Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Great to have you today. Today we’re going to talk about a fascinating topic. One that you probably hear a lot about some buzzwords thrown around, AI. But today we don’t want to just give you the generic, well not very helpful advice about it. And this is something that personally we’ve done in our business and we’d like to help you learn how. So, today we hear a lot about AI and how to use it but, how can we use it? There’s something that I learned about called a master prompt. What we can do is use that.
Today we’re gonna be talking about ChadGPT. In all reality, you can use it for any of these and it’s how we can use our AI tools a lot more effectively. We’ll talk about what it is and how to use it. Wena is here today and we’re gonna dive in.
Wena
Hi, Ezra. What exactly is a master prompt in the context of running a landscaping business?
Ezra McCarthy
Sure, Wena. So, a master prompt is really like a list of questions that we answer and we say, okay, I want to tell ChatGPT in this instance, all about my business. So that every time I asked it a question, it has context to run behind. Think of it a digital about us paid you hand into Chat GPT. Describe it like a deep dive, like what your business is, who it serves, the tone, perhaps that you respond to your business. And then even the goals, where are you trying to go? Then once you have this written, I recommend saving it as a PDF.
Every time you ask it a question, you can even save it in the files or you can upload that. This makes ChatGPT think like your company because as the old saying goes garbage in garbage out. If we don’t give it quality information to work from, it’s going to give us just generic lane Jane information. And it really is a powerful tool for business owners because it saves you time. There’s nothing worse than having to retype the same thing over and over again. That helps you create consistent professional results across all communication.
Another way you could use this is there’s something called folders within ChatGPT and you can literally craft these folders with specific instructions. So say for emails, there’s nothing worse than getting one of those customers that’s just a pain to work with. And you’re like, okay, how can I respond kindly? Sometimes it’s good just to put that email in there and then say, Hey, I want you to respond like our business with a professional kind tone in response to this email. then normally you have to tweak it a little bit after, but it helps get it going, especially sometimes dealing with these problem customers. It helps you create that clear, consistent, professional communication really across all platforms. And it helps you scale. It can instantly help you adapt your brand voice to whatever you’re doing. Say your brand voice is engaging, funny, witty, whatever you’re trying to portray your brand voice as how you want to communicate to customers, to those outside the organization. It can help you quickly, clearly craft that. Think of it like this, like training an employee once instead of repeating yourself every time.
Wena
That’s another interesting thing about AIs as much as you keep on asking questions or prompts it learns from you and it recognizes patterns and it remembers it so the more you ask and the kind of tone if you’re being consistent with it it’s gonna identify that and it’s gonna give you the right answers that you need. Now what happens when landscapers just sort of wing it with chat GPT and they don’t have a master prompt?
Ezra McCarthy
One thing I’ll note here just on what you said is to be sure you have your memory turned on if you use ChatGPT and hopefully you’re using something. I think ChatGPT is $20 or $30 a month. If you’re not using it, you’re nuts. You need to be using it. It’s crazy how it can begin to learn what you said about, it’s funny if you use it enough. I asked it, I think it was something like, what do you think my personality is? And then I showed my wife. It’s actually kind of scary how good it is. But if you’re just going and randomly using it and you’re not having a master prompt, basically telling it all about your business. For example, I have one of these things for our business financials. Literally I have a custom GPT, very simple to make and every month I put our financials into it. It has all the transactions, it has our gross revenue, our net revenue, and I’ll ask it, hey, how are we doing? Compare this month to last month.
You can say compare this quarter to last quarter. And because it has a master prompt somewhere in there, and it also has our data, we can begin to not just get back generic answers, but it can come back with clear, consistent advice and you can query it or ask questions about specific things. You can track line items over months and it’s really helpful.
Say you get that master prompt out there, you’re working on a proposal. It can help to add personality, depending on how you query it, it can help polish it. It’s really easy sometimes to get your grammar a little off. You’re tired after a long day, you’re writing up a quote and it just doesn’t go well. And who wants to waste time editing and rewriting 50 times? But you know, a lot of times we feel like AI just doesn’t get our company. But having this master prompt really makes a difference and it helps us get that clear answers that we need to help AI become really usable.
Wena
Now why does it matter to clearly define who you serve in terms of businesses and what do you do before asking AI for help so that you can arrive at the answer that you need?
