Why Working Harder Isn’t the Answer Anymore

We were trained in my era to say, you know,

proficient in Microsoft Office products. Well, now we have to

talk about proficiency in AI tools for skills. This is the

skill that we have to build, whether or not you are in the

workplace looking to get a job, or whether you're building it

into your business.

This is the entrepreneur school podcast where we believe you can

run a thriving business and still make your family a

priority. This show is all about supporting you, the emerging or

early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO,

while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is

Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who

started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR

girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life

is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On

this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business

owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you

grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life

that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur School.

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to entrepreneur school. Sorry if

I sound funny. I of course am getting sick because there's way

too much going on for me to be sick. Isn't that just how it

always works? Oh my gosh. Okay. I can totally breathe. It's

fine. I have been working on something I'm going to tell you

all about in this episode today, it's launching on my birthday,

which is was September 12. So then, of course, they have all

sorts of fun birthday activities planned for the weekend, and my

body's like, Yeah, we're gonna just give you a sore throat on

top of this, good luck. But I don't blame the kids going back

to school, or the several hockey tryouts that we've already been

experiencing. I don't know. It's just like, Get me my throat coat

tea, and I'll just be powering through. I'm gonna have a nap

today after this, and we're gonna make it happen. It's

totally fine. So in case you missed it, I am really stepping

into a role as an AI strategist. And the reason why I feel this

is really important, and I keep kind of coming back to talking

about it, is like, this is the way that we can make our lives

easier. And above all else, my values and what I feel like my

purpose here in this world is, is to help people build

businesses that create more space in their lives. So you

know that whole life, first business where we actually build

around the lives that we have and what we want, and also just

allowing ourselves to do things in an easier way. And I feel

like this is a really important thing for women to hear and for

us to speak more into that it's okay to let things be easy. This

is something I have been working personally on letting go of for

a really long time. And when I found AI in like, the last year

and a bit, it is clear to me that this is a tool slash set of

tools that can support letting it be easier, right?

There's a conversation coming up on the podcast in a couple of

weeks time where we discussed how women feel guilty about

taking what feels like easy routes, like we think we've been

programmed right to feel like everything has to be hard. We

have to work hard. It has to feel hard. It has to take a long

time. But also, what if it doesn't? And actually, now that

not have to be that hard. And when we allow AI to support with

some of the things that we may have done, even within our own

expertise, right? So for me, this is like, I work with people

to help them with their visibility strategies, right?

And I can build that plan. I can do it all myself. It used to

take me 20 hours to do that, and that's what we would bill for at

a PR firm, like a communication strategy was about a 20 hour

one I want to help solopreneurs, and nobody's got that kind of

budget to just make a plan with, and now I can use AI to support

me in making. Plan helping my client get more depth and more

thorough of guidance, and then we can have a more nuanced and

deeper conversation about how to actually apply it. And then,

bonus, we're also using AI to help apply the strategies that

we make together.

So I just see this as like, the total easy button and like,

let's actually press it. Let's actually use it, right? AI can

be so supportive. But what I think is that there's still a

preconception of AI is about churning out more like being

more productive, making more content and doing more. And this

is not, I am not in this camp like no. Thank you. Yes, you can

do those things, but what if you just did the same in less time

and actually had more time to do other things that light you up

and fill your cup? And you know, have the naps, and tomorrow I'll

be taking the day off for my birthday and going for a bike

ride like that's so important, and I think we need to just

bring this all back together into the forefront. Oh my gosh.

Side note, I'm currently watching American Crime Story

and watching the prosecutor in the OJ Simpson case, the female

prosecutor, lead Marsha, I think it's Clark. Was her last name. I

am hurting inside watching how she what she had to face as a

woman in the 90s who was getting divorced and dealing with child

care issues and working 70 hour weeks on this big, high profile

keys, and I'm just going, Oh my gosh. Like, of course, that's,

that's what she thought she had to do, right? And also, these

are the people who are like, in front of us in the world, who

showed that, you know, sacrifice was required. And I'm going to

challenge that now. I want to say, how do we not sacrifice all

the things so that we can have the life that we want, the

family life that we want, the open space, white space, like

self care, all the things, like, how can we actually have it all?

And so this is where AI fits in for me, and that is why I want

to share with you about this amazing bundle that I have put

together. And I thought it was important to provide that

context around like AI for the sake of ease and alignment. And

that's why it's called the ease and alignment with AI bundle.

And so from September 12 until October 12, you can get your

hands on 30, more than 30 free resources that fall into a few

big categories. So there's clarity and planning tools

helping you build out 90 day plans, seeing like what you

might need to do next. Think, doing some of that thinking for

you, we have a systems and operations category, so there's

SOP libraries, procrastinator friendly, planning, back office,

bot squad course to help you stop losing time on repeating

tasks.

Of course, there's a lot of tools to support with content

and marketing, messaging, visibility, audience growth,

boosting your discoverability, brainstorming aligned lead

magnets, and even into the offers and monetization space,

so tools to test if your offer is aligned, brainstorming new

revenue streams, maybe even naming a product so that it

sells itself. And then I also love that we have some

contributors who are specifically talking about

energy and boundaries. There's an energy mapper that helps you

check in and avoid burnout, scripts that make boundary

setting easier again, just so aligned with the whole purpose

of this bundle.

