AI Tools for Small Business: How to Automate Workflows and Save Hours Every Week with Lloyd Dodgen

AI tools for small business owners are more powerful than most entrepreneurs realize, and most people are still using them wrong.

If you have been using ChatGPT like a search engine and wondering why it is not saving you any real time, this episode will change how you think about AI automation entirely.

AI strategist and founder of Headcount Zero, Lloyd Dodgen, joins Crissy Conner on The Visibility Impact Show to break down practical AI implementation strategies that business owners can apply this week, without needing a tech background or a big team.

Connect with Lloyd:
Skool Group: https://www.skool.com/headcountzero/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lloyddodgen

OMNI is my full visibility system built for CEOs who want to grow online without living on their phone. If you’re ready to be truly seen, more strategic, and unmistakably in demand, head to check out OMNI at www.omniqueens.com 

https://www.instagram.com/itscrissyconner/
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https://www.facebook.com/crissyconner
https://www.youtube.com/c/crissyconner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/crissyconner/

Transcript

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the visibility impact show we have an amazing guest today who is a repeat guest. And he built a YouTube ad agency that managed over 50 million in ad spend And most people would ride that way for a really long time. But today's guests saw something bigger coming and made a bold pivot. He has since built an AI automation agency developed his own AI software tools and now teaches business owners how to actually implement AI in a way that does real work. not just post pretty prompts. He is the founder of Headcount Zero, a Skool community for operators and builders who are done being overwhelmed by AI and ready to use it to get their time back. Lloyd Dodgen, welcome back to the Visibility Impact Show. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. I really appreciate it. And last time we had you on the show, we introduced you as the YouTube ads guy. So we'd love to know how you went from managing over 50 million in ad spend because that's a massive track record. And what did you see happening with AI that made you say, I need to make this shift and shift my entire direction? I mean, everything started around 2023 when, you know, Jim and I came out or when OpenAI came out and really like even like back in the day when we were introduced to Jasper, because everything that I did or not everything that I did, but a lot of what I had done was script writing, you know, and so all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's a tool to help me write scripts. That's interesting. But obviously we didn't know where this was going to go. But like any business owner, I was managing, I had some clients were managing a million dollars per month in ad spend for just like singular clients. And I wasn't hiring anybody. So I was overwhelmed because, because I was having to do, I was, I was going in that cycle that everybody runs into, right? You, you, put a lot of effort into go get clients and then you put a lot of effort into onboard clients and then you put a lot of effort to keep clients and then. everybody who's ever been an agency owner understands that the clock starts ticking the day you sign that contract, that even the greatest clients with the greatest results will still move on. Maybe it's a whisper in their ear from someone else who says they can do it cheaper and better. Maybe it's somebody, a business partner that's like, Hey, I want to bring this in house. Maybe, you know, even though you've been running killer ads for them profitably, at least profitably from the numbers that you have, they have been running a terrible business. Because we all have this illusion, They're like, the $10 million business owners, they're really doing something special. Now, they just run through brick walls harder, but they had several concussions along the way. so I was in this place where I was growing a multi-six figure YouTube ad agency that required me to be the marketer. required me to be the salesperson, required me to be the script writer and the sales copywriter and the editor and the media buyer and the customer service manager. And all of a sudden I was like, I built the dream business and I was, I hated it. I just, hated it because it was, was so much work and but then things with AI started coming into play. And I was, my curiosity had got the best of me. And I just kind of followed down my curiosity and it was like, oh, well, maybe I could figure out how to make scripts this way. And I was like, and I learned how to make scripts better by just using AI. And then tools like HeyGen would come out. And then I had some clients that I ran a YouTube ad agency and I had clients that refused to make YouTube ads. They wouldn't get on camera. And I'm like, what are we doing here? Um, but then tools like, Jen, was able to take like videos from them that they already had done feed that in, feed our scripts in, in all of sudden I was able to create these tools essentially that was able to make a video of them, an AI video of them, like an avatar. And then I started doing things where I was like, well, Mondays, hate Mondays because Mondays are report days. And every week I got to go to all my clients. I got to go to, I got to follow the same process. I got to go to Google. I got to grab all the data. I got to upload it to a spreadsheet. got to then, you know, check high roast and make sure the numbers reflect there. Then I got to come up with a game plan for the week. And I got to write an email to them as to what happened, where we're going to go. And before, know, my Monday was like five or six hours of just putting out reports. And as the tools kept getting better and better, I started like replacing that. And I was like, like, this is awesome. Um, and a, had a. friend who had a YouTube channel really blow up and he got overwhelmed. Like I was switching over to AI automation more and more and more. But he had gotten