Embracing AI: Tools and Strategies Every Carpet Cleaner Should Know About

AI can revolutionize marketing in the cleaning industry by providing valuable insights, automating content creation, and streamlining customer engagement processes.

Jonathan Mast [00:00:00]:
A lot of people tend to overcomplicate AI, and and they they go, oh my gosh. It looks like this massive cliff I’ve gotta climb as a business owner, and I’d I’m busy. I don’t have enough time already. I I don’t even know where to start, and I wanna I wanna really address that question because it’s one of the most common things I hear from business owners, and that’s where do I start. And I think if you’re if you’re using AI or if you’re not, the best place to start is with one of the 3 major platforms out there

John Clendenning [00:01:01]:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back for another exciting episode of the carpet cleaner success podcast. Your host, John Flanning here. I’ve got a good friend of mine, Jonathan Mast on the call, former owner of a digital marketing agency. That’s where we met a few years ago, in the cleaning and restoration space. So very, you know, applicable to what we we talk about and everybody that shows up at these podcasts. And Jonathan now runs, an AI coaching and consulting agency. And I thought I’d get him on the podcast because AI is taking over everything, including cleaning business owners and use cases and all kinds of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:01:36]:
We’re using a lot more of it. We use some of Jonathan’s stuff, and he’s a consultant with us. But, we’re gonna have a conversation about places where, a a business owner in the cleaning space, just, you know, a home service business owner could use AI as well. So welcome to the podcast, Jonathan. It’s been a while getting you on here. I love I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. And, yeah, like, introduce yourself. Anything I missed, and, let’s get cooking.

Jonathan Mast [00:02:03]:
Well, no. Thanks for the invitation, John. Thrilled to be here. As as you mentioned, we’ve known each other for a couple years and love working with you and your team. I’m just excited to share a little bit about AI. I know, as you know, I I really got into it in the last 18 months or so. I believe it’s a natural fit for business owners, especially in the cleaning area. I mean, it really applies almost everywhere, And I’m excited to talk a little bit today about how it’s more than just marketing.

Jonathan Mast [00:02:29]:
Everybody seems to go, oh, yeah. Well, let’s use it to help us write this. And you and I both know that can be a massive failure. But there’s so many other areas where it can be a huge, huge help operationally, h r, standard operating procedures, you know, just even brainstorming. Probably one of my favorite things to do with AI as a business owner, and I’m excited to chat a little bit about that. So yeah. No. Thanks so much for inviting me on.

John Clendenning [00:02:52]:
That’s awesome. No. Cool. So, yeah, let’s unpack that whichever way you wanna start because I know you’ve you like, you’re you’re you’re knee deep knees deep in this stuff. So, and, yeah, like, again, as marketers, we think of using it in the marketing realm. And once you get used to it, like, even on our end, like our team, it’s like, oh, I can write a prompt in chat GPT, and you’re going, sorry, honey. That’s that’s just not good enough. You need you need you know, nowadays, GPT agents, you need multiple iterations, maybe moving through a bunch of the different tools, Claude and perplexity and all of that stuff, you know, just to create even good content that comes out that doesn’t sound AI.

John Clendenning [00:03:28]:
But, again, so a lot of people go, oh, I’m just gonna write a blog post, and I I can just type something in. That’s sort of, like, the base level that people think of using it for. I have my own personally, just so you know, I have it on my phone, and, I eat a low carb keto diet. And every now and then I’ll go, chat, I have all of this in my fridge. What should I cook? And it actually comes up and tells me what to cook for dinner. So I use it for some pretty fun stuff too, but let’s go down that road. Let’s unpack that. What are some of these brainstorming ideas and HR ideas that, that some of these that that that our our audience can say, hey.

John Clendenning [00:04:00]:
Yeah. That I could see that being a huge time saver, versus just going to Google and reading 80 pages on it and hopefully hopefully getting an idea, the old way of looking for stuff.

Jonathan Mast [00:04:11]:
Yeah. Really good question. Well, I think, you know, I wanna kinda start off with a lot of people tend to overcomplicate AI, and and they they go, oh my gosh. It looks like this massive cliff I’ve gotta climb as a business owner, and I’d I’m busy. I don’t have enough time already. I I don’t even know where to start. And I wanna I wanna really address that question because it’s one of the most common things I hear from business owners, and that’s where do I start. And I think if you’re if you’re using AI or if you’re not, the best place to start is with one of the 3 major platforms out there, and there’s really 3 major AI engines.

Jonathan Mast [00:04:42]:
There’s ChatGPT, which most of us have heard about. It’s been out for a year and a half or so now. Works very, very well. There’s Quad that you mentioned, which is a a newer comer, but a very, very solid in fact, my favorite of the AI models. And even though you may not have heard of Claude or Anthropic, the company behind it, you’ve heard of all their investors, companies like Amazon and Amazon. They’ve they’ve invested in multiple rounds now.

John Clendenning [00:05:08]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:05:08]:
Nvidia, who makes all the chips that run AI, and and literally hundreds of other companies of which dozens would be household names. So very, very big backers there. And then the 3rd popular option is by a company we’ve all heard of called Google, and they have a product called Gemini. So one of those 3, and it really doesn’t matter a lot where you wanna start. Pick 1 and start using it. And the reason I say pick 1 is because everybody has their favorite. John, it’s kinda like if you and I were gonna buy a new car today, you might wanna go to 1 dealership. I might wanna go to the other one across the road.