I do want to take a moment to interject and talk about the

sponsors for the bundle. I'm hosting the bundle, so I'm

sponsoring it, and what I'm sponsoring is with my new AI

tool called Brand calibrator, I am so friggin excited about this

tool and how it has turned out and helped dozens already of

solopreneurs to essentially walk through my entire brand clarity

and brand strategy process that I would typically do in A VIP

day for $3,500 but I have distilled it down into an

interactive GPT experience that you can do in under two hours.

And so what it produces is actually a brand DNA instruction

guide, and that's what I call the brand calibrator do. To

train AI how to use you as a lens, how to sound like you, how

to think like you, how to put everything it does through the

lens of your business and your brand. And so it's going to walk

you through a five step process to like, extract your vision and

mission for what you want to do and get that solid clarity

around your brand. And then it will do a brand audit. This is

like, sit back, relax. It's going to scan your content, look

at what you're putting out online, assess how you're

showing up, and identify as well, any opportunities or gaps

between what you said, Do you want it to sound like and show

up like and how it sees you showing up, and then it goes

through a deep dive, ideal client profile exercise, where

you're going to talk about some of your best fit clients, some

of the bad experiences, and really be able to distill that

down into themes and Reasons and values and beliefs and

challenges and pain points and all those things that you need

to understand about your audience. Because AI also really

needs to know your audience. When you're creating any kind of

communication material, we need to know who we're talking to,

right? And ultimately, like really understanding who your

potential buyers are is going to make all of your content convert

even better. And then my favorite part is the personality

infusion, which is step four, and that's going to like, get

your quirks in your sayings and your isms and stories into it so

it understands how to add your flair to things. At this point,

we have so many AI generated content pieces out there in the

world that we're starting to notice, right? You start to see

like, Oh, that looks like it was made by a robot. And this is the

way to help make sure that your robot created content does not

actually sound like it came from. So goodbye generic AI

content for good brand calibrator is here to save the

day. And then the last piece that it does is it takes all of

the information from those four steps, and it turns it into like

an AI ready document for you to upload. You can use it for

custom gpts, for projects, for just context within your GPT, or

any AI tool that you may actually use, because it is now

like your context Bible, and I am so proud of it and so excited

about it, and it's at on special launch founders rate during and

through the end of the bundle and through the end of October.

So make sure that you check that out as well. You can get there

directly through the show notes. Ks, co.ca forward slash, brand,

calibrator. Calibrator has 1l and there'll be a link below for

you as well. And the other amazing sponsor of our bundle is

an upcoming summit that I'm so excited to be part of it's

called the her AI era Summit, and this is all about women

leading the way in AI development and thought

leadership. And I'm so excited to share with you a conversation

that I had with one of the CO hosts of the summit, Kinsey

Soderbergh, and she is coming up on the podcast in a couple of

weeks, and we just really talked about how important it is that

women start to really lean into this and accept and embrace the

use of AI tools. So what we were talking about in this episode

with respect to not feeling guilty allowing yourself to use

things that'll help make your life easier. It's so important,

and so I'm really proud to be part of that event and to be

sharing about it with you as well. So if you want to sign up,

it's a free summit that's happening October 13 to 17th. So

right after the bundle is done, it's free to watch, and there's

a link below in the show notes as well.

And also we have some interesting special products,

such as an AI bias guide, and actually, Annie, who created

that, she's going to be on the show here in the next couple of

weeks as part of this series, just to have that conversation,

because there's a lot of layers right when we think about

starting to use AI and how this can be helpful for us in our

businesses, in our lives, and also, like we do need to ask

some tough questions. We do need to understand some of the

nuances and potentially the biases that are being created

because we don't really know how these tools are operating,

right? It's really interesting for me, as someone who's now

like programmed over 30 custom gpts, and I'm working with a

programmer locally who is helping to create a very

exciting new platform. Form that we'll be sharing about in the

next few weeks as well. And he talks about his experience in

programming software where you can kind of program it, and you

know that it will just keep working. The same with AI, you

can program it, but it will shift and flex. And so you have

to understand programming from the perspective of putting up

some guardrails so that it hopefully stays within a lane

and doesn't go off and start trying to do all these other

things.

Anyways, that's like a whole side note, but this is what I

mean. Is it, is it an area that we have to get familiar with

individually? You have to start using it regularly as part of

your daily workflow so that you can understand how it works. And

the only way to understand how it works is to start using it.

So this is about testing, experimenting, practicing, and

there's so many tools built for you inside of this AI bundle

that you can get your hands on that will help you, especially

if you haven't even started bringing AI into your work very

much yet. But you do know, and you understand that it's not

going away. It is the future. It is a skill like, you know, I

feel like we were trained in my era to say, you know, proficient

in Microsoft Office products. Well, now we have to talk about

proficiency in AI tools or skills. This is the skill that

we have to build, whether or not you are in the workplace,

looking to get a job, or whether you're building it into your

business and how you're going to progress and use these tools to

expand as an entrepreneur.

So I cannot wait to hear what tools you're grabbing. I'm back

in the DMS on Instagram a little bit now. I feel like maybe I'll

just be doing stories because it's more fun and it won't make

posts and whatever. So again, my Instagram still today, September

11, is saying that I'm off social for this summer. It's

still technically summer right until the end of September. So

that's fine, but I'm there a little bit, and I definitely do

love hearing directly from you, so please send me message there

if you grab the bundle and you want to talk about AI, so stay

tuned, because in the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some

conversations with some of our bundle contributors, and other

ways that you can use AI to build momentum without burning

out. I'll talk to you soon.