Simple AI tricks you're not using (but should be)

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:27

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleandra Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you can expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success.

Speaker 3: 0:52

Welcome to this week's solo episode of Designing Success. I've got some more interviews coming up for you next week but for today I am about to go into a, on Wednesday nights we have a catch up call for my emerging designer version of the framework and tonight's theme is AI and in the spirit of all things AI I thought I would run through with you 10 AI tricks that you're probably not using, but definitely should be. Alright, let's get into it. AI is everywhere. I feel really strange as someone who was an early adopter, I'm now starting to see people show up in the Instagram space specifically, And be showing up in that space from a place of wow, this is what AI can do. And I'm so glad to see more and more people are finally going, you know what? I will try it. I know that new things are scary. I know that robot things are scary and yet I still think there are. Thousands more benefits that outweigh the fear and I'm going to give it a go. So if that's you, if you're listening along and you are someone who thinks I'm not very tech savvy, or I don't know that it's for me, I would like to remind you that you might not be tech savvy yet, but that anyone who can send an email can use AI, my AI assistants, I have not worked with anyone who can't just start talking to them because they ask all the right questions, they extract the information that they need, and they give you the outcomes that drive the results. It's definitely something that if you have not got on board with, now is the time. You're behind the time, so we need to get going. In saying that, if I'm realistic, I think most people are using it at about, I'd say about 40 percent of its power for someone who thinks they use AI really well. And if you're having it just write captions for you ideas, I think you're really missing out big time. I think if you show up and your prompt is the same every single day, I What can I post on Instagram? Give me 15 ideas of something I could talk about in my Instagram stories, these sorts of basic bitch prompts, then I think you are probably working at that 40 percent or less. So today I want to reframe a few things and give you some possibilities of a few different ways that you could explore using the tool, really baby steps. This is not going to be a complicated tech bro kind of podcast. It's quick, it's actionable, and I think you're going to really love these. So here are 10 underrated AI tricks that will change the way you run your business. The first one is to take a piece of content that you already have and ask AI to rewrite it for a different audience. This one's really great. If I have an email that I send out on a Friday that I get lots of responses from, there are lots of people that connected to that topic or felt seen, I will grab that email, throw it into AI and say, how do you see this working for a TikTok algorithm? What do you think I could do with this piece of content to make it appropriate for LinkedIn even sometimes I'll just take a piece of content and say, suggest 40 ways that this could be repurposed across the platforms that I show up on and some I haven't even thought of. And it's so amazing with AI how you can actually really stretch it. If I had a staff member and I sat down and said, come up with. 40 ways to repurpose this one Instagram caption. I think that's really cruel and unkind, especially also being like, and things I've never heard of, but with AI, you get the results from that in seconds. And what I like about it is for me, it's a bit of a boulder effect. One idea sparks the next idea, sparks the next idea. Then I might see one and say, I love idea number 14. Show me what that could look like in real time. Take my original content and create the thing that you're thinking, and then I'll build my ideas into it. So I'll grab the microphone button at the bottom and I'll say it's good, but it feels a bit robotic. Here's a writing sample of my, I just go working back and forth. And then finally I have this piece of repurposed content and possibly repurposed for a platform or in a format that I had no idea that I had the intention to do that. Okay. And it may have taken me less than five minutes. I've got five minutes. Sometimes I'm just waiting for the bell to go school drop off, or I've just got this extra little pocket of time where I've pulled up to an appointment early. And that's the sort of time that I utilize this. So number one, rewriting for different audiences. Number two, spotting what's missing. So instead of just asking AI to create, to brainstorm, I always ask it, or I try asking things like, What are the opportunities that I'm not seeing with this? What's wrong with this copy or content? What's missing? Have I missed any opportunities for revenue diversity? Is there anything that I'm not seeing to its full potential. So asking the questions almost like reverse engineering, but coming from a negative angle instead of a positive one, instead of being like, great, love that, change this, change that. I