Your Weekly Battle Plan on Elevate Springfield

Summary

In this episode of Your Weekly Battle Plan on Elevate Springfield, Robert Ferriell discusses the importance of leveraging AI, specifically Claude, to enhance productivity and time management for small business owners. He outlines actionable strategies for setting up Claude, daily workflows to save time, and emphasizes the need for business owners to integrate AI into their operations effectively. The conversation highlights the significance of building a robust operating system that utilizes AI to streamline tasks and improve efficiency.

Takeaways

• The importance of local businesses in Springfield.
• Setting up AI tools like Claude can save time.
• Daily workflows can significantly enhance productivity.
• AI should be integrated into daily operations.
• Business owners need to adapt to new technologies.
• Effective time management is crucial for success.
• Using AI can help in decision-making processes.
• Creating a prompt library can improve AI interactions.
• AI can automate repetitive tasks for efficiency.
• Building a strong operating system is key to leveraging AI.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Elevate Springfield, where we will dive into strategies and stories that help you rise to your full potential. Each episode, we'll talk about how you can take intentional steps to elevate your life and your business while making a meaningful impact on those around you. Along the way, we're gonna bring in the change makers from our community that are already elevating. We'll bring the actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together we can elevate Springfield. Alright, let's go, Springfield. Time to 10X your day, 10X your life, 10X all of it. And that includes Springfield, y'all. You are listening to the Elevate Springfield Podcast. Robert Farrell here, certified 10x coach, speaker, and mentor, here to bring you actionable strategies. You bring the discipline and follow through. And together, we're gonna Elevate Springfield. You are listening to your weekly battle plan here on Elevate Springfield, where every Sunday we're gonna give you ways to control time, ways to create time, and some things that we encourage you to add to that battle plan. We're gonna get right to it after the break. Looking for expert tree care with hometown integrity, look no further than Sangamon Tree Service. They're your trusted local pros, delivering quality workmanship, exceptional customer service, and fair, honest pricing. Every time. Whether it's trimming, removal, or storm cleanup, their team brings professionalism and care to every job, big or small. Call the name your neighbor's trust, Sangman Tree Service, or visit them today at SangmanTreeService.com. Sangaman Tree Service, rooted in quality, built on trust. And we are back kicking off another great week on Elevate Springfield. Quick preview of the week. On Monday, we've got a bit of a combo show for you. On Thursday, I was over at Mascow University. You know Jeff Delman, friend of the show, regular contributor. They had their event over at Mascow, where they had a number of their reps in. So what we did was we spoke with a lot of the folks there about why it's important to do business with local distributors. So Jeff actually talked with a number of these folks. So he's going to be the one asking those questions. That's going to be the back half of the Monday show. But before that, I'm really excited. Hey, you guys know a couple of months ago we hit that one-year mark with Elevate Springfield, and we played some of the old clips from the show, but I wanted to take it one step further. So what I did is I went back and I listened to all the episodes again from the first year, went back through the transcripts, and I thought it would be fun to write a book based on the first year of Elevate Springfield, getting some of these actionable strategies directly from local folks. So been doing that over the past few months, just about done with it. And we're going to be releasing it here this summer. And we're going to start a pre-sale here real soon. So tomorrow on the Monday episode, I'm going to read a brief portion of that, real probably just the foreword, get you guys a little taste of what is going to happen in that book. And it's another way for you to learn from the folks in Springfield and the support the work of Elevate Springfield. Then on Tuesday, of course, Ellie's going to be back for our next gin segment on Wednesday for Communities Grow Together. We've got Brandy Stabler in from Compass for Kids. We've talked about Compass a number of times on the show, but we hadn't had them actually in to talk about it. So Brandy's going to come in and talk about all that they do and hey, maybe how you can support and help out that organization. Then on Thursday, we're going to have Dennis Bringett from Ace Sign Company and Faux Glass. As you guys know, we've had Todd Bringett on the show before. Dennis is Todd's father, and he was, of course, in Ace before. And he just has a really good perspective on the history in Springfield and businesses around. So I'm really looking forward to sharing that interview with you guys. Then on Friday for our wellness upgrade, Dr. Kelly Newman is going to be back in. You've seen her a number of times before. We're bringing her back in for this Friday's