general ones that do anything, but there are some that focus on a particular use case. Like there’s one AI platform that does optimizing YouTube videos, and there might be another one that’s really good at coding or something. Are those worth looking into, or should most owners just focus on the general broad?

Jonathan Mast (06:16.536)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (06:23.842)
They may very well if you need them, but even the general tools can do a lot with it. So for YouTube video optimization, I can feed my video transcript into ChatGPT and it can help me optimize my video. The new version of Gemini that just came out, I can literally give it my YouTube link. It’ll watch the video for me and give me recommendations. So those specialty tools are really doing the same thing. They’re just branded more specifically. In fact, most of the specialty tools that are out there, there are some exceptions, but most of the specialty tools are actually just Chat GPT with different lipstick. They’ve said, okay, you’re in the window cleaning business and therefore I’m gonna create a version of Chat GPT that’s the best AI for window cleaners. And all it really is is a re, again, a rebadged version of Chat GPT on the backend. And they maybe put in some prompts that help you out that are directly related to being a window cleaner. But the engine that’s underlying…

It’s kind like when you go to the car dealership or a good example, was looking at my son the other day at quads for four-wheelers to ride around on trails. And I found out that, you know, they had three different models that all had the exact same engine in it. They just were slightly different in the way that they worked. And I’m like, but it’s the same engine. And they’re like, yeah, so much easier for parts, so much easier for everything else. And that same type of thing applies here when we’re talking AI. just, yeah, it’s amazing.

Jeffro (07:48.388)
Yeah, well, and that brings us to one of the main conversation topics for today is prompting, right? Because this is a skill that lets you turn the general AI tool into a specific AI tool for whatever your use case is. You can call it a custom GPT or whatever, but this can make or break how useful the AI is for your business. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Jonathan Mast (07:53.592)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (08:09.068)
Yeah, so you know the moment you start getting involved in AI, Facebook and everybody else are going to start advertising prompt lists to you. Lists of prompts for your business. You you need 87 prompts. You need 387. I literally saw one the other day for 10,003 prompts. Let’s assume we didn’t buy for the… Probably yes. Let’s assume we didn’t buy that, but we just bought 87 prompts. The next time I need the prompt, if I’ve got a list of 87 of them that I need to read through, it’s going to take me some time.

Jeffro (08:24.369)
Probably generated by AI.

Jonathan Mast (08:38.018)
to find that right prompt and then realize that it’s probably not going to be applicable for my business anyway. avoid the prompt lists. There’s only one reason that I condone buying or that I recommend buying prompt lists and that’s if you want to learn from them. If you want to read them and learn and go, this is how they ask questions. Some of those prompt lists can be pretty good. Most of them are not, by the way, so don’t waste your time. But when it comes to prompting, it’s like communicating any relationship that you have and No AI is not sentient, so we’re not really having a relationship, but we need to communicate with it. If I’m working with a coworker, you know, if you and I are working together, Jeff, and I come to you and ask you, let’s say you’re an expert at writing press releases, and I come to you and say, hey, I need a new press release, and I turn around and walk away and you go, hey, Jonathan, I got a couple questions, and I ignore you, even if you’re the best copywriter in the world and the best press release writer in the world, chances are,

You’re not going to write a press release that fits my needs and desires that I found good because I didn’t give you any relevant information. So we need to remember that with AI as well. And we need to give it relevant information. We need to ask it questions. And how we do that can make a tremendous difference in the responses we get.

Jeffro (09:50.797)
Yeah, and I actually had someone come to me not too long ago and hire me to help her create a custom GPT. She knew what she wanted. She knew how to do it. But for the life of her, she couldn’t get ChatGPT to do it the way that she wanted. But I was able to listen to her and say, OK, this is what I want. And I typed in the prompts. And then I got it to do what she wanted. this is a good example of why prompts are such valuable lead magnets, which is why they’re all out there, but also why

Jonathan Mast (10:03.177)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (10:15.682)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (10:16.751)
Prompting is such a useful skill that you really need to master if you’re going to take advantage of AI going forward.

Jonathan Mast (10:23.035)
Absolutely, yeah. And it’s really easy. It’s not like learning Spanish or learning another language. It is really easy to go ahead and do that. And that’s the benefit.

Jeffro (10:27.897)
No.

Jeffro (10:32.951)
Yeah, what are some of the other mistakes that people make when they’re using tools like ChatGPT?

