Episode 35

Jonathan Mast From White Beard Strategies

In This Episode

  • How integrating AI into the window treatment and awning industry can save time, increase profits, and deliver exceptional value to businesses.​
  • Practical examples of using AI for communication, writing emails, creating standard operating procedures, and analyzing data to streamline business processes.​
  • Insights into common misconceptions about AI, such as fears of job loss, and the importance of engaging with AI models to enhance business strategies.​
  • How AI can improve customer interactions and help business owners create content, establish personal brands, and generate unique marketing materials.​

Guest Profile: Jonathan Mast

Jonathan Mast – Pioneering AI Prompting Mastery for Business and Marketing Excellence

Since his digital debut in 1995, Jonathan Mast has been a visionary in integrating marketing and business operations with AI. Founder of the seven-figure digital marketing agency Valorous Circle, he has collaborated with over 400 clients, demonstrating his ability to scale businesses online through proven marketing strategies. Now at White Beard Strategies, Jonathan focuses on AI prompting mastery, helping professionals save time, increase profits, and deliver exceptional value. A dynamic speaker, he demystifies AI concepts and offers practical strategies that drive immediate results. Committed to community growth, Jonathan’s contributions extend beyond the digital realm, fostering innovation and mentorship. Dive deeper into his journey and AI-driven strategies at Jonathan’s Linktree and White Beard Strategies Linktree.

Other Notes/Links:

To learn more about Johnson Mast visit:

Whitebeardstrategies.com

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Transcript

Episode 35 Jonathan Mast

Will Hanke (00:00)
All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 35 of marketing panes. This is the podcast where we talk to professionals, window treatment owners, and we just talk about different things related to the industry, how we can help you grow in different ways, what other people are experiencing. Today, I’ve got a fantastic guest that I think you’re going to be very excited to hear. And because our topic today is all around AI

Probably the biggest buzz of the last 12 months at least has been AI and how it’s going to maybe replace people or is there ways to use it. So we’re going to talk to a lot of those things today. But Jonathan Mast has been a visionary in integrating marketing and business operations with AI. Founder of the seven -figure digital marketing agency, Valorous Circle He has collaborated with over 400 clients

demonstrating his ability to scale businesses online through proven marketing strategies. Now at Whitebeard Strategies, Jonathan focuses on AI prompting mastery, helping professionals save time, increase profits, and deliver exceptional value. A dynamic speaker, he demystifies AI concepts and offers practical strategies that drive immediate results. Committed to community growth,

Jonathan’s contributions extend beyond the digital realm, fostering innovation and mentorship. Jonathan, thank you for being on today.

Jonathan Mast (01:28)
Well, thank you for the invitation, Will. I’m excited to be here and as you know, I’m excited to talk AI.

Will Hanke (01:32)
Yeah, yeah, we’re excited about this because it’s everybody’s talking about it. Everybody’s worried about it. Everybody’s, you know, thinks the thing certain things are going to happen. So we’ll kind of talk about some of those today. But before we kind of like jump into everything, just give me the 10 ,000 foot view of what whitebeard strategies is and what you

Jonathan Mast (01:53)
Well, we’d be happy to. So essentially, we’re an AI strategist. We work with businesses to help them figure out how to bring AI into the business and leverage it. And as you said, kind of in the workup, by the way, thank you for that. That was very nice of you. But I think we really try to help people figure out how do we save time because AI can save a tremendous amount of time. And I don’t know any business owner that has more time on their hands than they want. So that’s a big deal. Can also help with the teams.

That leads to better profits and better margins, which is super important. And ultimately, it even delivers and or I should say moves on to deliver better value to our clients. And we all know as business owners, especially with the economy the way it is today, if we went to the grocery store, everything’s more expensive. If we can figure out how to deliver more value without having to charge more money, that really can set us apart from our competition and really helps us keep that business and grow our business.

Will Hanke (02:47)
Yeah, I love that. So can you go ahead and share an experience where integrating AI into a business process has

Jonathan Mast (02:54)
Absolutely. One of the things that I think probably has proven to be most effective for many businesses is just learning how to use it from a basic communication standpoint as business owners, as team members. And by the way, we really are big proponents of teaching the team how to use AI as well, Will, because it’s one thing for the owner to know it as we were talking, Kevin, the pre -call, but the team needs to understand it as well. And one of the best examples is just in writing emails to clients. So often.

We’ve got an email we need to write to a client. We know we need to say something. Maybe we can’t agree with the client or they’ve made a request and we want to say, well, you can’t do that, but we want to do so in a way we’re not putting them off too bad and be professional. Those emails, at least for me, they take not just minutes, but sometimes tens of minutes to write or even a half hour sometimes. And I don’t have that kind of time. And then they don’t always sound right or I said something I didn’t mean to.

