The Commission Code for Success
Does your gross revenue come from commissions, fees, and other types of 1099 MISC income? If you answered yes, then the Commission Code for Success is a podcast created specifically with you in mind. Each episode is designed to deliver a concept or idea that will help you increase your revenue and have more time to enjoy it.
If you are an employee on 100% commission or an independent contractor you are a business owner when it comes to how you go about doing your daily work. The mindset of a business owner puts you in exactly the right spot to maximize your revenue and maximize the impact you have with your clients and customers.
The Commission Code is the library of knowledge and the set of skills you need to grow your business and reach your desires. Please join us and our guests at The Commission Code Podcast! I look forward to seeing you there, I'm your host, Morris Sims.
The Commission Code for Success
Stop Using AI Like a Vending Machine and Start Treating It Like an Intern
Struggling to maintain a consistent brand voice? Feeling overwhelmed by daily tasks that eat up your time? Lynn Colpaw, brand strategist and founder of Cyber PR Army, reveals how artificial intelligence can become your most valuable business ally.
Lynn shares her journey from using AI as a simple "vending machine" to treating it as a collaborative intern that learns about her business. This shift in perspective transforms how entrepreneurs can leverage technology to reclaim both time and joy in their work. "When you start treating AI like an intern or new hire that you're teaching about your business, everything changes," Lynn explains.
At the heart of effective AI use is brand consistency. Lynn emphasizes how crucial it is for businesses to maintain a coherent tone across all customer touchpoints. When your website sounds formal but your social media is casual, customers' trust wavers. AI can analyze these different channels and help harmonize your messaging, ensuring customers experience the same authentic you regardless of where they encounter your brand.
Beyond brand consistency, Lynn offers practical applications that can save entrepreneurs hours each week. From streamlining email responses to creating personalized client outreach based on social media activity, these small efficiencies add up to significant time savings. She also shares insider tips on how to spot and refine AI-generated content to maintain authenticity, looking for telltale signs like excessive em dashes and repetitive phrasing.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Lynn advocates for playfulness when learning about AI capabilities. By engaging in simple games and experiments with AI tools, entrepreneurs can better understand how these systems think and respond, ultimately leading to more effective collaboration. This approach helps business owners rediscover the passion that initially drove them to entrepreneurship before administrative tasks took over.
Ready to transform how you use AI in your business? Visit cyberprarmycom/thecastle for free resources and to book a 30-minute clarity call with Lynn to get personalized guidance for your specific needs.
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But you know what? We touched on it a little bit before and we talked about the tone. So we talk about the external communications and we do just like you said we take the tone of what's on the website, the social media, all these pieces, and then we create consistency. So that's the first thing Check your tone. The second part is check your systems. What are you doing manually and what can AI support you with?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Commission Code Podcast. We're here to help you overcome the challenges that most of us face in our business. From time to time, you know things like feeling like you're on a plateau and you just can't seem to grow your business. Or maybe feeling overwhelmed, just trying to make ends meet and yet it seems like you're always working. Or maybe you've done quite well for a while, but now nothing seems to be working anymore. Well, we want to help you solve those problems and many more. Our objective is to provide you with practical solutions so you can grow your business and have more time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. My name is Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for this show. I've spent years okay, decades really in the corporate world teaching business owners how to increase their revenue and use professional sales processes and run their business more effectively and efficiently. I started my own consulting and training business about seven years ago, I guess, and I'm helping my clients do just exactly that Get more revenue, increase their revenue and have more time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But I got to tell you I'm having more fun than ever helping people build successful businesses. So, with all that said, let's get on with today's episode of the Commission Code for your Success. Episode of the Commission Code for your success.
Speaker 2:Lynn Colpaw is our guest today on the Commission Code and I got to tell you Lynn is not your average marketer. She's a brand strategist who spent, I guess, 14 years helping small businesses and creative entrepreneurs become visible without burning out. Boy, that's a feat for anybody. A former musician and music industry veteran, lynn understands rhythm, resonance and what makes an audience lean in. In 25, she took a leap, not just using AI, but co-evolving with it Together with her AI collaborator. She's learned quite a bit and she does sort of a whole bunch. Please welcome Lynn Colpaw. Founder of Cyber PR Army, where clarity, context and a touch of mischief drive the future of storytelling. Lynn, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're so welcome. I'm excited to talk and get geeky with you.
Speaker 2:That sounds great, because we all need that from time to time. There's no doubt, lynn your stuff. You talk about AI a lot and I don't know. I think a lot of us talk about AI, but we don't really know how to make the most of it, so I'm hoping you can teach us a little more about that and using AI in our business and our marketing and other sundry ways to help us do what we all want to do, which is increase our revenue and have more time to enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Well, that is definitely a big question, so I'm going to narrow it down a little bit.
