This week: ‘2-Hour Tasks’ to accelerate your consulting business in 2025, and scratch your itch to work over the holidays, if you must...

2-Hour Task #1: Train your AI

I’ve referenced before my aversion to leaning too much on GenAI for IP/POV/framework creation, at least in the early stages, as I find it to be quite anchoring in the creative process. (See: #193 💡 GenAI: the tempting glue trap)

However, ChatGPT and other AIs can be extremely useful as a companion, particularly to us solopreneurs who run a heightened risk of the one-person echo chamber.

The brilliance of these tools is that you can converse with them as if they’re a live thought partner. As such, you can ask them to:

• Help brainstorm your potential ICPs and positioning
• Compare and contrast your service and pricing models
• Poke holes in your signature POV
• Create a starter outline of talking points for a panel or keynote

Now, there are two angles of interaction to engage an AI effectively:

• Training — giving the AI enough context about you so it can provide relevant and actionable responses
• Prompts — knowing how to ask it for things, challenge it, or ask it to challenge you

Today is meant to be a kickstart on Training, and I’ll walk through ChatGPT only (that’s the one I use most regularly at the moment).

(If you're already way more advanced than this, see my ask in the P.S. 🙏 )

Three steps to Training your AI in two hours:

1. Adjust it.
2. Feed it.
3. Test it.

1. Adjust it

There are two settings you’ll want to adjust as you get started: Personalization and Data Controls.

Under Personalization, make sure Memory is toggled ON - as stated, this will allow the AI to remember details about your conversations, and reference them as you continue to interact.

Next, go into Customize ChatGPT. Make sure Enable for new chats is ON.

Then, answer the two prompts about how you’d like the AI to respond to you.

You can see I told mine about the type of work I do, a bit about my own career, and some goals for my business.

Further down, I asked it to respond to me as a supportive counterpart, but one that will also challenge my thinking and assumptions.

Note: I find without this kind of guidance, GenAIs will fall quickly into confirmation bias, telling you that everything you say is fantastic and brilliant. :)

And to close out the Settings, go into Data Controls, and turn OFF “Improve the model for everyone”.

My rationale for this will become clear in the next step.

2. Feed it

Just as if you’d hired a new team member (or consultant!), your AI needs to become intimately familiar with your business in order to serve you back anything of value.

Luckily, it can drink from a firehose better than anyone, so don’t hold back.

Send it all your public-facing content:

• Your original blog posts/newsletters so it knows your existing IP
• An aggregated doc of your LinkedIn posts so it gets to know your writing style
• Your website copy so it knows your current messaging and offers

Feel free to load in any unpublished material you feel comfortable sharing as well.

• Recent call transcripts (with consent) to understand your interactions
• Screenshots of draft frameworks to help you complete them
• Coaching workplans so it knows things you’re working to improve

I know, this may seem weird handing everything into a black box.

That ‘Data Controls’ step above is meant to limit what OpenAI (or others) can do with what you submit.

But if you’re feeling odd submitting it, just use your judgement and skip it.

3. Test it

Now you can start asking it things like:

• What were the key themes in my 2024 content? Were there any obvious gaps I should explore?
• Based on my published pricing, how many clients should I be seeking per year to meet my revenue goals?
• What are some other potential market segments that might be interested in my services, that wouldn’t stretch too far from my core expertise?

You’ll know pretty quickly if it’s gotten the gist of what you do. And keep training and conversing with it regularly to keep it up-to-date.

Now that your new sidekick is onboarded, I imagine your wheels will start spinning quickly about how to engage with it.

Welcome to your new productive rabbit hole.

💡

-Wes

P.S. - Odds are good you're way more advanced with AI than this already.
​If you have some pro-tips on engaging with AI on your consulting business, hit 'reply' and send them over! I'll aggregate them (with attribution) and share them back out to the list.