overwhelmed because he had started getting a flood of clients for AI automation. He was like, hey, let's partner together. So we partnered together. We started building an AI automation agency. And that was me just going like. all the way in. Like I had started building a Skool group. I'd started building a lot of like my own YouTube stuff as well. And then it was just building and building and building for a ton of clients to the point where I was like, okay, this is something I'm actually really interested in. I see where the future is going. It's constantly evolving and changing. And so I just let go eventually of the YouTube ads guy and have just gone all in on this new path. love it. And you know, the fact that you brought up Jarvis or Jasper that we originally called Jarvis, I talk about this all the time. And I think that maybe we as marketers, because we had access to something like this, I don't, at least for me, maybe, maybe not you, but it was okay. But I didn't like going from that to like chat GPT was such a big jump that what we did with that we had no idea what we were going into with with chat GPT coming into the scene. Yeah, absolutely. Jasper was like a really amazing T9 word for anybody that's old enough to have a Nokia phone where you had to press the buttons on the dial pad in order to generate, predict the next word. And it was great at that. But yeah, did we really see that we were about to adopt this level of intelligence, like that the internet in its entirety would be at our fingertips. A lot of what I've ever told people is that We entered into the internet 3.0. We had the internet 1.0, you know, that was the wave in the 90s. Everybody thought it was a fad. You'd logged on through AOL and whatever CD that you had from EarthLink. Internet 2.0, we had social media. So we were able to start connecting with each other. But still at the end of the day, the internet was still a one to one billion type of relationship. It was you. going onto a site that was meant for a billion people to see on Google. So there was nothing ever personalized for us. And then a lot of people thought with like Bitcoin and crypto and the blockchain, that was the internet 3.0, but we all know what that was. Not. ah But when we entered into this era with AI, the way it is, is that it became this internet 3.0. It became a internet that was contextualized and personalized for us. And that aha moment was kind of like, remember Gary Vee looking at, you know, talking to people like in the original.com era and people are like, you can meet girls on this. And he's like, I can make money with this. You know, he saw, he saw a bigger future. And once that came out, I realized like there's, there is nothing else that matters right now, except going all in on this stuff. This isn't going to go away. This isn't going to get worse. And the people, you know, people are always worried about being replaced by this new technology, but the people that will only be replaced are the ones who are not adopting it. You'll only be replaced by people who are actually leveraging it well. Yeah, absolutely. And I am a firm believer that if we use AI to take care of some of these tasks, right? These things that are creating bottlenecks for us. And I look at it like this, and you may not look at it like this because you're an AI person, I'm a visibility person, but I look at it as if I have something that can free up my time, I can be more visible. I have a hill I will die on and AI will never do my video just so we're clear. However, I know that some people may go that route, but I believe we're already building so much mistrust in the online space that we need to stay face to cam on video. We need to be the person on video, not using AI. I'm going all in on video as well. You are so right on that. Trust right now. This is why if you look at the YouTube algorithm right now, lives are what are taking off. Not short form, not long form, but lives. Three, four hours of you just hanging out, working through stuff, talking with people, building relationships. lives or what I've noticed that that's where the trend is really moving to. And it makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely. So one of my focuses has been, and this is gonna come into play for you because I know this is going to help, we're gonna geek out about this. So one of my focuses has been because visibility is growing, it's different than it was two years ago, and we also have to be visible to AI. And one of the ways that I have done that is I was able to build 45 website pages in six weeks because of AI, because I gave that automation off versus me trying to build, I mean, I can build a website pretty fast, but not that fast. And so I would love to talk about what are the things that people aren't even thinking of that they can be doing with AI that they can automate that is gonna free up so much more time for them to be the human and create that human-human connection through visibility in the online space. I would say the very first place that you guys need to start off with is a self-report. Meaning, it's very difficult to be like, are the best places, right? But most entrepreneurs fail to, at least the ones that are not productive, and it's okay, guys, we're not always the most productive that we can be because we are in the business versus working on the business. But one of the things I would do is I would, over the next two weeks, do a 15-minute self-audit. Every 15 minutes, what am I doing? What am I working on? How long is it taking me to do this? And log that every single day for the next two weeks. Then run that into AI and ask it questions. Hey, this is all, this is everything that I was investing my time into over the last two weeks. Based on the way that you work and the tools that you have and the systems that you can build, what are the first things that I should be automating? I think that there's this thing that we like, we get caught up in the stigma that we're like, We have to tell the AI what to do all the time. And sometimes that is our greatest bottleneck when it comes to learning AI. The AI is really, really great at probing questions and coming to a conclusion