always ask a deeper question like, what opportunities exist in relation to whatever task it is that you're doing that I'm missing or that I'm not maximizing. That one's just a really good habit to get into. So when I'm doing a prompt, I get a result, and then I immediately respond with, based on this, what's wrong with it, what could I do to improve this work, and just really workshop back and forth with Chatty G. Okay, number three. I mentioned making it sound more like you. Obviously if you have GPT tools like the ones I have inside of the framework or the ones that I sell to small business owners, things like Bennett, who creates your brand command and really gets to know your tone of voice and who you're for and what offers you have and builds all the context that ChatGPT needs. If you don't have a Bennett in your life but you want to make ChatGPT sound more like you. You need to feed it past content of yours, examples of your writing, and say things like, rewrite this in my voice. AI learns really fast, so suddenly you have this personal assistant who knows what you want, but you must give AI context in every little thing that you do. So sometimes I'll say, in a moment, I'm going to ask, I'm going to workshop with you a blog and I don't even have a topic in mind at this point but I'd like you to look at these two pieces of writing, which are blogs that I follow, that I find engaging, that I read myself, that I can never put down. This is the kind of content. so much. approach that I want for an original piece that I'm writing. And here are two examples of my writing style. A previous email that I've sent, a blog that I've written, a podcast transcript, so it can really hear the cadence and the way that I pull together ideas because the podcast is not scripted. So I personally, because I have a podcast, Often reference podcast transcripts as a sample of my tone and who I am as a provider and as a coach. And then I find that, yeah, it can learn really fast and it gives it a really good overview so that it knows what you want it to do, but uniquely you and in your voice, it gets scarily accurate. There are times that I have my chat GPT trained at the moment where I am not. I am a huge advocate for editing, and I will always read through. And of course I do these little bits and pieces. I love to shave the first couple of words off because I hate that it starts every sentence with, but the kicker, but that's not all or. Real talk, let's, so it seems to start every sentence with these like really cheesy two, three, four worded sentences. The structure is just not the structure is nothing like how I would write things. So in saying that I have trained by GPT over time, I've got customizations in the backend that just say, We get to the point, we don't use emojis, we don't use this language, we are not vague, like all those sorts of things. I really would encourage you to spend time giving feedback to ChatGPT. It really pays off. If I hadn't have done that from the beginning, two and a half years ago, actually telling it I don't like this, I don't like that. That's a bad response. Marley, my three year old, is going through a stage at the moment where he does thumbs up and says good choice, thumbs down, bad choice. And that's how he ascertains how he lives his life and what he's doing. And I laugh a little bit because when I'm using ChatGPT, it's quite similar. It's got a little thumbs up and thumbs down and I, good choice, bad choice, ChatGPT around what responses I'm getting. Okay, number four. Summarizing really long things in seconds. I mentioned podcast transcript. Drop in a podcast transcript, a webinar transcript, a messy brainstorm session that you can upload the images of your notebook with bits and pieces everywhere. And AI will spit out a TLDR or too long didn't read for all the best takeaways. I use this all the time. I have an assistant named May and she does YouTube synopsis for me. And the reason I mostly use May, I like to watch YouTube clips and upscale and do that. But a lot of what I upscale in, again, back to the tech bro kind of approach to AI. A lot of the things that I want to learn. I don't want to watch 25 minutes of someone in Silicon Valley explaining coding to me. I need to know if anything in there is worthwhile. And may the chat GPT be there. And May, the chat assistant that I have, what I love about her, she puts the timestamps in, so then if I'm like, okay, at the 15 minute mark, they're actually addressing that one thing I want to learn about Notion or that one thing I want to learn about whatever software you've got or your problem that you've got, I can go directly to that point. But summarizing really long stuff in seconds is so helpful. It's helpful because you can grab the summary and you can drop it into a Trello board into a whatever. So if you have a lot of tech flow you use, and whatever software you use, it's a good way to get those key takeaways, but without having to store so much information, which we already have very full brains. Okay, we're halfway there. Number five. Analyzing your audience's words. I have been getting more and more feedback as my chat GPT has gotten to know me more and to know my ideal client even more than that. That, a lot of the comments that I get on my Instagram is okay, who