2107 – Elevating Your Brand’s Voice Through AI-Enhanced Storytelling with BizHack Academy’s Dan Grech

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1:05With us right now, it's Dan Gretsch. Dan, you are the founder and CEO of BizHack Academy. Your website is bizhack.com. Well, Dan, it's great to have you. Thank you. It's great to be here, Josh. Yeah. So give us an overview of your work with BizHack, particularly, you know, as it applies to folks that might be, you know, three to five years down the road. They've been at the helm for a while. You're always keen on best practices, what's working. Obviously, you're an expert in doing what you do. But yeah, give us an overview. Yeah. So we specialize in serving driven entrepreneurs of second stage companies, folks that have kind of made it past that initial phase of establishing a business and now they're looking to scale.

1:48And we specifically specialize in helping them with marketing and sales. And obviously, everything in marketing and sales right now is AI powered. And so we do training and consulting in how to leverage AI to be more effective and efficient. in helping scale your business. And we do that through courses, coaching, and fractional CMO services. Yeah. Well, you know, given your area that you end up doing a lot of work in, I'm hoping maybe before we begin, you know, because obviously, you know, storytelling is incredibly valuable to have, you know, have locked down well as a leader, as a business.

2:28Do you mind maybe just answering that question? Like, why is it so critical today, especially when we're really stepping into a world where, listen, I mean, if you are not surrounded and living in AI today, it's an inevitability. You will be by the end of 2025 because it will be inescapable because it will be in everything that you do, all your social media, all of your apps, all of your devices. Certainly, you know, again, if you're not leveraging the tools like Google, ChatGPT, you know, that sort of thing, those tools already, you're already behind because guess what? Your competitors are. But that said, let's take a step back because I do want to spend a little bit of time on why in that lens, why story is going to be more critical than ever.

3:17Yeah. I mean, in a world of AI where machines can do so much better than us, we have to really ask ourselves as business owners, well, what differentiates us from our competitors? Using AI tools is table stakes. If you're not using it, your competitors are going to be catching up to you and eating into your market share. And so there is still an inescapable truth, which is that people do business with people they like and trust. How do you establish trust? Through authenticity. And how do you tell authentic stories? By talking about your life experience and why you do what you do. And there's no AI on earth that can do that for you.

3:57It can help you articulate it, but you have to tell it why you do what you do. Yeah, it's not a mind reader, right? What is that? So like if we were to use AI to, and again, I think this is a really great exercise, but if we were to use AI, like let's say you pop into Gemini, you pop into ChatGPT, and you wanted to begin that process to start to explore that, it might feel daunting at first, especially if you've been around, you've done a lot of good stuff. You know, I think that overwhelm and that blinking cursor a lot of times is what keeps us frozen from actually putting pen to paper. And we may have written elements of this, or we may think we are, you know, sharing our story.

4:44But there's one thing to, you know, maybe just like share your bio that you've got on LinkedIn, there's another thing to craft a compelling story with hooks that are going to be applicable to the reader. So it's less of an exercise of just listing your bona fides, but to the reader, in their mind, they're thinking, well, what's in it for me? What's in it for me? How does this apply? How is this valuable for me? You know, a great story is going to resonate at that level, right? Yeah. So absolutely. Let me just define some terms so that we make sure we're talking about the same thing here. So first thing I want to say is part of what I'm going to say runs a little bit against the conventional wisdom, which is it's all about your customer.

5:30It's all about them. The idea that the customer is the hero and you're kind of solving for their pain point. Well, if you're Luke Skywalker, if they're Luke Skywalker, they're still hiring you to be their Yoda. And do you have the qualifications and do they trust you to be their mentor, right? And that's really what I feel like the foundation of the business story is. It's really about your personal motivation for why you do what you do and then why it matters in the world. In other words, what's your purpose as a company? And so those two elements, why you do what you do and why it matters, there is an exercise that we do in all of our consulting, which is we ask, you know, well, why do you do what you do?

6:11Why is it important to you personally? Why is it meaningful to you personally? And oftentimes we find the answers from that come from influences from their childhood or from traumatic life events that kind of set them on this entrepreneurial path. And so unearthing that and being able to articulate that is an authentic way to build trust that then is the foundation of the story you tell about how you're going to make their life better. I feel like there's not enough emphasis in the marketing world and in entrepreneurship on really identifying why you do what you do. Once you've articulated that, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool, not only for recruiting customers, but for recruiting staff and partners and really staying motivated in the work yourself.