for your specific use case. Now, are there plenty of things that we can focus on automating that make sense? Absolutely. But I would say for the average person, like go out and start mapping your time to figure out where you need to automate. So when I was running my YouTube ad agency, What's, what's the one pain point that I had more than anything else. was Mondays. I hated Mondays. I hated report days. and so I was, I, I built an automation for myself through N8N cause that was in it. Things are advancing to the point where like even N8N for anybody that doesn't know N8N is just a no code drag and drop automation systems where you can visually see things. Even that stuff, like that was. the primo technology for it. And even AI starting to automate that out. Like where you don't even need it. Now you can just describe your situation. It can build all the code for you. But I needed a way to go and gather from all of our accounts, the Google ads data, which is basically just going to the ad account with downloading a CSV and then processing that CSV and then uploading that information to the necessary spreadsheet that was related to the account and then making inferences from that of like what happened during the week, how well did we do, then using story prompting to essentially create, know, cause you don't ever tell the client like the numbers, you tell them the story whenever you're dealing with clients and then creating like these story prompts that was able to interpret. that and tell a story in a specific way with parameters of like how long the email should be, what it should be including. And then before, you know, I like every Monday that was automated out. It was just done. And I woke up and I just checked my email drafts and I made sure that everything was clean. did the human, the loop aspect, which I just, I stepped in to make sure that I, cause I'm the one who's accountable for these emails going out. Um, and just check that to make sure everything was a okay. And it was the same thing, even with script writing, like Eventually I wrote custom GPT scripts where it was like, this is our process for writing YouTube ad scripts. This is how we flow. This is how we write hooks. This is how we have call to actions. This is how we define the persona, all this stuff. And then feeding in all that information from the client and then walking it through the process to go print out pretty decent scripts, at least decent enough to where I didn't have to start from a blank slate. ah Like I said, the best part, the best places to automate are the places that you are doing the most work. So I would say like, look at the places where you or you were the most frustrated. It's probably going to be reporting. There are ways that you can do that, especially with the leverage of Claude Cowork. For anybody that's, if there was one AI technology that I could be telling everybody on this podcast to be leveraging, it is Claude Cowork. Because what Claude Cowork does is it works on your computer in folders that exist. and it helps you build scheduled tasks and automations that exist from your frameworks. You build skills and skills are nothing more than an SOP. How do I do this kind of work very well? So Claude cowork works. It's the very first, like we have had all of our AI be living on the cloud. This is the first time we've had that, like this AI technology and intelligence living on our computer where we can interact with. tools that are on computer where we can create like PDFs where we can create like I now have like where we have all of our spreadsheets that are downloaded automatically to a file and then Claude now just schedules a email report after reading it and it creates like I have it create a slide deck for the client and it sends out a nice beautiful slide deck with all the numbers and everything and it's able to do that automatically because things have just gotten crazy over the past four and a half months, five. Yeah, 2026 has been crazy. I mean, ever since open claw, it's like all of a sudden, if we thought Pandora's lid box was opened, it got opened much wider. So on the topic of open claw, I know we were talking about Claude co-work. I've heard a lot of scary things about open claw. If somebody was wanting to use Claude co-work, are there concerns, safety or privacy, maybe concerns that you have to worry about? If you're using things like OpenClaw, yes. Clawed Cowork is fairly, it's secure because it's all done through Anthropic and you're logging in through your OAuth. Now, do you want to give it open reins to do whatever the heck it wants to do? No. Like you obviously want to be strict about your instructions, but no. When it comes to Clawed Cowork, that's why Clawed Cowork is very different because it only has the ability to read and write within that folder. It doesn't have the ability to go and investigate any other folders or anything like it is. It keeps things myopically focused in there. So you have a lot uh better security and whatnot. Any data that you upload to an LLM, you have to understand they have full rights to be training on that data. That doesn't mean someone else is now going to have access to your data, but they're going to use that information of how you prompted, what you gave it, how it output it, how you responded to that and use that as ways to improve their LLM. So if you do not want anything inside their LLM at all, then make sure that you don't give it that data. But for the most part, there's not anything that's so proprietary or so like sensitive, you know, my clients add account numbers, like the ad spend and everything. It's not going to ruin anything or hurt anybody, you know, but maybe if it's HIPAA related, like maybe you may need a different level of security. And there are things that Claude does. Claude has a thing called Claude for Government and then Claude Security as well, where you can basically create an enterprise level, but this is where you need more money. But if your organization is large enough, you can have enterprise level security over your cloud where it doesn't have it send itself back to the cloud. And there's other locks that it puts on it, kind of