Unlocking AI's Potential: How Entrepreneurs Can Amplify Success with Jonathan Mast

In this episode, host Kyle Ariel Knowles sits down with Jonathan Mast, an international speaker and AI consultant, to explore the transformative power of artificial intelligence in the business world.

Whether you're an established entrepreneur or just starting out, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you leverage AI for your business. Don't miss out on the opportunity to amplify your skills and enhance your entrepreneurial journey!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: Jonathan emphasizes that AI is not here to take our jobs but to amplify our skills and experiences. Just like the introduction of electricity transformed industries, AI is poised to revolutionize the way we work. Entrepreneurs need to embrace AI as a collaborative tool that can enhance productivity and efficiency, allowing us to focus on what we do best.

The Importance of Audience Segmentation: One of the most powerful applications of AI is its ability to help businesses understand their customers better. Jonathan shared how AI can assist in audience segmentation, enabling entrepreneurs to tailor marketing messages to individual customers. This personalized approach not only improves customer engagement but also drives sales by addressing specific needs and pain points.

Start Small with AI Integration: For those feeling overwhelmed by the AI buzz, Jonathan suggests starting with a simple time study. By tracking your activities for a week and identifying tasks that drain your energy, you can pinpoint areas where AI can help. This practical approach allows entrepreneurs to reclaim valuable time and focus on high-impact activities that drive growth.

Jonathan shares his entrepreneurial journey, from his early days in sales and marketing to founding Whitebeard Strategies, where he helps businesses unlock the full potential of AI. Discover how AI can drive efficiency, increase profits, and deliver unparalleled value to clients.

In this insightful conversation, you'll learn:

• The importance of embracing AI for growth and success
• Practical strategies for integrating AI into your business
• How to create effective prompts for AI tools
• The significance of audience segmentation and personalized marketing
• Tips for reclaiming your time and increasing productivity with AI

LINKS

• Follow Jonathan on LinkedIn
• Follow Jonathan on Twitter
• WhiteBeardStrategies.com AI Coaching & Training
• 91-Day AI Transformation Podcast
• Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
• Follow Kyle on LinkedIn

Transcript

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Hello there, welcome to the Maker-Manager Money podcast, a podcast to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and wantrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Ariel Knowles, and today's guest is Jonathan Mast. Jonathan is an international speaker and an AI consultant and coach. He helps businesses and professionals unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence, driving efficiency, increasing profits, and delivering unparalleled value to clients. Jonathan is also the founder of Whitebeard Strategies and the creator of the Perfect Prompt Framework. He simplifies complex AI concepts into practical, actionable strategies, guiding AI enthusiasts and entrepreneurs on how to leverage AI for growth and success. With extensive experience in online marketing and strategy, Jonathan focuses on helping businesses save time, increase profits, and deliver more value by implementing AI. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Mast: Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I'm really excited for the conversation. Where are you dialing in from?

Jonathan Mast: I am up in Michigan today.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Great. And are you from there originally?

Jonathan Mast: I grew up here and then a couple of years ago we moved down, actually a little over a year ago, moved down to Alabama. We got sick of the cold and cloudy winters here, but my youngest is 17 and we promised him we'd come back up for the summer so he could hang out with all of his friends and all that type of stuff. So hopefully, crossing my fingers, this will be our last season in Michigan, but we'll see. It's not a, it's a beautiful place in the summer.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, very beautiful. And it will be cooler than Alabama for sure.

Jonathan Mast: By a long shot, yes.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Well, could you share a bit about your entrepreneurial journey and what led you to transition towards helping businesses leverage artificial intelligence for growth?

Jonathan Mast: Sure. I've been in sales and marketing most of my life and sold all kinds of different things. My wife loves to laugh that she never knew she was going to marry somebody that had sold both cars and pigs and other things in between. But most of my time has been spent in IT and IT related sales. And then that led me into digital marketing. And in 2010, I founded my own digital marketing agency. And we focused on helping people build websites and do digital marketing from a marketing perspective. as opposed to a developer's perspective. A lot of websites back when we started in 2010 were still based on, hey, it works because it was developed by a developer, as opposed to it converts and makes you money because it was done by a marketing company. And so we did that. And then in 2022, when ChatGPT added the AI interface onto ChatGPT and made it accessible, I started using it a lot more and I was like blown away. and just the productivity gains I got. But I saw my team was kind of on the other side. They're like, oh boy, I don't know. I'm a little unsure of this AI stuff. I think it might take my job. And having spent almost 15 years doing my thing in digital marketing and say, hey, it's time to take a step away. So in 2023, I stepped away from that agency and decided to found Whitebeard Strategies. And we're focused, as you mentioned, on coaching and mentoring businesses and their teams to help them leverage AI.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's awesome. And when you were younger than growing up, did you exhibit any signs of entrepreneurship or were you entrepreneurial?

Jonathan Mast: I was, I was fortunate enough. I grew up in a small business family. So my grandparents, my parents and that they, they were all involved in, in more retail than that, but it was still small business. And I grew up around that. So that was always very natural. And the concept of working for someone else always seemed a little foreign to me because I other than working for my dad and my grandfather, everything, you know, I'd always kind of worked on my own. So yeah, I've definitely had a lot of those talents. I, of course, was a good boy and went to college and then got a job and hated it. And so I didn't take too many years into that job to go I need, I need to step away and do something on my own. Okay, and what did you study in college, of all things accounting, which does not fit my personality at all. But in the in the illustrious wisdom of the guidance counselor in high school. Uh, I was very interested in investing and they said, well, maybe you'd like to be a financial advisor. And I didn't know anything at 17, 18 years old. I'm like, yeah, that sounds cool. And they're like, okay, so go get an accounting degree because that'll give you credibility. And after you get a lot after that, get a law degree because that'll give you knowledge. And then you can make tons of money in the financial advising business that lasted about a year and a half. And I'm like, I hate accounting. I don't want to get accounting. I remember my mentor at the time, he's like, just stick it out. So I did. And then he's like, you ready to do the law thing? And I'm like, not a chance. I am so done with higher education. So I just left and got into sales. And that's something I was pretty good at and made a career doing that and starting my own businesses.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: What was the point when you decided like you didn't want to work for someone else?

