Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink shares her personal journey with AI and how it is transforming her business practices. Tune in to learn about her perspective on the uncertainty surrounding AI, her experimentation with various tools, and the ways she is integrating AI into her personal life and business operations. Melissa emphasizes the importance of using AI intentionally to streamline processes, enhance client support, and ultimately drive business growth. She also shares insights on developing tools to help clients leverage AI for their own success.

Key Highlights:

• It’s important to embrace AI with a positive mindset 
• AI can be a powerful tool for streamlining operations and communication 
• Strategic implementation of AI can enhance both personal productivity and client service 
• AI is most effective when used as a starting point, followed by human refinement
• Intentional AI integration creates more time for strategic business growth

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're gonna take a look at behind the scenes, how AI is changing the way that I work and think. So this is just me opening up and sharing a little bit more about my own AI journey.

you know, more from my own perspective and experience today, but I'm hoping that you'll be able to pick up on some things that you could potentially use AI for as well. I also want to acknowledge that there's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to AI right now. In fact, I had a client a couple of months ago say to me, you know, I am concerned that I may be out of business in five years because AI can completely replicate the things that I'm doing for my customers. And so

There's a lot of interesting conversations being had, certainly some concerns in the overall job market, like what are jobs gonna look like in the next five to 10 years? And it sounds like there are many, many jobs that will exist in five to 10 years that don't even exist yet, just because of AI and all the technology advances that we see going on. So for me, I'm choosing to stay ahead of the curve, or at least,

try to stay with the curve, maybe not ahead of the curve. I don't know that I'm that I would I wouldn't say that I'm that far advanced in my AI journey, but you get the idea. What I want to do is I want to learn about it and I want to see how we can use it for good and elevate my business, elevate the work we do with our clients and certainly, you know, if there's some personal benefits to it as well. So really, I'm choosing to have fun with it at this point and not feel threatened by it. And again,

people tend to fear what they don't understand. And so if you're feeling unsure about the AI thing, highly recommend just in a zero pressure way, play around with it and see what kind of results or information that you get from it that would actually be helpful. So I'll be honest that before I really dove into my AI journey in the last, I would say month or so, this is something fairly new for me, I would use it very,

in very limited basis, like maybe to reword an email or to simplify a document or something like that, just some basic things. But since then, I've upgraded my chat GPT to the pro version. I understand that that's the best way in order to be able to save projects that you're working on. And then also what I did after I upgraded is you'll see I'm

I'm using, I'm kind of using this as a hypothetical here. You can kind of follow me. But I clicked on my profile in the corner and then I told it a lot of things about me and my business. So I filled out my profile just so that the overall tone and approach was more resonant with me and how I work and frankly, the way that I kind of interact with people on a regular basis.

So I shared a lot of information with it. Off the top of my head, I don't have this written down. More about my company and what we do. I shared more about my podcast and who the podcast is meant for. I shared some personal things like being a mom and having cats, some of my personal interests. I also shared information about my strengths, my Clifton Strengths Assessment. I shared things about my...

goals and interests and things like that. So I put all that in there. I also shared some details about the types of clients we work with, like just things that I felt that chat should know about me and my business that might be helpful. I also was able to specify kind of just the overall voice that I prefer to use and that I prefer used with me. Like I want it to be kind and approachable.

But I also want it to be simple and to the point. I don't like things that are long winded. I like things to be succinct, but not abrupt, if that makes sense. So I put all those preferences in there. And that really doesn't take a lot of time. And then I've been playing around with it, which I'll share a little bit more about specifically in a second. And then my business coach had an AI workshop a couple of weeks ago, and we dove into

how we can use it to really double our sales in the next however many months. think it gave me, ultimately what I ended up doing through that workshop is it gave me kind of a 90 day plan to double our sales, which is really exciting. I'll share more about that in a second. So those are some of the things that I've done. I've upgraded chat. I've put in information in my profile to help it understand more about me and how I work.

