How AI Can Transform Your Service-Based Business with Crista Grasso

Can AI really transform your business? Discover how with Krista Grasso, business strategist and creator of the Lean Out Method and Lean Scaling System, as we unravel the overwhelming array of AI tools available for service-based businesses. Krista shares valuable insights on cutting through the clutter to find the tools that truly enhance rather than replace the human element in your operations. Expect a few laughs along the way as we experiment with AI-generated content in the voices of famous personalities to make this complex technology more approachable.

Ready to revolutionize your content and marketing strategies? We dive into the last pillar of business scaling: creating and refining Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) using AI. Krista reveals how tools like ChatGPT, Cast Magic, and Searchy Wisdom can be tailored to reflect your unique brand voice, making your content stand out in a crowded online space. Learn practical tips on building custom GPTs to support your team’s efficiency, streamline your operations, save time, and cut costs—all while maintaining consistent, personalized communication with your audience.

Imagine AI not just as a tool, but as an invaluable business coach. Krista and I explore how customizing GPTs can lead to better client understanding and engagement, ultimately boosting your business efficiency and client satisfaction. We discuss the strategic importance of creating effective SOPs and role success kits with AI, backed by a compelling case study. Tune in to discover how AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and CastMagic can transform client engagement and conversion processes, setting your new hires up for success and empowering your clients to solve their problems independently.

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Transcript

Laura Khalil: 0:42

Hey everyone, I want to welcome you to this special episode of Big Deal Energy, where I am joined by the one and only Krista Grasso. She is a business strategist. She is the creator of the Lean Out Method and the Lean Scaling System. I mean, already, I'm interested, hang on.

Laura Khalil: 1:02

I just got to pause here because remember, krista, the whole lean in thing like a decade ago and how, like, as women, we were just told to like work harder and like like, drive ourselves more into the ground, and I think there's been such a backlash. So I love, I just love the name of your methodology because I'm like fuck, yeah, lean the fuck out. All right, hang on. Let me tell you more about Krista before we, before I just lose my mind here. What is this episode? What are we doing? So? Krista specializes in working with service-based businesses to implement a complete ecosystem for scaling success that allows the business owner to elevate their focus to becoming a thought leader and doing legacy work, instead of having to constantly put out fires and feel stuck all day because, oh my God, we do not have more time for that. Krista, welcome to Big Deal Energy.

Crista Grasso: 1:58

Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited for today's conversation.

Laura Khalil: 2:03

I can't wait. So Krista and I met through the incomparable Annie Ruggles, which y'all, if you do not know, annie Ruggles, she is like a ray of sunshine in the small business world, wouldn't you say, krista.

Crista Grasso: 2:19

She is one of my favorite humans in this world. She is incredible, she is brilliant and she will make you laugh while she gives you all the brilliance on marketing and sales.

Laura Khalil: 2:30

Exactly, exactly. She's amazing and everyone needs to know her. But she brought us together and she said I think you two are really going to get along. And boy was she right. Krista and I, you, we sat down what was that? Maybe a month ago to talk about our businesses and get to know one another. And you said something really interesting to me, which is the topic of today's discussion, which was do you know how to use AI to skill your consulting business? And I was like, I mean, I know chat GBT, but I don't really know more than that, or even what's out there. What do you see in the landscape around this? What are people? Are people sort of lost or are they just like is it a shot in the dark? What's going on?

Crista Grasso: 3:21

Well, one of the things that I think is so incredibly exciting about AI but also can be very overwhelming and cause people to kind of shut down is that there are 400 tools for absolutely any single thing that you are trying to do, and there are new ones that get released every single day. Right, I am so deeply embedded in this and I can barely keep up on all of the changes and all of the new technologies and advancements and tools and strategies, right and so for someone who is not as obsessed with AI as I am and who does not spend as big of a part of their lives focused on it as I do, it can get so overwhelming that people don't know what to do and where to go, so they either do nothing or they end up sticking with just one tool. They'll use a chat, gpt or a cloud or a Gemini or something like that, and they just kind of stay right there and they barely scratch the surface of what's actually possible.