Jonathan Mast: It was just it was Too many promises not kept too many, both to me and to our clients, too many things that I just saw that like, I, I, I, I'm not comfortable doing that. I don't want to be doing that. Not that all of it was illegal or anything on that. Although a few of them were, which was part of what led to that, but just not the way I wanted to run a business, not the way I wanted to do it. And of course, being in sales, it always felt like, you know, if we were working together, Kyle, it was you and I had a relationship as much or more than you had a relationship with the company. And so that, that was just a real important thing to me to, to address and to deal with.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. And I bet your sales background and sales experience really helped you to be an entrepreneur because I've interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs. And I think. One of the biggest struggles for someone to get into entrepreneurship is that sales side going and selling the vision of the company, selling the products and things like that. So can you talk a little bit about how your sales experience helped you as an entrepreneur?

Jonathan Mast: I certainly do think it helped. I mean, I know many entrepreneurs that are not salespeople by nature, but it helped. And I'm biased, of course, but I've always subscribed to the theory since I heard it from one of my mentors many, many years ago, which was nothing happens until somebody sells something. And I know even now in the coaching that I do, I talk to so many entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs. And one thing they often struggle with is, how do I make that first sale? And you and I both know, until somebody buys something, we can plan till the cows come home. We can have all of our ducks in a row just perfectly. But if at some point we don't sell anything, we don't have a business. And so I think that that sales background has been very helpful. I know it's frustrated some people along the way as well, because that means they don't necessarily have certain other operational skills because I'm a sales guy by nature, but ultimately, yes, I think that has really helped. And it's definitely helped as I've grown and then decided to relaunch or launch some new businesses along the way. That ability to. quickly start bringing in revenue and monetize those ideas. Even if we were maybe building the plane as it was taking off, as I'm often known for by my team. Again, for me, that model worked really well.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. And what kind of suggestions and recommendations do you have for, you know, people that are getting into entrepreneurship or want to get into entrepreneurship and maybe don't have that sales background? How do they learn, you know, just even the fundamentals of sales, what are, what are your recommendations?

Jonathan Mast: Great question. I think, you know, probably one of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs making is that they just assume if they make it or they build it, people will come and they don't take the time to match that up to what problem are they solving for their audience. And fundamentally, I think every business in order to be successful needs to solve a problem for their audience and they need to solve a problem that that audience is willing to pay them money to solve. And I think that's probably the first spot that so many people miss that you're like, okay, well, I can do this. And it's like, that's great, but nobody's going to pay you money to do that. And so that's, I think, step number one. Step number two is, I think, especially on the entrepreneur side, people that have not yet walked down that path and nothing negative by the term, by the way, just people wanting to become entrepreneurs. I think a lot of them haven't realized, you know, we hear from the media and we hear everywhere else about, you know, the small business people, they're making gobs of money and we see them take a nice vacation and Maybe they have a decent house and a new vehicle and we think, man, they have got it made. What we don't see behind the scenes is oftentimes it was 10, 15 or 20 years of hustle and hustle and hustle and hustle and maybe eating some beans and rice and not having as nice a vehicle in order to get to the point where they had progressed and got there. And I see a lot of people that don't understand just the amount of hustle and hard work it takes, no matter what you're doing, in order to make a business launch and work.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I agree. I totally agree with that. And when you start hearing the backstories of entrepreneurs, you're like, wow, do I really want to do that? Is that the direction I want to go?

Jonathan Mast: It's amazing, but it is a lot of work. And every overnight success that you've seen always has got a long backstory that that overnight success didn't generally happen overnight. It was typically over years or decades that it took to get to that quintessential overnight success.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love that when people say it's a 20 year overnight success story.

Jonathan Mast: That's a much truer way to describe it generally.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So your mission, Jonathan, is to empower businesses and professionals to unlock AI's full potential. So for an entrepreneur just starting out or struggling to keep going, what is the most compelling reason to start paying attention to and implementing AI today?

Jonathan Mast: Well, I think there's a couple, but one is my belief that AI is as monumental shift as when electricity was introduced. We can't even fathom some of the ways that we're going to be using it. But just like you and I couldn't look back and imagine living without electricity of any sort of any kind, I really believe in the next number of years, we're going to be at that point where we're going to go, how did we do this without AI? The one thing I want to encourage every business person to understand whether you're on a team, whether you're leading or whether you own the company, AI is not here to replace you. It is here to amplify your skill and experience. And the only risk I see in being replaced for 99.9% of the workers out there is that they may get replaced by somebody that embraced AI and has the same skills they do. But AI itself is a tool. I often compare it to, I just watched my neighbor's house get a new roof on it recently. And I remember when I was a child, when a new roof got put on, people would literally climb up ladders and they'd carry shingles on their shoulders and they'd be hammering for days in order to put all those new shingles on a house. And when my neighbor got their new roof, but on that happened in an afternoon because a forklift came in or a high level, whatever it's called, and lifted all the supplies up to the roof. Nobody carried them up there on that. That lift was a big air compressor and the people that were putting the nails in. weren't hammering. They were literally tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, putting shingles in. And they did an entire massive roof in a few hours. It wasn't because they developed new skills that the old roofers didn't have, but they had new tools and those tools allowed them to work a lot faster. And that's really where I see AI fitting in. It is a tool that allows us to work faster and more efficiently. That means we can save time. As a business, we can make more money. And at the same time, probably for the first time ever, Kyle, we can actually deliver more value to our clients while we're making more money and saving time.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Wow. And you've seen that in your practice as well.