Ezra McCarthy
Well, AI can only work with what you give it if you don’t give it anything. It’s just going to give you generic great value. Those here in the US, you know about the Walmart brand that is just as plain Jane as it gets, it’s just going to give you great value generically. That’s it. But we can even get a specific of what kind of customers we serve? Do we serve residential or commercial? Do we serve high end, do we serve the budget conscious and defining your audience will really help AI speak to customer pain point. Cause remember that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to solve the customer’s problem. Maybe the customer wants more time with their family. Maybe they want a nice lawn that their neighbors will look at and think, wow, they really take care of it. Whatever it is, if we can begin to give that information to it, it can begin to really help craft clear answers that really help.
Wena
I’m not quite sure, but I believe it’s AI assist. It’s machine learning that it recognizes patterns and it learns from you. So it makes inferences based on the data that you give. It really depends on you. Now some people think that ChatGPT always gives generic answers. How does a master prompt solve that problem?
Ezra McCarthy
Master Prompt is like teaching AI your company’s playbook. Answers can get specific to your audience and it helps results be more usable and tailored. And you can get an edge in your landscape business if you just take this time to create this strong line. It’ll help you with faster turnarounds for estimates, more and better communication. You can share this with your office staff to help quickly and clearly send out emails. It can help give you a consistent voice across proposals, emails and marketing. And it can really help even perhaps if there’s a smaller company listening in sound a lot more professional.
So you may be asking yourself, okay, you have talked a lot about this master prompt, but let’s dive in deeper. Okay, what specifically are we going to put within this master prompt? We’re going to put who we are. Let’s get specific. Your company name, your location, the services that you offer, who you are, whether you’re a residential, trying to serve residential, commercial, HOA, mix. What is the tone that you’re trying to do? Whether it’s professional, expert, casual, friendly, mom and pop. What are the goals? Are you trying to close more sales, build better proposals? Are you trying to help maybe with your team training? Here’s some examples of a weak prompt versus a strong one.
So a weak one would be to write a landscaping proposal for me. Now you can imagine what kind of result you’re going to get from that. But instead, if you would have said, right as a professional landscaping company in Springfield, Massachusetts, we specialize in lawn landscape and hardscaping for residential owners, write a clear proposal with the scope of work timeline and pricing in a professional friendly manner. That’s a lot more specific. You see the difference is context, audience and style. And we’re gonna get a lot better, more detailed, more polished result right away.
Wena
Once a landscaper builds their master prompt, how can they keep refining it over time?
Ezra McCarthy
I’d recommend you can export it as a PDF and then keep it handy on your computer or your phone, or you can save it. I really like Google Docs. It’s really easy to edit it over time as your services change, et cetera. And then as you grow, your business grows, add details, update it, tweak it and based it on answers that come back. This helps to build in and this is where you can also use another feature of ChatGPT called projects.
And in the project, you can edit that specific project and you can edit with personality and it can help you save all of that in one place. You can upload documents and folders so you can keep your brand and your personality consistent across, say we talked about emails or all these things because there’s nothing worse than having to retype it time and time again.
Wena
So if someone’s new to this, what’s the very first step that they should take? Someone who’s never written a master prompt.
Ezra McCarthy
Start with the about us section, define your clients and write down your tone and style. Some people may ask, well, do we just create one really big one or separate ones? I would recommend starting with one general one. Then perhaps if you want, you can create a separate one for proposals, marketing, maybe team member training. And then I would just use Google docs. It’s really easy. Create a little library of different prompts because then you can access it from anywhere. It’s really easy to edit. And you can add that into the AI tool that you use.
Think of it like having different SOPs for different jobs. We can use these whether it’s proposals, marketing, emails, all these things. It is so helpful to begin to create effective, clear and easy AI tools. Some of the mistakes that I see people making are being too vague. They’re too generic. They’re too plain, or they forget to define their audience. They make their prompt too short and they’re not saving it and refining it. If you can avoid these mistakes, start utilizing these master prompts, then here we might call it, we’ll just call it between us and those listening, your secret shortcut to making ChatGPt or whatever AI tool you’re using sounds like it’s been working in your business for years. It can transform your proposals, how you talk to clients, and even training your crew.
So don’t let this just kind of sit here in your ears. Hopefully you enjoyed this, but I’d encourage you to make a template, plug in your details, and you’ll see how fast it turns out. If you have questions or maybe you want some help creating your master prompt, maybe you want a template for that, feel free to reach out and we’d love to help. So until next time, we’ll catch you on the next one.