let you inside of my head? Or, I am feeling this in my bones, I feel this deep in my soul. Those are the sorts of DMs that I'm having on a daily basis and I think that's because I work so hard with chat GPT to really get feedback. into who my ideal client is because I strongly believe from a marketing perspective that everything I put out should be like a mirror and you should see yourself in that and go, okay, yes, this is the coach that can get the best result out of me. This is the right person, whether it's private coaching or a group mentorship. This is the world that I need to be in because you have that strong systems, AI capability to bring me to that next level. So I always want to be trying to do that in my marketing. So when you get a DM or a comment or a review and a testimonial, which is like also really great if you can get a video testimonial or anything, if someone voice memos you, anything like that. I grab those and I put them into ChatGPT and I ask it to analyze the audience's words and I get to know it a little bit more. What words and emotions show up the most? What are they struggling with? What are they feeling? And then sometimes you can even create just, Really targeted. Static posts on Instagram that's just a sentence, but in the words of your actual client so that we're not overcomplicating our marketing. We're not saying what we're not assuming what they need. We are going back with the exact pain point from every discovery call because we get to analyze those audience words and reuse them across all of the platforms.

Speaker 4: 12:38

Let's take a teeny break in the episode just so that I can give you a little update on what it is that I'm offering in 2025. The Oleander and Finch business has changed so much in the last couple of years and I just want to be really clear around the sorts of ways that I can support you in your business. So I obviously do have Not obviously, but I have designed clients. I take one design project at a time by application and that ticks away in the background and that's purely so I have a finger on the pulse so that when I'm working with students, I'm like, Hey, yeah, I understand your frustrations because things change and because I refuse to, you can't claw my white knuckled hands off working with clients. I absolutely love it. It lights me up. Um, and it's my creative outlet. So I like to do that. The second thing that I offer is the framework and that is. The foundational course that's been running for a couple of years now. It helps support emerging designers to understand the business and marketing skills that it takes to run a successful interior design business. Or more importantly for that one to set up a successful design business. It walks through all the documents you're going to need to have a master copy of. It gives you the templates of those documents. So you just need to apply your branding. It helps you decide on your branding. It has over 40 snackable lessons in video format so that you can learn the business of running an interior design firm. So whether that's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's finance, it's all the things that I wish I'd known or someone had filmed a video lessons and given me all of the templates. So that ticks along now that is almost half the cost that it used to be because. It's just built itself into such an amazingly tight ship that I show up once a week for support calls. But other than that, everything that you need is beautifully laid out for you and it's very self paced. It's 447 enrolment for that and 99 a month. So it's super affordable. Super affordable in terms of investment before you have clients coming into your business. You can purchase that on the website anytime. Just go ahead to www. olianderandfinch. com. My private coaching is two weeks intensive that I do. And that's a ceiling smash program where I meet with you. I hear what all your challenges are. We build out a Trello board. We build out the answers and the roadmaps and all the corresponding templates and AI solutions. And you get all of my AI Custom assistance and yeah, we just work intensively on your business for two weeks and then you're good to go. And lastly, the Framework Express, which is the new one that I've released. And that's for people who don't want to do two weeks intensive, and they don't want to do 12 months with me, but they do need business coaching and they do want access to all the AI assistants. They do want a masterclass to teach them how to use AI properly and how to level out their processes, workflows, systems, and get stuck into understanding, profitability and I'm going to be doing a video on scaling in general, making sure that everything is in place so that they're ready to really grow in the second half of this year. Hopefully that's broken down for you, the core offers that Oleander and Finch offer. We'll be working with in 2025, which is, you know, one is obviously for my design clients and the other three, it's just about finding what is the right fit and where do you fit? Are you an emerging designer and established designer? Do you need private coaching or do you prefer a group environment? If you ever have any questions, please visit me over at www. ollyanderandfinch. com or on Instagram okay, let's get back to it.