Jonathan Mast [00:05:40]:
At the end of the day, we’d both end up with a good vehicle that likely was gonna meet our needs regardless of the badge that was on the front. And AI is really pretty similar in that. You can use any of them. Are there differences? Yes. Do some people have very strong opinions about that? Yes. At the end of the day, for the average business owner, pick 1. It doesn’t really matter. What I do want to encourage, though, is that most of them are gonna charge you, if you wanna use them much, $20 a month.

Jonathan Mast [00:06:07]:
Yeah. As a business, it’s probably, in my mind, the best $20 a month you can spend. I make no money for saying that. I don’t get any affiliate links, nothing like that, but it really is amazing. And if you wonder how that works, most of the models today gives you access to almost all the features for free. Yeah. But they kinda sell it like and I’m gonna date myself, but like they used to talk in the eighties how drug dealers work. They give you the first bit for free, and then once you go, oh, I want more Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:06:33]:
Then they charge you. And so that’s what most of the AI companies are doing. But as far as getting started with it, once you’ve picked your choice, ChatGPD, Cloud, or Gemini, my favorite thing to do is almost all of us as business owners have things that we’re thinking about doing or problems we’re trying to solve. And and sometimes it’s lonely as the business owner because we don’t have an adviser to go talk to or somebody like that or, know, we probably don’t wanna bounce it off our spouse that may or may not go over well at dinner. So what’s the best way to do that? And I use ChatGPT, Quad and Gemini to do this almost daily, where I talk about, okay. Here’s something I’m thinking about. What about this? Right now, we’re looking to hire a new video editor for our agency, and so I’ve been talking with AI about what help me write a good job description for this. Help me determine, do I need somebody full time or part time? And we’ve gone through and talked about the work that I have for them.

Jonathan Mast [00:07:27]:
I’ve then talked about based on what you know about me because it’s learned a lot about me over the last year. What are some areas you think I really need focus on so that when we find the right person, this position is successful and that they’re able to excel at what they do? And I’ve literally had a conversation with AI. I’m typing. It’s typing back, and I think that’s the other thing I’d love to to remind the audience of. It it should be conversational. This isn’t like the magic 8 ball that you shake up and go, oh, am I gonna get the right answer? I’m gonna get the right answer. Yeah. It’ll give you an answer.

Jonathan Mast [00:07:59]:
But to to get the best answer, it’s like you and I collaborating on a project, John. We’re gonna talk. I’m gonna give you ideas. You’re gonna ask questions. We’re gonna go back and forth. And that’s how we’re gonna get the best results, and the same holds true with these models. And you can literally start by just going in and say, hey. You know, I’ve got a you know, for example, this happened the other day with one of my clients.

Jonathan Mast [00:08:20]:
They go, what do we do? 1 of their techs was out. They ran into got in an accident. They didn’t have a policy in place for what do they do when they have an accident. He goes, my insurance agent just asked. What’s our policy or what’s our procedure when we have an accident? I need to give him one. What do I do? I said, well, let’s go to AI, and let’s say, alright. This has just happened. So in in your case, you know, we run a carpet cleaning business, and one of our vans, unfortunately, just got in an accident.

Jonathan Mast [00:08:45]:
1 of our employees was driving it. I need to have a policy and procedure that we follow when this event happens. Give me your best advice. And, oh, by the way, ask me any clarifying questions that you need in order to give me that best advice. Because AI has been trained on all of this, John. It actually can probably give us a better procedure and policy to follow than what we could have done. And as a busy business owner who’s got an insurance agent who’s waiting for that email, it can do so in literally minutes. And you can then proofread that and go, okay.

Jonathan Mast [00:09:18]:
Yep. This makes sense. I’m gonna change a couple things here and there. And now you can say, alright. This is our policy that we have in place. Same for SOPs. You know? We’re talking carpet cleaners and and window cleaners and all that. And if if you’ve got people going into houses, you need to have a standard operating procedure for how they go into a house.

Jonathan Mast [00:09:37]:
Do they take their shoes off? Do they put booties on? How long do they knock at the door? What do they do if nobody answers? A host of things. How do they leave the site when they leave? And, yes, I know all of your employees have been trained on all that. I get that, but you and I both know that having been in an employee spot before, sometimes we’re trained and we forget. With AI, we can not only refine our SOP to make it better, we can create a training module for our employees to go through, which includes a quiz to make sure they actually go through it. And then we could create a checklist so that whenever somebody goes on-site and has to go in the house, they have to complete the checklist and submit it with the job paperwork so we can see, did they actually follow what they were supposed to do? And, again, we could do all that 2 years ago, but it would have taken hours and hours and hours of work so it didn’t get done. Now we’re talking minutes, and it’s done.

John Clendenning [00:10:28]:
And that’s the important thing. You put a pin in a couple of those things. So one of the things that you mentioned was, was also putting in the prompt. So prompt engineering has become its own job. Like, you’re getting better

Jonathan Mast [00:10:40]:
and better

John Clendenning [00:10:40]:
and better at writing these questions. And as you said, one of the easiest ways to do it is have that conversation. Treat it as an assistant. I’ve taught my entire team that. We’ve got, team members that are in the Philippines, obviously, raised it in a different language. They speak English, but they they were raised in schools to do a language. And so it’s like, no. Don’t expect this thing to be your boss or the director of the department.

John Clendenning [00:11:03]:
They are just in a a junior assistant that you’re asking questions to, and, well, you didn’t quite get that right. Can you you know? And you’re dialing in better yourself. And if you can ask it, like you mentioned, one of the trainings that we give our client or our team is ask it to, ask you know, tell it. Ask me any questions, clarifying questions before you begin to make sure you’re you’re dialing. Because we might not write the best prompt, but if we get it to ask clarifying questions, it is actually starting to sort of think in in its what prompting it needs sort of. It’s it needs that input. And that that Exactly. That alone really, really helps.