Jonathan Mast: We've seen it in our practice. We've literally seen it with hundreds of our students that have gone through our trainings and our mastermind programs. Again, action is required. So I don't want to say it happens for everybody. You and I both know there are plenty of people that learn and never actually implement. You need to implement. But if you're out there as a business leader and you're wondering where does AI fit in, I absolutely fundamentally believe that if you don't embrace AI within the next 12 to 18 months, you will be left behind by your competitors who do embrace it and figure out how to leverage it to save time, to make more money and to deliver more value.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Now you talk to a lot of different businesses and you know, they're, they're engaging you to see if, if, if you can help them. But so what's, what's your feel, you know, there's like 30 million businesses in the United States alone, small businesses. And I heard a stat the other day that there's only, I don't know, 20,000 businesses in the United States that have over 500 employees, right? So you have all these small businesses, small to medium businesses. And what's your sense for the percentage of them that are on board with AI and implementing it and figuring it out compared to those who aren't?

Jonathan Mast: All the studies I read and everybody I talk to make me believe that less than 20% of the businesses in North America are actively using AI. They may have played with a little bit, maybe they downloaded ChatGPT and they tried it a couple of times, but they're not using it on a day-to-day basis. So I know that's the one thing I hear from a lot of, is it too late? No, it's not too late. We're on the beginning of this wave. But I do believe it's a wave. And again, I do believe it's as monumental as something like the internal combustion engine or electricity. It's going to impact us in ways that honestly, I don't think Kyle, we can even imagine today because we don't know what we don't know. And that includes people like myself who are in the midst of what's going on. My crystal ball isn't perfect. I can't imagine some of the things that we'll be doing six months from now with AI that we never even thought of today.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's right. And so I imagine you spend a lot of time interfacing and engaging with AI each day. What percentage of your time, your workday, let's say in an eight hour period of a workday, what percentage of your time are you actually actively engaging and interfacing with AI?

Jonathan Mast: Yeah, no, it's a good question. I don't know if I have an exact number, but I tell you, I use AI hundreds of times a day. I use it to do all kinds of things. And it truly allows me to get, I believe, probably six to seven times more work done than I could do without AI. A great example is this morning, we're setting up a new training. We're actually redoing or updating a training we did about nine months ago. It's the first time we've ever done that. I'm meeting with my marketing team, and they've got a gazillion questions. Because we're a small company, and we're also growing rapidly, none of them were around nine months ago when I did the first training. So they don't know much about it. A couple of them have taken and watched the replays, but probably not very much. In the old days, that would have meant literally days of sitting around talking, planning, figuring out what we were going to do. This morning instead, we downloaded the transcripts of six hours worth of training that I'd done. We uploaded that into ChatGPT. We asked it to summarize it for my marketing team based upon our goal of doing a new version 2.0 with updates and explain that. In under 12 minutes, we had an entire briefing document for my marketing team that upon review, it took another probably 20 minutes, had everything they need to now launch this new program and move ahead. So we took something that literally would have been three to four people for at least a day. So we're talking 20 plus man hours minimum. And we turned it into three people for 20 minutes or one man hour. And that is just, in my mind, so typical of the type of thing that we can use AI to do. That's one of many, but it's just so typical.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. And I love, I love the, uh, the, you use the word, I believe, amplify and kind of all of a sudden you're, you become a superhero because of this, you have, you had this anchor asset, you had, you know, this training that you would develop and you're, you're taking maybe even you used AI to get the transcripts. I'm, I'm not sure.

Jonathan Mast: We did. Yep. Yeah. It was automatically transcribed by AI and then we fed that in. Yep.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: You get the transcript and then you can start asking questions of it, have it do things for you. So, I mean, I think there's just so many use cases right now that companies can use, but yeah, like you said, we don't, we don't know what we don't know yet. And the future is still available for us to pioneer, I guess, going forward.

Jonathan Mast: Absolutely.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I haven't heard people talk about AI as a using the analogy of electricity. Because that's even a bigger analogy than I hear a lot. This is like the early days of the internet, or the early days of mobile phones. But electricity, what? Why do you say electricity? Why do you use electricity as analogy?

Jonathan Mast: Because I think electricity has become ubiquitous for us in society, unless we're Amish and we're living without it at all. It's something that we don't even think about anymore. I mean, we don't, we may think about all my batteries that I need an outlet to plug it into, but we don't think about, electricity is expected to always be on, to always be there. And we notice very quickly all of the things we can't do if the power ever goes out due to a storm or anything like that. And in the background, to me, the difference is Kyle, that we don't think about electricity. It's just there and we use it all day long. You'd ask me, you know, how, how much do you use AI? It's hard for me to do because it's literally integrated in everything I do. I can, like I said, I can tell you hundreds of times a day, but it'd be hard to estimate. It'd be like asking me how many times today did you use electricity? And I'm like, well, goodness. I mean, in one form or another, I probably have been using it essentially every hour I've been awake. And I look at my home probably every hour I was sleeping, too, because there were things in my home that were running off electricity that would have probably caused some issue had they not been running. So that's why I compare it to electricity, because I think it's going to be such a monumental shift that down the road, it's going to be one of those things that we don't even think about. We just utilize.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love the analogy. So Jonathan, many entrepreneurs feel like they don't have enough time. And you mentioned that AI can dramatically increase efficiency and save you time. So can you give us a concrete, actionable example of how an entrepreneur could use AI this week to reclaim some of their time?