Speaker 1:One of the things we do is we talk about tone and clarity and how you present yourself. So there are so many touch points that your customer or your client will interact with you. So it can be your website, it can be your social media, it might be a transactional email from buying on on your site, it might be you in person or you at a sales event or you at the grocery store. So you think of all these different pieces that your potential or current user and customer is connecting with you. Does your tone match Like? Are you showing up the same everywhere? So if your website is really formal and reads like a dishwasher manual, but your social media is really touching and heartfelt, well now the user, the customer, the client, they're going to start. Their trust is wavering. So one thing we do with AI is start creating a tone so that you can go through all your content so that the tone matches and no matter where that client or customer has an interaction with you, it is you. So when I talk about tone, I'm like well, if you think about Pepsi or Coke, they have a tone. Or Nike has a tone. Or Starbucks recently kind of tweaked their tone with what they're doing so. All these major campaigns if you think about them, you can think of colors, you can think of their wording, you can think of, like, even McDonald's, how the imaging is. So now think about how you are.
Speaker 1:And if your website has, like I said, like really formal content with stock images, and your social media is vibrant and alive with personal pictures, it gets confusing.
Speaker 1:So we work with people to use already existing platforms like ChatGPT, to help them start working with it to find out what their tone is. And your tone can be so many things. It's not just I want to be a professional and approachable, it's also the things like I mine knows I love anime and I'm trying to learn Japanese and I want to go for a bike ride every day, but I don't really get out there and I really should Things that you wouldn't necessarily think are important, but they're part of the chemistry that makes you you and not just a clone of everyone else. And as soon as you start niching down in that, then that's where your customers start leaning in and going, start leaning in and going oh yeah, I connect with them, I get them. So that's a real big piece that we work on and a lot of people just say, oh, you know, I'm fine. But when you start massaging your tone, to be consistent, it does create a big impact.
Speaker 2:Interesting. And can I? As you were talking, I thought, well, I'll just go to GPT and say is my tone consistent? Here's my website, here's my Facebook. You tell me, Will that work?
Speaker 1:It can. Yeah, it can. So let's say, for example, you say here's my website. Now, it's not really great at retrieving information from Facebook, so you might just have to copy paste it and put it in and then copy paste some of the email newsletters. So what have I got there? And then you can even, let's say, a transcript from a meeting where you're talking, and it would have. The transcript would be how you would naturally talk. So now you have four data points for the chat, gpt to go okay, and you tell it the transcript is the closest to how I normally talk. And the website I did with a website company and they helped me write the information. So context is important too.
Speaker 1:Social media Well, my husband helps me with that, so it's kind of me, kind of him. And the emails oh, they're just the emails that appeared in the website, for naturally kind of evolved. Then it starts piecing it together and goes, oh, these are mismatches. So if you're identifying you how you normally speak as your primary, let's do some massaging of the other pieces and set out some guidelines and some rules so that you can show up better. So maybe it's being less cheeky on social media and more cheeky on your website. It'll help you kind of put that balance together.
Speaker 2:Interesting, very interesting. So, lynn, what else should we be doing with AI? Tell me where to begin. I mean, I really don't know where to even begin, and I think many of our listeners probably feel pretty close to the same way. Do what?
Speaker 1:of it. So when I started, I was like here's a spreadsheet, format it. I need some social media posts for this image, gimme, gimme. And I used it like a vending machine money in snack bar out and that's great, it works great. Where my turning point came was I started treating it like an intern, a new hire. So it was like I'm going to teach you about my company. Here is all the information about my company and what I do. Oh, and here is my LinkedIn resume about me. Oh, and guess what? I once did a personality profile about me and this is how it outlines how to talk to me, how to help me put pieces together in long-term strategy.
Speaker 1:But circling back to how I began, I just started playing with it Like things that are not a dire maker being silly. So we have every day I have a quote game. I don't know if I can find it here. It's just a little thing, a pieces of paper of quotes, and I pick one quote and I ask the AI to guess what it is. There is no way, like it's astronomical, it'll never get it right, but what I'm seeing is how it responds and how it adapts and when we get silly and when we get serious and when you, you know everybody hears about AI hallucinations, when you dive down and say, well, why did you create this? Complete falsehood. Once it said well, you told me it was true. So I thought it was true because you said that and it's like, well gosh, I can't really go against that.
Speaker 1:A lot of it is playing these games and when you think about it, kids at a young age they learn best when playing. They learn best by trying things out. So I encourage people who are completely new it's just to go in, introduce yourself. I often say give it a name, like an assistant, a new hire, you can jump right into business with. This is my business. These are the things I want to do.
