The Role AI Should Play in Strategic Action Planning: Show Notes & Transcript

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re chatting the role of AI in strategic action planning. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

• Episode Summary & Player
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The Role AI Should Play in Strategic Action Planning

We just launched our new book! You can grab The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things on Amazon or at ForthRight-People.com

It seems like everyone is talking about the role AI should play in just about everything. You guessed it! Strategic action planning is no exception. You can prompt your favorite large language model aka LLM – ours is ChatGPT – to do some incredibly helpful things for your strategic action planning. Things like asking it to run a competitive analysis for your business, asking it to run industry trends, and asking it to give an ideal customer profile aka ICP. As with anything, there are some watchouts. Enjoy this special look at Anne’s Tint World franchise in Cincinnati-Newtown on Round Bottom Rd. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• AI is a tool and “junk in is junk out”
• Speed of getting aggregated trend data that would have taken months to compile manually
• Test and learn approach recommended to refine positioning and messaging
• Watch out! Don’t fall in love with the tool and put analysis on autopilot
• Leveraging conversational nature of AI to build upon previous outputs

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

• The Role AI Should Play in Strategic Action Planning
  • [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
  • [00:29] The role AI should play in strategic action planning
  • [00:55] AI analysis can help inform strategic decisions without months of expensive manual research
  • [01:45] AI is a tool and “junk in is junk out”
  • [02:12] Using Tint World car styling franchise as an example business
  • [02:41] Prompt 1: Competitive analysis of tinting companies competing with Tent World Cincinnati Newtown
  • [04:08] Key insights returned: positioning statement, competitive advantages, weaknesses, key competitors, strategic recommendations
  • [05:36] AI suggests potential positioning as premium, professional, lifestyle brand
  • [06:34] Test and learn approach recommended to refine positioning and messaging
  • [08:25] Importance of combining AI insights with human knowledge and experience
  • [09:19] AI accelerates gathering competitive intel that used to take manual research
  • [10:16] AI surfaces insights to inform differentiation and right to win in the market
  • [11:39] Prompt 2: Industry trends for the next 3-5 years in the vehicle tinting and styling business
  • [12:59] Key trends returned: ceramic/infrared films become default, smart tint coming, local SEO as important as product quality, personalization demand grows
  • [14:22] Trends highlight where to focus strategically to capture opportunities and mitigate threats
  • [16:15] Speed of getting aggregated trend data that would have taken months to compile manually
  • [17:37] Trends inform talent needs and development to deliver on strategic priorities
  • [19:06] Hiring for aptitude over pure skills to align talent with business direction
  • [20:35] Understanding employees’ motivations and “currency” to attract and retain the right people
  • [22:01] Prompt 3: Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) considering everything shared so far
  • [23:29] Key ICP returned: The pride of ownership vehicle upgrader who wants looks, comfort, protection and personal style, quality-conscious and will pay for trusted expertise
  • [25:54] Matching selling approach and experience to target customer’s emotional drivers
  • [27:17] Leveraging conversational nature of AI to build upon previous outputs
  • [28:11] Extracting insights on perceptions, motivations and decision-making of ideal customers
  • [30:32] Potential to target underserved segments like women based on owning a differentiated position
  • [31:26] Watch out 1: Don’t fall in love with the tool and put analysis on autopilot – remember to apply human judgment
  • [32:22] Watch out 2: Beware of confirmation bias and thinking AI is just telling you what you already know
  • [33:36] AI augments but doesn’t replace need for experienced outside perspective to spot patterns and opportunities
  • [35:03] Be curious and use AI to go deeper, explore further, and uncover ugly truths, not just confirm existing views
  • [36:24] AI is great at aggregating the past but can’t predict the future so human insight is needed to connect dots and chart new directions
  • The book The Power of Your Personal Brand is available on Amazon with a companion workbook
  • Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
  • Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Prepare for honest, direct, and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business.  Referred to by some listeners as an “MBA in podcast form,” this show is dense with personal stories, proven strategies contextualized by practical steps, and tools to put what you learn into action now.

Your hosts Anne Candido and April Martini are Co-Founders of ForthRight People, a leadership performance company focused on developing leaders from the inside out. They are also Authors of the book: The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things. They thrive on engagement from listeners and welcome any show topics!  So, reach out and connect!

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic. 