Laura Khalil: 4:15

I feel like you're calling me out right now, krista. I'm going to be honest, I feel like you're calling me out. And here's the thing it's like when we talk about scaling a business. And and here's the thing it's like when we talk about scaling a business, especially as a solopreneur. I mean, that's tough, you know. It's hard to think about, like how, how can I find tools that are going to make give me more work to do, that are going to make it easier? At this point, I have really only mastered I don't even want to say mastered I have begun to dip my toe into chat GPT. My biggest issue with it is that it we now have within our vernacular like chat GPT speak, where it's like you can almost read something, and maybe if I were better at creating GPTs, I wouldn't have this problem. But, like, you can sometimes read something and think that doesn't sound real, like do you ever feel that?

Crista Grasso: 5:06

way.

Crista Grasso: 5:07

Oh, dead giveaway, right, when I get an email that is, in the bustling world of anything we're going to delve into and navigate the power of, we're going to harness the power of something.

Crista Grasso: 5:20

Right, there's like these dead giveaways that something was written by AI. Right, there's like these dead giveaways that something was written by AI. And I think so many people think of AI in the context of their content creation, and that's absolutely one of the use cases, but there are so many others, and I think the key is AI, to me, is an enabler in your business. It's not a replacement for the human or for the human touch or for the human thought, and so that email that I get with a bustling world of something that says to me someone copied and pasted directly from AI and didn't use it as the incredible input it could have been that they then took and put their own unique thought leadership on top of, and so, to me, I think that's something that we need to do is it's not meant for copy paste, it's meant to support and enhance, and there's some ways that we can get it to sound a whole lot more like us.

Laura Khalil: 6:11

You know, we did this thing in Elevate with my clients where they went into chat GPT and they were like someone was responding to an email or something. And we said, to chat GPT, now say it in the voice of Snoop Dogg, now say it in the voice of, like Anthony Bourdain or just like, pick someone famous. And it was hilarious. I mean, it was just really fun.

Laura Khalil: 6:35

But to your point and this is, I think, the thing we get wrong it is here to enhance our lives, not to replace. I mean, how many consultants are scared or were scared, especially when the stuff came out that like, oh, this is going to like I'm not going to have a business anymore, or this is going to like replace my work? It's like, are you kidding me? Have you seen? Like that's not really possible, but it can make your life better. Now you mentioned something to me prior to this call. You said there's sort of three pillars that you look at when we are talking about scaling businesses. Can you just briefly give us an overview of what those three pillars are? And then we're going to dive into the juiciness around what we can do with AI in each pillar.

Crista Grasso: 7:22

Absolutely so. The three kind of core pillars that I look at are your content and your marketing, right, Of course. How can you take your beautiful, big, bold message that you have and really be able to get that out there in a way that you might not have the space in your schedule to do otherwise? Right, AI can be a huge enabler there when you understand how to use it to enhance your thought leadership and add to the message around your unique point of view, as opposed to producing just generic content that anyone could produce. So content and marketing really, really important there, especially when you use AI around a really solid marketing strategy.

Laura Khalil: 8:01

Now the next I'm interested. Yeah, tell me the next one. I'm taking notes.

Crista Grasso: 8:06

The next one is your clients and conversion. So most of us, what's one of the very first things that we did when we started our business? We built our ideal client avatar, or it goes by a whole bunch of different names, right, and that's great. Right, you probably know your client. If you have people on your team who work with your client or who do sales or marketing for you, they probably know your client. That's amazing.

Crista Grasso: 8:28

But what's even more amazing is if you can build an AI engine that knows your client even better than you do and you can use to help run different things through. You can use to help pull out their language, you can use to get into their minds today, in today's buying landscape, that is really different than the buying landscape of 18 months ago, right, and so all of that sort of stuff will help with better conversions. It will help you have better and more effective sales conversation, sales copy, any type of marketing that you're producing. Your client will feel like you are in their head. They will feel like you get them, and you will get them in a way that your competitors probably are not doing. So. To me, that's the next category. That's really important, right?

Laura Khalil: 9:13

So content and marketing clients and conversions, and we're going to move on to the third one in a second. But for those who are not watching this on video, who are listening to the podcast recording, you should have seen my face as Krista was talking. My eyes were like bugging out. I'm like what it can know my clients better than me, or my ideal client better than me? What Like I am like I am chomping at the bit. So, before we get to that, what is the last pillar, krista?

