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The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
AI Board of Directors - Your 3am Problem Solvers!
Struggling with business decisions at 3AM? Wish you had Tony Robbins or Simon Sinek on speed dial? The answer might be closer than you think.
A powerful AI tool has emerged that could revolutionize how small business owners access expertise and solve problems. By creating an AI-powered board of directors based on actual human experts and their publicly available content, you can now have a virtual advisory team available 24/7.
The concept is brilliantly simple yet potentially game-changing. Select 6-10 virtual board members whose thinking aligns with your business values and methodology. These could include visionaries if you're strong on implementation, marketing gurus if that's your weak spot, or financial wizards if numbers make your head spin. The key? Include at least one outlier who challenges your assumptions to avoid echo-chamber thinking.
What makes this approach so valuable for small business owners is the unprecedented access to diverse expertise. Whether you're agonizing over pricing strategies, hiring decisions, customer retention problems, or team engagement issues, your virtual board can provide perspectives based on the collective wisdom of your chosen thought leaders. As I discovered while exploring this tool, "the assumption must be AI can do it until AI tells me it can't."
Small businesses rarely have the luxury of a traditional board of directors, but this AI approach democratizes access to top-tier business thinking. The virtual board isn't going to do your job for you, but it might provide that one crucial insight that helps you break through a persistent challenge.
Ready to create your own AI advisory board? I'd love to hear who makes the cut for your virtual boardroom. Connect with me on Instagram @thepeoplegardener or email ronda@rondadelaney.com to share your experience with this powerful new business tool.
Well, hey there, welcome to the People Gardener podcast. I'm Rhonda Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, thrilled to put this podcast together to help small business owners, new business owners, frustrated business owners and aspiring leaders, whether they're inside business or outside. Each week, we bring you some actionable steps so that you can actually improve your skill as a leader. That's what we're about. We're here to help you become a better leader by giving you access to lots of different perspectives. By giving you access to lots of different perspectives, the guests are varied. We're thrilled to have them. Get out your pen, get out your paper and be ready to learn Every single episode. You're going to be able to take something away that you can implement. Are you ready? Let's get to work. Well, hey there. Welcome back to the People Gardener podcast. Happy to have you here this week.
Speaker 1:Okay, I confess went down another AI rabbit hole. I'm becoming more and more comfortable. Ai gave me the heebie-jeebie creepies for the longest time and as I've been playing around with it, I have discovered that there's lots of ways that it can be practically really helpful in your business, and I ran across a prompt that just sent me down this rabbit hole, and what it was. It was creating an AI-powered board of directors that are based on actual human beings and their content that is available on the internet. So picture this you have a board of directors that's available to on podcast, whose work you actually go to. It could be live workshops. You know, I'm thinking Tony Robbins, thinking like Grant Cardone, could be Simon Sinek. I mean, there's just so much information available out there. So you're going to curate this board based on content that aligns with your values, with your business, with your methodology, with how you want your business to run, and I would recommend throwing in an outlier as well, somebody that you respect.
Speaker 1:But you often have very vigorous debates in front of your computer with what it is they're saying. It's not like you agree with them all the time, and we don't want to create a board where we just live in this echo chamber of sameness. We want competing viewpoints, we want to challenge, and the thing that I found so fascinating about this prompt was the person told ChatGPT, I have a problem and here's how I would like it discussed, and so each board member would be given the problem and then they would present, and she wanted them to be able to argue and debate and she wanted ChatGPT to stop every once in a while just in case, she wanted to interject. Because the reality is, chatgpt is going and searching all of the known data that is out there on this topic and is bringing it all in, and she didn't want it curated. She wanted to mimic a typical human board meeting where there's opposing views, and so she wanted to create this inside this chat. I was so, so intrigued because, as small business owners, this could be invaluable for you.
Speaker 1:The key is going to be you taking the time to research the people that you want on your board, the ones that are important to you. Myself, I don't classify myself as a visionary and I don't even classify myself really as creative. Where my strength is in organizational is in implementing. Tell me what it is that needs to be done and I'm your gal, I'll get it done, kind of thing. So for me, I want the visionary on my board. I want the creator, the creative inspiration, on my board.
