341. The AI Skill Every Wedding Pro Needs Before They Build Anything Else

You didn’t start your business to stay stuck. If you're ready to finally hit 6 or 7 figures WITHOUT burning out — book a call with our team → https://weddingproceo.com/application 

In this episode, I'm breaking down the one AI skill that has to come before any prompt, tool, or automation. 

Most wedding pros are building on a broken foundation, which is why their AI content sounds generic and nothing like them. 

I'll show you how to build your foundation file so AI finally sounds like you and saves you the hours everyone keeps promising.

 The (FREE!)ASSUME Sales Training: 2x your wedding bookings in 30 days—step by step. Thousands of wedding pros have already used it to land more clients immediately! http://weddingproceo.com/freetrainingorg

A favorite book of mine: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz 

https://amzn.to/4lbqZFw

Another favorite book of mine: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell 

https://amzn.to/3ITKLb4 

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EPISODE SHOW NOTES BLOG & MORE:

https://www.weddingproceo.com/341

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Wedding Pro CEO Podcast. If you find these strategies helpful, make sure to share this episode with your fellow wedding pros. And remember, in the world of weddings, it's all about building genuine relationships and showcasing your best work. Until next time, keep shining, CEOs! 

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Transcript

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Wedding pros are moving way too fast with A.I. Everyone's obsessed with prompts and automations and custom GPTs and all of the things that are gonna save you 10 hours of work a week. But most people are building on a broken foundation Before A.I. can improve your business, you have to understand how to think with it. Not how to prompt it, not which platform to use. Not which automation tool everyone on YouTube is talking about this week. I'm talking about the skill underneath it all. How to communicate clearly, think strategically and use A.I. as an operator instead of a toy. Because if you skip this part, every workflow you use will underperform. Every automation will create friction. And every tool will feel way more complicated than it actually is. I'm Brandee Gaar, and after helping hundreds of wedding pros build profitable businesses, I can tell you this: The wedding pros who will win with A.I. are not the most technical. They're the people who are willing to learn how to think differently first. And in this episode, I'm breaking down the one foundational skill that'll make everything else work. What I see happening in our industry is everyone's running to AI to use it, which is great because there's so many people that are excited to adapt it into their business. But what you're doing is you're going straight into AI, and you're saying something like, " Here's an email that I got from an upset client. Help me respond." Or, "I want to create an Instagram caption that's going to draw in engaged couples. Help me write it." And while those things are great, and you might get something mediocre, it's not gonna sound like you. It's not gonna be in your voice. It's not gonna actually even sound like something that ever would come out of your company. It's not even gonna know what you do or what type of engaged couples you talk to or who you serve because you didn't give it that. So what it's giving you back is a generalization of everything it knows, and while the response may be okay, it's probably not something you're ever gonna actually publish. You're gonna spend more time reworking it because it didn't sound like you, and then you get frustrated with it, and you end up just closing it and saying, "Eh, AI is not for me." If you did give AI another chance, you're likely either looking for a better prompt or a different tool because you're hoping to get the content that everybody says that they're getting, right? You see that, guru on Instagram saying, " My ChatGPT runs my entire business," " Or my Claude built an entire website that I was able to put up and start selling today." But the truth is, it's never about the prompt or the tool that you're using. It's about the piece that you're skipping right from the beginning. The piece we're missing is the biggest question everyone asks, " Is AI gonna replace me?" And I think in the wedding industry, we're not super afraid of AI actually replacing us, because I don't know of an AI tool yet that's gonna go and steam all the linens on wedding day, or make sure that grandma actually makes it into the family pictures. So we're not actually afraid of being replaced, but what you need to understand about A.I. is it can't replace you at all, even in the back end of your business. But you're expecting it to. You're expecting to be able to pop into Chat GPT, give it a mediocre prompt at best without knowing anything about you, and spit out something that you would actually use. It needs you first. It needs what's already in your head. What do you know about your business? What do you know about your ideal clients? What do you know about who you serve and what you do and why you're unique and why you stand out from your competition? All of those are things that AI doesn't and can't know about you without you as the human giving it that information. The reason so many of us jump straight into a tool or an automation or just giving it a vanilla, or just giving it a vanilla prompt is honestly because of what's happening on social