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it.

00:29
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast. am Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to talk about the role AI should play in strategic action planning. Now it seems like everyone is talking about the role AI should play in just about everything, right? Well, honestly, strategic action planning is no exception. And because I know how much people love strategic action planning, she says, facetiously,

00:55
Why not make it more productive and set you up for even more success? Yes, and this is especially important for those of you looking to pivot or expand and grow. This should never ever be done in a vacuum, but many don’t want to take the time or make the investment into additional analysis that could help inform strategic decisions. And believe me, we do get that. They can be costly and they can honestly take months to return.

01:22
And then there’s the time to digest the 100 page deck that comes back. So many times we will rely on our assumptions or our beliefs. But with these large language models at the tip of our fingers, there really is no longer any excuse. Yes. But hear me when I say that this, like any large language model, is a tool just like any other tool.

01:45
which means junk in is junk out. So mind the watch out, we’ll talk about it at the end and we’ll probably highlight some of those along the way too. Now with that, let’s jump into the role AI should play in strategic action planning. Now taking a little bit of a different direction on this, cause this is going to be more of a highly tactical episode. So you may be ready, might want to be ready to take some notes or you might want to go back and re-listen. So I’m going to use my franchise 10 world.

02:12
The one located in Newtown on round bottom, just everybody knows which tent world I’m talking about because there is a plug. Yep. So I’m going to use that as a proxy so I can talk details, but just listen to what I’m saying and just note that the insights, what’s coming back and how I use it to apply to my business. And then you should be able to see how you might be able to do the same thing, put in the similar prompts and then applying to your business. Now, my large language model of choice is

02:41
chat GPT just so you guys know, but there’s many out there and there’s many different ones that you can use for many different purposes. That’s just the one that I used for this exercise and it’s usually my go-to one for a lot of these exercises. So let’s jump in. Get ready. goes okay. Ready? All right. The first thing I asked chat GPT to do is I asked it to run a competitive analysis for my business. So my exact prompt I used was

03:10
Can you give me a competitive analysis of tinting companies are competing with Tint World Cincinnati Newtown? And maybe I should just say, just as a reminder that a Tint World is a car stylizing franchise. So we do do tinting as a primary, but we also do other car stylizing services like 12 volts. So think about your stereos, your lights, your remote starts. We also do ceramic coatings and detailing, paint protection films.

03:39
So we do just about everything that’s needed to up style your vehicle. And we also do residential commercial tent. That was not meant to be an ad that was meant to be context, but now you Okay. I don’t know about that, but okay. I mean, if I can hit, you know, kill two birds with one stone, then I’m going to it. All right. So again, the prompt I use is, you give me a competitive analysis of tinting companies that are competing with Tint World, Cincinnati, Newtown? And tinting being like 70 % of our businesses, that was where I chose to hone in.

04:08
So what came back was a series of really interesting pieces of information. So I got a positioning statement. I also got competitive advantages, weaknesses, a categorical list of my key competitors, and then insights and recommendations. So the first few are kind of self-explanatory. So I thought maybe I would go through a little bit of the strategic insights because this is where I honed in because I’m looking for ways of differentiating my business.

04:38
in order to compete in my industry and in my location, right? So I’m looking for angles for marketing, looking for angles for promotion, for basic ads. So this is what it gave me, right? So it told me that Tent World’s real competition is in price, it’s perception. So it tells me that premium shops went on best installer narrative and locals when I trust this guy narrative. And so my opportunity sits in the middle unless clearly differentiated.

05:08
And we all know the middle is kind of like E, kind of like a role to be there. You don’t want to be in the middle, right? So I need to push myself one way or the other. Now, the other thing it told me is that the market is crowded, but fragmented. So there’s dozens of smaller shops and there’s no single dominant local brand. So I have an opportunity to own a category position. Also told me that there’s clear white space that I could dominate if I lean into most complete solution, the auto home and business.

05:36
professional grade and lifestyle brand, or upgrading your entire life, not just your car. And then it gave me the positioning opportunity of the only place that turned your vehicle and lifestyle into a statement. Now, am I gonna go use those things necessarily verbatim? Maybe, maybe not. And April is gonna give us some recommendations of how she would use this information to take next steps. But what it does is it starts to get in my mind about, okay, how am I gonna sit?