Jonathan Mast: Absolutely. I'm going to give you two that I think apply to almost everybody. As entrepreneurs, we almost always have processes and procedures that are up here in our head that we haven't yet shared with our team, especially in small and medium-sized businesses. It's just the way it goes. The founder and the owner often have, we know how we want things done, but we haven't always communicated that well. And let's face it, writing an SOP or standard operating procedure doesn't necessarily fit the personality of a lot of us founders either. We know it's important, but we don't want to take the time to do that. And for me, I'll speak as an ADD entrepreneur, it's actually painful for me to think through the detail level in that. It's just, it's cumbersome. And it's, I mean, I'd rather go get my teeth drilled candidly, be easier. But AI allows us to create standard operating procedures in minutes because now All I need to do is go in, and I'll talk chat GPT. You could use any of the large language models. But I can simply go in and say, I need to create an SOP to explain to my team how to do the following. Please interview me to ask me any questions you need. Here's the outline of what I want this to do. Go. And literally, it'll ask me three to five questions, maybe seven if I've missed a few things. I can fill those in and I'll then have a standard operating procedure that is likely 98%, if not 99% of the way done. I just need to proof it really quick. In my case, I'm going to hand it off to my ops person and say, Hey, you've worked with me long enough. Go through this, make sure it's not missing anything. And that standard operating procedure that hasn't been created in years in my business, because I've never got around to it. I now create it in literally probably five to 10 minutes. Another example is as owners, we so often, as entrepreneurs, run into emails that we need to send that may require us to be a little more tactful, to think about how to say it. It's like, how do you tell somebody to take a hike with a smile? Because sometimes we need to do that type of thing, and it's unpleasant, and it's not easy, and we often procrastinate. With ChatGPT, I can literally take that email, Kyle, that you sent me that I needed to respond to. I can paste it in and I can say, here's how I want to respond to Kyle. And I don't want to tell him to take a hike, but I kind of feel I need to set some boundaries. And ChatGPT will write an incredible response to that, unemotional, professional. I can then make a couple of quick edits and I'm done. So that email again that I probably would delay and procrastinate, which is going to further exacerbate the situation, I now can deal with in a few minutes. And it's off my plate. It's no more stress. It's no more, I'm not wondering about it and thinking about it in the back of my head that I gotta respond to Kyle today. And maybe if you're like me, you're doing that for three or four days, and you're not dealing with it. It's now taken care of in about five minutes.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love those examples. And in the email example, so many times I've drafted something. And I think from my perspective, I'm not putting a lot of emotion in it or anything like that. And then I can have, as a personal assistant, have chat GPT take a look at it and say, hey, I just want to make sure we make this professional. And so there's a quick rewrite of something I've written. And then now it's where it should be, because like you said, taking the emotion out of language and things like that, or making sure it really hits the mark, it's incredible to be able to have those tools right there available to us. And we're two and a half years into chat GPT being available to everyone now. And we talked about earlier, there was this big spike in downloads and usage, and then it kind of dropped off. What do you attribute the… the initial interest and then people kind of dropping off and maybe going back to old ways. What do you attribute that to?

Jonathan Mast: Well, I think a lot of people, the first time they used AI, they expected it to be a magic wand. They really expected it to be, thinking back to Office, I think it was Office Depot, had the easy button. If you remember that red button they used to advertise, maybe it was Staples, I don't remember. One of the office companies did that. And I think that's how we were looking at AI. We were thinking this is going to be an easy button. The reality is it's not an easy button, it's an easier button. Meaning I may not be able to hand off that task that I hate doing, and have AI take care of it. But I might be able to collaborate with AI and instead of taking three hours every week to do it, I might be able to do it in 30 minutes. And I think that was the mind shift that needed to happen and is now starting to happen as we're two and a half years in, as more and more people are starting to go. All right, I'm seeing other people use AI and this makes sense. I think that's what caused it. Like any new technology, you know, we had a big spike. Everybody got excited. Lots of people didn't take time to really dig into it. And so they were then underwhelmed with the responses they got back and thought, well, goodness, this isn't so much better than I can do myself. Now we're beginning to see more and more again, where businesses are starting to understand how AI can be collaborative and how it can be a tool that they use as opposed to, you know, all the companies that were telling us upfront, Oh, you're going to have AI employees and they're just going to run everything. Well, no, just like if you and I stepped away from our businesses and didn't train our employees, we didn't tell them anything. We just didn't show up and let them run things that wouldn't run the way we wanted to. We need to train them. We need to give them guidance. We need to give them leadership. You need to do all of those things with an AI model too, because it simply can't read your brain and it's not going to show up and do anything. In fact, it might be too much like an employee. You might turn your computer on in the morning and have your AI running, but if I don't give it any instructions, it's not going to do anything. And we've all had employees that work just the same way.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, I like that a lot. And I think, I think you're absolutely right that that's why people, you know, they, they thought that it would just replace you to do all the work that you want it to do. But that leaves out all the things you need to do, like feeding it data, feeding it, you know, instructions, just like an employee, but the other day, I was on a walk, and I was just like a base, you know, having a conversation with chat GPT, and having it, you know, create web pages and things like that, just as I'm on a walk, right, instructing it to do what I wanted to do, and continuing to converse and chat with it until I got what I wanted from exactly, oh, there's this whole I, you know, there's this whole thing that you still need to communicate and you need to have good ideas and you need to, you know, utilize the tools. And I just think that it's amazing that for $20 a month, you have an expert in your back pocket, this expert employee, that's an expert, a subject matter expert in all kinds of things you're not an expert in that you can utilize if you chat with it.