John Clendenning [00:11:39]:
And then the other thing you said is, yeah. Again, I teach on delivering the client experience. It’s one of the things I was flown around the world for for the past 20 years, at conferences in the island of Samoa for a 3 day elite retreat and things like that. How do you deliver a client experience wearing booties, rolling out the red carpet, and and delivering sort of the dog and pony show when you show up, getting a text message to ring the doorbell, take a giant step backwards, and turn slightly to the side because the person answering the door is often the the housewife or the mother-in-law, little bit shorter in statue than a big carpet cleaner, and you you kinda you there’s already and you wanna make sure that you’ve created this this right environment. So if you’ve got that material and you’ve you’ve written some stuff out like that of of sort or you’ve you’ve walked through something like that or maybe even have a video where you’re talking about it or you can make it.

Jonathan Mast [00:12:26]:
Exactly.

John Clendenning [00:12:27]:
Now you can take a transcript of that and add that in as the base document. So one of the ways that we we can think here that that simplify because somebody might have been thought thinking, okay. Well, I’ve got all of that training, but how do I get it to create a checklist? How do I get it to create well, one of the easy ways is is take all of that material and upload it as the background data and say based on this document, this piece of PDF or depending on the platform. Again, each platform has its own way of adding that stuff in. Sometimes it’s just copy and paste out of notes. But based on this, I would like to tear this apart and turn it into a checklist, turn it into a, you know, a training module as you said. You can now break it apart, which would have taken hours of thought and

Jonathan Mast [00:13:15]:
weeks of

John Clendenning [00:13:16]:
planning, And now just have it spit it out, look at it, edit it, go through it, change a few things, ask it a few more questions. Well, this section, can you move that around or whatever? Output it into a Word document, turn it into what you need, and print. Right? So

Jonathan Mast [00:13:30]:
Yeah. No. And, you know, you may you made a comment. You know, it’s it’s like having a a junior assistant next year. I agree with that. The difference is it’s like having a junior assistant that has researched almost every bit of information available on Earth. And so, yes, you need to direct it, but it has so much information. It can help guide you through that process.

John Clendenning [00:13:50]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:13:50]:
And, you know, sometimes, just like when we collaborate, sometimes it’s gonna miss. The other thing you mentioned, I think it’s important to bring up, is is you talked about prompting. And I know a lot of people that are getting in to go, Jonathan, you just lost me with that word. I don’t understand what that means. What does prompting mean? And prompting is just literally typing instructions. Or if you’ve got your mobile phone, let me find mine on my desk with chatty or any of the others using and actually speaking to it through your microphone and asking it questions. That’s all prompting is. It’s kinda I compare it to texting.

Jonathan Mast [00:14:20]:
So if you’re out there and you’re going, what’s this prompting stuff? If you’ve ever texted anybody, that’s like prompting AI. You’re just texting. But text back and forth because that one model, just like you said, that one question to get the perfect answer, in all likelihood isn’t gonna do that. And, you you also hit on it. I think it’s so important. When you’re prompting, remember that AI has been taught to make assumptions. The reason is the developers want us to use the tools, and they know if it acted like a 3 year old and every time we asked a question, it went, why? Why? Why? We’d stop using it.

John Clendenning [00:14:53]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:14:53]:
So it it’s programmed to make assumptions, and you just added, you know, ask me any clarifying questions. That one bit, if you just add that to the end of your prompt or your text message to AI, that one thing will improve your responses dramatically because AI is smart enough to go, well, Jonathan, you didn’t answer these 3 bits that would really be helpful in order to give you this answer. Yeah. But and they’re right. I’m probably not smart enough for my ADD kicked in, and I didn’t remember. Either way, when it asks me the questions, it’s a lot easier for me to go, oh, yeah. Here’s this. 2, 3.

Jonathan Mast [00:15:27]:
Go. And now I’m gonna get a much more refined, a much more nuanced answer that likely does meet my needs because we took just a few moments, not this is not hours. This is literally a minute or 2 in most cases to be able to do that. And you mentioned your phone. I wanna encourage all the business owners listening. Download the app on your phone because if you’re like me, you’ve got time when you’re you get to an appointment a few minutes earlier. You get there and the homeowner is not there, and you’ve got a little bit of downtime. It’s a great time to use it on your phone.

Jonathan Mast [00:15:57]:
It all syncs up to your computer, and then you’ve got everything later. So, you know, you can do that. You can even and I live in a hands free state, so I can’t use the phone when I’m driving, at least in my hand. But they’ve even got voice now that I can use with chat g p t so that I can hands free carry on a conversation while I’m driving to a client and literally have it help me out. It could be as simple as, you know, reviewing the notes on my calendar and telling me what to expect at my upcoming call, but there’s so many things we can use AI to do to help us out.

John Clendenning [00:16:29]:
No. That’s that’s brilliant. And one of the things I found, is helpful as well is again, we we we all if if we’ve dug into the world a little bit, we hear about it hallucinating. Like, that’s it. Yes. It’s got so much information. Again, assumptions. It’s just kinda gone down a rabbit hole a little bit.