episode. And then, of course, Saturday, Separation Saturdays, y'all. And if you haven't listened to yesterday's Separation Saturday, make sure you check that out. Get that training. Separate yourself from everyone else. A couple of events going on this week. The chamber does have a couple of events. That's the Springfield Chamber. They have their state of Greater Springfield on Tuesday. That's a luncheon that they have every year. Then on Thursday, hey, head on over to Bailey Family Insurance. They have their ribbon cutting. You've seen Mark and Christine Bailey on the show before. They were on last year. They've got their new facility on the west side of town. So go check them out as well. So it is your weekly battle plan. So we're talking all about time, right? Last week we talked about how to control time in your business utilizing AI. We talked about the 90-minute weekly reset, the four buckets of work, the leverage points where AI can buy you back a ton of time. If you missed that episode, pause this episode today and go back and listen to that one first. Today we are doing a continuation of that. We're going to get a little more specific. We're going to open up that computer and show you exactly how to do some of that within one of the tools. And specifically, we're going to use Claude today. That's the AI assistant that I've been using a lot lately and found that it is really great for a number of tasks, and it can be a really great asset for small business owners. So I'm going to give you the setup, the prompts, the workflows, and talk a little bit about a few things that just launched last week through Claude that could change the game for small business owners specifically. So let's start with the setup. And this is where a lot of people skip this, and it only takes a few minutes, and it is the foundation because before you do anything fancy with AI, you have to set up the foundation. A lot of people get mediocre results and quit because they skipped that quick 10 minutes, that foundation that makes everything afterward 10 times better. So here's the foundation for Claude specifically. Three steps, take about 10 minutes, do this once. So step one, turn on memory. In Claude, go to settings, then capabilities, and turn on memory. What this does is give Claude a running profile of you and your business across every conversation. Without it, you are starting from scratch every single time. With it, Claude actually learns your voice, your customers, your offers, your patterns, and this part is not extra, and it just takes 10 seconds. And most owners never do it. So pop in there and turn on that memory. Step two, create your first project. In Claude, click New Project. Projects are walled-off workspaces within their own memory and their own files. So this is where most of your business work should live. You can create one called My Business and upload three things into it: your most recent revenue numbers, a one-page description of your business, and three pieces of writing in your voice. This could be a past email, a blog post, anything in your voice. This gives Claude the raw material to actually sound like you and think about your business. Step three write a five-line instruction for the project. Inside the project, there's a field for custom instructions. So five lines. Tell Claude who you are, who your customers are, what you sell, your tone, and what you want it to default to. So this could be an example that you can adapt to your business. So you could do this prompt. I run a blank type of business in Springfield, Illinois. My customers are blank, who are they? We sell. What? What do you sell? And our average customer is worth blank amount of dollars. My communication style is direct, warm, and confident, no fluff, no jargon. Default to giving me practical business owner level answers, not theory. When you draft anything, ask me one clarifying question first if it would meaningfully improve the output. That five-line setup is the difference between Claude being a search engine and Claude beginning to be a team member. So it takes 10 minutes, do that setup. Rewind this, listen to that again, get y'all set up on Claude. And if you're using a different AI, a different AI agent or different AI platform, a lot of them have similar ways to do this. You just got to figure out how to do it in your particular one. This one just happens to be within Claude because that's the one I'm using the most at the moment. So we talked last week about the 90-minute reset. So let's actually run the 90-minute weekly reset I gave you last episode, but this time with the exact prompts to use in Claude. So if you got Claude, open it up, open a new chat inside your My Business project, and here we go. So step one, we talked about the brain dump last week, where you take that time to just put it all down, type or talk for 10 minutes, dump every concern, opportunity, and loose thread. When you're done, send this prompt. Here's the prompt that you'll give it. Read everything I just dumped, group it into themes. For each theme, tell me one, what is urgent and real. Two, what is important but not urgent. Step three, what is noise, I should stop thinking about. Be honest, if I am avoiding something, name it. And that last line, if I am avoiding something, name it, is kind of the secret sauce. Step two, your calendar audit. Remember