Crista Grasso: 9:42

Yes, absolutely so. The last one is your SOPs and your processes. So if content and marketing is how you're attracting and nurturing people in your clients and marketing is how you're attracting and nurturing people in your clients and conversion is how you're actually converting people into paying clients, your SOPs and your processes is how you simplify and how you streamline everything from the things we've talked about so far to the actual delivery, the retention, the referrals, the testimonials, the everything that you do in your business. Ai can actually enhance and do for you.

Crista Grasso: 10:15

So, a lot of times, if we think about scaling our business, the way that we scale is to have the right team to support us, and one of the things that gets in the way of building out that team sometimes is we don't have the right systems or the right SOPs in place, so we feel like we're not ready to hire, or we bring someone in and we don't have the right systems or the right SOPs in place.

Crista Grasso: 10:31

So we feel like we're not ready to hire, or we bring someone in and we don't have those things in place and we feel like they're not really set up for success or they're not getting the results that we want. Well, ai can actually do a lot of that for us, or especially if we can train it on a few core things about our business. It can ask us the right questions to pull out of us what the right SOPs and processes are. So all together, that gives you your ecosystem for scaling your business in a simple way that does not take a whole lot of expense, it does not take a whole lot of time and it actually saves you both time and money. Now we can go into details.

Laura Khalil: 11:06

Damn. Okay, now let's start with content and marketing. Now, everyone, get your pens out, okay, because Krista is going to start spilling the tea on what you know, what tools you need to know or how you can use it. I want you to be ready to write this stuff down. Okay, krista, ready, set, content and marketing go. What do we do? What do we use? How does it?

Crista Grasso: 11:31

work. So I think the very first thing I will say about anything you do with AI is AI is simply a vehicle to get to a result that you want. You always wanna start with strategy, so I think you wanna have a really strong content and marketing strategy, and then you want to align the right tools and the right approaches based on that strategy. Now, assuming that most of you listening do something similar to what I do, right, which is coaching, consulting, advisory that type of role tools that are incredibly, incredibly helpful that I use all the time ChatGPT absolutely. I'm chat GPT absolutely, but one of the tools that I think is pure magic and is appropriately named is a tool by the name of Cast Magic, and another tool that I use regularly is a tool called Searchy Wisdom, and I'm gonna give you some use cases for each of these and how and why I'm using it.

Crista Grasso: 12:24

So, if we think about our marketing efforts, we are trying to get someone to take a particular action based on where they're at and their buying journey with us. Right, if they're brand new to us, maybe we want them to follow us or subscribe to our list or take some sort of initial action maybe attend a free work workshop, download a guide right. There's something we want them to do in the beginning. Then we want to be nurturing them over time so they can make the decision yes, this, this is the right person for me. Yes, they have the right solution for me. So, when we're creating our content and marketing, if you're putting out generic content where it's a copy and paste straight out of AI kind of engine, at the end of the day, that's not really going to achieve that, especially with all the noise there is online really going to achieve that, especially with all the noise there is online. So what you want to be doing is you want to be putting out things in your voice that are highlighting your unique point of view and perspectives, and so to do this, I build custom GPTs.

Crista Grasso: 13:21

So, in chat GPT, I create custom GPTs that represent my brand voice. I have one for each of my core programs. So, depending on what I'm talking about and what I'm selling, I have a GPT for each of my programs, and this has built into it all of my unique language, the things that I say, the things that I do not say. I have a long list of negative keywords. Do not say delve. Do not say bustling, do not say in the world of right. All of these key phrases that AI uses all the time. I tell it my tone, I tell it my style, I give it writing samples so it learns to speak like me. It uses the language from my programs and my sales pages and my content.

Laura Khalil: 14:09

Krista, I got a question Are you just feeding when you're creating that custom GPT, are you just putting all of your like sales page copy in there, like, or are you creating separate like brand voices for it, like, how are you doing that?

Crista Grasso: 14:24

Yeah, so I actually have something that I call an input library, and I have an input library for each of the things that I do, and so with that, I have the hi. My name is Krista Grasso, I am a scaling strategist and an operations alchemist. My website is, my business is, these pages are, and I have my links. Then I have one that describes my ideal client, then I have one that describes each program, then I have one that describes my unique differentiator, and so I built all of these different inputs that I will copy and paste in depending on what I'm prompting.