John Clendenning [00:16:45]:
And what I like to ask at the end is, based on the instructions, do you think you’ve accomplished the goal? And it will give an answer. 9 times out of 10, it’ll say yes, but and then tell you the reasons why and kinda get into detail. But and they say, if you had to do this over again, would you do anything differently? And I’ve started asking that question, and all of a sudden, it comes up with a whole bunch of thing. And then then the the next point is, okay. Can you do can you redo this rewrite this again? But

Jonathan Mast [00:17:11]:
Read that. Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:17:12]:
With those changes. So I’ve asked it to sort of self reflect. And when you kind of ask it to self like, first, do you think you’ve Yes. Instructions, it goes back and goes, well, yes, because of this and this. If you had to do it over again, would you well, now that you said that, and then, okay, go do that. And the next output is a little bit better or a lot better sometimes, because you’ve just got it to kind of hone in a little bit tighter on the original instructions and not kind of sort of hallucinate or go off on an assumption. It kind of tucks it back in a little bit as well. So I found those those are helpful to kind of add in in that conversation where everybody thinks it’s one prompt and done.

John Clendenning [00:17:48]:
No. Just just just have this conversation and and get it to sort of you know again, it has the whole entire world of data behind it. That’s almost too much data. So now let’s let’s tighten it up a bit. So

Jonathan Mast [00:17:59]:
Yeah. My I often compare it to anybody that’s married. At least the guys, they’ll be able to appreciate this. When my wife walks into my office and says, we need to talk,

John Clendenning [00:18:06]:
I

Jonathan Mast [00:18:07]:
immediately go, uh-oh. I forgot to do something I was supposed to, or I did something I wasn’t supposed to.

John Clendenning [00:18:12]:
One of those

Jonathan Mast [00:18:13]:
And AI and why? Because I’ve got all oh, oh, oh, but 20 some years of marriage to things too. Yep. In a snapshot. But if my wife comes in and says, hey. We gotta talk about what we’re doing for dinner tonight. Oh, no problem. Now I know that it likely means I gotta go to the freezer and get something out for dinner because I’m the cook in the house, and I, of course, didn’t think about it. And or are we gonna go out to eat and and all those things? Now I can narrow in really quickly.

Jonathan Mast [00:18:36]:
And AI is really that same way. Like you mentioned, it’s been trained on all of this data. And, yes, it can hallucinate, but and that’s make mistakes. Part of the reason why we need to understand is, John, I’m sure you’ve read content online or a book, maybe even 2 books that disagreed with each other, And you’re like, which one is right? Because one book says a and one book says b. Yeah. Well, AI was trained on both of those books, but nobody necessarily said, I wanna believe a. Yeah. So it’s really important.

Jonathan Mast [00:19:05]:
If you’re the type that says, alright. I have this perspective, you need to tell it to take that perspective or write from that perspective so that it knows that this is the perspective you wanna take as you’re doing that because it’s read both all the the pro and the con information out there, for that. So that’s super, super important. I love your idea of asking it to go back. I do something similar. I ask it often to rate on a scale of 1 to 10. 1, you failed miserably. 10, you hit it perfectly.

Jonathan Mast [00:19:33]:
Where would you rate this response? And I generally get somewhere between a 6 and an 8.

John Clendenning [00:19:38]:
Okay.

Jonathan Mast [00:19:38]:
And then I’ll typically say, what could you do to improve it to a 9 or a 10? I don’t know if I’ve ever got a 9 or 10. But like you said, then it will often make some adjustments to what it did to refine it. Again, much like we might go back to this person on our team when, you know, let’s say I have my assistant help me write a memo for a company event. She writes it. It’s good. I send it back. What would you change if you had more time to work on it? All of a sudden, now she looks at it through a different filter, and she’s like, well, I probably add this, and I guess we should probably add some more information about this because there was that second chance, that second look, and AI does the same thing. So really good advice.

John Clendenning [00:20:15]:
And that’s the way I use it as well. Like, I mean, I’ve always done that with the team. It’s like, I am much better at editing, refining, and moving something forward once it’s already started. Maybe that is the entrepreneur at 80 ADD and me as well, but, I’d rather somebody hand me something even if it’s like I my framework in my brain is always good, better, best. Can we start with good, move it to better, and then start iterating best, best, best over over time? So same idea. Like, I don’t even care if the team went to chat gpt or wherever they’re using, came up with something to pitch past me. It’s like if if it’s a message, an email, a webinar coming up, whatever, do something, get something started for me, and then pitch it. And then I can help them I can refine it back and forth as well and do that same idea and then say, yeah.

John Clendenning [00:21:00]:
Go back to the well and fix this section, do this section, and that even gives them instructions to go back and prompt better as well. So, I mean, I’ve done that for before the days of AI. And now if you think in those same terms of sort of treating it as that assistant in your office if you’re doing it yourself. So, so yes. We’ve got a couple of it. I love the idea of, like, I do chat to my my the one on my phone. Yeah. It’s just so everybody knows when you talk to it, when you come back to your desktop version of it and log into the same account, it’s all typed out.

John Clendenning [00:21:27]:
Right? So when I get it to make a recipe, I copy the recipe and move it into a doc that I can now use from this point forward. There’s my recipe, and I just keep stacking them again when I when I do it for how to cook, and things like that. The other thing I tend to find I’m use I’m doing more and more often is the starting off a prompt with act as, because you’re saying

Jonathan Mast [00:21:48]:
Yes.

John Clendenning [00:21:49]:
Take all of this and bring it in. So just act as an HR specialist. Act as a copywriting specialist. Act as a, you know, you know, a a a training specialist or whatever, a home business service owner, training manager, or something like that. Give it a context and just start your prompt off with act as, seems to mitigate a bunch of follow-up questions and at least kind of bring reels it in. Is there any other types of prompts like that that would say, like, the act as is one of them, but any other ones that would help sort of somebody just getting new? Like, again, a cleaning business owner driving around in their truck or in the office and looking to kinda just get get some production out of the way quickly with by using AI better?