Jonathan Mast: Yeah. I mean, I, for example, I have multiple what I call boards of advisors. So, you know, being an entrepreneur can be lonely. Sometimes you don't know who to reach out to. You don't know what to do. And so I've got different boards of advisors that are made up of virtual people using AI that I can go to and help figure things out. I've got a couple that are specialists in not my industry AI, but are specialists for coaches and people like myself that run masterminds. And when I have questions about new programs or how can I best serve my audience, a lot of times I go to that board of advisors. There's five virtual people. They're real people. We've used public data to pull in their knowledge and everything else. So we've not stolen anything. This is all literally public data that we found. And we've now said, when I ask questions about how to build out a new course, I want you to use this perspective. I want you to use this framework and Again, it saves me so much time, as opposed to trying to do everything manually. And what's even more powerful, I've made those same tools available to my team. So now my team can also utilize those, and that makes them more productive. And again, everybody wins in that process.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And how did you set up these virtual personas then?

Jonathan Mast: I literally went so in chat GPT, we there's a lot of different models we could talk about and they're all by the way, real quick, this side thing, whatever AI tool you have access to is a great tool to use for you today. You don't need to find the perfect tool. But let's talk about chat GPT because it's kind of the big 900 pound gorilla. ChatGPT has the ability, as do others, to create what are called custom GPTs or models that are trained on data you've uploaded. And for my avatar advisory board, I literally went in and I said, all right, I needed a board to help me with the following. And in my case, it was grow my coaching and mastermind business, help me provide incredible value so that people just line up and basically want to pay me money. Because if the free stuff is so great, imagine what the paid stuff is going to be. And based on that, I knew there were a couple of people in the world that coaches, a couple that I've actually hired that have expertise there. And I said, here are the programs and the type of data we want to include. I had it go out and do deep research, which is a new AI function in the last couple of months. And literally one of the reports I have is 143 pages long with over 300 citations about this particular coach's frameworks and what they recommend and success stories and how they've helped other businesses like mine grow. And by the way, it doesn't matter what line of work you're in. My son's in-laws, they have a landscape company. And there are coaches and specialists that teach landscape companies how to do better, how to grow and scale. And he did the exact same thing for their business because Now, when they have questions, instead of going, I don't know what to do, or, you know, this we're second generation, they literally go to this board of advisors, it's made up of AI based personas, trained on real data. And they can ask you questions like, how do we implement this new service? Or this is a problem we're running into what have others found? And the great news is, is it's trained on this data. So it comes back and it actually gives you relevant guidance. It's like having a paid consultant, except that it's like you mentioned, it's $20 a month.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: It's amazing. And so each of the personas is a custom GPT, I assume.

Jonathan Mast: Each of the boards is a custom GPT in this case, because they work in conjunction. I also have some that are just a single person that have a particular. But these that I'm talking about, mine's got five people on it, the one that I'm talking about. And it's defined here, the five individuals. Here's who they are. One of them happens to be deceased, so there's no way for me to reach out. tremendous pool of knowledge that's available. We can pull that knowledge. And so, you know, I mentioned, you know, my backgrounds in sales and marketing, and I grew up on Zig Ziglar. Zig Ziglar passed away a number of years ago. I can't hire Zig Ziglar to come coach me. But Zig's got multiple books out there and tons of resources. I can train an AI model on that. And now when I have questions, if I want, I can have the persona of Zig Ziglar help guide me through based on the public data that's available. And the difference is, you know, Zig's got, I'm guessing, dozens of books that I've bought over the years. I don't always know which one to go grab. But AI can take all that data and in milliseconds, find the part that relates to cold calling or rebuttals or whatever, and help me respond to that. Because it's just, it's a computer, it's super fast.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love that. This is giving me a lot of great ideas for things that I'm working on right now. So one quick question, I might scratch from the record, but a quick question about custom GPTs. Can you access multiple custom GPTs at the same time? So if you had two personas, for example, that were individual GPTs, can you use both those GPTs at the same time?

Jonathan Mast: Kind of. And my reason I say kind of is that you can do what's called stacking. So once I begin a conversation with you, Kyle, if you're one of my avatars, and then I want to add in another, I can bring the other one into that conversation. But the only data they will have will be the data in that conversation. They won't necessarily have access to all of your data. So if I want both of them together, I need to do that. For example, on one of my boards of advisors, I have dead, living, and fictional characters. And the fictional character I have that everybody laughs about is Tony Stark from the movie Iron Man. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, I like Tony Stark. Don't like everything he did, but I like his attitude. So he's on my board. Steve Jobs is also on the board. He's deceased. I can literally have Steve Jobs and Tony Stark debate an issue and then give me feedback as AI would interpret that they would do. It's not guaranteed, but I can tell you it gives me insights and perspectives that I would never have thought of had I not had the opportunity. And like you said, I can do this while I'm walking down the sidewalk, having my phone literally wearing these, the ear things I've got in here, and I can carry on a conversation with it while I'm walking. That's the type of efficiency I could never have done before.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, having a personal assistant for $20 an hour that's an expert in everything's would be amazing. But for $20 a month is super extraordinary. It's it's it's amazing times we're living in. So I know you probably used chat GPT from the beginning two and a half years ago.

Jonathan Mast: I did.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Have you used some of these prompts? I see these prompts on Tick Tock and things like that where people are basically asking ChatGPT to tell them about themselves because we've been sharing all this information about ourselves, our hopes and dreams and projects and different things we're working on. Have you used some of those prompts and what has been amazing or revealing to you about the conversations and the things that ChatGPT knows about you that maybe you didn't know about yourself?