like Microsoft Copilot. Yeah. So I would say that, and I'm going to make a generalization here. You can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would say that most business owners are probably using most AI tools. they're probably partial to chat GPT and they're using it more like a search engine. how much time could they be saving if they actually utilized it for things that would take things off their plate? like four or five hours a week minimum. So yeah, there's a few misconceptions that exist when people are using things like chat, right? One, like you said, they are leveraging it like a search engine. It's not a search engine. It is an LLM, which means that it is a model that has been trained on trillions and trillions of words all across the internet. And it has, over a period of time, it has basically created context about that. Just like T9 word, when we used to use that and our phone, when we have prediction, it is predicting not the next word or the next letter, but the next series of tokens. And a token is much, much different because a token is just a series of characters. could be a question mark. It could be a space. It's usually about like four characters. So it's not even predicting full words. It's pretty, and this is what, this is the big part, right? It is predicting. is generating, not indexing and searching based on the way LLMs work. So it is based on the way that you are reacting to it based on what it has gathered. is predicting what it believes is the next is the best response for you. Does that mean it's a hundred percent accurate of a response? No. and so while people are using it that way, there, it's not very helpful. Now, can you use AI just chat GPT to improve your workflows? tremendously and not have to dig into maybe more scary complicated things like co-work. Yes. That's where you do things like custom GPTs or custom GPTs. I like I said, I wrote scripts all the time and I had to write brand new YouTube ad scripts. So instead of me having to sit there from a blank slate work, you know, on some research, 30 minutes, 40 minutes just to do research and then a couple of hours to go write scripts and make tweaks and modifications. I had a custom GPT. that had all of my information in there of how I write. And then it also had documents that I uploaded, knowledge-based files that it would refer to. And then I would just go grab other people's YouTube ads that were related in the niche and be like, use these as, you know, this is what's new in the market. Here's the thing. And then it would create four, five, 10, 15, 20 ad scripts. So like I had a full day worth of ad scripts that I didn't have to write anymore. And I could go test those out because that's all at end of the day, it's just testing. testing new ideas. But yes, like there are things that you can do now that go well beyond. You're still stuck in this. I give you an input, you give me an output. I give you an input, you give me an output. And we are now in a realm where things are moving from this chat interface to an agentic interface where we can have it go and actually generate real reports. We can have it go and do deep data analytics. We can have it go in and create beautiful slide decks and PDFs and update our spreadsheets or email clients or transform entire bodies of work. you can now like you've been able to do like go create websites. I mean, I have entire softwares that I've built specifically for my stuff. Like since I'm growing my YouTube channel, there's a few things that I know with my own deep domain expertise on how to grow a YouTube channel. which part of it is just researching and finding where the outliers are. So instead of me going and doing the research on the outliers, I built a tool that has an API connection to it. And I just upload all of the YouTube channels that I want to stay in touch with. I hit a button and it provides me an entire list of the past like seven to 30 to 60 to 90 days of the outliers. And it shows me how big of an outlier is it. And it shows me like how many views they have. shows me what their baseline is. And then I can click another button now and I can transcribe the entire video. I can have eyes on the thumbnail and I can do a deep analysis based on the way that I'm doing it. And then I could take that, store it off and I could come up with it with an idea. Like, so if there's something hot in the market, I can make a video today and all I had to do was just press a button now and I can, I can get straight into content creation. I get straight into visibility versus spending hours and hours and hours scouring YouTube in the hopes that I'm going to find something cool enough to go make a video. So cool. So cool. Yeah. I'd have to spend for research that I don't have to do anymore. I literally just have to push a button and we're good to go. which means that pressing record is so much more simpler now because all the backend work is done for you. Yeah, absolutely. And I can have it start creating the script frameworks. And then I could basically go back into Claude and do a voice transcription, which I will say this, you want the biggest hack to productivity with AI guys. Stop using these. Like use voice to text, brain dump everything. So like when you're working on your scripts, when you're working on these things that you're trying to build, don't be stuck in like how fast you type, like just There's there's tools like whisper and gladio and so many other great tools. I like whisper flow a lot. And I just hit control and start and I just start speaking into my computer wherever whatever LLM I am. And I just I brain dump everything. So if I'm working on this YouTube script that I'm going to record, I've got the entire script framework that now I have because of my tool. And now I'm brain dumping my ideas, my angles. And it's also interpreting my words so it understands the way I'm speaking. And oh in a couple of minutes, have a YouTube script that I can be like, it's pretty good. We'll make some tweaks here. We'll make some tweaks here. And then I can get it recorded. I actually I know because I created a content creation app for my clients. And one of the things was I