Speaker 1:And sometimes it's just tell me a knock knock joke. And then it tells you a knock knock joke and it's like that's a terrible knock knock joke. How would it react? Right now it's going to react just generically, but once it knows the fact that you love reading Astronomy Magazine, I bet you it will react with something that has to do with stars and constellations.
Speaker 1:Now, as this evolves and the play and how it reacts and you understand it more, then you will see the shift in yourself Having fun, when you show up Like we all start our businesses and our passion projects and entrepreneurs because we love what we do or we're passionate about something, and then it gets lost in invoicing and legal documents and inventory. Ai allows you to show up as a leader, being vulnerable, mischievous, with ability to make mistakes not make mistakes, perfect, not perfect, it doesn't matter and reclaim time and fun, and that's where I advocate, for playing games, as silly as it seems, is a great way to just understand how the model works, whether it's guessing games or different types of jokes or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So chat, gpt, for example, I mean. I understand there are others, but that's the one everybody seems to know about right now. It remembers what we talk about as we go forward. I know there's free accounts and then some that you pay for. Even with the free account, it remembers me and knows all this. You say we're going to teach it like it was an intern. Does it remember me only for that session or does it remember me forever?
Speaker 1:A caveat is that I can't quite remember what the free version has. I have the $20 a month one, so it's the pro model, but there's many, many levels above it. So there are. Let me see there's three sections. It can remember you, so one section you can turn on and it will remember things like I want you to always sign off on an email when you're helping me, to write it with my first name only, so it just writes it in. It can remember things like I asked it to remember that I get migraines. So if I ever ask for food recommendations or I'm presenting food that I might be eating, it will say Lynn, you get migraines. This is known as a migraine trigger. Do not eat it. And it's like oh, ooh, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, okay then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that is one section. The second section is a section you can turn on that allows it to grab pieces of other conversations. So it's like, oh well, when you were talking about this yesterday, you mentioned that you were excited for it, but what you're writing right now seems like you're not excited. So I'm trying to balance what's happening.
Speaker 1:So, those are two. Those are within the settings. The third part is within the pro plan you can create folders. So it's much like your desktop where you'd have folders and in it, files. Each folder can hold 20 files.
Speaker 1:So I have my core area which I put my personality profile, my business profile If we've discussed things in depth that I'm like I need you to references, at least for six months. I'll put it in there, just as a text file Doesn't need to be anything crazy or a list of clients or whatever the other file folders are for each client I have. So I have one client that is tech averse. It does not like geeky talk, so I have a style guide in there.
Speaker 1:So when I prepare reports for this particular client A, I'll say chat, gpt, refer to the project files in client A's folder, and when we create the document, so the report, make sure to follow the style guide in there. So now what that's allowing is less stress like less. Oh my gosh, I got to do this again because this is a really geeky report for a client that just wants the five bullet points. So those are the three pieces. So it can remember things day-to-day stuff, it can remember conversation threads and if you have long-term memories that you may or may not need up to 20 files, you can put them in each project folder.
Speaker 2:That is neat. Oh wow, I had no idea it would do all those things, and even in a free plan, but for 20 bucks a month. That's. That's basically, you know, a couple of cups of coffee.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the way I look at it. I was. I was like, well, $20 for all these tools that can help me. I'm willing to invest it because, like, if I had an assistant and I paid them $20 an hour, that would be one hour of work where chat GPTs, by using these extra functions like the project folder, is saving me hundreds of hours.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, absolutely, it sounds like it at least. So where do we begin, lynn, you know, okay, get out there and play with it, but what would you use it for first if you were advised? Well, when you advise a client, where do you suggest they use it first in their business? Is it marketing? Is it a sales talk, is it? You know? I'll quit leading the witness here. What do you think?
Speaker 1:But you know what. We touched on it a little bit before and we talked about the tone. So we talk about the external communications and we do just like you said we take the tone of what's on the website, the social media, all these pieces, and then we create consistency. So that's the first thing check your tone. The second part is check your systems. What are you doing manually and what can AI support you with? Whether it's AI or like Chachi PT, which is different, it's a large language model there are so many things like automation or integrating pieces that can help reduce that decision fatigue, reduce the amount of work going in. So, tone first and then internalize Okay, what can we do in your day to day. And you know what, even though I often get hired for the business end of it, it ends up more personal that people are like okay, well, my day's just overwhelmed with stuff. Well, that that to-do list is probably not going to change in the near future. So let's approach how we can make these easier. So, for example, you're getting emails in and just the volume of them is so much. You can copy your email, put it into ChatGPT and say oh, you know my tone already. Put it into chat, gpt and say oh, you know my tone already. I want to answer this client that I'd be happy to meet with them on January 10th, and it will help write it in your tone. You just fix a few things and then you paste and send. So now, if you can take 20 minutes of replying to each email, down to five, that's a huge amount of hours in your day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what if you can look at outreach and reaching out to clients that you haven't talked to in a while? Well, a lot of times it's like oh gosh, what are they doing? Like you know, what am I going to talk to them about? Gosh, what are they doing? Like you know, what am I going to talk to them about? Even just giving a link to their social media site and saying what's happening with this client recently that I could maybe give a warm email to, to be like hey, I saw that you just sponsored the local baseball team. That's so cool. Just wanted to reach out and say big thumbs up and congrats. Just wanted to reach out and say big thumbs up and congrats. Sometimes that's all it needs.