Jonathan Mast (10:38.262)
I think one of the other biggest mistakes people make is they say, if this is AI, can do everything for me, right? So I can literally like press go and it will do every step in the process. So instead of helping me write an email, can it check my email? Can it read my email? Can it respond to my email? And can it deal with all the responses and can add the people into my CRM and then it can sell the appointment for me. And by the way, if we’re to do that, can it just do the appointment for me? And can it talk to the client? And the answer is not yet. It can do a lot of those things and individually.

But we can’t necessarily tie all of that together with one prompt. And that’s the second mistake people make. They assume that when we’re working with with chat GPT, and I’ll hold up my phone because I use it on my phone a lot, that what we’re really doing is we’re playing the slots. And they assume I’m looking for that perfect prompt, that one perfect thing I can put in. When in reality, just like if we’re working together, Jeff, we need to have a conversation. So I need to give it information. I need to ask it to ask me clarifying questions. Probably one of the most powerful thing you can do is say, ask me any questions you have when you’re done with a prompt. Because it knows the information you forgot to tell it and other than ask you.

Jeffro (11:43.842)
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a big piece of a lot of when I’m doing a custom GPT, I’ll often say like, don’t start writing. I forgot something, like you need at least these things, make sure to ask if that information isn’t given. And that’s an important step. Another thing to remember is that, like you said, is communication, right? It doesn’t have a personality, but it does have tendencies. And the more you interact with chat, GPT, or whichever one, you’re going to notice, Hey, you know, I asked you to write 1500 words and you said no problem. We only gave me like 800.

Jonathan Mast (11:58.083)
Very much so.

Jeffro (12:14.03)
Can you make it longer? Sure thing. 850. So sometimes you got to fight with it a little bit to get it to do exactly what you want.

Jonathan Mast (12:18.84)
Yes.

Jonathan Mast (12:25.324)
Yeah, no, so true. And there are some things that AI doesn’t do well. Counting words is one of them. It doesn’t do a good job. But ironically, if I needed to write a longer article and I break that up into, three parts and have it write the introduction and I have it write the main part and I have it write the outro, I might very well get my 1500 then because it’s going to be able to break that up and still be consistent about how it does all that.

Jeffro (12:44.269)
Yes.

Jeffro (12:49.826)
Yeah, and it’s interesting. The more you learn about AI, the more you’ll be better at prompting because you’ll understand how it works. So if you look at what a large language model is and what a GPT is, the Generative Predictive Text Model, it’s not actually thinking and writing original concepts. It’s just predicting what should come next based on the other words that I saw. these are numbers to it. It’s not words. And so it’s spitting them out in a way that is coherent to us. But yeah, it’s just interesting to know about that.

Jonathan Mast (13:00.802)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (13:06.872)
correct.

Jonathan Mast (13:10.862)
Yeah, it’s a good point.

Jonathan Mast (13:18.102)
No, it’s absolutely, it’s in zeros and ones. It’s why so many AI image tools can’t spell properly. Because they’re not looking at it as text, they’re looking at it as an image and it’s all zeros and ones. And so when you say, want it to say this, most of the tools out there today, at best, get it right 50 % of the time. And I’m probably being overly generous when it comes to spelling.

Jeffro (13:24.512)
Yeah.

Jonathan Mast (13:39.894)
your LLMs again, many times can’t create graphics because that’s not what they’re trained in. They’re trained on language and words and it’s important just to understand there are some unique tools like you mentioned earlier for different tasks. But again, we don’t need a hundred of them. We probably need a handful of three or four.

Jeffro (13:56.629)
Yeah. So a guy I follow Dan Martell, maybe you’ve heard of him, he’s an author, entrepreneur. Well, he says, you know, AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will. Do you agree with that?

Jonathan Mast (14:01.09)
I know Dan. Yep.

Jonathan Mast (14:09.268)
I’m not going say they will, but they likely will. You know, there’s a lot of people out there fear mongering about, what’s going to happen? Are they going to take all the jobs? I’ve done a lot of study of the history because I’m kind of a buff when it comes to that. And we’ve had a number of major, just massive changes in the way we look at technology over the years. One was when the internal combustion engine came up and everybody said the same things they’re saying now. my gosh, this is going to basically remove work. Nobody’s going to need to work. Nobody’s and what happened instead is yes, there were some people that were displaced by the internal combustion engine, but it created so many more jobs. As long as somebody was willing to be trained in it, there were ample jobs. The same thing happened when the PC came out, when the personal computer came out. They said, my goodness, we’re not going to need all of it. Has business changed? Yes, but there’s more jobs available. And the same thing’s going to happen with AI. Will there be some people who stick their head in the sand and they go, no, I’m not going to do it. Will they lose their job?