Crista Grasso: 15:01

But the beautiful thing is, if, as I say, that any of you listening are like I don't have any of that. That sounds so overwhelming. You can actually use AI to help you create and curate and craft all of that. If you don't have an ideal client avatar already, AI will help you create one, like anything that you feel like you have a gap in. That would help you do more targeted messaging or better content and better marketing. Ai can actually help you define those things for your brand, so you could then feed it back into AI to get you the results that you want. So I have all of those different things and I feel, oh, it's so good, you can use AI like a business coach in a way, or like a strategic advisor. Right For any of you who I will date myself here, but you remember Clueless, one of my favorite.

Laura Khalil: 15:49

Yes, girl, we remember Clueless, right so as if.

Crista Grasso: 15:54

I always think of Clueless when I think of AI is you want AI to act as if and you tell it how to act, Right, so just picture Clueless.

Crista Grasso: 16:03

picture Alicia Silverstone in her little like plaid jacket, yellow plaid jacket, right, Saying as if and I always think of that when I think of AI, because it's you, you want it to act as if. And so you could say act as if my business coach, who is an expert at, and ask me the questions that I would need to tell you in order for you to do ABC, and it will give you all the questions and it'll pull out of you the answers.

Laura Khalil: 16:33

That is so cool. You know it's interesting. You mentioned two tools Cast Magic and Searchy Wisdom. So I actually we've I just turned on Searchy Wisdom, like just today, and Searchy has been such a game changer. I cannot tell everyone. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, is it worth the investment which is around? I think for me it's about a hundred bucks a month. It is so worth every single penny because it helps your clients solve their problems. And, to Chris's point, if your clients can solve their problems, you are one helping them service themselves more when they need the help to. You're also freeing yourself up so that you don't have to quote unquote like baby bird your client like at every second of the day they can go and be empowered to go find the knowledge and it really does help you scale. That is incredible. Okay, so I'm sold. Here's where I think we're going to get real excited, if we're not already clients and conversion. What are we doing? What's going on?

Crista Grasso: 17:55

So your content and your marketing fit really closely with your clients and conversions because they kind of dovetail together. But let's talk about your clients and having AI know your clients even better than you do. So, just like I shared with you, I build custom GPTs for my brand, for my programs. I also have one for each one of my client avatars. I run multiple businesses. I have different client avatars. Even my programs target people at different stages of their business journey. Although it's the same general person, they're at different stages and so I have different GPTs for each one. And this might sound like it's a lot of work, but it doesn't take very long once you build the first one and the results that you get and the targeting that you get are so worth the initial time investment. And again, have that kind of prompt input library where you have some of this stuff that you pull from, where you have details on your programs, details on your clients. But what you want to be doing is you want to be thinking about your ideal client and I would go in and I would start to build that custom GPT and then I start to ask questions. So for people in the coaching, consulting and service-based industry today, who are running businesses at this revenue to this revenue? Who work with these types of clients? What are some of the current challenges that they are facing, based on today's economy? What are some of the current challenges that they are facing based on today's economy? What are some of the current challenges? What are the things that are keeping them up at night now that weren't a concern for them a year ago? And I'll start asking some of these questions and I don't necessarily use everything it gives me.

Crista Grasso: 19:31

I put common sense against it, I bump some of it up against clients, but I will tell you it has you think of things that sometimes you don't always think of. And I always love to ask, share obvious and non-obvious answers, because the obvious answer might be I'm worried about whether or not people are going to convert. I'm seeing buying cycles being a lot longer right now, and so it's hard for me to manage my cash flow right. That might be more of an obvious answer, but the non-obvious answer is if this doesn't work, what would I do with my life? I've been an entrepreneur for so long.

Crista Grasso: 20:11

I don't think I could get a job. I don't know that anyone would hire me. I don't know what I would do. What will people think of me if my business closes Right? And so it's like it will, it will, it will go deep, it will go really, really deep. In some times you need to keep prompting it, like I was doing this for one of mine and I said describe a day in the life of my ideal client on a workday and describe a day in the life of my ideal client on a non-workday. And it painted the non-workday really refreshing. On a non-workday, I sleep in a little bit.