06:06
How am I gonna differentiate? How do I want to show up and how do I wanna position myself in order to win? So April, what would you do with this? Yeah, so I think the first thing that comes to mind is just to remember that this is a really strong jumping off point. So when I first sent this over, I started thinking about how long this type of work used to take us, right? Because you’d have to do it manually. Now you have the aggregate of the information that’s out there.

06:34
right at your fingertips. think the other thing you said, is you may or may not want to take verbatim what’s here. And we know that one of the watch outs, which I know we’re going to do overall ones at the end, but one of the watch outs with this is just to make sure that you’re not having information out there that sounds just like everybody else, right, is one of the things that can happen. So what we echo, and I’m sure this is no surprise, is to test and learn through these insights that we now have, or these learnings that we now have.

07:02
and do things like different social campaigns and then see what resonates and then, you know, optimizes you need to go through or test out or match some of the campaigns with deals or offerings and then see what pops or what kind of business you get as a result of that or referrals or leads or whatever that looks like. All of these types of things to put out into the marketplace quickly and then learn as you go in order to see.

07:29
based on that initial information, where are you actually landing and where are you winning? Or do you need to make changes to, like Anne said, figure out where you sit in this best installer or trust this guy narrative and just kind of go through to make sure that you are elevating based on the learnings and then optimizing the tactical things you’re putting out there to increase the business. Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. And it actually gave me some messaging angles

07:59
that they considered our messaging angel angles to win like more than 10 complete vehicle transformation where performance meets personalization, your car, your brand fully expressed. Again, these are really easy things for me just to plug into social. And guess what you guys chat GBT if you pay for the one version up from free, we’ll do the images for you and you can put in prompts and you can get back images and you can put this stuff out very, very quickly.

08:25
even put a little money behind it to boost it to get a little bit more visibility. And you can kind of see what people start reacting to because the best way of actually understanding of things are going to work is to put them into practice, right? Is to put them out there and see, well, gosh, people seem to reacting to this one either through likes or engagement or calls. Like, ultimately, that’s what I want. I want them to call the store, right? Or and they come in and I’ve had people come in and say, hey, I saw your social posts and that’s what got me in here.

08:52
So you start to kind of create an ecosystem that allows you to kind of see, is this messaging working? You don’t have to sit there and wonder, hey, what do I need to put out there in order to position myself to win here? Because the data starts giving you that feedback, right? Yeah, or starting from nothing, right? Like I was saying before, like, I remember having to do these types of analyses and it’d be like, oh, and I have to collect all the data, where am I gonna start, right? And it’s like, well, we’re giving you the starting point, but then like you just said,

09:19
Then you have on the other side, the metrics of the engagement of what’s happening in order to make it even better from there and continue to iterate and do that to get closer and closer to ultimate target, most sales, whatever it is you’re looking to do. Yeah, 1000%. And even after it gave me all of this, it tells me I can map exact local SEO competitors through Google rankings. I can build positioning statement for 10 world, or I can create ad messaging that beats these competitors directly.

09:46
Yes, please. Right. So it just continues to be able to feed you the next step along the way in order to give you like April set a place to start. But it also gives you some interesting insights on where you want to hone in, like what are the areas that you think you have a particular right to win based on your understanding of your competition, based on your understanding of the industry. Right. And so it starts to just kind of percolate that thought process that allowed you to do some insight mining, which is critical in order to

10:16
drive any kind of differentiation. Yeah. I also just one last thing to say here is you also do have to do the human piece that you just said. And yes, you own a tint world, but you’ve done branding and marketing for years and years. Exactly. You know, you said, garbage in garbage out at the beginning. It’s like, you know what good should look like. So then you’re able to be like, OK, well, that is too generic, for example, or that sounds

10:45
like chat GBT or you know, those types of things where it’s like, it’s so ingrained in you versus sometimes where we see people do this stuff without any sort of sense of how these things work. That’s just my point. No, I think that’s a really good point. And if you’re sitting there going, well, I don’t have 20 years of experience. How will I know? You put it into practice and you see if people react to it or not. Yeah. Right. That’s how you know. And then you know, if you need to go a little bit more detailed, you know, if you put garbage in and then you