AI is a great tool for that because we literally can take that request email from the client. We can paste it in and say, here’s what I want to say, please rewrite this to make it sound more professional, to make it easier to read, easier to comprehend. And literally often in less than 10 seconds, AI will write an email that’ll get us 95 to 98 % of the way to completion. And then we just have to edit it real quick and press send. It’s now off our mind as a business owner, so we’re not thinking about

We’ve dealt with it and it always can do so in a way that, again, especially when you proof it, is very professional and makes the right points because it’s got like the perfect words for everything we want to say. So that’s one of many. Another big one, and I’m sure your audience runs into this, standard operating procedures. We know how important it is to give our team standard operating procedures and checklists so that when they’re worth a client, everything gets done the same way, the same.

for every client and we have that consistency. But it’s hard to keep those up to date. Even if we wrote one a year ago, things have changed, maybe we don’t have a checklist with it. With AI, I literally can take existing SOPs or in my case, I can take brand new ones, give it an outline and say, here’s the things I want to cover, here’s the task we’re doing, I want you to create a standard operating procedure. And again, in about 10 to 20 seconds, we’ve got a really well thought out standard operating procedure that’s probably 95 % of the way there.

And then one of my favorite features, and my team loves this, instead of just giving them the SOP to follow, we then can have AI create a checklist that corresponds to that, that now our team can go out and go on site and go, okay, did we do these steps in the right order? And then that checklist gets returned back to your operations manager, your office manager, whomever, and you can validate, hey, know, yeah, we did do everything the right way, we covered everything. And if not, we can identify what happened and make sure that we’re prepared.

So in the future, let’s say that customer comes in and says, why did this happen with my window coverings? Now you’ve got your checklist to go, well, we didn’t do this because of the following reasons or because you requested we didn’t. So those are just two areas that I think AI can be hugely beneficial

Will Hanke (05:50)
I love that. saw an example of AI for somebody had received a one -star review and what they did is their van, their installer had backed up the van into a car. And so they got a one -star review. So they went to AI and said, here’s the situation, help me write a really nice reply to this review. And it was anything, it was better than anything I could have come up with for sure, right?

Jonathan Mast (06:10)
Mm -hmm.

Exactly, exactly. And it’s not emotional. We know when we’re emotional, that’s not the time for us to be writing them. Let’s say maybe a customer gives us a negative review, like you mentioned, may or may not be deserved. But how can we respond to that? And maybe more importantly, how do we reach out to the client to address that? We recently had a scenario with one of our clients, very similar, where the crew went on site. When they went in, didn’t clean their shoes off well, and they tracked all over the carpet.

And the homeowner understandably was ticked off. they gave them a one, while the job got done right and everything was happy, they were, they gave them a one -star review because they ended up tracking mud onto the carpet. Good news is, is they found out about it and we actually used AI to write the email back to the client and then it followed up with a phone call. And the nice thing there is that the owner is like, I’m not sure what to say. We used AI to help give them some bullet points, hear the things.

Essentially, they reached out, they said, wow, we’re so sorry, that’s not what’s supposed to happen. What I’d like to do today, if it’s okay with you, is I’d like to send my carpet cleaning crew over and have them clean your carpets at my expense. And would that be okay with you? And the client was like, yeah. By the end of the day, that was all done. And guess what? That one star review now turned into a five star review and not just the five stars, but a long explanation, all very positive that told the story of, hey, you know

were human, things happened, but this company stands behind it, they fixed it, and I would never use anybody else

Will Hanke (07:39)
Love it. Yeah, that’s great. And it’s the what is it called the Pareto principle, I think 80 20, we’re using using a tool to get your 80 % of the way right off the bat, you know, and all you got to do is a little bit of tweaking and you’re done.

Jonathan Mast (07:52)
Exactly. It’s like having an advisor that’s sitting next to you in your office or in your truck or wherever you are. And that when you have that problem, you can go, what do I do? And that can be as simple as, geez, I forgot to publish a social media post today. I told my office manager I was going to do that or I know I need to be doing that. Or it could be much more elaborate and what I find again far more common

I need to respond to this email or I need to do this or, you know, one of your team members calls and there’s a problem. And like you said, you’re trying to figure out what are my options? What should I do? You know, you get that phone call and somebody crashed the van and okay, they’re safe, you know that, but what steps do you need to take? That doesn’t happen every day. AI can help them say, here are the things you should be doing if your employee just smacked your van up and at least give you next steps. And as somebody that owns a business, I find that really helpful because

Will Hanke (08:24)
All

Right?