Crista Grasso: 20:41

I wake up, I journal, I go and I'm like, yeah, no, give me the real non-workday of my client who is trying to relax but still doing work and still checking in on all their clients and it rewrote the answer and it was so incredibly right on. I sent it to my team members and I sent it to a few people in my target market which I recommend you do and said how does this does this seem accurate compared to your day? And I got hands down that, did you like? Take this from my journal.

Laura Khalil: 21:11

Right, exactly.

Crista Grasso: 21:13

It is so incredibly accurate and once you have that data, once you have that input just think about how important that is for the copy on your sales pages, for the emails that you're sending, for even the conversations that you're having Exactly being able to go out and even look at what people are posting you can have it. Pull anything from the web, from people's LinkedIn profile, from their social media profiles, from articles and interviews and podcast interviews. You can pull all of these things about people who are prospects and leads and you can have that ready. I've actually used this to create contracts. I've used this to sign multi-million dollar contracts with one of the consulting clients that I work through, and it's amazing what you can do with publicly available information, being able to pull really targeted things about individuals or businesses that you are targeting and trying to get contracts with or trying to get relationships with.

Laura Khalil: 22:12

Krista. Is AI pulling that or are you pulling that in Both so?

Crista Grasso: 22:17

AI will actually pull it, and if you have the paid version of ChatGPT now, most of what I'm talking about here is ChatGPT. Just to keep it really simple, there's certainly targeted tools that you can use, but ChatGPT the paid version will work until it doesn't. If you're pulling from a LinkedIn profile, it will pull, and then all of a sudden you'll get a message that says we're unable to pull from a LinkedIn profile. It can it just. Eventually it like taps itself out, and so if you wait until the next day, it'll work. But you can also go to somebody's profile and copy and paste in the sections that you want into your prompting, which is the way around it.

Laura Khalil: 22:53

You know, I hope people are really taking this in, because my mind is kind of blown right now. Like I'm sitting in chat GPT, like give me three bullet points to talk about. Chris is in there. She's like the fucking FBI. I mean, it's like listen to this. You're like this is amazing. I'm just like, oh my gosh, but it gives you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. And one of the questions I was going to ask you and it's funny because I feel like you're answering it as we're speaking One of the questions as you were talking, I was going to say gosh, do we lose the human touch in all of this AI? And here's what I've heard, and I want to hear your response here. What I'm hearing from you is actually that human touch can be way more targeted on point, personalized, with the assistance of these tools. So it's not to the detriment of building a human relationship with someone which I am a huge fan of and I know you are too. It's really helping to enhance what that relationship could be. Is that? What do you think?

Crista Grasso: 24:04

Yeah, it's interesting, right, because a lot of the work that I do is I train and certify and mentor operational leaders, and operations is an area that's absolutely going to be pretty significantly impacted by AI. So people are really concerned, like, is my job going to go away? And I think the reality is no, because somebody needs to know how to run the AI first of all, but the thing that you're never, ever going to be able to replace is that critical thinking, that strategic thinking, the ability to see how everything fits together. Ai is phenomenal at executing on a task, on doing research, on writing content.

Crista Grasso: 24:40

There are certain things it does really well, but it's never going to be able to replace the human. And so if you think about what you spend your time on today, or even what you might have your team spending their time on today, if you have a team supporting you, right, so many of those things don't need to be done by a human. It's just today. The human is the only thing. You have to do them, and when that goes away, think about the space. You then have to cultivate those relationships to do those things that are so incredibly meaningful things that are so incredibly meaningful and are so much of a differentiation.

Laura Khalil: 25:20

I love that. Let's move on. Okay, we actually are you using primarily? Are you using anything like something called crystal? I think that's one of the AI tools for, like figuring out people's personality. Are you using any other tools in clients and conversion other than chat GPT? Are you using any other tools?

Crista Grasso: 25:34

in clients and conversion other than ChatGPT. I still use CastMagic for that quite a bit. I do. I love CastMagic. And then the one tool that I'll toss out that I use is Claude, and Claude has a million different use cases, but there is one primary use case that I use Claude for where it works a little different than ChatGPT. Even with all the best negative keywords on earth, chatgpt can still be a little wordy and it can still sometimes sound a little bit like AI. What Claude does a really nice job of is if I have a random brainstorm or if I have something really long that ChatGPT gave me, I will toss it in Claude and I will say please make this more concise and compelling, use everyday language, and it will spit out something beautiful and summarize that I could never say in that few words. That captures exactly what it should be.