11:13
you refine or you know if you hit it because you’re starting to get some traction. So you have to start to train yourself too. Like you are a large language model for how, what garbage in and garbage out and what good stuff in and good stuff out actually looks like, right? Yes. Yep. All right. So the next thing I asked it to do was run an industry trends search. So specifically the prompt I used are

11:39
What are the industry tends for the next three to five years? And since it already, I’d already trained it that I was talking about tent world. It already knew what I was talking about, right? So this is what it came back with. So it says, I’m just going to read you some of these things. Some of these things you guys are like, I don’t even know what that means. And that’s okay. I’m just trying to give you some understanding of the content that comes back. So it told me ceramic and infrared heat rejection films become the default upsell, which is

12:07
interesting and I’ll tell you why in just a second. Paper protection film plus 10 plus ceramic coating bundles are growing. Residential commercial tent become bigger opportunities. And mind you guys, I’m giving you the headlines. It gives you details underneath these and positioning opportunities and everything that I’m saying here. So I’ve just given you kind of the top lines. Um, it told me smart adaptive tent is coming, but not mainstream yet. That caught my attention.

12:35
Local SEO and reviews become as important as product quality that I know. I was gonna say that’s not a surprise. And I’ll tell you, but what’s interesting about that in a second, price pressure increases for mobile and DIY options and customers want personalization. So you might be, if you were putting yourself in my seat, you might be like, I knew like a lot of these.

12:59
And traditionally we do know a lot of these, what we don’t generally do is put them all together, look at them in a complete total list and be like, okay, what strategic choices then am I making in order to go and have a right to win in this industry and think about what my growth is going to look like over the next several years with either industry headwinds or industry tailwinds, right? I’ll just give you a little bit of kind of how I thought through this list when I saw it.

13:26
So when it told me the ceramic and infrared heat rejection films become the default upsell, that is something that I already had recognized. And so actually our price point, we actually talk about from a tenting standpoint is one of the higher price point items. And then we go down if we need to, or we go up from there if we need to. Traditionally, and hopefully nobody from tent world listens to this, because I’m going to call out corporate a little bit. I mean, traditionally they want us to start at the lowest one.

13:53
And I’m going to tell you why in the next one, why that didn’t work for us. But you know, you sometimes you have to fight some of your traditional industry knowledge or how things have always been done in order to be like, Hmm, well, what is really right from my store? And so the fact that it told me that it may be reaffirming something I already suspected that I need to dig in deeper and really understand how I’m going to use that as a competitive advantage. The other thing that we kind of laughed about and chuckled about with like the Google reviews.

14:22
I mean, it is really hard to consistently ask for Google reviews, right? And that is something that I have found, especially if you have a normal retail location like me, it is a deal maker. All right. I’ve had people, customers come in and say, I chose your store because you have a 4.9 rating. All right. And so, and the more Google reviews I get, the more Google rewards me and my prioritization of the search. So when somebody’s searching,

14:51
If I have more Google reviews, puts me at the higher level of search. It wasn’t something that was top of mind initially for me because I was dealing with a bunch of other things, but it’s a very tactical thing that once I started focusing on started paying back dividends. So again, it’s reaffirming something that I kind of knew, but it didn’t put it higher on my prioritization because I was like, this is really low hanging fruit that I’m not paying enough attention to. So this is where you start to kind of like take these things in and you start to think about what am I doing now?

15:20
What I need, you know, it’s what I’m doing, continuing to work or do I need to switch that? And what do I need to plan for in the future? And again, like I had made a note about the smart adaptive tent is coming, but not mainstream yet. This is a really big opportunity that if I really want to differentiate that I could dig in now, become an expert at that and basically own it before anybody else even thinks about it. And it was something that was kind of slightly on my radar and something I kind of heard about. But the fact now that

15:49
you know, chat GBT is like, it’s in that model, which now remember this model came out or is based on learnings that were about a year ago or six months ago. So it’s already known this for a year or six months. So I’m already behind the eight ball. So these are the ways that you start to think about then though, where your strategic focus is based on what is actually out in the industry and what are people talking about?