Jonathan Mast (08:40)
A lot of those things we don’t deal with every

Will Hanke (08:41)
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. That’s great. So how do you see AI benefit benefiting the small and medium businesses in the window treatment and awning industry?

Jonathan Mast (08:51)
I think there’s a couple different areas. Probably most important to me is just general communications like we talked about. But a secondary part is really helping them brainstorm. And when I say brainstorm, I don’t just mean new business ideas, but brainstorm about the best ways to handle situations that come up. Again, whether it’s an employee that crashed the van, or maybe it’s just getting a better understanding.

of your audience. Maybe it’s doing some data analysis. For example, imagine being able to upload all of the jobs data that I’ve done for the last year and take a look and I have AI. I go through and analyze that and determine what products are selling the best and have the most profit. What products do we have the least amount of complaints about? Which install crews are doing the best jobs? Which maybe install crews are not doing the best job?

Can we identify any trends that are happening? Maybe we find out that we have a consistent complaint that’s coming up that maybe as the owner you just didn’t think about. But AI can analyze all of that data and in seconds it can give us that. It’s imagine we could essentially upload all of our job data for the last year and then have a conversation with a data analyst asking you questions about all of that data and knowing that it was going out and not giving us stuff it made

but giving us context right from that data that we uploaded. I think for any business owner, that’s probably one of the superpowers it can get because it can, even though we know we’re supposed to do that, at least maybe, I don’t think I’m alone well, we get too busy. And so at the end of the day, when the end of the day rolls around and it’s now after dinner and we’re full and we’re dealing with the kids or the family or whatever, the last thing we want to do is pull out these major reports and start digging through the reports and looking for trend analysis and all that.

because it’s candidly probably not what we enjoy doing. And now we can use AI to do that for us and give us those insights. And then when it identifies them, we can even take it a step further and we can say, okay, now I want you to act as my business consultant and I want you to give me advice on what things should I be considering in order to rectify that or what steps could I take in order to minimize this from happening in the future.

Or how can we better capitalize if we know that this particular type of blind or awning that we’re installing is always getting five star reviews and the clients are loving it? What are those? Are there commonalities amongst those clients that we can identify and go, hey, this type of customer tends to spend and upgrade and buy that product and buy those. How do we better reach them? What are their pain points? How can we make sure that in all of our communication?

whether that’s your email newsletter, whether it’s your social media, whether that’s your phone calls, that everything they get is focused on addressing those particular pain points that cause them to spend more

Will Hanke (11:38)
that’s awesome. So one thing people maybe don’t realize is, and maybe if you’ve not been exposed a ton to chat, GPT or some of these other services, it’s not, you just put something in and get something out. You can actually then ask follow -up questions, clarifications, ask, can you please rewrite this in a different way? It’s a conversation,

Jonathan Mast (11:56)
Absolutely. And I think that’s probably one of the things so many people miss, Will, it is absolutely a conversation. Most people think, OK, this is my magic box. I’m going to hold my phone up here and I’m going to ask it my question. And I didn’t like that response. It’d be like hiring a new employee, having him sit down in your office and walking up and asking them one question and then turn around and walking to leave. when they go, hey, Will, Will, can I ask you? No, you can’t ask me any questions. But no, no, no, never mind. Figure it out.

We were not going to get good results out of that. And then deciding, well, I’m going to fire them because I gave them a task tutor today and I didn’t like what they did because we never gave them any information. So yes, we need to have that conversation with AI. We need to ask follow up questions. Just like an employee, they may sometimes give us something that’s not exactly what we wanted. This morning, I ran into that. I asked it to help me out with some things I was doing as far as checklists and it didn’t give me what I wanted. And I said, that’s not what I was thinking.

Will Hanke (12:31)
Bye.

Jonathan Mast (12:51)
What I meant was this, and it’s like, okay, now I understand it had misunderstood, just like you and I can misunderstand if we’re collaborating on a project. So that follow -up is super important, having that conversation and not expecting it to be a magic box that if I give it three words is going to understand everything I’ve been thinking about since I left the house this morning and all of that context. I need to give that to the AI model as well, just like I would a fellow team member if I was working with them.

Will Hanke (13:18)
And all these platforms or at least most of these platforms remember things that you said. So if you come back a week later and ask it something, it’s going to take into consideration past conversations,

Jonathan Mast (13:28)
Each model handles that a little bit differently, but yes, ultimately you can maintain. The best way I think to explain it is it’s like a text conversation. If you and I are texting each other about having lunch next week Wednesday, and I text you today and you’re busy and so you don’t get back to me until tomorrow, when you respond to me tomorrow, it’s still going to be in that text thread. as soon as I see it, I’m going to go, yeah, Will and I are talking about lunch next week Wednesday. I’m going to remember that.