Jonathan Mast [00:22:32]:
We actually recommend a 4 step simple process, and it’s and it’s really simple to get the best results. And we’ve already talked about 2 of them. So the first is just as you said, act as what type of experts. So maybe, you know, this morning, for example, my assistant had to write an email to one of our clients whose credit card was declined. And, yes, I should have an SOP for what we send that out to, but happens very rarely. Yeah. And I don’t. And so I said, Yvette, will you just go ahead and use chat and explain the situation and have it write an email for us? It did.

Jonathan Mast [00:23:02]:
I said, run it past me. I wanna make sure just to take a look at it. And it was it was perfect. It was it was professional. It was polite, but it was also, here’s what’s going to happen if we don’t get this fixed as far as your service is gonna be suspended and things like that. But it did so, like, with a smile almost. It was great. So the first is tell what type of expert to ask act as.

Jonathan Mast [00:23:22]:
Step 2 is something we so often forget, but we we dealt with a little bit, and that’s background information. So if it doesn’t know what’s going on, you have to say, you know, I’m Jonathan with White Beard Strategies, and I need this. Just some just as if I was talking to you about something. The third part is the question, and this is what most people put in. So act as an expert. Here’s the background. Then what here’s my question. Here’s my prompt, whatever I want.

Jonathan Mast [00:23:47]:
And then the 4th part, which we talked about earlier, is so important, and that’s simply ask me any clarifying questions you need.

John Clendenning [00:23:54]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:23:55]:
So if you put that all into one prompt so let’s say we’re doing the SOP again or even this morning for Yvette. It was act as a professional copywriter. I need an email to a client whose credit card has been declined and is at risk of having their service suspended. Please write me that reminder email that we need an updated credit card in the next 72 hours. Please ask me any clarifying questions you need. That was one prompt. Yep. And it it did.

Jonathan Mast [00:24:20]:
It asked her a couple clarifying questions, and we got this amazing email out. Normally, knowing myself, I probably would have taken 5 to 10 minutes to pour over that email, to think about all the various things, and I probably should have spent 20 minutes on it, but I wouldn’t have. And then it wouldn’t have it would have been okay. But now, literally, a member of my staff who isn’t trained in all that stuff was able to get that email written in under 2 minutes and have it back to me in literally 5 minutes. We had the entire process done, including my review. That’s how it saves so much time for us as entrepreneurs. But, yeah, just those 4 steps. Tell what type of expert, give it the relevant background information, ask it your question, and give it permission to ask you clarifying questions.

John Clendenning [00:25:04]:
That’s perfect. Yeah. I mean, just yeah. Everybody listening to this, pause right there. Write that down. There is your prompt framework from this point forward. Do that, and you are 90% down the road of getting a good output that you can then just, again, go back and forth and have that conversation with. So no.

John Clendenning [00:25:23]:
That’s that’s really good. Let’s let’s let’s let’s kind of so we’ve given some ideas around SOPs. We’ve given some ideas. Again, email, that happens all the time. A customer’s credit card declines or there’s a late payment. That that that obviously happens in the world of home service as well. It’s kind of, like, again, giving some other ideas that you you’ve you’ve you’ve got in mind of other places that people can use, AI in their lives to help run a brick and mortar business. What what would be a couple of other ideas that might, might fit into that as well? Like, policies made sense as well, obviously, because we should have Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:25:59]:
I mean, yep. Policies policies are a big one, but, you know, another one might just be, again, let’s say you’ve got a new, a new staff member who’s in charge of opening up the office in the morning or closing down the office at night, and you simply wanna put a checklist together. They don’t need it forever, but they need it for the 1st couple weeks to remind them, you know, turn off these lights, turn this off, turn this on. You know, make sure the the open sign in the window is turned off so it’s not on all those little things. And instead of thinking out this long drawn out list, again, I would if I’d grab my phone and go, hey. I need to put together a checklist for my new ops manager, and here’s the things that I want included when they open the office in the morning. Here’s the things I want included when they close the office. Do you think I missed any? And it it may then bring up some things that maybe you missed or didn’t miss.

Jonathan Mast [00:26:45]:
So that that would be one. Obviously, I think it’s great for hiring. You know, we’re all looking when we need staff. We’re trying to find the right team members, the ones that fit. And nowadays, oftentimes, it’s more than just putting a job posting out because it seems that everybody that wants a job’s got one. So now we now we need to figure out how can we make the opportunity at our company sound like it’s a better fit for them. And AI can do that very engaging job descriptions that are gonna make that end user look go, wow. I wanna work for ABC carpet cleaning because that looks like a great place to be.

Jonathan Mast [00:27:20]:
Yeah. And good one. You know, that’s another area I love using it for.

John Clendenning [00:27:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. My daughter actually, so graduated, 5 years, biochemistry something rather. Gosh. I was way smarter than I am. And it was, like, trying to get a job in the field. And I literally went to chat GPT and said, because it’s, you know, again, hard to get into the field on her end, like, how does she stand out? How did all that what would be some ideas that would work? And it gave me ideas about volunteering. It gave me, like, ideas about who to reach out to at at different labs and hospitals and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:27:53]:
And and they’re all like, it was, like, I I used it as sort of like a, a career placement, and I think that was probably that act as a whatever. And I just copied and pasted it into our messenger chat that we’re having, and she she came back to me. You used chat g p t for this, didn’t you, dad? I’m not gonna lie, But it’s really good. You’ve got Yes. I did. And options, and I think you could probably, you know, use a couple of those to stand out. Right? And it’s it was just sort of like, yeah. Do I have a few off top of my head, make your resume a different color and do the you know, all those those those old school ones? But, yeah, in today’s day and age, how do you stand out? Well, you stand out by knowing people.

John Clendenning [00:28:32]:
Like, we teach our Yes.