Speaker 1:Not sure what you might want or need on your board, but, man, it could be incredibly powerful. You know you wake up at three o'clock in the morning because of a problem that has just persisted. It won't go away and you say, okay, you get up and you get in here and you put the problem to your board and you let it do its thing. You could probably even just go back to bed and then come back in the morning and see okay, what insights has the board been able to give me on this challenge? And my hope for you is that there's some nugget in there that is able to unlock yourself and you be able to move forward. This board isn't going to do your job for you. What they're going to be able to do is put some perspective around whatever challenge it is that you have.
Speaker 1:So what are the kinds of people that could be on your board? Well, I actually should back up. I'll say how many people. Six to ten members is probably where you want to live. You get more than that and it could be pretty overwhelming. And again, it depends on your business. If you've got really specific departments and things that you want to be able to get information on, you might want to be up towards the 10, and if it's a more straightforward business model, you might be fine with the six.
Speaker 1:So what are the kinds of people that you want on your board? I would recommend looking at yourself and saying, okay, I'm pretty good at this and this and this, but I really need help in this part of my skill set, this part of my world, and then start adding board directors for that. Add ones even for things that you feel that you're skilled at, because another perspective is always always helpful. So you might need somebody for strategic planning. It could be the financial end of the equation that you need help with. It could be marketing social media, right. What do I do with it? How do we get it done? What makes the most sense for us? Sales is huge, right, we don't have sales, we don't have businesses. So definitely have somebody on your board for that Could be the production and efficiency organizational type of thing.
Speaker 1:Copywriting right. I'm not a copywriter, but I do know that I need to learn to write better copy, and that doesn't just mean things that go out into the internet, the world, even this podcast. It's copywriting inside an email. It could be in a text message. It could be you've got an autoresponder and it's the SMS autoresponder and it's like yeah, no, everything that communicate is important. And don't forget the spiritual help, somebody that helps you to be rooted and grounded.
Speaker 1:So what's the benefit of a board? Well, I think one of the most important is that you have access to expertise instantly. Here's this board and they are available to you anytime. So it doesn't matter if it's in the wee hours of the morning, over lunch or in the evening. You can go to this board at any time and get feedback, try and find solutions or just insight to things. It could be that you've got a new product that you're thinking of and you want to put it in there and say, okay, so what do you all think? And get some feedback on that. I'm going to say relatively unbiased feedback, because chat GPT is just simply taking information that somebody has already made publicly available and presenting it to you.
Speaker 1:I haven't worked with it enough to know whether or not things are being skewed one way or the other. Faster problem solving absolutely. One of the neat things, especially if you're in the productivity end of things, is the standard operating procedures, getting those all created for you. When you're putting your you know you say, ok, this is what we do. Create an operating procedure and then everybody can chime in on that. Financial modeling and forecasting. I mean yeah, I mean yeah. And the neat thing is this board of directors is available to you, but you can choose to tell the AI saying OK, we're dealing with finances today. It really specific. I have come to the conclusion that the assumption must be AI can do it until AI tells me it can't, because some of these prompts that I have been seeing is like wow, it does that. Really, it can go there. So it's pretty, pretty wild.
Speaker 1:What are the kinds of things that you might want to bring to this board? Should I raise my prices this quarter? It's going to go out and it's going to get information and it's going to come back with an answer and it's up to us to weigh and determine whether or not that answer is correct. Should I hire? Should I outsource? Here's the data where we're at. Here's our capacity. We're over capacity. Do we need to add another person? Does it make sense financially to add another person? How can I reduce customer churn? How do I get my team more engaged? Make sure you have me on your board, because I can help you with that. How can I make onboarding smoother? I've got that handled too, so there's so much help for you at your fingertips Now. Absolutely, it's going to take time, it's going to take energy. There will be a learning curve for you in order to put this board together. I'm working on mine, so who knows, maybe I'll do another episode down the way about what it took to put this board together.
Speaker 1:One thing I do know is small business often does not have a board of directors.
Speaker 1:They don't have a group of experts to get feedback from. This is a way that you can have top industry people, specific people, on your board, and don't be shy about kicking people off your board if you're not getting the feedback that aligns with your values and where it is you want your business to go. Have fun with this. Really jump on it, and I would love to hear all about your new board of directors. So don't forget to message me on Instagram at the people gardener, or shoot me an email, ronda at rondadelaneycom. That's it for this week. We'll talk to you again next week. Well, thanks for joining me today. Just a quick reminder if you were not on my email list, go to my website, rhondadelaneycom, and there's a place there that you can subscribe, keep you up to date on all things people gardening and leadership, and also a reminder that the Raving Fans Society app is available on the Apple Store and the Google Store. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you again next week.