and then took that workshop. So those were some of the base level things that I've done. So there are three areas that I am experimenting with when it comes to chat GPT right now. I'm using it personally, I'm using it internally for my business, and I'm certainly using it for the benefit of our clients as well and creating some new things, which I'm excited to share with you. So on a personal note, I took some time and I really mapped out kind of my goals and

Here's what's important to me. Here's what I'm working on. Here's what I would like to be in the next couple of years. Here's a trip that I wanna take. Here's, you know, just all the things that are kind of on my, I guess you could say vision board or maybe bucket list, whatever words you like to use. I shared all that with chat. And then I basically asked it to create for me a daily structure and weekly routine and based on my goals, values,

and priorities. Of course, the first iteration, there were a few tweaks that I wanted to make, but I was really impressed with what it came up with. One of the tweaks, for example, I wanted to make is, on Tuesdays every other week, my daughter and I volunteer with the local No Kill Animal Shelter that we love. I wanted to put that in. Then I would make note, I chat. actually don't grocery shop on Sundays. I try to

keep my Sundays for me and light and without a lot of commitments. And so I told chat when I prefer to grocery shop, I prefer when to meal plan. There were things that chat laid out in my initial schedule that I went, I don't like to do it on that days because of this reason. And I just kept tweaking it and fine tuning it. And I'm really excited about what chat came up with based on some of the day-to-day things that need to get done.

but also carving out time, especially on the weekends, for advancing on some of the bigger picture goals and things that I would like to be doing. So one example, I think it had a travel planning session maybe like every other Sunday. It taking a look ahead at where we might wanna go, what we might wanna see, what we might wanna do, investigating how much is a cruise or how much is a trip to Europe, things like that. So it was just kinda cool.

that it had plugged all of those things in. So of course, I'll continue to fine tune. And that's the cool part about chat is you're not going to offend it by saying, that doesn't really make sense for me. I'd like to change this, that and the other. And it does it like almost instantaneously. Another thing that I've used it for personally. I don't, I'm not super active on social media personally. Now, certainly for business, I use it. I think it's a great tool to kind of help.

establish rapport and build trust and credibility with people who might be interested in working with us. I know that even though the vast majority of our clients come to us through referral, they are likely searching for us online and kind of digging in and seeing that we're a legitimate business. They kind of see what I talk about and my approach before they agree to meet with me or certainly schedule a consultation. I realize that. But personally,

I don't post a whole lot. Sometimes I'll post something cool that my daughter did or I'll post a funny picture of one of our cats or something like that, but I don't use it a lot for myself personally. So there were a couple of instances in the last month where there were some causes that I really supported and I really wanted to help spread the word.

And since this is not something that I do regularly, it doesn't feel natural to me. So I pull up chat and I would just say, hey, this this GoFundMe is really important to me. I know the person who is impacted by this event. And, you know, I want to I want to share this in a meaningful way and also in a persuasive way to encourage people to make a donation. And so chat wrote a beautiful just like two sentence, two to three sentence caption for me. And I just made a couple of minor tweaks.

Again, it's easier, this is one thing that I also heard, the benefit of AI just in general, is that for a lot of us, it's easier to edit and fine tune than it is to start something from scratch. So for me to sit down and write a social media caption, it would take me a long time. But by having chat at least start it, like here's what I want to say, then chat spits something out and I'm like, yep, just a couple tweaks here, there, and it's done.

It's just so much less energy to create something from the bottom up, if that makes sense. So that's another way that I've used it personally. I know I've also heard of others using it to find recipes using ingredients they have on hand. Like, you know, it's getting to the end of the week, you need to go to the grocery store, restock your pantry, and you're like, okay, chap, I have this, I have this, I have this. What are some recipes that I can make for dinner tonight?

and they've been blown away by all the cool different combinations and recipes that chat has presented to them as options. So little personal hint there if you wanted to experiment with that. I am an avid meal planner, so I have not done that, but I certainly would love to have somebody report back and tell me what types of things, what types of meals that chat maybe came up with for them based on the couple of things they had rolling around in their pantry.