And all of the models have that capability. So if we stay within a particular conversation, they’re going to remember that. Some of the models have the ability to actually give it information that it’s going to remember across all of our conversations if we want it to. And you can turn that on and off. you know, so that every time I do it, I want you to know, for example, this is my personality type and here’s the way I like to respond to things. And it will remember that across all of them. And both Claude and ChatGPT

two of the major components, they both give you that capability.

Will Hanke (14:25)
Yeah, I’m the owner of a window treatment company. So every time I ask you, that’s that’s what I’m asking because of that.

Jonathan Mast (14:31)
even things like your phone number, your web address, the email address you want to use and things like that. So if you’re writing an email, it knows how to do your signature. All of that information can be put into place so that next time you ask it to write that email, it’s going to finish it with, well, Hanky, and all of your information, the right phone number, the right email address. And that makes it easy because you can just copy and paste. And again, it makes the amount of editing you have to do much, much faster. Like you said, if you tell it I’m in the window treatment business or I’m in the awning business,

it now will understand that so when it’s writing things for you, it’s going to know that and it’s going to use that as context. And again, just makes your life much, much easier.

Will Hanke (15:07)
That’s fantastic. What are some of the other misconceptions or concerns that business owners have about AI and how do you address those?

Jonathan Mast (15:15)
think one of the biggest ones that I run into is they’re concerned as business owners that it’s they’re going to have to let, it’s going to cause so much benefit, they’re going to let some of their team go. And as we know, our team becomes part of our work family. We don’t want to do that as owners. We don’t want to see these people that we’ve built lives with and see that happening. And we just don’t see in the reality, we don’t see that happening.

What we do see happening is that when we teach our teams how to leverage AI and give them permission and give them the room to start using it, all of a sudden they start finding new ways to provide value to our clients, new ways to provide value to the company, new ways that they can add value in their position. And then we’re like, wow, not only were we saving time, but now we’re getting more value. And as a result of that, our profits are better because sometimes it just allows us to be more efficient.

Imagine instead of your team being able to do, and I’ll pick a number, four installs a day. Imagine with AI and optimizations that you could move that to an average of four and a half. That extra half is pure profit that comes into you at that point in time because you’re not paying extra labor to do that extra job. You’re just finding efficiencies that allow you three days a week to get an extra job done.

Will Hanke (16:25)
that’s pretty awesome. I like that. That’s good. We talked a little bit about reviews, mostly negative reviews, but there’s other ways that AI can help with responding to reviews, even positive reviews, right? And we should, as a digital marketing company, we very much encourage our clients to respond to every review, but there’s only so many ways to say thank you, right?

Jonathan Mast (16:44)
Mm -hmm.

yes, absolutely. Well, you’re right. That’s one of the great things. One of things we recommend is the simple tip. When you get a review from a client, copy and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, doesn’t matter which one, and basically say, help me write a response to this. And again, especially with what we were just talking about, if it knows this is your business, this is who you serve, and that it’s going to then do that and it’s going to come up

unique ways to do that so that you don’t just say thank you, we value you too on every single response that you give. Yeah, so yeah, it’s very, very effective. And again, it’s not a matter of minutes to do it, it’s literally a matter of seconds to do this now. And that’s so much better than going, oh, I’ve got seven reviews, I wanna respond, I wanna tell them how thankful I am. But man, I’ve said thank you, we love having you as a client 27 times in the last two months, I need to come up with something new.

Will Hanke (17:15)
Right.

Yeah. And the other thing is by by varying every reply, the people that are looking at those reviews are going to kind of that personality is going to start to come out that this company really does care. And they were a little bit more they went a little deeper on, you know, beyond just thank you.

Jonathan Mast (17:53)
Absolutely, and that helps again create those relationships and strengthen those relationships, ultimately bringing more value and hopefully in that case, as you mentioned, bringing in new clients who go, wow, I want to work with you because I like the way that you communicate. I like the way you do it. And that can be on both good and bad. Sometimes, know, business owners, I know I do, I fret if I get a bad review, I’ve only had a couple, but, you know, one of them, for example, it came from a company in Brazil that we’ve never worked with before. I don’t even know who they are.

Will Hanke (18:18)
out.

Jonathan Mast (18:19)
but I can’t get Google to remove it. so now I probably should talk to you about that. Well, you might be able to help me, but I can’t get Google to remove it. So instead we responded to it. And now I’ve had clients that have reached out and go, man, I can’t believe that company in Brazil that you’ve never worked with gave you a one -star review. Why? Because they read our response that wasn’t calling them names, wasn’t being mean, basically just very nicely said, wow, we’re so sorry you had a bad experience. Unfortunately, we don’t show we’ve ever worked with you.

or any company in Brazil before, but if there’s a mistake, let us know. And it was simple and effective, and now when people read that, again, that helped instill credibility in our company because of how we handled the negative situation and that we didn’t blow it up. We didn’t act like we were all better than them or anything else. It was handled professionally, and that also can bring new clients in because they see that and they go, that’s reasonable.