16:15
I do like this because again, I was talking before about having to go and collect all the data and you just said it’s already known this for six months to a year, right? The fact that this is right here at your fingertips. And then I think it becomes the work of you or whoever’s doing the work to make those strategic decisions for the business in order to make your play, right? So if you decided that you wanted to be cutting edge quote unquote, then the smart adaptive tint

16:42
maybe the place that you put all your eggs because you’re like, I’m going to stay ahead of the curve and I’m going to be the leader in the marketplace. And that’s what I’m going to continue to do, which then to the conversation we were having in the previous point, then you would focus on what’s coming next every time you did this, right? To try to make sure that you were setting yourself up for success to continue that leading edge. Or if it’s a quality thing, I want to be the best at fill in the blank. You have some indicators of what those things would look like. And I’m not going to try to say all the words like Yen does because I’m not in the business. So we’ll just leave it at that.

17:11
But I think the other thing that struck me, especially as you were talking about SEO and reviews and quality and all of those things is making sure that you have the right people in the seats to uphold the quality of what you’re doing. And we all know that this is where I love to live anyway. And as far as AI goes, I do like it as a tool, but I’m the first one to always remind people that we still need to be people. So there’s my plug for that for today. But I know just…

17:37
from knowing you and knowing the business, and I know others have these challenges too, is getting quality people in the seats and then getting them to stay and learn these new things and be really good at the work so that you know that you have people you can rely on to execute so that those reviews and all of those things continue to come in positive in order to fuel that machine for you so that you’re having the score that works for you versus against you. Yeah, I think that’s a really important point because not only does it give me

18:07
context for what services I want to continue to focus on to push that differentiation piece and that positioning piece. But it also does give me a line of sight into the kind of people that I’m going to need and whether or not I have gaps there or whether or not I have somebody that I can transition or position to take ownership there. And if I need to send people out to training, I need whatever I need to do in order to become a better

18:36
practitioner of those different areas. And so I think that’s really critically important to think about because sometimes where we put in people in some very traditional roles, we don’t really think about the context for how we want them to grow within that role or what else we might need them to do within that roles. And this is where, you know, we talk about all the time, aptitude versus skill, right, April. And I just actually went through this where I just hired somebody else. I’m not going into a lot of details, but I had to get rid of

19:06
Um, one of my employees who was my general manager and I hired somebody who was actually a little bit younger, a little bit more, um, in the mainstream of understanding how to use social, how to use relationships in order to be able to fully leverage what we’re trying to do here based on his experience. And then also based on what he just currently practices himself. Right. And so, you know, when you start to kind of put those pieces together, you start looking for people who have those aptitudes.

19:36
rather than just the skills for which I might be hiring like, know, a tech to do tint or a person who sits at the store and, you know, answers phone calls and does administrative tasks and scheduling and stuff. You’re looking for people now in the context of where I want to grow. Now that I’m clear about that, I’m looking for people who might be able to take on some of these roles that I’m seeing out three to five years. Yeah. Well, and I think the other piece that comes to mind is

20:06
figuring out your employees currency too, so that you know what drives them and what they’re looking for out of the experience as well. So that, you know, mean, there’s always money as an actual currency, but then like you said, there’s, you know, I’m a hungry go-getter and I wanna learn new things or I wanna be really good at this craft. And so I always wanna know the latest technologies and how to do those in order to execute flawlessly. Like whatever those things are for people, going back to my point about hiring right people and then being able to keep them and making sure that that,

20:35
balance is always known and recognized so that they feel like they’re appreciated and growing themselves in addition to helping you grow the business. Right. And I just want to make a very, very clear point that I did not get rid of my GM because of this. was a totally different circumstances because I didn’t want us to get hate mail that I you brought in the young whippersnapper because they were because they were quote unquote old or whatnot. just

21:03
I don’t want that to be what everybody heard from that, but just more to April’s point of listening more for the psychographic nature, the aptitude nature, and the current reality of those people and seeing that as a opportunity for building your business outside of just what skills or experiences they may have. In the other part of this, it brought back, and this is important as I lead into the next

21:30
thing that I asked chat GPT to do for me is it told me that tinting is increasingly part of a broader vehicle identity styling purchase and that benefits tint well because it can position itself around full vehicle transformation, not just tint. And it also told me the opportunity is to own the premium but accessible space, protection, comfort and personalization in one place, which becomes very interesting because the next thing I asked them, I asked chat GPT to do was to give me a profile from my ideal customer. All right, so my ICP.