Okay, moving on to how we're using chat internally. First things first, I had asked chat, just kind of high level, generally speaking, I don't remember the exact question that I asked it, but I had just said, I want to be able to use AI more intentionally, internally, and also to support our clients. Based on what you know about me and my business, again, what I put into my profile,

where do you think we should start or where do you think our greatest opportunities lie? And it spit out a lot of different things. And I said, where do you suggest we start? And it basically said, I recommend starting with some of your internal processes first so that you can experiment with it yourself and then be able to help clients understand it. And that made perfect sense. So we started with streamlining communications.

So I said, okay, that sounds good. What are the three steps that we need to do internally or that you recommend we do internally? Because here's the thing, I feel like a lot of communications go through me and I'm just having a hard time keeping up on all of it, or at least keeping up on it is taking more time than I would like it to. And so chat spit out a beautiful checklist of some simple steps for me to...

change the way that I have my email organized. And so I spent maybe about an hour one day kind of reconfiguring my inbox and creating some automated rules for things to be filed and a system for my executive assistant and I to communicate based on like, what am I taking action on? What is she taking action on? What are things that I just need to read and file and things like that. So it's helped us figure out a different way to structure my email.

also recommended for meetings, recording every meeting and getting meeting summary notes for every meeting so that when those are emailed to me, I can forward it to the people that could help me take action on some of those things. Now, maybe that's not novel. I know a lot of people have their note taker apps now, but I think it was just the overall process that it outlined for, okay, when the meeting is done, you're gonna take this information and here's where you're going to basically

disperse it among your team and your organization so that you're not doing a lot of the follow-up things that come up from those meetings. Or it'll cut down on you from updating other people on what was discussed in those meetings. So that was one thing that shared also. It also shared with us, so we use Voxer, especially internally with our team, to communicate. It's basically a voice messaging app, like a walkie talkie, where

All throughout the day, my team members can send me voice memos. I can answer questions or give my thoughts or my feedback on something without having an email. Sometimes it's just easier to send a quick verbal message than it is to type out an email and all the nuances and details that people need to know in order to answer the question. And so it also structured for us some channels that kind of like a Slack channel, but a Voxer channel system.

in order to triage which messages from the team are urgent and need action, which ones are just kind of a general update, FYI, which ones are meant for brainstorming, like, hey, team, I've got an idea for this. What do you think? So that we can kind of triage our messages instead of everything kind of being dumped all in one place. So I thought that was really cool. Another.

way that chat is helping me to kind of streamline some of our own internal processes is to refine our sales process. So one of things that I am working on is creating a, almost like a welcome drip or an informational drip for people who are interested in working with us so that we are able to spend our time together more efficiently. There are things that I inevitably cover in

every sales call or every consultation call, things about how I started my company. Other things include the way our team is structured. What do our contracts look like? How long are our contracts? You know, all the just frequently asked questions and things that I want our potential clients to understand clearly before they make a decision with whether we're a fit. And so what I've been doing is working with chat to create an informational series.

ahead of those consultation calls so then we can really focus our time together on figuring out ways that we can best support them and how we can best collaborate. They are also filling out an intake form that tells me a little bit about their business, their team, some of the things they're looking for support on ahead of time, but armed with me, armed with that information and them armed with

the information about our company, we can have a much more productive conversation and a much deeper conversation when we meet. That's one of the things that we've been working on also. And chat has been helping me to outline what does that drip need to look like? What are some of the next steps that we need to do and so on? Also internally, when I did that workshop with my business coach, I talked about the best ways for us to

double our sales, there was a 90-day action plan that chat created for me based on how I responded to those questions. Where are at now? Where do we want to be at? What does doubling look like for us? How many clients do we have? What do our packages look like? All the things. It asked a variety of questions and it spit out this beautiful 90-day plan for how we can double our sales. The primary way that it recommended was launching a referral program.