Jonathan Mast [00:28:33]:
Our

John Clendenning [00:28:34]:
clients. They can’t they are. Like, they can’t just post on an Indeed and hope to get a carpet cleaning technician nowadays. The best are employed. So it’s like, can you can you go to a church? Like, I mean, I I I generated lists of this that we’ve done, but also took that entire list back into, AI when I was doing a presentation back in December, I think it was, with Jeff Cross from Clean Facts Magazine. We did a we did a a whole thing on a roundtable on how to hire in this industry because it the world has changed. And part of it was taking the list of all the stuff I’d ever done in my 30 years of running cleaning businesses, plugged it in, and said, what works in 2023, 2024? Right? And

Jonathan Mast [00:29:13]:
Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:29:14]:
It came back with, like, some refinements on some some social media ideas I hadn’t thought of and and and things like that. And, you know, so yeah. Like, going to a a church and and saying, hey. You might know some some people in the congregation that, are in looking for a job or whatever. Can we would there be a way that we could post? And then if we do hire somebody from here, you’ll get we’ll give you a, you know, a a a commissioner or stipends to the, you know, tithing to the church. And, you know, the other one has said, well, if you like that church idea, what about sports leagues and little leagues and and things like that? Or, like, you know, because our ideal the ideal technician for a carpet cleaner is probably around early twenties to late 20. You know, males are the best ones to carry the equipment and stuff like that. Well, where do they also congregate around? The the better ones, not the ones that are fully tattooed and and, you know, faces tattooed and piercings and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:30:05]:
But where where are the, you know, the good wholesome kind of crowd? Well, that those are a couple of the ideas it it spit out. I’m going, holy crap. Those are really good ideas too. Right? So, yeah. You can use it for brainstorming, like you mentioned as well, where it’s like, hey. Think outside the box for me. What are some other ideas? Right? So

Jonathan Mast [00:30:23]:
Well, I met Sandy. It you know, it it it’s gonna be able to think about things. We so often as entrepreneurs and business owners, we get we get so buried in the day to day operations of what we’re doing. I know it still happens to me that, you know, I don’t take a break to to look up until the end of the day, and some of the things I need to do, I really need to take a step back in order to do the best job at. Yeah. And it’s so important. This and AI can help you do that because it’s always got time, and it can always turn things around. And, again, I I just find it super, super helpful.

Jonathan Mast [00:30:54]:
Yeah. Like you mentioned, it also can be fun just on a personal level. Like you, I’ve literally went to my refrigerator. I also am eating a a keto type diet and taking a picture. And and, you know, it’s it’s even funny because the last time I did, my kid doesn’t necessarily eat that way, my 17 year old. And so there was a loaf of bread in there, and he even made a comment about don’t use the bread. That’s not gonna be keto friendly. You know? And I’m like, okay.

Jonathan Mast [00:31:16]:
And and literally, it did that off an image that I took by opening my refrigerator and going, okay. Here’s what’s in my refrigerator. What could I do today? And it asked me a couple quick questions, but it’s amazing what it can do like that. Same thing for, you know, analyzing something that’s been done. Again, looking at I’m trying to think of a good example in the carpet cleaning business, but, you know, you can take images and upload those images, and AI will do an amazing job of recognizing what’s going on in that. As you said, the the food was one example. But Yeah. That is just there’s so many things, and and I think it just it’s what makes AI.

Jonathan Mast [00:31:54]:
Once you start using it, it really is one of those. It’s like, wow. How did I get by without it? It’s almost like, you know, the first time I started sending text messages years ago, I was a little reluctant. I’m like, I don’t know if I like this text message thing. Now I don’t know how I’d get through a day without it. Yeah. And AI to me, email could be another example, but AI is another example that the difference is unlike text messages and and email, we don’t have people bombarding us with stuff because we’re the one asking the question. So, again, it’s great.

Jonathan Mast [00:32:21]:
Speaking of email, by the way, that’s another thing I use it for regularly. I need to write an email to somebody. I need to figure out the best way to to do that. I can just say, here’s I need to write an email to John about these three things. Help me write a great email, and it will do that again in seconds as opposed to me spending minutes pouring over an email or not spending the time on it and getting it sent out way too fast and not getting you what I needed.

John Clendenning [00:32:43]:
And that makes sense because, again, we talk a lot about, making sure that, you know, like, there’s a chase sequence. You follow-up with somebody. Say say you went and did a quote at a commercial facility, and they’ve just kind of ghosted you. They’ve paused a little bit. Right? You can message them, text message, email. I’ll follow-up with them. If you don’t really know what to say, a lot of people just don’t do it. Like or they don’t they they they they sort of painstaking over the one email.

John Clendenning [00:33:08]:
Well, maybe 3 or 4 days later, they should send another one. Right? You you could actually say, hey. I’d like to you know, this person still hasn’t responded. I’d like to share some great results from another client or whatever. How would I write that in an email as a follow-up? Hey. We’d love you to get these same results, and sort of you can drip a little nurture on them like that, and you can get it to help with that where, again, it’s spitting it out in seconds. You came up with the idea, but you would spend an hour struggling overwriting it the right way that wouldn’t come across sort of, you know, maybe spammy or a little too aggressive, and you just give it a style and say, well, that seems a little harsh. Can you tone that down a little bit? Make it friendlier? Perfect.