Jonathan Mast: Well, I'm probably unique there because I do so much coaching and training. I actually have turned off all the memory features in chat. And the reason is, is I don't want to cross pollinate as I'm working with different companies and have it decide that it's going to use certain data. So I have it off, but I've talked to many people that have used that and turned it on. I think a lot of it is insightful because I don't think most of us take the time to really try to understand ourselves. I may be unique in that area. I got diagnosed with ADD when I was 43 years old. That caused me to take quite a bit of time to really analyze who Jonathan was and what were the god-given strengths and weaknesses that I had. Because I realized I'd spent 40 years of my life trying to become something everybody else said this is what success looks like. And at that point I was able to re-evaluate and over the next number of years learned that if I could lean into that circle of genius, those things that I was just wired to do well and not try to become great at everything that I sucked at. And there's a big list there that I could hire people to do. My business and my life got so much better. My business soared in success when I started doing that. My life got so much less stressful when I started doing that. because I was able to focus on that. Long answer to a very good question. Yes. I think for a lot of people, that's where ChatGPD can be really helpful because it is trained on all kinds of data and it can provide you with insights that you may or may not have ever really taken the time to dive into on your own.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: For sure. And I think it's a lot easier to share even, you know, personal things and dreams and things that you have. with chat GPT than it is sometimes with other humans. And so and it's remembering all of that, and it's not approaching it from a judgmental standpoint. So the feedback is extraordinary. And I can see that, you know, AI and we already have doctors and therapists and things using AI as they're meeting with patients to not only record the transcript, but also to get feedback on. So this is going to be something that's amazing moving forward. And again, $20 a month compared to a $200 session with a therapist. It's, you know, some people can't afford these, you know, expensive therapists. And so I can see AI used going forward for a lot of therapy as well.

Jonathan Mast: Absolutely.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Beyond saving time, you talk about AI helping businesses increase profits and uncover opportunities. What's a key way AI can directly contribute to an entrepreneur's bottom line that they might not have considered?

Jonathan Mast: Well, I think because most of us as entrepreneurs have more to do than we have time. One of the things we don't do a great job of is what we call audience segmentation. In other words, we don't look at our customers and try to figure out what should I sell Kyle? And is that different than what I might sell Sarah? AI can now do that for us and it can help us customize marketing messages. So I can now look at your behavior as a customer of mine and customize marketing messages quite literally almost on the fly so that I can literally say, all right, it's day three of a campaign. We need to send Kyle a follow-up. Here's the general message I want to send, but I want you to look at Kyle as a customer and his experience. And I want you to customize this message inside the boundaries that I gave you to fit for Kyle. And all of a sudden, now you're able to get marketing messages that you feel resonate with you because you're like, how did Jonathan know that? How did, how did he know? Wow, because we have that ability to do those deeper dives that we literally just never had the time to do. It wouldn't have been worth it to pay somebody to go through that on a one by one basis. So we did kind of a broad shotgun approach. Now we have that ability really not to always compare it to guns, but to take that sniper rifle and go, okay, I'm going to go after Kyle with this message. And now I'm going to go after Sarah with the next one. And while they're similar, they're unique and identifiable for you and what's important for you. And that as an entrepreneur allows us to make more money and better serve our clients. Because if, and I've always believed this as a sales guy, if what I sell adds value to your life, I shouldn't want you to say no to me. I should want you to say yes, not just for the money that I'm gonna make, but because of the fact that it's gonna improve your life. But it's my responsibility to help you come to that realization that this value is worth you parting with some dollars for. And AI can help us do that. in a scale that we've never dreamed possible before.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: It's an excellent example. And I was just thinking, you know, as an entrepreneur, all the different things that you can't get to, you don't have time to get to all the things that you can't afford to pay someone to do. Now there's an opportunity to see how AI could sort of fill in those gaps. Does that sound correct to you?

Jonathan Mast: 100%. I have a team of nine people counting myself. If I didn't have AI, I would need at least twice as many. And some people go, well, that means that people lost jobs. No, I'm a brand new startup. We're two and a half years old. We've never had to fire somebody because we didn't need their skills. We've gotten rid of a few people that didn't fit, that's happened, but never because we didn't need their skills because AI replaced them. But I will tell you that AI has helped us grow and scale. If we weren't in AI now, we probably would only be a third as far along the growth path as we were. Because again, we wouldn't be able to act as quickly and wouldn't have taken advantage of some of that amplification.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's really cool. So, you know, you're the creator of the perfect prompt framework. What is prompt design or prompt engineering? And how does having a framework like yours help entrepreneurs get significantly better results when using AI tools?