6:59Yeah. How important is it when we're thinking about a well-constructed story to evoke or, I'm sorry, to communicate the why and the values and, you know, these like, what are the passions that drive us? And, you know, in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, that is one of the fastest ways to connect with like-minded people is to be bold about the things that, you know, are your non-negotiable values. And that might feel scary to do, especially if you're maybe newer. You might think that, you know, you sharing your passion for equity, for example, might be polarizing. And you know what? Yeah, it might be.

7:43But do you mind kind of taking that thought and continuing with that? So, you know, Simon Sinek has talked a lot about the power of why, and he's definitely been very influential on me. And he talks about that largely in the context of leadership. And I have kind of brought that into other areas of the business like marketing and sales. Now, when you are communicating your story, why you do what you do, it is by definition going to be attractive to people who are like-minded and repellent to people who have different values. And that's exactly what you want. In other words, it's an incredible filter mechanism for the types of customers, the types of employees, and the types of partners that you want.

8:24And that's why I I strongly advocate to take that brave step of telling your story because, you know, for instance, if you're a faith-based person and you've built a faith-based company, you know, and you share this, there's going to be a set of customers are going to absolutely love that and others who just aren't a fit. And it's better for you to know that up front. So I love the filtering mechanism. There's plenty. We're lucky enough to live in a country with enough business to go around. And so you want to be filtering who your ideal customer is. And a story is a great mechanism to do that.

8:59Yeah. And again, I agree with you. It's kind of nice to kind of figure that out earlier. But okay. So Dan, obviously when we're talking about writing, we're talking about copy and we've been talking about AI a little bit. Listen, writing is going to get a lot better, but right now it's pretty easy. I think, especially for an experienced person, like we've all read bad AI copy. It feels generic. It feels, to me, it feels soulless. And I'll be honest, there's been a couple of times, and I've seen this, and I would just say exercise caution here, because there's been some times where someone was communicating with me and it was painfully obvious that that was just AI correspondence.

9:51And I'll tell you, Dan, as someone maybe who's a little bit higher empath, I actually found myself, like my knee-jerk reaction. I'm not saying this is my logical reaction, but my knee-jerk emotional reaction was I felt kind of ripped off and I felt like Like it felt, it felt it was worse than not saying anything at all. I felt like the other person saw me as kind of cheap. And again, these are just kind of my gut reactions. But I was very curious about my own reaction to this. And I thought, ooh, there's probably something for me to be aware of with this. I agree with you. I mean, what you're describing is user error.

10:39That's not AI. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the fault of the person who was very disrespectful to you in cutting and pasting. Yeah. Look, I want to be very careful here. I don't mean to be all bad. I would be even more insulted by that than you're describing. Like, I think it is. So let me just go ahead and put a stake in the ground here. Okay, all right. Here's your strong point of view values. It is offensive and insulting to your relationship for someone to cut and paste badly written AI copy into an email that if they don't even have the self-awareness to know that it's super obvious that they just had an AI write it, you know, shame on them.

11:19The good news is that with a little bit of knowledge, you can leverage AI to write highly crafted personalized emails. And then with that human last touch, which is one of the principles we always insist on, making sure that you then edit and review it. Often when you're in partnership with AI, you'll get a better email, a better correspondence. It'll say some things you wouldn't have thought of. And so AI tends to be a little flowery, a little formal. like get all that out. That's exactly the word I use too. I said, stop using the flowery language. And there's some things you could do and hopefully we'll pass along a couple of tips here.

11:59Yeah. So, you know, long story short is if you are guilty of doing this, you are hurting your business. Yes. Stop, just stop. Like go learn how to train a custom GPT so it can speak in your brand voice. Go get some training in prompt engineering. And we have a prompt engineering guide that we'll be happy to give for free to your audience that can give you some tips, but you are really hurting yourself and your business and your credibility. If you're sending that kind of information, it's as bad as like an EA writing a typo filled email. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so here's the deal.

12:40Like it's like, I think it's like the default. If you step into AI and you're just getting to know it, you're likely going to make some mistakes because you're going to be very tempted to say, ooh, I could save a bunch of time by just copying and pasting this stuff. And it was like the default output that was created by ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever platform you're using. That's what a lot of rookies will do. And then there are people that kind of get over that initial learning curve. And I was sharing, Dan, you and I were talking before we hit record. I'm not going to lie. As of right now, I am probably spending somewhere between two to three hours directly in ChatGPT, meaning I've got the app open and I'm working through things.