this from last week. Copy your past week's calendar, meetings, time blocks, everything. Paste it in, then send this. Here's your prompt. Here's my calendar from last week. Tag every block as revenue, strategic, operational, or garbage. Give me the percentage breakdown, then tell me the three highest leverage changes I could make this week to shift the mix. Read the percentage breakdown out loud to yourself. If revenue plus strategic is less than 30%, you found a problem. Next up, step three, if you remember the week build, now it's time to build your next week. So here's your prompt. Based on my brain dump and calendar audit, build me a draft schedule for next week. My top revenue priority is blank. My top strategic priority is blank. I work best between, put your hours in, block out time for both priorities first, then schedule the rest. Then for each priority, draft the first version of the actual deliverable. So I am editing on Monday, not creating. That last sentence does a thing most owners do not realize is possible. You are telling Claude not to just plan the week, but to actually start the work. The first draft of the sales email, the first draft of the offer, the outline of the meeting. When Monday hits, you're not staring at that blank page like we talked about. You're editing. And remember, editing is like 10 times faster than creating every single time. And then step four of that 90-minute reset is the delegation pass. So here's your prompt. Look at this finalized week. For every task on it, tell me, could this be handled by a virtual assistant, a junior employee, an automation, or another AI workflow? For each one you flag, draft the handoff message I would send to that person or describe the workflow that would replace it. 90 minutes, four prompts. That's your weekly reset, and that's how to do it within Claude. Save those four prompts somewhere, reuse them every Sunday, quick and easy. They get better the longer you use them because Claude's memory, that thing we turned on at the beginning, keeps learning your business. So let's talk about some daily workflows that will save you more time, allow you to control more time. So some of the day-to-day. Each one of these could save you somewhere between 30 minutes and two hours a day, depending on your business. So workflow number one, we'll call it the email triage. Every morning, copy the subject lines and senders of your inbox and send this prompt. Here's my inbox this morning, sorted into needs my reply personally, can be replied to with a template, can be archived, and is a fire I need to address before noon. For each one that needs my reply, draft a two-sentence response in my voice that I can edit. Owners are spending 45 minutes a day on email. If you can cut that to 15 pretty easily with this, that's a huge savings for you for over the course of a week, a month, a year. Workflow two, the meeting compressor. After any meeting, paste the transcript. Some of these will do this automatically. I do, these are great. I use these a lot. So after the meeting, paste the transcript into Claude. And here's the prompt. Here is a meeting transcript. Give me one, a three-sentence summary, two, every decision made, three, every action item with owner and due date. Four, any open questions that did not get resolved, then draft the follow-up email I should send to the attendees. You just turned a 40-minute meeting into a four-minute review, and that email goes out the same day, and your team thinks you are on top of everything. Because you are. Using AI to help you control time and become more efficient. Workflow three, the content engine. We talked a little bit about this being one of those, all of these really, about being those places that you can use AI to really control time. So one idea, one afternoon, a week of content. Here's your prompt. Here's one idea I want to communicate. Put that idea in there. Turn it into one, one short form post for LinkedIn in my voice, two, three social captions for Instagram, three, the outline of a 500-word blog post, or the subject line and first paragraph of an email to my list. Keep the same core message, but adapt the format and tone for each platform. That's your marketing department in one prompt. Edit, post, send that stuff. So those are three ways, again, that you can leverage AI to help you control time email, meetings, content. Now with Claude specifically, just uh this past week, actually, uh they released a product called Claude for Small Business. So it's not, as you know, if you're using AI just for like a chat window, just like a Google, it's not doing you any good. But what this does more now is it allows you to connect directly with tools you're already using, things like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Stripe Square, et cetera, right? And what it comes with, ready-to-run workflows for small businesses built around the exact tasks you keep complaining about. Planning payroll, chasing invoices, reconciling books, leads, drafting marketing campaigns, onboarding employees. Think about what that means for a second. You probably had a few different software subscriptions sitting half used for a couple of years because you didn't have the time to actually run the thing. Now you have an AI that actually knows how to use them and can do the work inside the tool. And you just approve