Jonathan Mast: Good question. So prompting is really just talking to AI. It's really that simple. There are fields of study like prompt engineering and all that and 99.9% of us humans on earth don't need to worry about that. It's really about how do we communicate. What happens though, as soon as we start using AI, then between Facebook and Amazon and everybody else that listens to what we're doing and pays attention to our digital footprint, we start getting offered all these lists of prompts that are available that people want to sell us. And it's very enticing if I'm, let's say in the landscape business, and I get a marketing message that says, you know, 117 of the best AI prompts for landscape companies to use, And it's $29. I'm like, wow, I should probably do that. I mean, I'd learn. And that's great, except that now when it becomes time for me to use one of those prompts, I have to, one, remember where I put that, and I may not remember. Two, I then have to take the time to read through on the low end 117 prompts. I literally got an offer this morning for 10,007 prompts. Imagine trying to go through 10,000 prompts to find the one you want. You won't. Instead, it's easier to just use a framework. I'm a huge believer in frameworks, and I teach the perfect prompting framework, which is four simple steps. Step one, tell the AI the type of expert that it is. So let's say we're going to write a press release. You're an expert at writing press releases. That's it. Step two, give it context. I'm launching a new training next week talking about how to build out avatar advisory boards, And I want to relay a press release that we did this last September, and now we're doing a new version of it. Step three, what's your question? Write me the press release. And step four, the most important, you can skip one, two, and three. Don't forget number four. You literally end your prompt or your communication with AI with, ask me any questions you have. So in this case, it sounds like you're an expert at writing press releases. I'm releasing a new course next week called Avatar Advisors, and it's an update from a course I did last September. I want a press release going out to people explaining what we're doing. Please write that press release and ask me any questions you have. Well, here's the beauty of that. I didn't have to think. I could just follow my 1, 2, 3, 4. And there are absolutely things that I left out in that, that now the AI model, ChatGPT or whatever, will come back and go, OK, Jonathan, who's the audience? You didn't tell us. Tell us a little bit more about your new course. Tell us a little bit more about your old course. And you may be going, Oh my gosh, this is hard. Well, no, we're going to have a press release written in a few minutes based upon this, as opposed to, as you mentioned before, probably never writing the press release. Cause we had too many things on our plate and too much to do and press releases. Well, they were far enough down the chain. They just didn't happen.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love the framework and it's very simple and easy to follow. So for entrepreneurs or even established entrepreneurs. You know, a lot of them might feel overwhelmed by all the AI buzz. And, you know, where do I begin? But what's the very first step they should take to explore integrating AI into their business or idea in a simple, practical way?

Jonathan Mast: So one of my favorite books out there that I've ever read is by Dan Martell and it's buy back your time. And one of the things that Dan talks about in the book is to do a simple time study. And if you would imagine for an entire week, you would just every 15 minutes, you would write down the main thing that you were doing that 15 minute period. That's it. Just. run that. So after a week, you're gonna have a lot of data points, and then go back through and highlight everything that made you feel good that you're like, wow, I wish I could do more of that highlighting green, everything that made you go, which I didn't have to do that highlight in pink or red or whatever. And I don't know if there's a red highlighter, but I know I had a pink one. then go through all those items in pink. And there were a lot of them for me that I don't have to do, but I don't really love doing. And let's figure out how we can use AI to help me get those done faster. And miraculously, if you do that, and you just try to pick one of those pink things every day to work on, you'll be saving hours a week by the end of the week.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's really cool. That's great advice. Thank you for sharing that. And, uh, name the book again.

Jonathan Mast: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. And it basically talks about how as entrepreneurs, we often do too much of our own work. And it's not that it's bad, but I'll give you the one example he gives. It's true for me. So I don't mow my lawn. Not because I'm too lazy to mow my lawn, but it costs me $45 to have my lawn mowed every week. It takes the lawnmower crew that comes in and trims and everything else about 45 minutes to do that. So I'm paying them a dollar a minute. They go, that's crazy expensive. No, because it would probably take me three hours to do it. And then I'd have to have the equipment. I'd have to have everything else. And by the way, I don't really enjoy cutting my own yard. So now I'm trading $45 for three hours of my time. I'll do that all day long because I make more than 15 bucks an hour. So why wouldn't I want to do that? I'm oversimplifying, but that's really what the book is about. And again, that time study thing for me was just critical. It's like, yeah, I don't want to spend three hours a week mowing my yard. I don't enjoy doing that. Well, I don't have to, because for $45 a week, somebody else will do it for me. They'll do a better job. My wife's happier. I'm happier. We all win.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's great. So a core benefit you highlight is delivering unparalleled value to clients. How can AI help an entrepreneur enhance their customer experience or the value they provide in a way that builds loyalty and growth?

Jonathan Mast: First and foremost, have AI go through your customer onboarding experience. No matter what you do when you bring a customer on, explain that to ChachiPT and have it help you improve it. I will promise you, no matter how much time you spend on it, you can improve your onboarding process to build more loyal customers and to make them go, wow, I am so glad I decided to work with Kyle. So that's step number one, as far as adding more value. Step two is the fact that AI is going to let you save time. So you're going to be able to deliver whatever you're doing currently to your clients generally in less time. Even if you've got a landscape company, and that means you're mowing lawns, AI is going to help build you more efficient schedules. It's going to help build better maintenance schedules. It's going to do all kinds of things to help make sure as my son just shared with me that happened in his in-laws business recently, they got an urgent call because somebody forgot to mow a lawn, happened to be an hour away. So now they literally had to take a crew and send them an hour away to mow a lawn and come back. So they wasted essentially half of a day to mow one yard that paid them about $45. They lost money on that big time. That happens in business. Some of it's unavoidable, but if AI can help us with our schedules, it doesn't take many of those that don't happen again. And again, we can now provide more value to our clients because maybe we've got an extra five minutes now to spend on taking care of Ms. Wood's roses instead of skipping them because we didn't have any time. That can create more value, more trust, and more loyalty.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I know you've guided over 400,000 people with AI. Do I have an old number?

Jonathan Mast: Yeah, we reach out to over half a million people a day right now.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. So, and, and that's through training programs and coaching. What's a mindset shift that you recommend for entrepreneurs looking to quickly become proficient in AI? I know you've talked about the framework. Is there any other kind of mind shifts that needs to take place with an entrepreneur?

Jonathan Mast: It's a process, but after you follow through and identify all those red tasks you don't want to do, then we want to encourage you to start thinking about AI first as a solution instead of AI possible as a solution. And that does take up, it's going to take a month or two of you focusing on the red tasks to get there, but then you can start doing it. And then even more powerful, you can start teaching your team how to do that. Because when your team does that, even a small business with say 10 employees, If you can save every employee a half hour a day, that's five work hours every single day that you have back for them to do a better work, to spend more time on something, or maybe just to take a breath and enjoy their job more and provide more value ultimately.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So looking back at your journey, your entrepreneurial journey and seeing the impact AI has on others, what's the most inspiring aspect of AI for entrepreneurship right now?