Speaker 3: 16:07

Number six, creating content gaps that your competitors miss. So having AI analyze your top competitors blogs, emails, asking what topics are they not covering. That's your next big idea. This is my ideal client. This is who I'm for. We all know that. We all know that. exist in a world where we know heaps of business owners who have identical niches or ideal clients. If I had a dollar for every person that said they're busy professionals, like I get that. That's totally fine. It's okay to have the exact ideal client. I have the exact ideal client as other business mentors who run Group memberships for emerging and established interior designers. So of course, when I say a topic that's about pricing in the industry, that is of course, something that I expect to see my competitors also talking about, but actively seeking out the gaps that your competitors miss and looking for that lane is fantastic. It's such a great way to use AI. Now the AI can search the web. Hey, this is my brand command using Bennett. This is every bit of context about me. Here's two or three competitors I'm aware of, but I'm open to you looking across the internet and finding others that you think are comparable to the way I run my business. What topics are they not covering? list them out for me, give me 10 for this week and that's going to support your content strategy straight away and it's going to make you feel like you're not showing up in that perpetual cycle of same. Okay, number seven. I mentioned brainstorming before. Brainstorming is still a massive part of why we use AI and what it does. It can do for us, but so good if you're stuck in a creative rut, you can ask AI for 10 unexpected angle on any topic. So even you could upload a photo of the room that you're working on and ask for 10 unexpected ideas for what to do with that wall or maybe Because I just find the weirdest ideas are often the best ones, or they spark the better ones later for me. So getting, it's almost like having an EA or having an assistant who can say, Hey, no idea is too crazy. Trust me. I am king of really ridiculous things that don't get off the ground, but gosh, I have fun planning them. And get AI to play the game with you because it, is exposed to way more things than the human brain could possibly be exposed to. So every now and again, it's going to come up with a beauty. And this is brainstorming across all areas of your business. I'm not necessarily saying that a client gives you a creative brief and you take it to AI. I would hate that. I think I was chatting to Nicholas Gertler last week on the podcast, just saying, I will never be that kind of designer because I live for the challenge. I love the idea of coming up with the solution, but I think it's really cool to be able to say, Hey, I've got an idea for something I want to talk about in the Instagram space. For example, I want to do a carousel this week on this topic, but I want you to show me 10 different angles of why, like what approach I might have to come in and speak about this topic. And I think you'll, really be surprised by how much more variety and creative your content gets because you weren't supposed to be a content media marketing manager or social media content manager. You really weren't. We were here to be business owners running our own interior design business and all of a sudden it turned out that took up a rude percentage of time. Number eight, turning data into storytelling. So having AI transform dry statistics into really engaging, easy to digest stories that actually resonate with your audience. So if you do have access to that sort of data, I helped this person go from this to this. That's more relevant to my style of business, being able to say here's all the data that I have and being able to say, statistically, everybody that I've worked with has been able to increase their revenue year on year by 15 percent or more, those sorts of things. But then that's not that interesting. And I'm not really one to go on to Instagram and just be shouting out numbers and, really doing that. But I would love to break that down into a story that tells the story of how a lot of the people that I meet with are nervous about their pricing, or they think their pricing is at its top tier already, or they think they've got their pricing right. But when we sit down and actually, with the awareness that I have of what everyone else is doing in the industry, and what you should be doing to get particular results, I almost always stretch them into a different bracket when they're working with me. Because I'm able to. Help them to really audit their time, understand their hourly rates, their value based pricing, understand their value a lot more, and just build that confidence with them to be able to say, you know what, enough is enough, I have been sitting at this for a long time. Level and I've plateaued and I haven't been brave enough to see what else is out there for me. And really understanding that, but that data, as I say, is quite boring. So being able to workshop with chat, dbt that I would like to tell it in a way that says, when Sarah came