Will Hanke (19:14)
Yeah, that’s great. Can you share any success stories, case study, something like that of maybe a business that has really implemented AI effectively?

Jonathan Mast (19:25)
Like there’s a lot of different things I can share. think probably one of the most impactful to me is one of our clients that they’re utilizing it to make sure that they’re communicating best with their clients. Not everybody on their staff. This happens, I won’t say the industry they’re in, but this happens to be an industry where the people that are on the phone are really smart think technicians and engineers.

but they don’t necessarily have a customer service bone in their body. And it’s not that they’re trying to be rude, they just don’t communicate with smiles. That’s not what they do. You know, they fix problems all day long. And they’ve implemented AI for their help desk and their customer support team to help make sure that not only do they now have an expert who’s answering the question, because it’s one thing to have a customer service person, but if they don’t understand how that awning’s installed or how that awning works, it doesn’t necessarily help them. Now we can have that expert involved

And we can use AI to help them say and respond in a way that’s just a little bit more friendly with a little bit of a smile and that helps the customer service so much because they’re getting the experience they want without the, shall we say, the attitude of dealing with a technician or an engineer who’s brilliant but just doesn’t possess some of those traditional tactful skills that we want a customer service person to have.

Will Hanke (20:39)
that’s fantastic. I love that example.

Jonathan Mast (20:41)
Yeah, and so that’s been in a real world. We literally, in this case, we’ve empowered their customer service team. Their customer service team, they’re good at that. But we’ve given the tools to the technicians to be able to use to put their responses in because it’s almost always via email. They don’t get on the phone in this case. The other thing we’ve done, and it just reminded me as we’re talking about it, well, we’ve taken all of the basic recommended customer service policies.

Will Hanke (20:57)
Okay.

Jonathan Mast (21:05)
all of the company’s policies and we’ve uploaded those to what we call a custom GPT that now their customer service team has access to. So when their customer service team says, well, I don’t remember what is our policy for return in this case, or what’s our policy for going back out, or how much do we charge because this, all of that is now stored in a custom GPT. And instead of going to the boss and putting a client on hold, go hang on, let me check and they, hey, what do we do for this?

Now they literally can go into that custom GPT, that AI model, and it has all of your company’s information, your policies, and it will give them the answers that they need so they can do that essentially in real time with the customer.

Will Hanke (21:44)
wow. That’s awesome. Now you mentioned leveraging personal branding alongside AI. How do you see those two things kind of working

Jonathan Mast (21:52)
Well, the reality is, is that, you know, at the end of the day, as business owners, we need to make sure we’re seen as an expert in the industry that we’re in, in the locale that we serve. So basically within our territory or location, we want to be seen as that expert. If I need to buy new window treatments, I want my customers to be thinking of me first, not third. I want them to go, I’ve got to call Jonathan because I know he’s the expert. The reality is, though, sometimes creating the content

keeps you in front of those people to be that expert can be arduous. Because again, you’ve got other things to do all day long. So you don’t, for example, you may not know, but I mean, the recommendation in the industry right now and the marketing side is if you want to be seen as that expert, you should have three unique social media posts going out every single day. That’s your minimum, your minimum. Most business owners, if you’re like me, you struggle to get one out.

Maybe a week, let alone three a day. Well, now now we can use it for your personal brand and I can go, OK, I’m Jonathan and I run Jonathan’s, you know, awning company and I need help coming up with 21 social media topics that I can post this week. And I need an outline so that I can put them together real quick. And oh, by the way, it’d be really cool if you could give me a related graphic that I could post. AI can do

Now, we need to take a look at it, we need to make sure it’s relevant, but if we do 21 of them, 19 are gonna be almost perfect. One’s gonna be okay and one we’re gonna throw away and try again. And now at least I can do things like that from a personal branding. That’s so important because again, we’re not talking now just about the company, we’re actually talking about maybe you as an owner going out and being seen as that expert. And that’s something that I think a lot of us as business owners are not doing.

And that personal branding side is really an area where AI can help you strategize and plan because it’s kind of like videos. You know, I’m a huge fan of doing daily videos, answering a question that your clients are asking. And by the way, you know, how do we do those videos? On our mobile phone, we just hold it up and we answer the question. We don’t worry about being in a studio. We don’t worry about proper lighting. We literally from our van or our truck are going to hold our phone up and answer that question.