13:29Now, what I have to tell you is that my evolution as a leader has been significant because a lot of things I'm working on are mind mapping and decision making and project planning. And I don't do a lot of copywriting with it anymore. It's mostly about those deeper, bigger picture type things. And I feel like that's part of the evolution that a lot of AI users go through. You find the easy stuff first, then you get to the real juicy stuff that is truly transformative to a business. And Dan, I know that you do that work with clients personally, maybe help them get over that initial curve really quickly.

14:11Yeah. So just to circle back to the business story and how AI can help you document it so that you don't face that cursor and then also the role AI can play. So AI is a very facile tool. It's got a lot of different aspects that you can use. And one of them is it can kind of interview you. So one of the ways, so nobody, you probably don't even yourself understand fully why you do what you do. You know, it often is something that is rooted in your childhood and influences from there, both negative and positive. More than half of the businesses that I've, business owners that I've interviewed have a trauma-based reason for starting their business.

14:56Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Trauma is an incredible driver and motivator. It also ultimately can lead to burnout. So you want to like, make sure you understand why you're doing it. And ultimately, I, you know, and this is talked a lot about by Gino Wickman in the book Shine, but sort of transitioning from a kind of trauma based to a love based reason, because most of us start the business for trauma reasons and continue it for love based reasons and kind of figuring out that journey of understanding your motivations is so powerful and unlocking in terms of not only your own personal feelings about the business, but also the types of people you'll attract to you.

15:35So anyway, AI can help you discover that by almost like interviewing you. And we actually are in the process of creating a virtual biographer who is specifically trained in helping you unearth that. But even a ChatGPT, more generic model can at least help you understand why you do what you do and why is it important to you. And kind of by probing, what are the stories from your childhood or your earlier life that lead to that? And then once you have that down, ChatGPT can do a really credible job of documenting or writing that up for you. And so it's sort of like, here are the notes, now write it out for me.

16:12And so that's sort of where we are leveraging. So traditionally, the way we would do this is I'd spend an hour interviewing. I'm a former investigative journalist. I would interview a business owner. On the call, I would have a professional writer. We would document that, explore the motivations, and then combine that with the more traditional bio information. We write up a bio for them, for their company, and for LinkedIn. And now we are building AI in to do both the discovery piece and the actual documenting of it. yeah and then the other thing i'll just quickly say please once you have that business story documented it's a foundation of all of your communications and that's that's the key is then you create a custom gpt that's i call mine dan gpt i'm sure there's a josh gpt and it's trained you know in your bio in your values and then and in your writing style and then everything that comes out using that custom gpt is in your brand voice and that is a powerful unlocking mechanism for getting started with ChatGPT in marketing and sales and communications.

17:25Yeah. It's kind of funny. Actually, just last night, there's a lot of things that we're talking about that our friend listening may or may not be familiar with. The permanent custom instructions in ChatGPT, for example, I actually probably, I spent about 45 minutes to an hour last night, just kind of working on that and refining that. And I already had some pretty good settings in there. But there were just, there's quirks. And there's certainly going to be things I think that are going to be frustrating as you're using these AI tools. Namely, you may or may not like the voice. You may or may not like the voice on how it's communicating with you.

18:06And you certainly may be really picky about the output. And you absolutely should be very picky about output as we've illustrated earlier. Dan, the last thing I wanted to talk with you. I just wanted to give you a quick hack before, because there's a technique I developed. So many of us entrepreneurs are not writers. What we are by and large is strong verbal communicators, right? We're salesmen, salespeople. And so here's a technique that I developed recently with, I will often ask a client, hey, send me your writing. Some of the examples of your writing, and they'll send me the driest proposals, you know, and it's like not at all them.

18:46And then I'll say, hey, can you send me a podcast interview that you've done? And they'll send it to me and they're funny and they're, you know, they're a little, they have a great sense of humor. And so we'll actually take the transcript of the podcast interview and we'll use that to get the tone and style of their communications. Because remember, and this was actually a big hop from my days at NPR, your voice as a writer mirrors your voice as a speaker. And the more conversational you can be in your written prose and the more aligned with how you are in person and how you were writing, the better.

19:25And AI is an extraordinary tool. I remember as a young journalist, as a young writer, everyone was always saying, hey, you need to become more voicey. You need to become better at kind of getting your voice down on page. And then I became a radio journalist and suddenly, well, my voice is literally my voice. And it became, it went from like inscrutable to obvious. And so that metaphor of like literally how you speak, that's what you want to train ShaGPT to write. Great, great way to illustrate that. I appreciate that. Dan, your website is bizhack.com. Do you mind sharing to our friend that's been listening?