to me, she was very happy with her in home consultation fee of 95, including GST until I told her that I would expect at her level of experience that she would not Cross the threshold or enter a home under 495 plus GST, like upping her price, her initial in home consult by 400 before we've even gotten into her pricing. It's a game changer. And I think it could tell a really strong story. And it's actually a very common story for designers that I work with. Yeah, think about how that might relate to your business. How could you take a piece of data or something that seems quite dry statistical and ask AI to work with you to Create something engaging and easy to digest. Maybe you could share it as an email with your audience. Number nine, I feel like a lot of you probably have had a go at this. I don't know how successful it's been, but batching your content calendar in minutes. So giving AI your content pillars and saying generate 30 content ideas for each of these pillars that I can use this month. Bam, instant strategy. You just pick 10 of the best out of each of those pillars and you're good to go. I'm not trying to promote that. You have 30 content ideas and you post every day. I think that's ridiculous in these modern times, it's not necessary at all. I think that you need to have variety. I think you need to think about which platforms you show up on. We'll save that for a marketing specific solo episode later in the year, but certainly being able to pick your top five for this week, for example, and say, that's going to make a great email that would make an excellent podcast episode. These two I'll put on Instagram and I'm definitely going to write a blog about this one. Bang. You've got a really strong strategy that is related to your content pillars. There's other things that you can do around batching your content calendar. I know Sylvie, my assistant that I have, does a seven day strategy every single week for me. And I tell her where I want to show up. So all the platforms that I work on. And then she says what we're going to say on which days, what are the topics on which days. And she's really got some great strategy built into the back end of her that talks about top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel marketing. It also, there's a lot, there's lots and lots of principles and strategies in the back so that she is assessing your individual needs and coming up with that content strategy every week because obviously it's not built around my business because when you get to meet your AI assistants they become yours and they learn about your brand through the brand command and they create strategy for you that's going to work to convert conversion content for your brand not conversion content for my brand that would not work of you and lastly, testing different tones before you commit. So sometimes I get a block of texts and I'd say, this is great. Show it to me if it was sassy, witty, and funny, like two best friends chatting. Also show me a version that's educational. I'd love to see a version that feels emotional or heartfelt. Rewrite that in these three ways so that I can compare and give it to me in the format of a side by side table so I can actually see the differences. Again, it's really great just to be able to ask chatGPT to deliver things in an unexpected way, not just immediately going, okay, if I said, If I asked it to write a block of content and it gave it to me, you can test out different tones before you commit. You don't have to just go with whatever it is that you got. And that comes back to that feedback piece from earlier. Just making sure that we are constantly saying, I love that and this is why. Or, I'm not going to use that. My biggest tip, and one thing I repeatedly do, not only do I do the one that I was talking about in number two, spot what's missing, ask for the opportunities, ask how you could improve everything, but when I have finished editing, because I do edit so strongly and I take out all the chat GPT recognisable Tone, cadence, language, all that sort of stuff, and make it my own. When I am finished, I always copy what I've got in my notes and give it back to chat GPT and say, FYI, this was my final edit. Take what you will, learn what you can from this, because next time I come to chat to you, this is going to inform the tone. So I really suggest taking that extra 10 seconds to just feed it back and say, Hey. You could be doing a better job. Here's what I came up with and here's what went live to my audience. So clearly this has been authorized by me and this is more what I'm looking for. The truth is, most people are just using AI to save time. But investing time in AI is also really important, just as I've mentioned. If you can really give it context and really challenge it when it needs to be challenged. Here's an example, this morning I had a piece of content come back that said something. Chaos and busy work. And I said, okay, that's super vague. What does that mean? Paint a picture of the chaos that this established designer is experiencing when they have created a bottleneck in their business and they're not sure how