I've been working with chat to first of all, create a PDF about that program, talking about the benefits. It helped me really fine tune who is our ideal client. Who do we want to offer this referral program to? All the different things. And then it also helped me to draft an email to announce this program. And just, there were so many things that would have taken me realistically months to find the time.

to create from scratch myself. These are things that Chet is offering to help me with. And then it creates a draft of something and all I have to do again is fine tune it. It's been really, really cool. lastly, of the areas that I'm experimenting with AI is also supporting our clients. So one example of this has been

growth strategies specifically tailored to them. So I do a growth mapping session with our clients on their half and full year anniversaries of working with us. And that just gives us an opportunity to kind of branch out a little bit, zoom out from the day to day more task oriented work that we're doing together and take a look at what is the client focusing on in the next six to 12 months and how can we best support them do that. And so chat has been coming up with some really cool ways for how we can

help our clients get better results. Question came up from a client the other day was, hey, I'm looking to gain one more client in the next month. And I have this opening, I've reached out to past clients and asked for referrals. I have reached out to referral partners that I've worked with in the past or collaborated with in the past saying, hey, I have this opening. She's like, I've been doing that but

I'm not seeing a lot of momentum happening there. How else can your team help me with some of these outreach activities? And so I put in, I went into chat after our call, I told her, let me do a little research. After our call, I put in some information about the client, her services, the types of clients she works with. Here's the things that she's already tried. How else can our virtual assistant team help her with outreach and help her land this client that she is looking for?

And it came up with so many different ways that we can help her with that outreach and maybe help gain some clients. It involved even a fun incentive or a giveaway. it just had a whole list of things that we may be able to help her implement, which was really, really cool. And again, it is something that I didn't have to come up with from scratch or...

forward it to my team and say, think about ways. And then they're coming up with ideas all on their own. It was something that chat generated. We pulled out the best ones because not every idea it listed was something that necessarily made sense for her or maybe wasn't something she's already done and thought of. But it was great to at least have that as a starting point so then we could then take that and fine tune it and work with her.

Another really cool way that I am working with AI to support our clients and to help them grow is that I'm in the process, and this is gonna sound really advanced. It sounds advanced for me, because it's something that I'm still kind of learning and fine tuning, but we're going to be developing some tools to help clients determine their 80-20 and also how to take action on those things easily.

So in a recent episode, I talked about the 80-20 rule, basically saying that 20 % of your efforts determine 80 % of your results. So with that being said, your top 20%, your needle movers, the most important work that you need to be doing, we wanna focus as much of our time and energy on that 20%. And what do we do with the other 80 % of, frankly, the crop that's on our plate? And so...

kind of triaging and figuring out with that 80 % remaining, what needs to just be eliminated completely? What can we leverage systems or how can we automate and make some of these things simpler? And what are some things that just need to be delegated and handed off? And I feel like that is the core basis of so much of what we all do on a day-to-day basis. And it's super important, but it's hard to see for yourself. And so I am working on developing a tool

that can help clients gain clarity on really what is worth their time and what's not. So without them also having to spend a lot of time tracking all of their time and logging it for weeks and doing an analysis, like some even simple questions through an AI tool to get clear on who are your best clients, how are those coming in, what are your goals, what does it take to reach those goals, and so on.

So I'm excited about that. I'm excited to create even a tool that will help clients with workflows and delegation and drafting SOPs so that it's easier for them to improve upon their processes, but then also to hand them off to others to run as well. So there's a lot of really cool tools that I'm coming up with to help our clients regain their time and their energy, and then also be able to just focus on growing their business in a really simple way that isn't

a heavy lift for them and also doesn't require a lot of manual work on anyone's part. So looking at opportunities that we can leverage AI to do that. So all of that being said, if you are interested in learning about our new AI powered business acceleration program, that's something that we are in the process of developing, just email me at hello at aliceswink.com. I'd be happy to share more with you once we have that finalized in that container, started out and we can.

We can tell you more about what that's all going to entail and look like, but that's something that we are actively building and I'm super excited about it. So I hope that all of this was helpful for you. I hope that this gave you an idea of how you can use AI to really streamline and get some clarity in your business where it's not such a heavy lift and starting point from scratch on some of your endeavors. So I really appreciate you tuning into today's episode and I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More.

Take care.