20:00So obviously there's kind of one of two paths here. I know you have some great resources here. So let's talk maybe about some of the resources or, you know, kind of the free next steps. And then for someone who's like, listen, I really like what those guys were talking about. You know, clearly there's likely some opportunity. They probably are feeling a lot of pressure. They know their competition is using AI already. They're starting to feel like they're getting lapped out there because they have not made some of those decisions. They've been a little either apprehensive, maybe they've been just, they don't have anybody internally that is at that level of comfort, or they know that they have operational gaps, leadership gaps.

20:42You know, they're overspending on operations. Well, that's one thing you're likely going to be able to find some immediate opportunities, and that's just It's cost savings. It's able to produce more output, make better decisions faster, make less mistakes. And all of these things AI can enable you to do and far more. Yeah, beautifully said. So here's kind of a potential journey through BizHack's offering. So strongly recommend you go to bizhack.com, sign up for our newsletter. You'll get, as a thank you, a free prompt guide for AI. That's a great starting point. It's free. It'll give you some cut and paste prompts that you can use specifically to help you with your marketing and your sales.

21:28We also offer masterclasses that are also free, another great resource and different topics in AI and business. If you get really excited about that, kind of the next step would be to join some of our recorded courses, which give you, for instance, if you're really intrigued by this idea of documenting your business story with the help of AI, or if you're intrigued by the how to create a custom GPT in your brand voice. We have courses for that. And then finally, our fractional CMO and consulting services. So when you're a second stage business and you just, your time is your most valuable resource, we will just shortcut all of this with kind of do it for you playbooks and techniques to immediately accelerate.

22:10Now, about half of the use cases in AI are customer acquisition, marketing, and sales related, and the other half are operational. BizHack really focuses on the marketing and sales pieces, which are easier generally to implement than the operational efficiencies, which usually require a certain amount of intelligent automation. A little bit digging, that's for sure. Yeah, so just in terms of where the lane that we live in, we live in that marketing and sales lane and we'll help you get noisier about your business, more efficiently, grow faster, and do it in a way that's authentic so that people are feeling trust and connection to you.

22:45Yeah, yeah. And I'll just say, you know, the process of becoming competent will unlock so much other possibility. And you will, to our friends listening, you are likely going to find yourself on the same evolutionary path. And what a world that can open up to you if you really get quite serious and prioritize this. Dan Gretsch, your website, bizhack.com. You're a great LinkedIn follow, by the way. But again, as you shared, when you go to bizhack.com, you'll see all the resources. There's also an orange button that says schedule a call, Dan, where certainly, you know, someone, if they're kind of at that level where there's likely some significant opportunities, boy, grab that call.

23:32And just if nothing else, figure it out. And just see what those opportunities might be. How's that for a nice testimonial? Thank you, Josh. And, you know, I really, research says it takes about 10 hours to become basically competent in prompt engineering on a chat GPT. And what I would say is rather than sending bad emails to valued partners, practice on personal stuff with your kids, you know, with people in lower stakes environments until you get proficient with it. And the other thing I'll say is don't wait. Because obviously there's the FOMO of, man, I could, my competitors are using this.

24:10and so forth, there's also, I just want to acknowledge that many of us are feeling overwhelmed. It's just like, whether it's social media or the political landscape, or just this sort of up and downs of the economy, or just the regular old fashioned challenges of building something from scratch and trying to build your own business. There is a tendency in some people to say, you know what, I'm going to wait for AI to kind of settle down. And for these practices, the problem is we're not in we're in an exponential space yeah where the longer you wait that's further behind you'll get and yeah yeah catching up that's right that's right um this is a platform this is technology what is happening right now is going to grow faster than your ability to keep up with it especially if you're slow to the race if you stay current yeah i i really couldn't agree with you more.

25:01We are in the midst of something that's, it's as transformative as social media, if not more so. It's as transformative as the internet. And I know that sounds very hyperbolic. I'm bullish. All right, Dan, you're right. Yeah, go ahead. Bill Gates said the same. And what's different about that is just the potential of this technology and this amount of money that the largest tech firms in the world are investing in this. So we've never seen... Microsoft buying Three Mile Island, are you kidding? Yeah. We have never seen in our lifetimes, you know, as professionals, as sort of fully, you know, anything like this.

25:46And so the techniques that might, you know, wait and see with Twitter, wait and see with, you know, do not wait and see with AI, just start getting into it and recognize you're going to feel forever, like you're going to have to keep climbing a mountain that keeps getting taller. It's just going to be part of the new normal. Awesome. Dan Gretchkin, founder and CEO of BizHack, your website bizhack.com. Dan, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Pleasure.

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