Quick Hits: The Role AI Should Play in Strategic Action Planning

Need a quick hit of business inspiration? Here it is. We have lifted portions of our episodes for those who need a quick jolt of business savviness right now. Refer to the description for how to find the longer form version.

And with that, let's get to it. So I'm going to use my franchise Tint World, the one located in Newtown on Round Bottom, just so everybody knows which Tint World I'm talking about because there is Tint World. Yep. So I'm going to use that as a proxy so I can talk details, but just listen to what I'm saying and just note that the insights, what's coming back and how I use it to apply to my business.

And then you should be able to see how you might be able to do the same thing, put in the similar prompts and then apply them to your business. Now, my large language model of choice is chat GPT, just so you guys know, but there's many out there and there's many different ones you can use for many different purposes. That's just the one that I used for this exercise. And it's usually my go-to one for a lot of these exercises.

So let's jump in. Okay. Get ready. This goes okay.

Ready? All right. The first thing I asked chat GPT to do is I asked it to run a competitive analysis for my business. So my exact prompt I used was, can you give me a competitive analysis of tinting companies are competing with Tent World Cincinnati Newtown.

Maybe I should just say, just as a reminder, that Tent World is a car stylizing franchise. So we do do tinting as a primary, but we also do other car stylizing services like 12 volts. So think about your stereos, your lights, your remote starts. We also do ceramic coatings and detailing, paint protection films.

So we do just about everything that's needed to up-style your vehicle. And we also do residential commercial tint. That was not meant to be an ad. That was meant to be context.

But now you know, okay? I don't know about that, but okay. Yeah. I mean, if I can hit, you know, kill two birds with one stone, then I'm going to do it.

All right. So again, the prompt I use is, can you give me a competitive analysis of tinting companies that are competing with Tint World, Cincinnati, Newtown? And tinting being like 70% of our businesses, that was where I chose to hone in. So what came back was a series of really interesting pieces of information.

So I got a positioning statement I also got competitive advantages weaknesses a categorical list of my key competitors and then insights and recommendations So the first few are kind of self So I thought maybe I would go through a little bit of the strategic insights, because this is where I honed in, because I'm looking for ways of differentiating my business in order to compete in my industry and in my location, right? So I'm looking for angles for marketing, looking for angles for promotion, for basic ads.

So this is what it gave me, right? So it told me that Tent World's real competition is a price, it's perception. So it tells me that premium shops went on best installer narrative and locals when I trust this guy narrative. And so my opportunity sits in the middle, unless clearly differentiated.

And we all know the middle is kind of like, eh, kind of like a rough place to be. You don't want to be in the middle, right? So I need to push myself one way or the other. Now, the other thing it told me is that the market is crowded, but fragmented.

So there's dozens of smaller shops, and there's no single dominant local brand. So I have an opportunity to own a category position. Also told me that there's clear white space that I could dominate if I lean into most complete solution, the auto, home and business, professional grade and lifestyle brand, or upgrading your entire life, not just your car. And then it gave me the positioning opportunity of the only place that turned your vehicle and lifestyle into a statement.

Now, am I going to go use those things necessarily verbatim? Maybe, maybe not. And April is going to give us some recommendations of how she would use this information to take next steps. But what it does is it starts to get in my mind about, okay, how am I going to sit?

How am I going to differentiate? How do I want to show up? And How do I want to position myself in order to win? So April, what would you do with this?

Yeah, so I think the first thing that comes to mind is just to remember that this is a really strong jumping off point. So when I, when Ann first sent this over, I started thinking about how long this type of work used to take us, right? Because you'd have to do it manually. Now you have the aggregate of the information that's out there right at your fingertips.

I think the other thing you said, Ann, is you may or may not want to take verbatim what's here And we know that one of the watch outs which I know we going to do overall ones at the end but one of the watch outs with this is just to make sure that you not having information out there that sounds just like everybody else right is one of the things that can happen So what we recco and I sure this is no surprise is to test and learn through these insights that we now have or these learnings that we now have and do things like different social campaigns and then see what resonates and then, you know, optimize as you need to go through or test out or match some of the campaigns with deals or offerings and then see what pops or what kind of business you get as a result of that or referrals or leads or whatever that looks like.

All of these types of things to put out into the marketplace quickly and then learn as you go in order to see based on that initial information, where are you actually landing and where are you winning? Or do you need to make changes to, like Anne said, figure out where you sit in this best installer or trust this guy narrative and just kind of go through to make sure that you are elevating based on the learnings and then optimizing the tactical things you're putting out there to increase the business?

Yeah, I think that's really good advice. And it actually gave me some messaging angles that they considered are messaging angles to win, like more than 10 complete vehicle transformation where performance meets personalization your car your brand fully expressed again these are really easy things for me just to plug into social and guess what you guys chat gbt if you pay for the one version up from free we'll do the images for you and you can put in prompts and you can get back images and you can put the stuff out very very quickly even put a little money behind it to boost it to get a little bit more visibility and you can kind of see what people start reacting to because the best way of actually understanding if things are going to work is to put them into practice, right?

Is to put them out there and see, well, gosh, people seem to reacting to this one either through likes or engagement or calls. Like ultimately, that's what I want. I want them to call the store, right? Or, and they come in and I've had people come in and say, hey, I saw your social posts and that's what got me in here.

So you start to kind of create an ecosystem that allows you to kind of see, hey, is this messaging working? you don't have to sit there and wonder, hey, what do I need to put out there in order to position myself to win here? Because the data starts giving you that feedback, right? Yeah.

Or starting from nothing right Like I was saying before like I remember having to do these type of analyses and it be like oh and I have to collect all the data Where am I going to start Right And it like well we giving you the starting point But then like you just said then you have on the other side the metrics of the engagement of what happening in order to make it even better from there and continue to iterate and do that to get closer and closer to ultimate target, most sales, whatever it is you're looking to do.

Yeah, a thousand percent. And even after it gave me all of this, it tells me I can map exec local SEO competitors through Google rankings. I can build positioning statement for Tint World, or I can create ad messaging that beats these competitors directly. Yes, please.

Right. So it just continues to be able to feed you the next step along the way in order to give you, like April said, a place to start. But it also gives you some interesting insights on where you want to hone in. Like what are the areas that you think you have a particular right to win based on your understanding of your competition, based on your understanding of the industry, right?

And so it starts to just kind of percolate that thought process that allows you to do some insight mining, which is critical in order to drive any kind of differentiation. Yeah. And I also just one last thing to say here is you also do have to do the human piece that you just said. And yes, you own a tint world, but you've done branding and marketing for years and years.

Exactly. So, you know, you know, you know, like you said, garbage in, garbage out at the beginning. It's like, you know what good should look like. So then you're able to be like, okay, well, that is too generic, for example, or that sounds like chat GPT or, you know, those types of things where it's like, it's so ingrained in you versus sometimes where we see people do this stuff without any sort of sense of how these things work.

That's just my point. No, I think that's a really good point. And if you're sitting there going, well, I don't have 20 years of experience. How will I know?

You put it into practice and you see if people react to it or not. Yeah. Right. That's how you know.

And then, you know, if you need to go a little bit more detailed, you know, if you put garbage in and then you refine or, you know, if you hit it because you're starting to get some traction. So you have to start to train yourself to like you are a large language model for how what garbage in and garbage out and what good stuff in and good stuff out actually looks like. Right. Yes.

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