22:01
And the exact prompt I gave it was, me an ICP from my business considering everything you have given me. So again, it’s learning from everything that we, you know, all the questions, all the prompts we just went through and it’s now giving me an ICP. Now what it told me was my ICP, the title that the pride of ownership vehicle, up grader, right? Your best customer is someone who sees their vehicles more than just transportation. They want it to look better, feel better, stay protected and reflect their personal style.

22:29
And then it gave me some demographics of who that person is, some areas that I’m probably going to want to target, types of vehicles I might want to target, which is always very interesting because that then also leads into what kind of vehicles I’m going to have on my ads, on my positioning, what kind of promos do I might want to do around certain vehicles? What kind of engagements like car clubs and those sorts of things do I want to be able to connect with in order to be able to bring in more of these vehicles? And so just to be able to get different ways into this customer.

22:59
And it also said that the mindset of this customer was quality conscious, practical, but image aware. And if they’re willing to pay more when they trust the expertise and see the value. Now my shop sits in a pretty affluent area of Cincinnati, right? I learned very, very quickly. Again, this was contrary to what I was told through the franchise. I was not going to win on price. I just wasn’t. And so for somebody to call and be price shopping, which a lot of people do,

23:29
And I just gave them the basic tint that we have and the lowest price that we have 85 % of the time. I was never going to hear from them again because I was still not cheaper than the other local shops that were have been doing it for a very long time. And that’s what they kind of do. Right. So I had to reposition my selling strategy to that mindset of that consumer or that customer and be able to speak to them the way that they want to be spoken to.

23:59
So they’re not necessarily looking for the cheapest price this customer. And that’s what even Chachi BT was telling me. They were more concerned about the quality that they were going to get. They were more concerned about basically the image of what the actual quality product was going to look like. But then as well as where are they taking their car? What kind of facility is it? And I happen to have a very upscale facility, right? And a brand new one, is brand new. Yep. And so like it just looks very slick. Like it’s

24:29
Yeah, it’s very shiny, right? And so that’s when people walk into our store like, whoa, right? When they see our shop in the back, it’s clean. It’s cool in the summer and it’s warm in the winter. So it has temperature control, right? And that’s not very normal. know, most of the time you’ll see garages and the doors are open and we do have doors and we put them open, but it’s like think of it more of a traditional shop shop. And a lot of people who have these nicer cars don’t want to take them there.

24:57
A lot of women feel very much intimidated by going to those kinds of shops. Like, so we, we strive to be very inclusive. So it’s all about matching the way that we’re talking and the way that we’re selling with what the customer expects to hear in order to appeal to them in their, in their mindset for how much they love their car and where they want to take their vehicle and what did they expect the final product to look like and how they expect to be treated and what’s the overall experience. And that becomes

25:25
part of not just the tactical, hey, I’m getting tint on my car because I want my car to be cooler and I want it to look good, but the emotional drivers and how many times have we talked about that you can put a price tag on a thing and you can try to sell it very transactionally, what you, if you want the true value and be able to charge the higher price points, be able to drive loyalty among your, customers and consumers, the way to do that is by actually selling the emotional driver of why they even want that thing.

25:54
And that was where I started honing in on my shop and it totally changed the way that we got business. So how much business we were able to close, the amount of each ticket, how much each ticket was valued at. So I talked a lot about that because it’s so important to understand who you are talking to. Yeah. Well, and I want to go back just something you said that I want to make sure that people hear when you started this point of the section is the fact that the prompts and the information

26:23
are also able to build on themselves. So that’s one thing that I think people don’t clue into immediately is like, you’re basically having a conversation, as weird as that sounds. I always think of that creepy movie where the guy was like dating the thought or whatever. So anyway, it sounds weird to say it That’s coming at some point. Yeah, I know. But it is really how it works. And so we said garbage and garbage out at the beginning, but the fact that you can use it to build

26:53
upon what it’s already done for you, I think is also one of the other time-saving interesting things about all of this. And then going back to the ideal customer profile, I the same things apply as I was saying about your employees internally, right? Like, and you said it, Dan, the emotional side of things. You want to make sure, okay, yeah, it pumped you out the demos and the types of cars and those types of things that you want to look at, but…

27:17
the emotional thing in and of itself as well as some of those insights of what doesn’t work for certain targets helps you make decisions around what is the ideal for you, right? So you’re a woman owned tent world, which I’m going to guess is not the norm. Correct. Right. But there is a world where you could go and target women. Now you’d have to be able to say like, oh,