added the uh microphone on it because if we're typing something, we're trying to be so perfect, And we're gonna like correct ourselves where if we're just verbal verbalizing something, we're just gonna let it roll. And AI is gonna take the information, it's gonna get more information, it's gonna be more meatier, Versus we're gonna be so probably, probably wide, not as narrow and specific. And I feel like the more that we talk as humans, we get more specific with what actually AI actually needs to build out content or to build out a script or to build out whatever it is that we're doing. Well, it's, it's a, it's, type at 200 words a minute. I'm fast, but the average person types at like 120. And we speak at like four to 500 naturally. So we're already at almost like I'm at two X average person's at three to three to four X, you know, other normal speed that they're able to go to and how we type and how we speak. they're not the same things. How we formalize like essays is not the same way that I'm going to be having a conversation. And if we're doing stuff with, especially with visibility, our ability to be conversational and still like be able to communicate clearly is very important. So like, why would focus on typing if we're creating a transcript for a video, you know? Also in this, I'm I'm flowing through ideas. I'm using stream of consciousness. I'm thinking through things out loud and AI is fantastically brilliant at understanding us and our stream of consciousness to take something from that and turn it into whatever it is that we need to transform does. So yeah, I would say like you want to save hours out of your week. Stop typing guys. We're eventually like about about like 10,000 years from now, we're all just going to be this evolution is going to remove our fingers. You We're just going to hit one button. That's it now. But yeah, I think that's it's a big deal in this day and age to just. I was I was working with uh I teach as well, working professionals and. This guy was stuck on this idea that he had to he's like, well, I don't know how to prompt it. And I'm like, well, I showed him, you know, our five box prompt framework, which for those I'll give you guys this. There's a thing that there's a thing I developed called the five box prompt framework and it helps you improve your ability to prompt. And so when you are communicating with AI, AI has to make a ton of assumptions. It just does. If you think about the trillions of words that it has and all the context that it has from images, videos, websites, Shakespeare, you name it. has a, it has your one little question. ah How do I make this better? Has to have a ton of assumptions. And so this five box prompt framework helps AI overcome this assumption. So there's five parts to it. One is your role. AI is basically a great role player. It is a chameleon and it's able to step into an identity. So you always want to tell it who you are. And you might think that's completely silly, but if I were to ask a Navy SEAL, versus a camp counselor to help me resolve a problem, Jocko Willink is gonna tell me something way different than an elementary Skool camp counselor, right? It's gonna be a different framing. The way a PhD candidate in uh combinatorics is gonna talk way differently than a uh middle Skool algebra teacher, you know? Cause it's, it's also starts breaking down well, how, how am I speaking to this audience? So I always give it a role. I, what that does is not only does it shape its personality and it shapes its output, but it also kind of sheds away a lot of the fat because now it knows that it doesn't need to be a Google sheets expert. It doesn't need to be, you know, an SQL expert. doesn't need to be a coding advisor. just, it needs to be a Navy seal instructor to get my ass into gear, you know? So. Once we give it our role, we will then give it a task. Now, a task isn't make this better. If there is ambiguity in your task, you need to go back to your task and you need to update that task. If you were to give it to an intern or someone in your company and you said, hey, Timmy, go make this better. And then Timmy comes back and he's I made it better boss. You're like, that's not what I wanted though. You're like, well, that's on you. So you got to remove that ambiguity with your task. It's got to be clear. It's got to be actionable verbs and some sort of outcome that you're hoping for. The third is you want to give it context. Context is everything. When we switched from ChatGPT 4.0 to 5.0, I had asked a question to ChatGPT 5.0. I was like, hey, what's the one question you wish that people would ask you that they're not asking you now that you're this new model? And it gave me back this profound answer. It's that I wish that people would ask me what my assumptions are because it has to make a bunch of underlying assumptions. so context basically removes a lot of those assumptions because while it's brilliant about the internet, it is not brilliant about you. It doesn't know that you just had, know, your, your general manager, you know, is, is now off because of paternity leave. It doesn't know that the marketing campaign that you ran in for this product flopped. It doesn't know that you're a freshman in college. It doesn't know that you're studying for, you know, an aerospace engineering one-on-one exam that's focused on, you know, you know, just mechanics. Like it doesn't know those things. So the context is what we tell it to give it all the reference and understanding as to who we are, like what we're doing, why we're doing this, what happened, like why does it matter to us? And so. Now it has a lot more information. And then the next thing that we want to give any of our AI is our constraints. It's our guardrails. When we're driving down a bridge, what's the one thing we're glad that we see and we take for granted? Guardrails. Cause I don't want to go off that bridge for any reason. And it's just important to tell our, to be specific about telling our AI what to do as it is to be specific about telling our AI what not to do. You can think of it like, the, know, like the fence around your, your property. It defines that no one can step into that and