Most business owners I know can do that, but the problem is they don’t know what question to answer. But if I start off at the beginning of the month and I go, need 30 questions this month that I’m going to answer that relate to my industry, AI can give you those 30 questions. And now when you get to a job site 15 minutes early, you pull your phone out and you go, I’m going to record two or three short videos. And now for the next couple of days, I’ve got the videos that I need. Or, know, Saturday morning when, you know, if you’re anything like me, you take the family somewhere and

They’re doing something, they’re running around in the market or at the flea market or at the farmer’s stand or wherever you’re at, and you are sitting there going, okay, I’m just watching everybody’s stuff. Well, pull your phone out, look at your list and go, okay, I’ll record a couple videos. Those are the types of things that build personal brands that you really can’t outsource that. You really need to do that as the owner of the business, and now we can make that very easy and attainable, and it’s not a heavy lift to get done anymore.

Will Hanke (25:02)
Yeah, I love that. And I’m guilty of the same thing. I’ll be at the park or something. My wife likes to run. I don’t like to run, but I’ll walk, you know, and it’s like, gosh, I should take out my phone and shoot some videos, but I’m just like, what could I talk about? And I just can’t think of anything. So that’s a great example of having, just have a list on your phone of here’s the 21 things you need to do this week or this month and knock them out when you have

Jonathan Mast (25:26)
Yeah. Yeah, and again, it doesn’t have to be professional. Literally just grabbing your phone while you’re walking around the park and your wife’s lapping you and laughing as she goes by because she’s lapping you. You can record that whole thing because that makes you personable to your audience. And if you’re in a locale, they’re going to go, wow, I know where Will’s at. That’s a park in our city. Guess what? Now you’re local and that matters and you’re relatable. So all of those things are much more attainable with AI now.

Will Hanke (25:53)
Yeah, yeah. So if you’re new to personal branding, or maybe you’ve never heard of this before, this kind of concept, Jonathan, what do you think some steps are that people could take to start to establish their presence effectively in that

Jonathan Mast (26:06)
I think the first thing I want to hit on is that personal branding is different than company branding. It’s similar, but it’s different. You are now trying to make a personal connection with that end user. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to have to call up and they’re going to expect to talk to you on the phone. But if they know that you’re the face of the company and you’re the face of what you do, it’s establishing yourself as an expert. And that means, yes, necessarily like me, I’m going to talk about whitebeard strategy sometimes. That’s my company.

But I also talk about what I do and I don’t always talk about it. Probably the biggest change for business owners is it’s not about selling. Personal branding is about adding value to your audience and adding value to that potential customer, not telling them that you’re running a promo on this brand of blinds this month because they don’t care about that. It’s talking about, again, problems. How do I make sure that I get blinds that fit?

I want to put blinds in my child’s bedroom or in my bedroom and I don’t like the sun shining through. What type of blind should I get? Now know everybody listening to podcast is going, well, everybody knows that. No, they don’t all know that. You need a blackout shader and I’m not even sure I’m using the right terminology because I’m not in that. But there are different things that you can use on your window treatments in order to achieve those objectives. And if you can talk about them without

constantly saying, and don’t forget, call Jonathan’s Blind Shop because we’re here to serve you. No, no, and it’s hard. We want to do that as business owners, but this is about personal branding, personal connections. You want to be known, liked, and trusted by that audience, and that’s a personal connection more than it is a business connection. You know, the best example I can give is I think of, I live in a small town and we’ve got multiple grocery stores, and we’ve got the big chains that are here.

but we’ve also got some local places. And I don’t know the owner of the local place, but I know who he is because of the things that he does and he posted. He’s done a really good job with personal branding. And so what that means is that we go to the local market first to do our shopping and we only go to the big box store for the stuff that he doesn’t have. And think about that. Now we’ve actually, we could go to the big box store and buy everything because they have it all. And it might even be slightly less money.

But we go by from the local guy because guess what? He works in the community, he lives in the community, he goes to church in the community, his kids are in school in the community. And I feel like I know him, even though I don’t personally know him, because of the content that he shares. And I therefore feel an affinity to work with him. And the really cool thing is if I’m in the store and he’s walking through, I can go, hey Bill, Bill has no idea who I probably am. But it doesn’t matter because

He’s friendly and he’s built that personal brand and the name of his market doesn’t even matter because we shop there because of

Will Hanke (28:51)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. That’s very impactful, I think, for people that take that advice and try to start implementing

Jonathan Mast (29:00)
Yeah, it can really make a world of difference. And the other thing is it helps, let’s face it, for our businesses, we do do marketing, and we do do advertising. When the owner has a strong personal brand, it amplifies all of those dollars that we’re spending on other marketing so that those dollars do even more work for us as opposed to not having that personal

Will Hanke (29:20)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So you mentioned earlier on about having these, in nerd speak, global parameters, right? There’s these things that it always remembers, no matter where you’re engaging it with. How can AI maintain that personal touch, especially in customer interactions, and particularly in the window treatment and awning industry?