media. Literally everyone is talking about AI. This prompt, this automation, this one thing that I did, this thing I did in Claude Code all saved me time and energy. And so you think, "Yeah, I want that too. It sounds so simple. Let me just go into ChatGPT, let me just go into Gemini and type in a generic prompt," because that's what they did. Or maybe they even gave you the prompt. Maybe they said, "This is exactly what I typed in." But they're a software engineer. They're a tech company. They sell gym clothes. They are not you. They're not in the wedding industry. They don't know what you know about your business. And so that generic prompt they gave you is never gonna give you the same output it gave them. What this causes is AI burnout. You've gotten into it, you've toddled around with it, you've maybe gotten a few things out of it that you might use if you tweak it and spend lots of time in it, but you're just like, "This isn't worth it. I'm in busy season," or,"I have a business to run. This isn't giving me anything that's life-changing, so why would I keep using it?" But the missing link is the foundation. You forgot to ever spend the time in your tool of choice giving it the foundation that only you can know about your business. That takes time, and we don't wanna spend time doing it. We wanna do what all the A.I. gurus on Instagram are telling us we can do. Just go in and put in a silly prompt. It doesn't work. A.I. is only as good as the human feeding it, and that's the coolest thing about it. You're not gonna be replaced by the tool. You're gonna be so much better because of it. This is why y- if you open threads, especially wedding industry threads, you'll see so many people complaining about everyone using AI because they're like, "I can tell when something's written by ChatGPT. I can tell when this is AI-generated." And honestly, they probably can because it was junk in, junk out. You put in a vanilla prompt, you got back vanilla content, and you posted it because you thought, "Well, that's what all the other people on Instagram are telling me to do. All the AI gurus say this is what it's supposed to do." That's not what it's supposed to do. You skipped a step, the most important step, and that's why your content is clearly generated by AI. So let's define what the foundation is. The foundation that you have to put into any AI tool that you're using first is what's in your brain. What you already know about your business, who you serve, what their pain points are, what makes you stand out from your competition, what makes you unique, what's your differentiator? And all of those things can be, honestly, a little bit difficult to understand. Inside of Wedding Pro CEO, before AI, these were things that we were making our students do anyway, manually. Because even before AI, you have to understand all of these things about your business so that you can even create great content. So how would you expect an automation tool, an automatic tool, a robot, a computer, to understand what's in your brain if you never even gave it that context? The really cool thing about this is it's actually much easier to create now because of AI. So now you can ask AI to scan all of the reviews that exist about you and pull out keywords that your clients say to describe why they loved working with you. You can feed it transcripts of consultations, of final details meetings, of meetings with vendors. You can feed it transcripts of just you talking into a voice memo about what you do, why you love to do it. You can feed it transcripts of team meetings that you have with your staff or with a venue manager, because those are all things that you just naturally say because you know your business, you know your clients, you know who you serve, and you know why you love to do it. Then AI can help build that foundation, creating your ICP, your ideal customer profile, your avatar, who you are, what you do, who you serve, by taking the context that you already say. That's the really cool difference here, is that you already know it. It's in your head. We just have to get it out of there and into the tool so that it creates the foundation that everything else is gonna be built from. What changes once AI actually understands this foundation is that everything now that comes out of it is gonna sound like you. It's gonna be based around what you already sell. It's gonna be exactly pointing to the pain points of your ideal customers. It's gonna be using the unique differentiators that you have against your competition to help sell you and your team. It's gonna listen to your sales calls and say, "Hey, you forgot to mention that we do this." It's pointing out the things that are gonna make you so much better because now it knows who you are. It has that foundation, and it can go back and scan these things to make you so much better as you're selling, as you're creating new content, and as you're working with your clients to make their client experience even better. The unlock here is that what you already do is going to continue to feed your AI and make it so much better. One of the things I used to tell our students for years is the things you say on your consultations are the things that you need to put in your marketing, because those consultations have golden nuggets you don't even know that you're saying. So record them and pull them out. Well, now AI can do that for you, because you can take that transcript, feed it right into your AI, and it's gonna pull those golden nuggets out for you, and it's gonna create a week of content based on something you already say, things that you're already an expert