Laura Khalil: 26:22

Use everyday language. I love that. I'm just listening to you speak. I'm like I can make this so much better by just taking a few of Krista's prompts that she's mentioned today and just putting them into practice. Because, you know, when I tell it to sound more like me, it starts throwing emojis and exclamation points everywhere and I'm like what are you saying? That's crazy. I don't speak emoji, but okay, sops and processes. This is and this is really you mentioned it at the top of the show this is so important. I have personally I have a friend experienced the pain you described of I've hired someone, but I don't know how to set them up for success. I don't know how to get this stuff out of my head and give it to them, and then you know what happens. Well, you know we don't get the best right, or we don't get the best out of someone or out of the experience. So how do we deal with this?

Crista Grasso: 27:28

Yeah, one of the things I love helping my clients create are playbooks, and there's the overarching company playbook, but then there's also like role success kits, which are a playbook for a particular role and the things that that individual needs to do, and so I think that we can use AI for that to support that quite a bit for any SOP or any process that we want in the business. But, like I shared when we were talking about content and marketing, I always like to think of it strategically. So, if you think strategically, what is the use case that you have where you need an SOP or a process? Is it that you're about to hire someone? Great, you can use AI to help you write your interview questions, your job description, to help you vet candidates to send your offer. I mean, you can have it help you with every step along that process. But then the person's hired Great, what do they need to know to actually be successful in their role? What do they need to do day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year? Like, what are the things that they need?

Crista Grasso: 28:30

That, to me, is where you start to build out your role success kit, which is part of the overall company playbook, and this is where you can use AI to support you with that. So what I will do, right, there's probably about 20 to 40% of things that are really unique to your company, really specific to your context. The reason why you do something or why you do something a particular way, it's the steps themselves that tend to be pretty generic, but it's the context around those steps that tends to be really unique, and so what I recommend is that's how you use AI. You use it to do the steps while you put the wrapper around it, and what I do is I have a template that I use for all of my SOPs and all of my processes, and I have that template in surprise surprise a custom GPT, so that anytime we're creating SOPs or processes, it already knows what the output should look like and it knows what questions to ask me if I have not given it all the information that it needs.

Laura Khalil: 29:37

That is so cool.

Crista Grasso: 29:39

It just. I mean, it simplifies everything and it standardizes everything, and it has you thinking already when you're about to create the SOP. Oh wait, I need to answer this question before I put that up there, because it's not going to know the answer to why we do it the way that we do it. And so you have it, take the time and build it once, and then it just becomes super simple. But something that one of my clients is doing she's in the middle of SOP creation. She is as visionary as it gets. Sops are like her nightmare in life and she does not want to do it, but she's the only one who could do it, and so I showed her how to do this and she loves it.

Crista Grasso: 30:18

If you have the app downloaded on your phone, you can actually talk to chat GPT. You don't have to type, you can talk. And so we prebuilt the custom GPT for her. We loaded the template in, and so she will literally just talk to it. Random stream of thought, like all right, I need to create a process for hiring Tiffany to do this thing, and here's it. Oh, and here's why I do it. Oh, and make sure that you include this. Oh, and I forgot. Do this step two and she's literally just talking to it and then she's done and it will spit out an SOP and it is pretty good first pass. And then she will say what else do you need to know in order to complete this? And it will ask her questions.

Laura Khalil: 30:56

Because it has a template to work off of.

Crista Grasso: 30:58

Exactly yeah, and it will answer. And then, when she's done, it's done good enough to hand it to somebody. And then the first job of the person who's hired and who takes it is now go polish this and finish it, spot the gaps, figure out what's missing. But they have enough to go ahead and get started. She'll even walk through all the steps like first thing I do is I pull a contact out of my phone and then I go over here and we load it into the crm and then we and she's just talking talking, talking and it steps it all out so she could hand it to the new team member and then they're going to refine it.

Crista Grasso: 31:33

They're going to take it to a hundred percent, but if you can get it to 80, talking into your phone or typing something out, just think about how much time that saves and how much you're setting your team up for success.