it can't step outside of that. and so your constraints can be something as simple as like, I, I, this is one constraint I always add in. If you don't know the answer, just tell me you don't know, don't make stuff up. Don't, don't guess at it. Don't, don't, don't go who listening. Just tell me like, I don't know. And, like, if I have a file, I'm like, this is your only point of reference that you're allowed to look at. And then the final is just the output format. Like. How, what do I want? You know, it's the notebook. What do you want? What do you want? Like we go and we just say like, hey, make this better. And then it gives like this very verbose documentation. And you're looking at it, you're like, I don't even know what you just gave me. I have no way of discerning this at all. So it's like, do you want a couple of paragraphs with a bullet point, you know, header or a bolded header? Do you want an email? written in under 200 words, you know, with this type of PS on it. Like you have to just be specific about the outcome you want. Do you want a JSON file? Like I will go and like I teach, I teach people like how to do data analytics. And something is as simple as like, give me the actual Google sheet equation, or just create the P, create the actual Excel as X file for me with all the equations in it. And it knows how to go do that. But it doesn't know how to do that if we don't tell it what to go do. And so that even that will help you guys save a ton of time just during your week, because instead of you going back and forth and being like, this AI stuff doesn't work. It just gives me crap. You know, it's like, cause garbage in equals garbage out. But if we can, if we can do all that, we can, we can help just kind of funnel down our work and get better outputs. Absolutely, like saying I don't know what to post today versus be a content creator with these boundaries. I want to focus on this as my you know, as my number one skill and the result that I provide. It's if you think about it, Lloyd, it is a lot like marketing because the more specific and narrow we are in marketing, again, with the boundaries and all those things, the more we're going to attract our ideal person. And so if you want to attract the ideal output, from AI be more specific and have boundaries around that. Yeah. everything I did, that's assuming I know everything that I need to. But maybe you're like, I don't know what to prompt. Go ask it. So I worked through this prompt. I was like very curious about it. So because you know, it's a demonstration, right? So I had this person that we were helping out and I was like, he was like, well, I don't know what to prompt. And I was like, okay, then just let's just brain dump everything that's in your head. And so we just typed in, he's like, I'm in the food industry, I need to create a demo spreadsheet for AI data analytics purposes, currently learning how to use AI for the purposes and I don't want to ruin any files. Okay. I need stuff like sales by store by week. sales by store by week by SKU. He's running a grocery store and he's running several chains. And he's trying to do basically uh forecasting is this whole thing. And he's like, I need to forecast what's going to happen with revenue over the next two months. I need to aggregate what to do, what we need to produce to meet the demand. This is for seasonality and week by week changes. And this is just him brain dumping everything Christmas. Weather is also an important factor in me. uh whether there is a promotion or a discount on an item, how sales and he's just going, we're just going down the stream of consciousness, 52 weeks. I need you to ask me whatever questions you need uh for me to understand the situation and the implications of what it is that we're asking. Ideally, I want you to create a demo spreadsheet and then maybe even based on what I've given you a series of prompts using our five box prompt framework. on what it is that we can ask, right? Like how is it that we can get better results to get to the end goal that we're trying to do and have it tell me what prompts I should be prompting. This is so I can understand uh what is uh it that Claude is capable of doing and even more, whether I need to use Claude for these purposes or is it better to use chat or Claude Cowork or maybe even Claude Code, help me to understand this. And it brought me through, it's like, hey, like here's some questions that you need to answer. And so we look at these. Explain the five box prompt framework just in case and you didn't I gave it the answers that it was looking for and then it was like cool like let me work through this entire process and in it It created this entire demo spreadsheet so that I could work through practicing before I started running it like as an actual thing. And this has 6,000 rows. It has stores, it has chains, has SKUs, it has weather, uh like for every day, it has promotional events. And we were able to then... get a series of prompts that we could, because now I don't, maybe he doesn't know how to prompt, but now we have the prompt here. Here's the rule. You're a small retail data analyst onboarding a new client. First, I want you to audit the attached workbook. Tell me what I'm gonna be looking at. How many rows, what tables, what grain of each tab ah is, how the tabs join, you know, et cetera. The context, this is the context, which we're telling it what's in the spreadsheet, the constraints that we don't want it to guess, we want it to keep it under. And so now it's saying, Hey, this is how we're going to verify the spreadsheet is that we understand everything. And then after that, like, okay, cool. Let's pull up a per store trend. And now we have a prompt built for it. And now we have a prompt for, you know, skew seasonality. And now we have a prompt for, for lifting quantification and promote promo. This guy was just freaking out. then we go into Claude code, which is basically living on my computer. Mm-hmm. now we have this thing doing linear regressions. We have it creating actual heat maps showing each of the products related to the time of the year in which this this moment in time happened where we had spikes in