Jonathan Mast (29:29)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Well, I think the key there is again that we’re going to train AI on the basics of our business. We’re going to tell them that. Once we’ve told AI that this is the tone and style that we want, or this is the type of thing that we, the way that we want to communicate, it will then remember that so that we can use that in the future. So that when your customer service team is going out and responding, they’re going to respond as you want them to, not necessarily respond with, let’s say,

and I’m going to date myself, I’m 55, not respond like a 21 year old that’s just getting in college and smacking their gum. They’re going to be literally now responding as you who’s got 30 plus years of experience in the industry. They’re not going to say they’re you. It’s not that they’re going to go, oh, I’m Jonathan, but they’re going to have that knowledge and that experience that’s going to come through in their responses. And that’s going to do wonders for your customer service. It’s going to do wonders for your image and your brand as well, all tying that together.

So I think just training it to do that, and even in models like Gemini that don’t have memory outside of that, it’s a matter of what we call creating a little snippet. And basically imagine if you could for a moment, well, that we’re going to have AI interview you with the goal of creating a little bit of text that it puts in some brackets that you then save on your clipboard or in a document or something so that every time you’re writing a response, you just paste that in and now it knows,

I now know all this information about how I’m supposed to respond and maintain that tone and structure. So it’s responding as a well -trained and experienced staff member, not as a brand new person that just stepped out of college or high school or wherever and is trying, but maybe misses the mark because they don’t know what words to use.

Will Hanke (31:23)
that’s fantastic. Something that just came to my mind was recording those first customer interactions when somebody’s calling to maybe set up an appointment, something like that. And then putting those transcripts into AI and teaching it, here are the way these conversations always go. What questions should we, you know, it could probably take all those different conversations and build us a list of questions that we should always ask our new customer.

Jonathan Mast (31:46)
Yeah, and that’s actually a really good point. Like we talked about other data analysis, we can upload customer calls, recordings, we can upload videos, we can upload things that we’ve written, we could upload letters, policy manuals, you name it, marketing pieces we’ve done. And AI can learn from all of that. Just before our call today, I actually was working on my website, which is something that I’m terrible at because I do stuff for other people.

but I realized I needed to update it and I wasn’t sure the best way to do it. So I literally grabbed a screenshot and I uploaded it and I said, I want to change this to reflect this updated service that we’re doing. What should I do? And the AI literally read all the content, the pictures, everything that was in that screenshot and came back with recommendations for me of things that I could do. So again, it’s so important to remember there’s all kinds of content that can be uploaded.

I love the idea of taking some customer service interactions and calls, uploading the MP3 file or the transcript of that call and learning from that and using that to train. Very, very effective.

Will Hanke (32:47)
Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about one last thing. And it’s something I’m a little addicted to right now. And that’s mid journey. So up to this point, you and I have kind of been talking about you have to put some sort of a text or a MP3 or something into the system, get something back out, right? In our world, some of the big dealers like Hunter Douglas and Greybird, they give us just mounds and mounds of gorgeous pictures to use on websites.

Jonathan Mast (32:55)
Mmm.

Will Hanke (33:14)
So I have personally become kind of addicted to mid journey and the idea of giving AI a picture and say, do this differently. The other thing I’ll just toss in here and you probably cover this is what comes back is a hundred percent original,

Jonathan Mast (33:16)
Exactly.

Mm -hmm.

right. Well, yes, yes and no. 100 % I don’t. It’s going to use what you gave it as influence. So yes, you’re right. It’s absolutely unique. Absolutely. But it will use that as influence. So if you’ve got some of those beautiful pictures from one of the distributors or manufacturers and you upload that, yeah, you can now create something that’s entirely unique to you that still looks very similar. And now, like you said, the real benefit

Will Hanke (33:39)
Yes.

Yeah.

Jonathan Mast (33:57)
there’s never going to be another dealer that’s using that same image. It’s just, so you’re going to have that. I’ve run into that by using stock photography, which is really what you’re talking about when you get it from a manufacturer. You know, and in my case, I’ve done it before with my marketing experience where I’ve used it maybe in a campaign. And then a month later I’m driving down the road and I see an entirely different business in an entirely different industry with a billboard with that exact same photo. And I’m going, man, cause it’s

Will Hanke (34:01)
Yes.