Laura Khalil: 31:44

I love the talking aspect. I love being able to just vocalize, because that doesn't feel like work for us. That's just a very natural sort of human activity. Is speech? Funny enough, I'm writing a book right now and I have been orating the book because it's so much easier for me to speak and to get the ideas out than to type and then fix this sentence and fix that sentence. That can all be fixed later. Frankly, listening to Krista, I should just throw this thing in chat GPT. I mean honest, just have it like fix all my spelling errors.

Crista Grasso: 32:24

Well, in all seriousness, that is what I would use Cast Magic for, and I'm not kidding, like if you do Cast Magic. What I like about Cast Magic is it only pulls from your voice and your content. It does not pull from anything else on the web or anywhere else. It only pulls from what you upload into it. So I use that for my podcast and for things like that. But if you're doing any thought leadership content, cast Magic is brilliant for it because it will absolutely clean up what you put into it, but it will not add to the noise.

Laura Khalil: 32:54

I got to tell you all. I cheated earlier today. I cheated and I found some of Krista's tips online. She's going to tell us where we can go, like, learn more about all this, but I found some of her tips I already downloaded. I already signed up for Cast Magic. I've already started using it because I was like this is so cool, it's so helpful. And I do want to say just another shout out I know I'm certainly not being paid to say any of this it actually sounds pretty good, Like it didn't sound like that terrible, like AI voice, so I really liked it. Krista, I want to ask you a question. I have two questions for you. One I'm going to. It's kind of a curve ball. I'm going to be honest. I didn't prep you for this, so don't kill me, but I'm curious. Is there something that you have changed your mind about in the last decade?

Crista Grasso: 34:04

I mean all sorts of things, but give me, give me a context. Is there something in like the world?

Laura Khalil: 34:12

is there something in the world of operations and business growth and business strategy that you've really changed your mind about?

Crista Grasso: 34:19

Like I'll.

Laura Khalil: 34:19

I'll. I'll tell you mine, my biggest, my biggest thing was, you know, that chicken and the egg problem of like is it sales first or marketing first? For me, what I teach and what I've learned is it's like sell it. If you can sell it that validates you have a thing, then you can go market it. Now I come from a marketing background, so if you'd asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have said go create the thing, go market it first and then sell it second. But now I'm sell first, validate that it's a real thing, then go market it to the masses. So that's kind of like one of my like things that I've changed my mind about in the last decade. So that's kind of what I mean. Do you have?

Crista Grasso: 35:00

anything like that. Yeah, for me, I very much grew up focused on growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, and I really think it's actually all about scale. Now, I don't think it's about scale day one. You need to grow something before you can scale it. But I think so many people anchor in on growth, and growth is amazing because it's more revenue, it's more clients, it's more all those things. But growth also usually comes with more complexity and more expenses and more headaches and doing actually less of the thing that you love to do, whereas what I love so much about scaling and why I've kind of anchored in on that so much is scaling is about broader impact, broader profit, all the like good stuff without all of the expenses and increased complexity. Right, you can serve more people with the same amount of resources. And to me, it's all about leverage and just thinking about it really strategically in that way. It's not just about the more, it's about the strategic leverage so that you can achieve more without actually requiring more.

Laura Khalil: 36:04

Well, that's so cool. Thanks for thanks for letting me put you put the spotlight on you like that, because I just think it's so interesting, because we all evolve and grow and change and it's just interesting to hear a little bit about people's perspectives and journeys. If you have been here for this, listening to this, watching this, and you're like I need to understand more about how Krista is building these custom GPTs, I want to really dive into Krista's brain around AI. Who is this woman, krista? Where do we go?

Crista Grasso: 36:39

to learn more? Yeah, absolutely. You can go to leanoutmethodcom as my core website, and then I do have a program called Scale with AI. You can go to scalewithaibiz for all the details there, and that's where we focus in on those three things. I give you all my prompts, everything, and show you how to actually build your GPTs, but you can get a lot of really great insight and a lot of good info just right on my website, where you'll find links to my podcast where I talk about this stuff all the time.

Laura Khalil: 37:07

So, so cool. Krista, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Big Deal Energy. This was awesome. Thanks so much for having me.