Jonathan Mast: It is the expert that you can't afford and desperately want to talk to. It's been trained on that. It will be as good as your average, you name it, professional. and it can help you with guidance and advice and counsel, and it will allow you as a leader to up your game in ways that you've never even imagined before. Just start sharing with it what you're dealing with, what questions you've got, or maybe it's just getting in your head because you had a rotten day and have it help you get out of that so you can be a positive leader.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: What's a question about AI you wish I would ask you right now that I haven't asked you yet?

Jonathan Mast: That's a great question. I think, you know, probably one of the biggest questions we get from people, it relates again to, is it going to take over the world? No, AI only does what it's been programmed to do. And AI is not sentient. It doesn't think about things like that. It's not lying to you because it didn't make a decision to try to deceive you. Is it wrong? Yeah, it's been trained on human data. Sometimes it is wrong, but it's not intentionally trying to deceive you.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, I think there's a lot of fear out there, you know, fear, uncertainty and doubt and a lot of FUD out there surrounding AI. But when you start talking about it as a tool to help you to become more productive in a similar way, electricity is a power tool and the internet is, then it makes it easier to kind of get over that fear, uncertainty and doubt. So I wanted to go into some personal questions right now for you. What's the most exciting thing you're working on right now?

Jonathan Mast: For me, I think the most exciting thing is just helping businesses learn how to use these custom GPTs and then agentic AI, which is the next thing that's coming out, started already, which instead of just giving it individual tasks to do, we can give it goals to accomplish, and it will actually define the tasks and execute on a number of those things independently. I think that again, we're just scratching the surface of what AI can do for our businesses.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay, what's your number one skill? I know you've been in sales, you've done marketing, digital marketing, you're now doing consulting and coaching. But if you were to sum up Jonathan Mast and this is my number one skill, what is that?

Jonathan Mast: I make complex things seem simple. I like that.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I know you spent some time working for the man or maybe working in corporate or other people. What is a key difference between someone who works in corporate and someone who works at a startup?

Jonathan Mast: Well, I think the big difference is, is everything is your job in a startup. There, there is no, that's not my job mentality. That doesn't work. It doesn't always work well in corporate either, but it can work there. It definitely doesn't work in a startup. And the other thing to remember is that, again, I'll go back to what we talked about. Nothing happens in a startup until you sell something. And I see way too many business owners and entrepreneurs spend too much time planning everything out for every eventuality. and they never get around to selling anything. And I find that they often lose steam then before they sell something. I would encourage everybody out there, messy success beats clean failure every day of the week.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love it. So what TV, movie, book or musical or opera character do you most relate to?

Jonathan Mast: Boy, that's hard. As of right now, just because I just spent the last entire weekend driving and pulling an RV up from Alabama, it would be Dumbledore in the Headmaster Wizard in the Harry Potter series. In listening to the books that I listened to while I was driving, he has this immense ability, or his character does, to actually make complex things seem simple. And I really hope to be able to do that for my audience.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Who has had the most significant impact on your life?

Jonathan Mast: Hmm, probably my wife had a lot of issues, screwed up a lot of things. My wife's one of the few people that just unequivocally believed in me and turned me around.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love that answer. What's the book that you recommend the most to people?

Jonathan Mast: Probably just the one that we talked about, the buy back your time by Dan Martell. I think it is so impactful for a business person. And it's one of those things we don't often think about. Time is something we either spend wisely or we lose it. And I think learning how to do that better is really important.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I can't wait to read it. It's going to be next in my queue. Thanks for the recommendation. So lightning round of questions, favorite candy bar.

Jonathan Mast: I haven't had a candy bar in forever, but I, the favorite of all time doesn't even exist anymore. It was called a whatchamacallit. And it was like Rice Krispies and chocolate, all that together came out when I was in grade school. Love those things.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. It still exists. So I'm going to send you.

Jonathan Mast: Okay. I don't, I, I try not to eat candy cause it's not good for me, but that would, that'd be my favorite.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. Awesome. So a favorite music artist.

Jonathan Mast: Boy, that's a real tough one. Growing up, it was Def Leppard. I'm an 80s kid and I used to love Def Leppard. Now it's probably gonna be like a Hillsong Worship or something like that that I listen to.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Favorite cereal?

Jonathan Mast: Oh boy, Frosted Flakes.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Mac or PC?

Jonathan Mast: 100% Mac.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Google or Microsoft?

Jonathan Mast: Google, both evil, but Google less evil than Microsoft.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Dogs or cats?

Jonathan Mast: I love them both, but cats are easier to take care of.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Phantom or Les Mis?

Jonathan Mast: Definitely phantom.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. And last question for you, Jonathan, what's the worst thing about being an entrepreneur and what's the best thing about being an entrepreneur?

Jonathan Mast: Probably one in the same, no accountability. I mean, ultimate accountability, yes, but no direct day-to-day accountability. It's the worst thing because sometimes that hampers us, but it's the best thing when, you know, it's sunny out and my motorcycle's calling and I want to go take a ride.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love that answer. Well, thanks so much, Jonathan, for being generous with your time today. I've loved having you on the podcast and talking about all things AI. It's been very informative. It's inspired me to go try a few things with ChatGPT and the other LLMs that I'm using right now, and I hope it inspires entrepreneurs too. get on board with AI or use AI in different ways. And we'll put links to all of your training courses, your website, all those kinds of things where people can find and connect with you. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

Jonathan Mast: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.