purchases and lulls and purchases so that we can visually be like, man, stolen is only happening during this time of the year, we should not be producing anything, you know, for the bakery. And so Like we're able to create trend charts and we're able to create like all this data analysis, deep data levels of data analysis, create matrices and all this other things that we wouldn't be able to do on our own. But now we're able to do because of AI, but not, and I'm not a grocery store manager. I don't run a chain. I don't know these things, but what I do know how to do is I do know how to be curious enough to reverse engineer the results. I know the outcome that we want to get into and I'm able to just ask it the questions necessary to help, help me help you, you know, thing, you know, it's, like, it basically is, it's, it's asking me what it needs so that it can give me what I need so that I can get the results that I want. So we don't even have to be stuck in being like, I'm making the best prompt in the entire world. And that's what the cloud code doing like real, like real work on my computer. Those are files that are being stored on my machine, for them. And still it was the same thing. We just reversed, reverse engineered our prompt and we gave it our framework. And then it just filled in our framework and then was able to get these, the guy, the time the end of the class was over, he was just like, how does it, how did they know to ask that? Like, those are questions that I, I wouldn't have thought to ask. I'm like, because I had the AI, I gave it the brain that it needed. I gave it the inquiry that it needed for it to start giving me the fuel to start building these prompts so that it can do what it does best now. and look through the data and look through its entire LLM brain to be like, well, this is how data analysis is done for grocery chain stores. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. We could geek out about this all day, but I think what we want to know or what my audience wants to know is tell us about headcount zero. Tell us why you built it and who you built it for. Headcount Zero is a Skool group that I've started and it's free to join. And the whole purpose of it is to help business owners grow their business without growing their actual team. I don't think we're living in a world where we need to fire everybody, but I do think we're living in a world where there's a level of abstraction. where employees have been doing the run of the mill work on the very bottom or just us. And that grunt easy work, they're about to move up to a higher order of work that they're able to do. And so this whole entire Skool group is just devoted to giving you the skill sets to know how to use these tools so that you can start replacing and automating work in your job so that you can grow your company without having to actually bring on more people. I love it. I love it. and so it's free to join and there is an upgrade and a monthly membership which you get more access to me and other stuff, but like the fundamentals and everything and the community, it's all there for you guys. Well, and it sounds like it's a place that you go where you don't know what you don't know. So you do know. So you know how to basically maximize your time. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's there's paths for everybody depending on the business that they're in. What do you feel is like the biggest mindset block that is holding business owners back from fully embracing AI? I think that... It's the same block that stops people from growing their business. It's the, have to, I have to be so stuck in the business and I have to, I have to put all my time into the business that I don't take any time to start figuring out how to grow the business and work on the business. it's that same. And, and, you know, let's be real, like people will work for 16 hour days, but are they working 16 hour days? Yes, busy, not productive. Is he not productive? Yeah. It's just, it's that same, that same, that same issue, you know, and I would say this, the, the, the best thing you guys can do for yourself is to block off time, put time that you're like, this is for me to explore what's going on in AI. This is for me to try out this idea and, understand, like, you don't have to figure it out all in one go. Like you don't have to like have this revelation and be like, I can make software now. Maybe you can't today, but. Maybe you can engage your curiosity for an hour to ask enough questions that the AI to have a better understanding that you can take into the next session that you have. But more than anything else, just keep playing with this stuff and trying to figure out how to solve your own problems. Just take one problem and work. Even if it takes you six weeks to go figure out, you know, with an hour a week or an hour every other day, whatever it is to go solve this problem. By the time it's solved, you solved. your own problem that you no longer have to deal with anymore. And you'll come out with a set of skills that will help you solve the next problem in your business even faster. And you start seeing the power of it that way. Absolutely, absolutely. Because you have this YouTube background and this YouTube expertise and because you have the AI expertise, I would be doing my audience a disservice if I didn't ask you this question. for entrepreneurs who want to use AI to help them show up more consistently with content, where would you say that they would start so that they can sound like themselves, you know, and not lose their voice and also keep the human side of them specifically on video? Okay. I mean, honestly, I would just be all in on Claude. Like I said, you're able to do talk to text, so you can have it in for your own voice when you have the script. Also, you don't have to have your system write your entire script for you. You can have it write the script framework, and that way at least you know what you're going to be talking about next so that you're not reading like a robot, unless you're really good at reading from that. But you can leverage these tools to connect to the internet to start doing research, like actual