in. When your client asks you the same question over and over in your email or in your planning meetings, AI's gonna pick up on that, and it's gonna create content that's gonna draw in more of those ideal customers. So what changes is that you become so much more efficient, so much more powerful, and the language you use in your marketing is gonna be exactly what already drew in your last 10 ideal customers. You may have skipped this step because honestly, it can take some time to build this foundation inside of your AI. But the amount of time that is gonna save you in editing your content that comes out of it will be a life-changing. Because now instead of getting a vanilla response back from your AI, it's literally gonna sound exactly like you. The more we feed your AI of how you already sound. The more call recordings we put in, the more voice memos that we give it, it's gonna understand how you talk. The little idiosyncrasies that you do, the things that you say all the time that you probably don't even realize, when it spits out that response, it's gonna sound more and more like you because that's what we're training it to do. Every single week we're giving it new content to sound more and more like you. So more and more, mmm, so eventually the content that comes out of it is nearly a copy and paste because you've trained it so well. And you've heard us say all the time, " You have to be consistent. You have to be consistent. You have to be consistent." And you probably get sick of hearing that. The reason we say it so often is because consistency builds trust, and when your clients come to your Instagram, for instance, and they see that you're posting consistently, they're not afraid that you're gonna go out of business. But the reality of consistency for a wedding pro is that we are, most of the time, small teams or solo business owners, and consistency gets difficult because you get busy and things fall to the wayside. But AI, built with a strong foundation, changes that game because we can set it to be on a weekly schedule to say, "Every single week, deliver me a content plan based on the calls that I had last week. Every single week, deliver me a new hook that I'm gonna use in my content this week based on calls that I had last week." The consistency becomes easier because your robot, your AI, is not gonna fail on that consistency. It's not gonna get too busy and forget to do it. It's not gonna get too busy and forget to follow up with the leads. It knows when it's supposed to do it and knows what it's supposed to sound like because we've spent the time building that foundation, and it's gonna do it, making you not only more consistent, but more profitable. It's like any other thing that's worth it. Taking the time to build the foundation and pour into something is what's gonna actually save you time and money down the road. When you built your business, you didn't just open the doors and say,"Hey guys, I plan weddings now." No, you had to think about, "What do I want my brand colors to be? What do I want my fonts to be? What do I stand for? Who do I serve? What type of weddings do I wanna do?" All of that took time to build that foundation so that when you created your website, when you created your Instagram, when you created your ICP, those things came more naturally because you had taken the time to build the foundation. The same is true with AI. We have to teach it what we want it to say so that every single time, we get better content out of it. You wanna start building this foundation today, but what do you actually do to get started? The first thing I would do is ask my AI to scan my website and tell me who it thinks I am. The next thing I would do is ask it to scan all of the public reviews about my company and point out keywords that my clients say about working with me all the time. From there, I would ask it, " Ask me five to 10 questions that you don't know about me yet, that would help you to get to know me and my company better and who we serve." It's actually really fun when your AI starts asking you questions because it already knows what it doesn't know about you, and it will start to ask you questions that then can lead into other questions. My favorite thing to do is to actually turn on voice mode with my AI and just start having a conversation. I say, "What do you not know about me yet?" Or, "What's something you wish you knew so that you could give me better content?" It's wild to sit there and chat back and forth with it, but it helps it to understand you better by asking you questions it doesn't know yet. So those are the things that I would do to get started because that's gonna help really start building that foundation so that your AI knows you almost better than you know yourself. All of this is what we at Wedding Pro CEO call the foundation file, this is your AI brain that's gonna feed everything that you ever create. The really cool part about it is it's actually built outside of the AI platform that you're using. It's actually going to be files that you're creating about who you are, who your ideal customer is, what makes you different, all the things that we've talked about. It's getting created outside of AI because if you ever wanna switch platforms, you actually are just gonna feed it to the next platform. We call this the foundation file because it's literally the foundation of everything you will ever create with AI so that AI knows everything about you. This is exactly what we're doing inside of our programs because this is so important to being able to actually make AI work for you, and save you all of those hours.