You already know AI can tidy up a caption. Most salon owners stop right there. Renee from Salon Society and Jen do not.

In this Mini Moment the two of them fall down a happy little rabbit hole on all the other ways AI quietly takes the load off a busy owner. Not the marketing stuff. The day to day stuff that clogs up your head and steals your day off.

Renee, who is in salon in Perth every week, shares the exact thing she did after a five hour client meeting. One voice note, dropped into Claude with a bit of context, came back as a full action list of who does what. If you want to go deeper on this kind of thing, Renee teaches the whole system in her online course, How to Market Your Beauty Business Online.

Jen then talks through how she runs her admin days now, from sorting her inbox to building apprentice training plans, so the mental load stops living rent free in her head. This one is for anyone who has ever sat staring at a to do list with no idea where to start. Especially the neurodivergent owners, who Jen speaks to straight here. AI does not replace you. It just clears the path so you can actually get going.

What we cover

• Why AI is for so much more than checking your captions
• Turning a long staff meeting into a clear action list in a minute
• The voice note habit that writes your client content for you
• Giving AI proper context so it sounds like you, not generic
• Using AI to sort and triage your inbox on admin days
• Building apprentice training plans that are easy to actually follow
• AI as a way past analysis paralysis and the never ending list
• Why it buys back time without ever doing the work for you

Dip your toe in. The water is warm, and your next day off will thank you.

FAQs

How can salon owners use AI for more than writing captions? AI can turn a long staff meeting into a clear action list, sort your inbox, and build training plans for your apprentices. The trick is giving it context about your salon so the output sounds like you, not generic.

How do you use a voice note to create salon content with AI? Record a quick voice note about a client's consultation on your phone, then drop the transcription into a tool like Claude or ChatGPT. Ask it to write the caption as a story about that client, and you get content in your own voice in seconds.

Does using AI mean it replaces the salon owner? No. AI does not do the work or send your emails for you. It speeds up the planning and thinking you already do, so you take action

Mentioned in this episode:

💖 Celebrating Our Podcast Partner – Christophe Robin, proudly distributed by McM Imports

We’ve partnered with Christophe Robin and MCM Imports to bring you something beautiful:

➡ Experience the Christophe Robin Discovery Box — curated by pro ambassador Monique McMahon.

➡ Inside, you’ll find her handpicked favourites — the hero products she swears by in the salon.

It’s your invitation to explore the range and discover why Christophe Robin has become a quiet obsession among stylists who know their craft.

Click the link below to request your FREE Christophe Robin Discovery Box, exclusively through McM Imports. 👇

MCM

https://www.salonrising.com

💛 A Limited Time Offer From Our Amazing Sponsor, Timely 💛

➡ Timely is the easy to use booking and payments system that puts salon owners in control of the whole client experience from the first booking to final payment.

➡ Salon Rising listeners get a 14 day free trial plus 50% off their first 3 months.

➡ And until August 1st, when you activate with Payments, you'll also get a free Touchscreen terminal, worth $349 + GST.

Use the code SALONRISING at checkout or click the link below to get started. Once you're set up, your Timely contact will take care of the rest. 👇

Timely

[00:00:17] renee: Hi darling. So we decided with this mini moment that

[00:00:46] renee: Yeah

[00:01:04] renee: Agree 100%. So would you like me to share what I did the other day at my meeting with my client? I feel like that's a really good place to

[00:01:12] renee: All right. So if you are, as a salon owner, if you're hosting any kind of a training, if you're doing anything that around you sharing something or talking about something with your team, what I would love you to do is on your iPhone, you have a little app that's like a voice note memo.

And what you can do with that is you can literally just hit record and just let it dictate your entire staff meeting. Because a lot of the time there's always things that in that meeting you need to take notes of, and so it allows everyone to be present in the moment while you're doing the thing that you're doing.

And then basically... So what I did with my client was we were at a meeting five hours. I hit record. Um, in the Apple, uh, version, it gives you a transcription already. So then all you need to do is copy and paste that from your phone, drop it into Claude, into ChatGPT, and make sure that you're prompting it with context.

Whatever you are putting into your, you know, your AI models, you always wanna make sure that you're giving it context. You're not just dropping it in. Whatever you put in as your input is what you're gonna get out on the other end, so give it enough context. So I just shared that I had a meeting with my client, this was the client's name, and that what I wanted it to do was I wanted to analyze the notes that I was dropping in, and then I asked it to then summarize the meeting minutes into a step-by-step action list, and allocate out to who needed to action what.

And within about one minute, I had a full-blown segmented out list of who had to do what, who was doing this, who was doing that. Anything that it mentioned, it broke it down into topics, and then under the specific topics, it literally gave me everything that I needed to do. Then what I did was I copied those, dropped them over into our Salon Trello board, put it as a checklist, and now everybody's working through their checklist from the massive five-hour meeting

[00:03:43] renee: Agree. And I mean, like, I- this is the thing, I could go down a massive rabbit hole, which I won't 'cause we only have a mini moment and Jen's got a client. But, the big thing is that we wanna be making sure that with... when you're setting up your AI models, there are things you wanna do to make sure that you're actually setting up your AI to understand your tone of voice, the way you like to speak, the kind of jobs that you do, all the things so that it understands exactly who it's working with.