John Clendenning [00:33:45]:
Thank you. You know, and it’s that fast that you’ve you’ve put an output. So, yeah, I could yeah. Obviously, if once you dive in, if there if if we’ve got anybody on the call that’s not using it, don’t have their staff member, office managers using it, definitely start just looking into opening it up. One one other thing I use it for a lot is I’m self taught on Excel, and I I mean key lookups and, like, I mean, pivot tables and all this kind of stuff. It’s like every time I needed to do something, it’s like hours of going on Google and and searching for how to do this and YouTube videos and all that kind of stuff. Probably only 6 months ago, I went, you know what? Why don’t I just here’s I in this column, I’ve got this. In this column, I’ve got this.

John Clendenning [00:34:29]:
In this cell, I wanna put this. How would I write the formula for that? And it goes and not only does it tell me the formula, it tells me why and what function to use and try the, you know, vlookup plus match and this and that, and here’s how you’d write that. And, you know, copy, paste it in, and there’s your answer, but you also can read through and figure out how it got there. So you’re not completely blind to sort of, like, using a GPS and going, I have no idea how I ended up at this cuss or this person’s home or this this resort. I’ll never be able to get my way back again because I just literally falls to think of my my right? You should learn a little bit of what happened there, but you don’t have to. But I’ve used that now for Excel, and all it does is speed up my the the ability to get the output I want. And, again, in business, we all use things like Excel and tables and, you know, quantify this and find any customer that, you know, download this database and find any customer that didn’t get this service that hasn’t called back in this period of time, but boom. There’s your list.

John Clendenning [00:35:22]:
Right? That could have taken hours to figure out how to create that. Now it’s minutes. Right? So, same idea. So cool.

Jonathan Mast [00:35:29]:
No. And I’m glad you mentioned that. It it knows all those applications. One of my favorite ones is I have a love hate relationship with QuickBooks. I’m sure some of your your clients use that as well. And I love it and hate it because I can never it seems like the developers of QuickBooks never put a single button where it was supposed to be before the way my brain thinks. Now, again, maybe for the way that and so I go into to AI all the time and go, how do I do this in QuickBooks? And it will literally give me click here, click here, click here. And I all whenever I do that, I go, well, I would have never thought of that, but okay.

Jonathan Mast [00:35:59]:
And it works. Yeah. Excel’s another great example like that. You know? I wanna write a formula to, I wanna concatenate, I think they call it, when you bring 2 cells together or something like that. I’m probably mispronouncing. It. I can never remember that formula because I use it, like, twice a year. Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:36:14]:
But if I go to AI and go, I have column a and column b, and I need to create column c that puts in both values and combines them. It says, oh, here’s your formula. Yep. Oh, boom. Done.

John Clendenning [00:36:24]:
Yeah. No. It’s it’s incredible. And that I think that is the point is that, you know, we could go on and on about all these ideas. The point is jump in, start playing with it, use it where you you can, and think of other applications. I like to follow a few YouTubers, follow Jonathan, on YouTube. So, like, I think there’s there’s always, like, oh my gosh. I never thought of that.

John Clendenning [00:36:46]:
Oh my gosh. I never thought of that.

Jonathan Mast [00:36:48]:
I don’t exactly

John Clendenning [00:36:48]:
what the future of search is gonna be because, again, Google built its entire like, obviously, Google’s transitioning this way as well because Google built its its entire platform around giving a great user experience and trying to get the best information upfront. Now we know that, again, with AI, we can get those steps without having to go all the way to QuickBooks website to their health. Even if we typed it in well and it took the very first result or the second or third result was somebody telling us how to use QuickBooks, and then we had to click on it, and then we had to read through it. Exactly. Eventually find the step by step instructions. Now it’s just like, no. This is all you need. That’s all you asked for.

John Clendenning [00:37:23]:
There you go. Here’s the answer. Right? So yeah. Like, I can’t even imagine what the world looks like in 5 years from now when that’s baked into everything. Like everything. Yeah. Right? So Yeah.

Jonathan Mast [00:37:34]:
Well, it’s definitely gonna change things around. It’s gonna change the way more than anything, the way we as humans interact with that data, and, therefore, the applications like Google and that are gonna have to change because the way we in it implement’s better. You probably saw, I think it was Thursday last week, Chat GPT, he can’t speak today, just announced search g p t, which is gonna be a now direct competitor against Google. I don’t know how it’s gonna work yet. It’s just out in beta, and I’d love to say I have access, but I don’t yet. Yeah. But, you know, that’s going to change the way things work, and just be ready for that as a as a business owner nowadays. Don’t don’t threat it.

Jonathan Mast [00:38:12]:
Don’t worry about it. Be ready and embrace it, because by embracing, you’ll be able to provide better service to your customers. There will be things that I know by the end of the year that we’ll be able to do in our cleaning businesses that will make a better customer experience. That will mean they’ll come back more frequently, give us better reviews, spend more money with us because of the fact that we’re using some of these technologies.

John Clendenning [00:38:35]:
Yeah. No. I think that I think that’s a beautiful sort of takeaway from all of this is, we spend so much time. Like, I’m just looking around my office here, and I’ve got because of my 30 years in the industry, I’ve got Howard Partridge stacks of old cassette tape bomb over there. I’ve got, prana marketing stuff, and I’ve got, Michael Gerber stuff and all of that kind of and but a lot of this data like, again, it’s it’s already known if you can say, hey. Based on this this training, this transcript, this whatever, what would be a good next step to do this in business? And now it’s not hours and hours and hours and hours of going through the material again that you remember Exactly. Listening to 10 years ago. Oh, there was a couple of good ideas there.

John Clendenning [00:39:20]:
Now it’s a matter of learn it because we’re business owners. We should learn it. Book market when you’re ready for it. Go back to your your notes and go, yeah. Let me take that, and now it’s time to implement that. And implementation like, speed of implementation is how we grow businesses, and we’ve just got tools now that can speed up our implementation even more. So

Jonathan Mast [00:39:38]:
Oh, yeah.