It is.

Jonathan Mast (34:24)
So you can avoid all of that. And mid -journey, by the way, is the right choice if you’re going to do that. It can create photorealistic images and they are absolutely amazing. Except the fact that you may not keep every image it creates. So sometimes it’s just like when we’re coming up with ideas. Not every idea I have is great, even though I try to convince my wife they are. Not every one of them is really great. And that’s OK. Mid -journey and all of these are going to occasionally come up with things and you go, no, that was a miss.

Then you try again, not a big deal, because 80 % of them probably will work out well. And I love your idea of, again, giving it something to follow and say, all right, here’s some sample images. I’d now like you to create some that are unique that now you can use through your dealership and your business. And again, never have to worry about somebody having the same image.

Will Hanke (35:12)
Right. And you can even be a little bit specific. You can have conversations with it. You can ask it for variations of a word or of a picture. You can say, do this living room, but with green couches. Right. You can do some really cool stuff with

Jonathan Mast (35:18)
Absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you could change the environment. Maybe you’ve got a picture of an inside of a house looking out. I’m thinking of one I saw for Pella Windows not too long ago, and it was an inside of the house looking out. Maybe you want to change what’s outside so that it’s a different type of back lawn. AI can help you do that. There’s so much that you can utilize it for. And again, now you’ve created unique images, and I love what you were saying, that every dealer in the country is not using.

Will Hanke (35:49)
I love that idea. Take this picture, but we’re in the mountains instead of in Florida or something. know, could, that’s awesome. That’s great. I love it. So thank you, Jonathan, for all the expertise that you’ve shared. just, I love the AI stuff. I think there’s some great advantages that we can use in our industry. Can you tell me a little bit about the prompting course that you have and how our listeners could benefit from that? And I think you have an offer as

Jonathan Mast (35:54)
Exactly.

I certainly can. I believe at the end of the day, the best way to use AI is to learn prompting. It’s not just and for those wondering, that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just learning how to communicate with it. So just like Will and I are talking, it’s learning how to talk to the AI. I do have a course that we put out there and we’re going to we’ve got a code set up for your listeners actually. And by the way, Will was

super generous. offered to pay well for the course for a referral. He goes, no, just give the discount to the listeners. So we’re going to go ahead and do that. And we’re actually going to sell you the course at fifty dollars off. Normally the course is hundred and ninety seven dollars. You guys, I’ll give you that code here in just a second. You can put that in. I’ll give you the links. You can put it in the show notes or whatever. You can go out and get that. The neat thing about the course is I have talked for.

almost a year about how you shouldn’t buy AI courses because they’re outdated the moment you buy it. My wife corrected me and said, yes, but you could update them every month. And so that’s what we do with this course. It literally gets updated every single month as new things come out. Well, you know, we’ve got new AI news coming out every single day. And we’re updating that into the course so that when you buy this, it includes all the updates for the rest of the year. That’s all included. And yeah, again, I’ll give you the link on

is really easy. It’s just save 50 and then will your name. W -I -L -L. So save 50 will. That way we know it’s there and again we’ll give you link if you need to find that. You can also go to my website at JonathanMast .com. We talked about personal branding. JonathanMast .com slash Linktree and there’s a link right on there. You click that. You put the coupon code in. Save 50 will and you’ll save $50 on that if you’re interested.

Will Hanke (37:53)
Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much. So for those that are listening on audio, maybe don’t understand why your business is called Whitebeard Strategies. I think those on video will get it, but those that are not might question it a little bit, but to get to your website, I guess it’s

Jonathan Mast (38:09)
You can go to my company website is whitebeardstrategies .com and if you’re listening and not watching it’s because I have a ever growing white beard. I’m old enough that it’s white and it’s it continues to get a little bit longer every year. Although this is about seven years in and it’s not getting a lot longer. But yeah, that white beard strategies or if it’s easier to remember my name, Jonathan Mast, -A -S -T, you can go either place. And then if you’ve just put Linktree at the end, it gives you all the ways to contact me to reach out to get the course.

join some free resources we’ve got and all that type of stuff.

Will Hanke (38:40)
Well, fantastic. I love that. So, Jonathan, thank you so much for your time today. This has been eye opening even to me. You know, I’m kind of in that world a little bit, but there’s some really cool stuff I didn’t even think about as well. So thank you for your time

Jonathan Mast (38:54)
Thank you for having me on, Will. I really appreciate the opportunity and love being able to share with everybody. So thank you very much.

Will Hanke (38:59)
Awesome. For those of you that are listening, thank you for listening through and please, if you have not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. We’ll bring you more experts just like Jonathan here and want to really set you guys up for success and we’ll see you all on the next episode.

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