research on it. And I think that's probably one of the best places for anybody wanting to create content. like, always think that we have to have these original ideas. And while that's great, I'd rather pay attention who has arrows in their back. And tools like Claude are able to do great research on YouTube in order to actually pull who's doing well. If you are, I keep going down on tangents. If you do have these people that you look up to, you're like, hey, I would like to have a channel like them one day. I would like to talk about what they're talking about on more consistent basis. You can use tools like Notebook LM. Notebook LM is so rad where you can upload YouTube videos to it and then you can ask it questions. and only reference back to the YouTube videos. It'll transcribe them. You'll be able to create like actual script frameworks from it. You'll be able to pull like information from it, have conversations. And you can even connect that to things like Gemini with their gems. And what you could take this body of work that just continues to grow. And then you have your framework on how you want to maybe write or how you like to speak. And you'd be like, hey, let's look through these videos and let's help me go create, you know, a video for that. It's just so many combinations of tools, you know, to exist, but more than anything else, just find the videos. That's what I'm doing. That's my, my whole strategy right now is I'm doing the Picasso. I'm doing the, the, the, the, the steel, you know, method. So I'm just looking for people that are doing great in my niche. And then I'm looking for, I'm, I'm, I'm once I have that intelligence, I'm just looking for my own angle. And because I have that, I don't have to worry about. this, um, what do I make, you know, place that we all get stuck in? know what to make. already, I already have banger videos. Like I know before the year is over, I'll have a video that does over a hundred thousand views on one shot because like, I'm just going to do what works in the market. Yeah, absolutely. And what did our old mentor used to tell us? We're not inventors. We're not inventors. We model. That's it. model. Yeah. And that's it. I'm just stealing. I'm, I'm modeling and I'm stealing and I'm, you know, modeling for a nice prettier word. but that's, that's content creation in a nutshell, right? Huh? Yeah. Cause at the end, yeah, exactly. But I, but it's like, I'm stealing the idea. Like I'm, I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting insight into something that somebody's already, they already did all the research for me. Yeah. Yeah. it's like a John Mayer had always talked about it. He's like, he's like, I can make a song and I think it's going to go out there and it's going to be beautiful and everybody's going to love it. And it falls on dead ears. And then he creates a song that it's like, whatever. And it goes out and it's a hit and he doesn't understand why. But the one thing he does understand is that the audience will always tell you that, that this is working, that this is, this is responding to them. So it's like, you don't need to do the research anymore. You can have. tools that you can build or you can use these these cloud systems to go do the research for you and then you're like oh cool these three videos would be great and they're already proving that they're that they're winning in the market. Absolutely. Absolutely. my gosh. I think we could have like three back to back episodes on all of this because it's so fascinating. We will. We'll have you back on the show. But to end this with the very last question, where do you see AI taking the entrepreneur landscape over the next two to three years? And how does my audience listening position themselves right now? Gosh, I don't even know how we got here in the last six months. This is what I genuinely believe. I believe that we're going to enter in to a world of AI if I'm doing things with like uh true agentic AI, where I no longer have to tell AI what to do. It just knows. It knows my goal. It knows me. It is telling me, hey, by the way, bud, We just made you another $10,000. Isn't that sweet? And I'm like, cool. I think that's where things are going. I think we're genuinely moving to a place in the next two to three years where AI is going to start doing work for us. But I don't, it won't do that. It won't do these things for the people that are not investing into it right now. It won't do it for, their, their, there will be a permanent underclass in this world. And that sucks. But then I think the only way to escape that is simply by investing your time right now to learn these tools, to apply these tools to your business, to make business easier for yourself and to figure out how you can start creating more value with these tools. Yeah, absolutely. I'll end with this, it's called a to-do list, but it can be called a to-done list with AI. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and it's like a list. You're like, I didn't even know we needed to get that done, but I'm glad you did. yeah. Well, and I think it's an opportunity for a lot of businesses who are running a business like I have this small little business to run it like a real business. And it's giving me the opportunity to do that. Absolutely. Lloyd, where can my audience connect with you and find you and find out more about your Skool community? Yeah. I mean, so you guys can go to, to look for headcount zero in the Skool community. or you can find me at my YouTube channel and it's just at Lloyd Dodgen. so you can find me there. we're going to be pumping out a ton of content and yeah. Helping you guys learn AI and implement it into your business. I love it. I love it. We'll put all these links in the show notes so you can connect with Lloyd. Lloyd, thank you again for being on the show. We're gonna have to have you on again because I feel like we could go deeper on so many other topics, but we're gonna make sure we honor your time today. And if you want to hear Lloyd back on the show, make sure you share this episode, reach out to him and let him know how much you enjoyed it and share it with someone who you know needs to listen to it.