27:42
you know, there’s this many women, which is another way you could use the tool, right? That are actually part of this psychographic or this demo psycho, um, psychographic mixture that actually want this, right? I don’t know how many women do or don’t want their cars tinted, but outside of that, if that is a gap in the marketplace and you know that that exists out there as an opportunity, that could be one pillar of where you go and focus, right? Or if it’s like the people don’t want to go to the dirty garage that’s been around since

28:11
1970 because they don’t want to leave their car there, right? But all of those different things to help you really get to not only the physical, is what this person’s looking for as far as the previous things we talked around. Again, I’m not going to try to talk about the types of tints. Smart, adaptive. I’ll read off my page here. I have no idea what those words mean. But the point here is, you’re getting more into what is motivating them to come in and what, once they’re here,

28:39
perception are we giving off and is it matching what they’re looking for? And also the fact that you can have more than one ideal customer profile, right? So I outlined a couple of different ones. You want to figure out who is this person in their mind and head at the very top, but then there can be different examples of how those come to life and you can service all of them if you’re smart and strategic about which directions you’re trying or taking that sort of thing. Yeah. And then also, I mean, really good points April, but also listening to why they’re coming in.

29:08
So when you said, I mean, we have a ton of women who come in and when women come in- didn’t know I just was using that and I was like, I don’t know what I’m talking about here. No, but you know, I mean, you’re exactly right. But I mean, and there is an opportunity as a woman owned business in a traditional male industry, being able to appeal to women that might be different in a differentiated spot that other people can’t do. And that’s an interesting angle because I know most of the women who come in for a tenant are wanting it for privacy.

29:36
They don’t want to be in a fishbowl. say they don’t want people, and especially, you know, people looking in at them and saying that they’re woman alone in a vehicle, especially if they’re driving at night and those sorts of things. So a lot of them want privacy, a lot of them want comfort. So they do want the ceramic films because they want to want their car to be hot when they get in there hot because then the makeup starts to running and it gets sweaty and they just, are more conscientious about showing up sweaty and, you know, disheveled and stuff like that, right?

30:03
I do know those things based on the insights of being in my shop and just talking to customers when they come in. And that is an opportunity of differentiation. And that is something that I can build and test and learn against in order to see how that operates and kind of see if I become the shop for, you know, for women. So everybody’s like, Hey, if you want, you know, as women talk and you want to go to the shop, it’s a woman owner. She understands. And you know, she, they know how to talk to women when it comes to, to vehicles.

30:32
Right. And so that is definitely an angle. And so you just kind of like depicted like the core of how you can use this information to start to pull things together, these insights together into actionable ways of going to test and learn and kind of seeing how you want to orient your strategic action plan. Yep. All right, good. I did a good job. You did a great job.

30:58
Okay, so now we did say those are just three of the prompts. I’m not, could take you through a lot more, but then I might, you know, tuck myself out of a job and you know how much I love to do strategic action planning, but, um, I thought it would be good for us to talk a little bit about some of the watch outs, um, because what people tend to do is they tend to fall in love with the tools and then they tend to over index on the tools. And that can be a dangerous spot to not just because we want you guys to pay us to do strategic action planning, but for some very real reasons.

31:26
So I’m gonna let April take you through some of those and I’m gonna chime in when I have something to say. Yeah, well, and this is the piece where you desperately need to remember to tap into your human brain because one of the things we do see people do, which Andrew said fall in love with the tools, but it becomes almost like a set it and forget it or autopilot sort of thing where they’re just plugging things in and then just believing whatever comes back out, right?

31:54
And so I think that is one of the big things of like, well, hold on a minute, like check yourself. Is this actually making sense? What’s coming out of this thing? Cause we have to remember that it, yes, it’s aggregating all the stuff it’s pulling in, but that doesn’t mean it all makes sense all the time. So that’s definitely one of the watch outs. Another one would be confirmation bias. And Anne said this before, you know, when she got her initial list, I already know some of these things, right? And so then you think that you’re like,

32:22
Oh, well, I don’t have to do this type of work anymore. I’m just going to go ahead and know that I know that and then believe that I already have addressed this. But this is, I think, one of those critical points where it’s like, OK, maybe it did live somewhere in your brain. Or maybe you read it and you’re like, oh, yeah, that makes complete and total sense. Or like Anne gave the example of like.