to scale. They don't know how to go to the next level and what to do. Show me a picture of what that chaos feels like and looks like and what exactly is busy work. Busy work is the vaguest I'm like, Sorry, what? What is that? And then it came back with a version that was walking around with that pit in your stomach because you've got proposals out and you don't know if the client loves them, but your phone's also ringing, but it's nothing that's important or going to convert in any way. It's just another supplier chasing it in. But it just painted this really specific feeling that, a feeling I remember before I decluttered my brain and my business and my systems and my processes. And I built a sustainable lifestyle business suite that was like balanced instead of, yeah I almost said chaotic. See where we are also guilty of not being specific, but when we think about feedback if nothing else from today's conversation, if you go away and you do these three things, You ask what opportunities you've missed or what things could be improved. You challenge things that are vague and not specific to get clearer and clearer so that your audience can really see themselves in that content. And you feed back what the final result was, what you actually posted live. Your chat GPT will stop running at under 40 percent and start behaving at a 60%. I'm going to throw in a little bonus tip for you if you haven't seen any of my recent reels around AI hacks and little tips. This is another piece of feedback I love to give AI. I will say to AI, This is a really great start. I would imagine if I was rating it from one to 10 for what I was looking for, I'd give this about a four. Let's try again, but this time I don't want you to show me anything under an eight. So an eight or above for what I'm looking for. And for some reason it jumps from basic, mediocre to really incredible stuff. It does this big leap because it goes, whoop, I just got feedback. I just got told that I just gave a response that was a 4. So it goes back to your original prompt and it's like, how can I do this better? I obviously haven't done a good job. So it loves feedback. It does love guidance. It loves to be taught. It's looking to learn. It is a large language model that is absolutely here to learn whatever it is that you have to share with it. If you found this episode helpful, please pass it on to a business bestie. Let everybody share in the tips. There is no gatekeeping in the Oleander and Finch world. If there's something that's working for me, I'm always going to want to be sharing it with you. Certainly in my group and private coaching, it is so much like you end up knowing exactly what I know. And that's something I want to bring to the industry as a whole. I am an open book. If you are curious about something, drop into my DMS over at oleander underscore and underscore Finch. Come and ask the questions, ask me anything about AI, about business, about marketing, about anything at all, I would love to have those conversations with you. But yes, if you did enjoy this, please, if you could review the podcast, if you could send it to a friend, all the things that help me. This podcast get discovered by more and more designers, and I truly believe that this particular episode on a couple of little AI tips can help any small business owner elevate the way that they're using AI. I have mentioned my AI assistants a couple of times where they've been appropriate through here, but I do have a team of over 15 that are targeted to do specific jobs and that can make your life running a business incredibly easy. There's a reason I can walk away from my laptop at 3 o'clock each day and not have to open it anymore. I've done that. I've done the late night working and all the things and this is just a faster, more productive, better way. It is life changing. It really is. it means everything to me. It means I can spend all this additional time, actually reading with my kids and enjoying them and doing all the things that I want to be doing while still running a super successful and busy business. If any of that is giving you FOMO and you want to get involved in the Oleander Finch family and really get serious about your business for 2025, there are links in the show notes that you can explore. You can check out each of those options by name. That's it from me for today. I have a brilliant AI brain joining me as a special guest in early April, so keep your eyes out for that as well as it is something that it will not make up every solo episode that I do, but wherever I feel I can pack a whole bunch of great tips like today into one update, I may even make a little AI above and beyond podcast ep, just for those of you who are committed Next Thursday, I am bringing you an amazing chat I had recently with the gorgeous Emma Bloomfield from Emma Bloomfield studio. She has been in business over 14 years or just celebrated 14 years, which is a long time and many lessons and so much to share about the interior design industry. So I will chat to you next Thursday. Bye for now.

Speaker 2: 31:07

That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.