Probably not this year, but in the next couple of years, very likely they will. On the other hand, as Dan said, if you embrace it, then you’re going to be the one that’s going to excel and add value. here’s the key for, I don’t want everybody to understand, AI is not here to replace us. It’s here to amplify our skill and experience. And if you leverage it to amplify your skill and experience, you became more valuable to your customers.

Jeffro (15:22.924)
Yes.

Jonathan Mast (15:31.736)
to your employer, whoever it is that you’re working for, you just became much more valuable because you, it’s like if you’re a roofer and you want to nail everything by hand or you want to use a pneumatic nailer, the guy with the pneumatic nailer is going to do a better job and a whole lot faster.

Jeffro (15:48.033)
Yeah. And another thing that I really like about it is the fact that it gets you away from the blank page. You you always hear about writer’s block or starting from scratch feels so hard. There’s so much inertia you got to build up to start moving forward. But if you can just go to chat GPT and say, hey, here’s what I got to do. Can you give me a first draft? OK, now I have a draft. I can edit that. That gives me ideas. OK, I like this. I don’t like that. I’m going to tweak this. And now you’re off to the races and you just save so much time and mental energy just to get going. And so I think that’s a huge thing.

Jonathan Mast (15:53.995)
It does.

Jonathan Mast (16:04.408)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (16:18.282)
absolutely. It’s interesting. So many people talk, well, AI is going to take away all our creativity. We’re going to lose it all. I actually believe just the opposite is true because it actually gives us time to be more creative because we’re not focused on that first draft anymore. We’re now focused on the final draft. And I think that’s so much more effective.

Jeffro (16:36.012)
Yeah. All right. So here’s another question. Let’s say we start using AI in our businesses and starting to automate things. How do you balance the AI automation while keeping a human touch in your business?

Jonathan Mast (16:46.286)
Great question. Well, first accept that AI is not going to get everything right. It will make mistakes. And people go, why is it going to make mistakes, Jonathan? Well, it’s been trained on every book in every library. And if you’ve ever went to any library or bookstore and looked up a topic, there’s generally always more than one book on the topic. And not every one of those books agree. So AI has been trained on all of those books and all of the surrounding data behind those books and everything else. And nobody told it which one to believe.

So it will absolutely get confused on occasion. And that’s just the way it is. As far as AI overtaking the business and that, and it’s losing it, a big part of that is just understanding that we can’t or shouldn’t, we can, we shouldn’t copy and paste out of AI. Any more than I would blindly trust my assistant to write an important memo on a huge business deal without me looking at it. I shouldn’t do that with AI either. I may use my assistant and my team to help me prepare that.

But I’m still going to take a look at it because I want to make sure everything’s right before it goes out. You need to do that with AI as well.

Jeffro (17:49.717)
Yeah, totally agree. Now in your work with, I mean, you’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs. Can you give us some examples of some of the most effective ways that owners are using AI to help with their marketing and operations?

Jonathan Mast (18:03.358)
I think one of the most effective is in the area of marketing because let’s face it, as a service-based business, we’ve got things to do. And that’s generally not about marketing the business. We’ve got business to do. And AI is a tremendous fit for marketing. If you want to sit down and you want to better understand your audience and you want to better understand how you can position your services to appeal to the pain points and the things that you solve for your audience, AI can help you do that in minutes. And that can be so incredibly effective.

Great examples, I literally just had a call with somebody about two hours ago and we from scratch built the prompts and went through to create a marketing campaign, to create a landing pen campaign and ad copy. They happen to be in the health business and they help women that speak Spanish between 30 and 65 who have diabetes or pre-diabetes and they have a program they try to get them on to help them through that. And in about 45 minutes total we created an entire marketing campaign, including landing page copy, including ad copy, including recommendation for images, including email welcome sequences that were all put together by just explaining what we were trying to do. And it was probably in most cases better than any agency would have done. Not necessarily every agency, but it was, you if we go on a scale of one to 10, it was at a solid seven or eight. And in most cases, a solid seven or eight out of 10 is going to win because most people kick the can down the road and they’re settled with a three to a five. And so AI can help us do that. And operations, it’s great because we all know we need more SOPs. Every business out there has operating procedures that they need to create. And creating them, unless you’re an operational person, isn’t any fun. And let’s face it, a lot of us that run businesses are not operational people. Some are, but a lot of us aren’t. And so creating those SOPs is a royal pain in the tush.