32:41
I knew about this one type of tint, but I wouldn’t have guessed that that would be a trend upcoming, right? Those types of things, I think you have to sit with it and say, what is it actually telling me? And then what do I want to go and do about it? Because otherwise, I think you’re just patting yourself on the back and saying, I’m an expert in what I do. We all wanna be experts in what we do. But the point of the work we’re talking about here and the whole reason you do strategic action planning is because you want something

33:10
different for your business than where it is right now, whether that’s I want to grow or I want a new target or I’m not sure I understand this piece of my business exactly right, right? So we’re not using it to say, oh, I’m already really good at what I do, right? And then this also goes hand in hand with what I was saying before about don’t take everything that comes back at face value. That’s where you do the investigation, right? Make sure that you’re really processing through things and sitting with it.

33:36
And ultimately it’s hard to be objective when you’re in this stuff every single day. So Ann said, we don’t want to work ourselves out of jobs. We certainly don’t want to do that, but it is really helpful in addition to these tools that we’ve talked about today to have a business consultant to act as a third party kind of accountability and process partner, because that is the work that Ann and I do. I will shamelessly plug for us is that we work across and with a lot of different businesses. So our purview is just really different to the way

34:05
things come through in our brains and patterns we see and things that we’re like, oh, we could take from this industry and bring to another. It doesn’t eliminate the role of this. And actually I think it makes it more important because if we go back to the point about investigating things that feel strange or off, think having someone that’s not in that business every single day, head down, working on it 50, 60 hours a week, seeing things with fresher eyes can also really help to validate or not the things that we’re seeing when we’re using these large language models.

34:34
Yeah, I think those are really good watch outs. I think just to build on a couple of these, think the biggest thing is to be curious when you’re going through this process. Like that’s your favorite thing lately. I know I really is because I’m like, if I think the opposite of confirmation bias is curiosity. So be curious if you already know something and you’re like, Oh, I already knew that ask it to tell you more. uh Ask it to go deeper. Ask it to give it, give you the context for a different filter.

35:03
There’s no harm in just getting the data back. Now you could go down a rabbit hole and that’s happened and you have to kind of stop yourself, but get the data, like be curious, ask it to tell you more, of allow yourself to explore a little bit and don’t be afraid of what it returns. Uh, because that’s the other thing is like sometimes people like, well, don’t want to go do it because they don’t, you’re afraid of what it’s going to tell them.

35:29
I don’t want to look at that ugly thing about my business. Yeah, I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to ignore that or I know that’s coming, but I don’t want to address that or, you know, we’ve had those conversations too. as April said, this is part of a strategic action planning process. It does not replace strategic action planning because as you guys know, and we have episodes on this strategic action planning is really about looking at your business as a whole.

35:56
and then addressing your pillars, your enablers to those pillars, what success looks like. Things that chat GPT or other large English models aren’t necessarily going to be able to articulate for you, but it can be used in order to get the data, the insights, uh the places to jump off from in order to be able to build that productivity and efficiency and capability like I mentioned in the beginning. One thing that’s totally stuck in my head is the fact that it’s a great aggregator of things that have come before.

36:24
but it can’t predict the future of what’s to come next. And not that we can do that as humans either, but I think about it as yes, but we can make those connections to then start to put ourselves, our businesses, our teams on paths for the future because we have all this information now. Whereas AI is great, but if you ask it, what’s going to happen to my industry in five years, it doesn’t know how to answer that.

36:49
I can give you the trends, I said, it can’t tell you for exactly. It doesn’t have a crystal ball, like any rest of us don’t. So we have to be thinking about our short term and our long term goals. And this is a great way of being able to reaffirm what my short term and my long term goal should be. Yeah. I’m going to do a blog just to give you guys like the full write up of everything that I got back. Just.

37:17
In case you’re curious, again, there’s that word of what it actually returns and then how to kind of process through it. So then you’ll have a written and the podcast in order to have a couple of different references for that. All right. And with that, we encourage you to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put it into practice. Try chat, GPT or your favorite large language model. Just see what you get back. What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose?

37:46
Because remember, Strategic Counsel is only effective if you put it into action. Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, forthright-people.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic Council on your favorite podcast platform.