You need to give it as much context. And so taking that time is really important because it means then that it's gonna truly understand, like you said, Jen, when you're voice noting it in, it's literally taking your wording. And so when it's taking your wording, it's gonna sound like you. Whereas, if you're just like, "Write me this or do this," and it's very

[00:04:33] renee: I find whenever I have a concept or an idea, because I have Claude on my phone, I will literally just talk into... So for example, you're in the salon, right? And this is a really good hack if you're wanting to write really good content. I'm gonna give you something to do. So what you're gonna do is, say for example, you've just had Jenny come in and Jenny had her consultation.

You could literally, on the way back to the back room as you're going to mix color, hit the voice note recording and go, "Jenny came in today. This is her consult. She want..." duh, duh, duh, whatever it was she had, whatever she didn't like, all the things, and then ask AI to create you a AEO and GEO optimized content.

GEO is what is the content that you're gonna put out that is gonna help AI recognize you, okay? so,

[00:05:24] renee: so, so always, like take basically that client's consult once you've done it and voice record it into Claude. You can just like dictate it in there, and don't do anything with it at the time. Just put it in there and put your phone down.

And then what will happen is when you come back into your Claude, it will be sitting in there and it will have transcribed it, and then you can just hit go. And to voice record something so quickly, it's so fast. to write that caption, and also I would ask it to write it in a storytelling format, so you're telling that client's unique story versus just, "Write me a caption."

So again, you could literally all day, every time you have a client if you know you're creating content, just voice drop their actual, their actual consultation you did, they didn't like, what they liked, and then you could do it. Another thing you could do is you could actually set it up and record while the client's having the consult because you're just dictating the entire consultation.

And just be transparent with your client that you're doing it not to actually use it for anything. It's just more

[00:06:26] renee: another great one that I get my girls to do, too, when I'm not in the salon. They can just get that out and then I can take and do a really amazing, uh, piece of caption with that as well.

So, yeah

So it's even things like, you know, this invoice needs to be paid then, right? Let's create a list of like this month and when invoices need to be paid. Like, all those little things that it literally takes me two seconds to prompt,

[00:07:38] Jen: is a huge mentally labor-intensive task that I actually don't need to do because it does it for me.

Like, I still need to take the action. It's not a- like, don't get me wrong, guys, AI's not sending my emails for me, and it, and it can't, but it can certainly give me an action plan. It also makes information so much more accessible. Like, sometimes I find, companies will send things that are really confusing to read, so I just give it the information and say, "Hey, I just want this in a dot point format." I can keep my notes over a week of the things that I have to do, and then just before my day off the next day, I can be- or my day off, my day off the floor, I can be like, "Right, collect those notes. Let's do an action plan, top, top to bottom in priority of how we're going to tackle this task tomorrow."

And it just comes back. We do the same with, our staff meetings, I do the same. I use it for staff meetings, and then we come back and we get all the points and everything created from it afterwards. But it'll even action things that at one point we went through a meeting of just making sure that we were all making all the beverages that we have on offer the same way so that it felt really consistent so that, this is how we make a cup of tea.

This is how we make a hot chocolate. This is how we make this cocktail, so that everybody was making it the same way. And because we talked through that, at the end of the meeting, write, create a table for me with instructions on how we make, each thing, and then just turned it into a little flip ring. You know, it's just a print-and-go type situation.

[00:09:17] Jen: the other thing I use it for is for my girls', apprentice girls' training plans because I want it to be really easy for them to see. I don't want any of the stuff that you look at like at school where they're like, "Ugh, timetable, bleh." And it just can split everything across, and I'm really big on making sure they are not working linear.

And when I say linear, it's I don't ever want them only focusing on one thing. I think it creates fear around other areas of hair. So we work in like a spiral, and so we're using AI all the time to make sure that we're hitting a pillar across that spiral as we continue their training path.

[00:09:56] Jen: and that's got nothing to do with my social media writing captions

But we can then take those videos of the owner then talking and then I can then summarize those into, like you said, dot points around again, making it really easy because apprentices learn differently. Not everybody can stand and watch a visual. Like everyone learns different.

So there are so many ways that you can use AI in the business to, like you said, speed it up and to just remove that barrier to getting things done because

[00:10:56] renee: so many things on the to-do list. And so if you can have it all sort of summarized, dot pointed, it just means that you can take faster action

[00:11:18] renee: Yeah

[00:11:24] renee: procrastinate

[00:11:32] renee: Literally, and then it just go, and then you can just tick it off. So yeah, look, I think it's, it's definitely if you are afraid of it, I would just say to you it can save you so much time, so much brainpower, so much energy. But the key is that it doesn't replace you, it just helps to speed up the things that you're already doing so that you can buy back more time.

Because I know firsthand that all salon owners love to have more time back in their life to be with their family, to have time for themselves, because the list is never-ending. And so I love how you're using it for emails as well, 'cause you can miss things, things miss slip down. I think that's a really great thing, and again, it just puts everything front and center for you versus you trying to chase it up and, and I think I saw that and I saw...

It just, it's a lot of time wasting is what I love about it

[00:12:29] renee: to

The water is warm. AI is here It's gonna make your life so much better.

[00:12:46] Jen: I really am.

[00:12:48] Jen: having said that, to go and do my client now. She very kindly waited for us to do this mini moment. But, once again, friend, it is so lovely to see your face and to catch up and to get some of your insight, and I really hope...

I know, I know that everyone's gonna get so much support and help out of what we've had when we've chatted on this today.

[00:13:09] Jen: Pleasure. I'll see you soon.