Now I can literally go to ChatGPT and I can go, hey, I need to create a new SOP to do the following. Here’s an outline of what I’m thinking. Please put together a step-by-step comprehensive SOP for my team and it will have it done. And now like you said, I’ve got something to edit that’s probably really close in seconds. And then beyond that, what’s super cool, we just did this for a service-based client. They were a roofer. They have contract labor that goes out to actually do the roofs. And so they said, when my foreman goes out,

Jonathan Mast (20:27.16)
They’re not talking to the homeowner. They’re not making sure that everything’s in place before they get up on the roof. It’s causing us problems with satisfaction. We need to fix that. We helped them put together a simple thing using Chat Robe Tee to create an SOP that when the foreman arrives at the house, he’s supposed to go to the front door and he’s not not just once, but three times. Make sure if somebody’s home, if they’re not home, they’re supposed to leave this pre-printed flyer in the door reminding people that they’re going to be there. They’re going to be working. And then, by the way, the customer’s like, service provider, the roofers like that’s great, but he’s never going to do it. I said, so great chat, GBT now create me a checklist that we can give to the foreman that we now tell the foreman has to be submitted at the end of the job. And in minutes we had all of this done, edited and ready to go literally probably 15 minutes total. So when it comes to operations, all of those types of things that we normally go, great, I don’t have time to put this together. I don’t have time to make this SOP. I don’t have time because we, none of us have enough time AI gives us that time by allowing us to do something that may have taken hours in the past and do it in minutes now.

Jeffro (21:32.616)
Yeah. And like you said, getting to 80 % that fast is a huge time saver because the amount of time it takes to do it manually is just ridiculous. And sometimes it’s not worth spending all the extra time to get from 80 to 95 because it could be just as much time as it took from zero to 80. So just get there as quick as possible, take action. And now we’re ahead of everybody else just because of that.

Jonathan Mast (21:47.702)
Exactly.

absolutely.

Jonathan Mast (21:56.738)
Yeah, I find that success in life loves action and imperfect action beats perfect action. Imperfect action today beats perfect action tomorrow every single time.

Jeffro (22:08.873)
Yeah, it’s the ready fire aim principle. It’s better to start now and then course correct as you go, and then you’ll end up hitting your target.

Jonathan Mast (22:15.875)
Yes.

Jeffro (22:17.519)
Awesome. Well, Jonathan, thank you for joining me today. This is really cool. I know we could keep talking about this for a long time, but I want to wrap us up here in a minute. I do have a feeling we’re going to keep having more episodes like this where we’re talking about AI because it’s working its way into so many areas of our lives. So for those of you listening at home, you guys can reach out to Jonathan using the links in the show notes. He has a course on AI prompting that you should check out. So if that’s something you need help with, go check it out and he’ll make sure you know.

Jonathan Mast (22:31.768)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (22:43.943)
what to do and where to start and make the most of AI. So last question for you, Jonathan. What is an AI strategy that most businesses aren’t using yet but should be?

Jonathan Mast (22:54.126)
That’s a great question. I think it relates to brainstorming. I don’t think enough business owners are looking at AI as a consultant and saying, I’ve got an idea. I want to brainstorm about this. I need to figure out what to where to go with this and literally telling it to interview them and ask them questions to help guide them through a brainstorming process. AI is very good at that and it can add a tremendous amount of value. Let’s face it, being a business owner can be really lonely because sometimes we don’t have anybody to talk to. We don’t have anybody to run our ideas by. And AI can serve that function incredibly well and help you as an owner again, expedite that process from idea to execution or maybe from idea to, nope, that one’s not going to work. And that’s okay too.

Jeffro (23:11.517)
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Mast (23:40.46)
Because that allows us to move on to the next idea that much faster.

Jeffro (23:44.264)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s great advice. I totally agree. Well, thanks again, Jonathan, for being here today. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. And if this episode has inspired you to start using AI for the first time, tag me on LinkedIn to let me know. And that’s it for now. Take care and we’ll see you next time.