John Clendenning [00:39:39]:
Stand out against the competitors. Because if you don’t, they’re gonna be standing out against you by using this anyways. So it’s a keep up kind of thing. So cool.

Jonathan Mast [00:39:47]:
Absolutely. 100%.

John Clendenning [00:39:49]:
So I think we’ve imparted a lot of good information here in the 30, 40 minutes we’ve kind of chatted. What would you say is a wrap up sort of idea of way things people should do to kind of, you know, for ones that have already waited into this world and the ones that are Mhmm. Hesitant and not, where should they go? What should they do next? What’s a what’s, you know, kind of a good next step for a business owner looking to put in some of the suggestions we’ve just rattled through in the last little bit?

Jonathan Mast [00:40:15]:
Well, I think that is be open and be trying to think of reasons you when you need an adviser to help you out, when you need somebody to help you do something, whether that’s an admin or whether that’s a business consultant or anybody else, just be thinking as a business owner. When something comes up and go, man, I wish I had somebody to help me with this. You now have someone to help you with this, and it’s called AI in the form of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. And just ask them to help you through whatever it is, whether that be advice or what. And it’s like talking to friends. Sometimes I don’t take my friend’s advice, but many times, I get insights that I wouldn’t have thought of had I not asked. And keep that in mind. The decisions you make are still your decisions.

Jonathan Mast [00:40:58]:
You’re still gonna decide what to do with it, and you and your teams are not gonna be replaced by AI. I know there’s a lot of employers that are worried to go, I love my team, and I don’t wanna and I don’t wanna bring it in because I don’t wanna replace them. You’re not. What you are gonna be able to go to do is you’re gonna be able to serve more customers. You’re gonna be able to provide a higher level of service, and you’re gonna be able to further separate yourself from your competition so that when that next job comes up, your clients and their friends and their associates reach out to you because you have a reputation for delivering more value than everybody else because you decided to use AI, and you’re able to really just add gas to that fire of your business that’s already going to help it go faster, grow better, and better serve your clients. No. I appreciate that. I think I think that’s a really good way to wrap

John Clendenning [00:41:46]:
this up is just take that thought, everybody, and definitely just start jumping in because it’s not going away. It’s like it’s this is this is like when they said, oh, the Internet’s just a fad. Well, sorry. It didn’t go Yeah. This is not just a fad. This this this is life, and it it will it it’s infiltrating every area of our lives, and it’s gonna continue. So don’t be afraid of it. Jump in and use it for all of those things.

John Clendenning [00:42:12]:
I, for 1, can’t wait for the day, and you probably have you probably already know there you might know already that there is something that does this. I can’t one of the big bugaboos in my life is, scheduling travel, finding the best tickets, the best flights without connecting flights, and all of those things, and I’ll spend hours with Expedia and Hotjar and all these things open going back and forth. I can’t wait to the day that it’s just somebody’s built an AI tool or there’s a prompt or something that just goes out, does it all, and comes back with the best itinerary. I haven’t found that yet. I haven’t gone digging for it, but my gosh, anything any areas in our lives like that where we just get frustrated doing the task, it would be great to have sort of that personal assistant that just could go boom, boom, boom, boom. Here you go. Here’s what here’s 2 or 3 suggestions. Pick which one you wanna do, and we’ll book those for you.

John Clendenning [00:42:56]:
So I’m sure it’s gonna

Jonathan Mast [00:42:58]:
be pretty much I’ve not tried this, but but KAYAK has a a custom GPT for chat GPT. I’ve not tried it. I should’ve just done it. I just had to book travel down to Mexico. Yeah. So for speaking engagements, I should’ve done it, but I didn’t. That’d be interesting to try out.

John Clendenning [00:43:12]:
I think it was because I think it’s one of those any of those frustrations in life, if you can get a an an AI to take that off your plate. Like, back in the day, it used to be hire a personal assistant, have your office manager do it. Get somebody take take the stuff that that, you know, that frustrates you, lower value tasks that frustrate you, hand it somebody else so you can work on the higher value tasks, going meeting clients, planning new jobs, all that kind of stuff. Well, now we’ve also got the ability to then put that through AI, tell our office manager, use an AI tool to do that. Don’t spend 8 4 hours figuring out my flights. Find this kind of idea as well. So cool. Well, I think, yeah, I think we’ve opened up some people’s eyes, hopefully.

John Clendenning [00:43:47]:
Definitely put in the comments wherever you’re watching this, whether it’s YouTube or on, on on the podcast, you’re listening to it, whatever. Put some comments. Any any questions, any thoughts, you have from this, how you’re using AI in your world, definitely reach out. Look for White Beard Strategies and follow Jonathan. He’s got lots of good stuff, on Facebook, on YouTube, and stuff like that. So, you know, keep your brain kind of rolling through this and, and how it can help you and your business. And any famous last words and parting thoughts, Jonathan, to the crowd that, can help them out?

Jonathan Mast [00:44:19]:
Well, if I can add any value, I’d love it if people would connect, and they can just do that at jonathanmast.com. That’s mast.com/linktree, and I’ve got links to all my social media. There’s a lot of free resources. I’d love to add value where I can. And the last word is just understand what John just said. AI is here to stay. It’s not going away. So we can make a choice.

Jonathan Mast [00:44:38]:
As a business owner, we can either bury our heads in the sand and have our competition surpass us, or we can embrace it and surpass our competition.

John Clendenning [00:44:45]:
Yeah. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for jumping on. Really appreciate it. And, yeah, till next time, everybody. Take care, and, happy cleaning.