before anything sends, posts, or pays. This is the part of AI that small business owners have really been waiting for, not chat action inside the systems you already run. So if you're using Claude, check out some of those connectors to all those different software pieces that you're probably already using. And when you start using it like that, you're using it more as the operator. So how do you talk to Claude like an operator? I give you four habits that separate the owners who get massive value from Claude from the ones who say it's overhyped. Habit number one, give it the role first. Do not just ask a question, tell Claude what the role what role to take. Say, act as my CFO and review these numbers. Act as a copywriter who specializes in service businesses. Act as a friend who runs a competing business and is being honest with me. The role changes the answer every time. Habit number two, always tell it the goal. Don't say write me an email. Instead, write me an email whose goal is to get the prospect on a 15-minute call this week. The goal changes the structure. Without it, Claude is really just guessing. Habit number three, push back always. First draft is almost never the right one. Say shorter, more direct, in my voice, give me three more options that are bolder. What would you change if our customer is a skeptic, not a believer? The owners getting the most output from Claude are having conversations, not just simple question-answer transactions. Your habit number four, save your best prompts. Anything you ran in though in this episode that you've been doing along with me here, hopefully, the four reset prompts, the three daily workflows, save them, keep them in a dock, paste them in when you need them. Over time, you are building your own custom playbook that fits your business exactly. That is an asset. Owners who treat prompts as throwaways start from scratch every single time. Owners who treat them as a library compound their leverage. So those four habits again. Give it the roll first, always tell it the goal, push back, always, and number four, save your best prompts. Finally, for today, let's zoom out for a second here. The bigger point with AI. The owners who win in the next five years are not going to be the ones with the biggest teams necessarily. They're not going to be the ones with the most capital necessarily. They're going to be the ones who built the tightest operating system between themselves and their tools. And that is what Claude actually is and some other AI entities are. It's not a chat bot, it's an operating layer. It is the thing that sits between you and your inbox, your calendar, your team, your numbers, your customers, and absorbs that work that does not require your judgment. Your judgment is the only thing you cannot delegate. Most everything else you can. So the point here is stop treating AI like a novelty. Stop operating it once a month to ask it something random. Make it part of the operating system of your business. Run it every day, train it on your voice, build the prompt library, connect it to your tools, let it do the work. Because while you're deciding whether this is for real, somebody else with a smaller business and a hungrier mindset is already three months ahead of you. They're not smarter, they're not better, they just started. So it's time for you to get started. Here's the challenge for the week. A couple of things. One, do the 10-minute setup. Memory on, project created, five-line instruction written. Ten minutes, that's it. That's specifically in Claude, but you has that's in others as well. Two, run the Sunday reset using the four prompts I gave you brain dump, calendar audit, week build, delegation pass. That's the whole assignment. Ten minutes once, and then 90 minutes each week. And next week, find out how much this thing, how much time this thing is gonna save you. Tools themselves cannot change businesses. Operators do. Be the operator who actually uses the tool properly and gets the most out of it. Hope that helps. We'll be back after the break. Hey, Springfield, when it comes to reliable, high quality roughing, you don't want to leave things to chance. That's why you should reach out to Acosta Angeli Ruffing. Your local roofing experts serving Springfield and surrounding communities from quick dependable repairs to full replacement, from residential to commercial, they are your trusted pros. Call them today at 217-993-2748 or visit their website to book your free quote and inspection. Don't wait. A little leak now could lead to major damage later. Trust the local experts, protect your home, and get peace of mind with Acosta Angeli Roofing. Well, thank you for joining us today, everybody. Appreciate you making us a part of your day. Hey, don't forget while you're out on social, check ours out. You can check my personal one out at RobertFarrell at everywhere. Check out those Elevate Springfield pages, those big dog business coaching pages as well. Check us out over on YouTube. Give us a subscribe, give us a like or a follow on any of those channels. We would certainly appreciate it. So hey, take what you learned today. You bring the discipline and follow through and together. That's right, y'all. We're gonna elevate Springfield. Be great.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

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