Plus an old favourite returns – welcome to my newsletter for March 24, 2023. You can subscribe to receive your own copy here.
As always, my focus remains practical – amidst the noisy news, what can you be doing to make a difference in your business and your life?
This week:
- What do bank collapses mean for my small business?
- AI Tool of the Week
- Blackboard Friday Returns
- Case Study: Automating Recruitment
1. What do bank collapses mean for my small business?
Students of history (or my Recession videos) know that failing Banks are normally the second domino to fall when a Recession evolves. But banks can collapse for many reasons, so do we as small business owners need to worry about this month’s news?
Here is the most helpful explanation I’ve yet seen about why Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed. While you can directly blame inflation and rapidly rising interest rates, they were only the cause because the SVB board bet against them … and lost.
What does your bank do with your money? Are they able to take it aside and ‘invest’ or gamble with it? If so, make sure you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.
It’s still too early to tell how many other banks were similarly exposed and whether this will spread – I’m watching Credit Suisse UBS with much interest.
2. AI Tool of the Week
A segment that will fluctuate between both definitions of the word ‘Tool’.
Regular readers will know that the AI Web3.0 revolution is exciting me about technology for the first time since Web2.0 allowed me to blog; but which tools are fantasy and which can actually help your business right now?
OpenAI has now released GPT4 – but WTF does that mean? Well ChatGPT, which late last year became the fastest product to reach 100 million users, stunned us all and was built on GPT3. The new version of this Generative Pre-trained Transformer (a useful piece of trivia to know) can process pictures, eight times as many words, and is generally more efficient, nuanced, and powerful.
If you haven’t yet created your account (free, with some restrictions, for GPT3.5; US$20/mth to include GPT4) head to https://chat.openai.com/. Try these 3 prompts to see how you could be using this tool already – and that’s before the API becomes widely available (I’m on the waitlist, because I’m not cool enough).
Prompt #1 – “What are the top 3 reasons customers won’t buy <your industry> services”?
Prompt #2 – “I want to film 1 video a week talking about how my <your industry> company helps our clients. Our top 3 value propositions are <list 1, 2, and 3>. Please create a list of 50 video topics, including some seasonal topics I can take advantage of.”
Then ask ChatGPT to sort that list into a weekly table with dates starting on March 28, 2023.
Prompt #3 – “Our most valuable service is <your product or service>. Please write a rap song about how important it is for people to use this service.”
While barely scratching the surface of ChatGPT, let alone the underlying AI engine, I’ve found those are excellent prompts to help business owners warm to playing further.
80% of my clients are now using ChatGPT in their business on a weekly basis.
3. Blackboard Fridays Episode #1
In conjunction with businessDEPOT, we categorised the whole library of Blackboard Fridays strategy videos and made them available so you can watch and re-watch them as you desire.
But the feedback has been constant … so many of you like the weekly prompt. So here we start again at the beginning. Introducing the Business Lifecycle.
As well as being the first of 134 episodes, that was also the first of 8 episodes dedicated to just that one strategic framework – there’s a reason it’s the most important tool in my clients’ toolkit.
4. Case Study: Automating Recruitment
While 2023 is breeding more uncertainty, the war for talent remains a critical focus for most of my business owner clients.
This small project ($10,000+GST from start to finish) won’t solve all your problems, but it did create 8 top quality applicants and 2 new recruits in just 3 weeks.
Want more great people for your team? Click here to read the case study.
With love,
Jacob Aldridge
International Business Advisor