Speaker 1:And even things like on LinkedIn. I've used it to reach out to people based on their, because LinkedIn, when you have your connections, it'll have your connections name and then what they do. And I've screenshotted it and said I want to get hold of these and I've done a filter before that. So let's say I filtered it for people in the automotive industry that are connections with me, I will screenshot it, bring it into the AI and said here are 10 leads I am directly connected with on LinkedIn. Here are their names with their companies, like their most recent companies underneath.
Speaker 1:What are just some like quick five sentence hellos that I can send them on LinkedIn without exhausting myself with recreating the same message each time or making it specific. The chat GPT will be like okay, lynn, here you go, here's 10 of them and you know you tweak them, you move them around and then, once the conversation started, then you can take it to the next step. So those are some things. A lot of it is just it thoughtfulness and a little bit quicker. So that's a big part of it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I had no idea that it could be that powerful for my business as well as just a neat little thing. I'm also. The questions are just going bingo in my head here, but I guess the first one is I hear so many people say well, I don't want it to sound like AI created my stuff. Well, I don't want it to sound like AI created my stuff. I can't tell the difference, lynn. What's the difference? What do they mean by that? Because the few times that I've touched it and I've asked it to do something sounds like me. I don't know how people could tell the difference. What am I missing?
Speaker 1:So there are a few little pieces. So one is the use of the em dash. I'd never even heard of an em dash before, but now it's all super trendy. An em dash is a long dash so it's like a pause. So Chachi Piti was trained on some of the best literary works in the world and MDASH is really important in those literary works and it helps create a dramatic pause.
Speaker 1:So when you see if you've created something and you see a lot of MDASHs, that's signal number one. Signal number two is often doing point form on things, so reiterating an idea with bullet points. You often see that in there. And the third point and this one's a really difficult one to see is saying the same thing over and over again. So it's like saying, let's say, you have a recipe and you're like so mix the dough, make sure it's in your hand, and you're turning clockwise because you need to make sure all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients are thoroughly mixed together and that's why when you hold the bowl, you should really turn it with all your gusto.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a lot of explaining for just fixing some dough. And once you start looking for it, you do start seeing it and that, if I'm getting the uh chat gpt to help me. A lot of times I'm deleting lines going. You already said this three times, you said that that two times, but let's make it more succinct. It just I mean, like I said, it's been trained on trillions of words so it likes talking.
Speaker 2:M-dash. Never heard of that. I had no idea. How does that show up in what they send you? Is it just?
Speaker 1:a long line. Yeah, it's like two minus signs side by side.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:You'll see it and it's just like pardon me, just consider it a thoughtful pause. So let's say AI is important and all of the things in history you know, like that pause where you could also use three dots, but the em dash is like the classier way. Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:I had no idea. Interesting, interesting, very interesting. Oh man, lynn, you have opened up so many doors and so much good stuff for us here. It's just absolutely amazing we got to end this so I can go play with ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:You don't know how many podcasts I do that end that way.
Speaker 2:That's amazing, lynn. If somebody out there would like to chat further with you and get you to help them with their marketing, their business and their use of AI, how do we best get a hold of you?
Speaker 1:Well, the best way is, I've set up a page for your listeners. It's called cyberprmecom slash thecastle, and there there's a whole bunch of free resources and information as well. You can book a clarity call with me and we just sit and chat for 30 minutes and I kind of help you unload things and give you that real refined starting point specific to what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Outstanding and do that website for us one more time please.
Speaker 1:Sure thing, it's cyberprarmycom. Slash thecastle. No spaces, nothing else.
Speaker 2:Very good. Lynn, thank you so much for being with us today on the Commission Code. I really have enjoyed this and I got to tell you I think I learned more today than I have in the last 10, 15 podcasts I've done. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Well, that does it for this episode of the Commission Code Podcast. This is the place where we want to help you find the commission code to success in your business. Remember, go to morrissimscom for more information and in the meantime, hey, have a great week, get out there and meet somebody new, and we'll see you again next time right here on the Commission Code. Best wishes. I'm Morris Sims, thank you.