Kickstart Your Creative Business With Chat GPT

1. Intro: People start a creative business for freedom to do what they love, to make something that matters. But that dream can get buried under admin, burnout, and to do lists longer than your arm. I know because I've been there. But here's the good news. With the right support and a little help from AI, you can build a business that works for you and not the other way around. Let me show you how. Hey, friends. How's it going? Hope you're having a great day. My name is Mike. It's really nice to meet you. I'm a UK based musician and music instructor, and I'm also proud to be a top teacher here on Skillshare. And over the last decade, I co run a multi award winning music company called Time. We design and deliver music workshops and projects for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Through our work, we've helped thousands of people, assembled an incredible team of musicians and professionals and create a business that's been central to building a life and a career that I really love. And one of the most important things I've learned over the last couple of years is that getting to grips with AI is one of the most cost effective, efficient and time saving skills you can learn. In this class, I want to share the most valuable things I've learned about starting a small creative business, but also how we can supercharge and simplify the process with the help of AI. We'll start by building a plan and a roadmap for your business to ensure your idea is fleshed out and well thought through. Next, we'll learn about the most effective way to set smart goals and to do lists, to ensure we're always hitting achievable, relevant milestones. We'll then dive into how to prompt AI for the most personal brand aligned feedback. So your copy, emails, and content sounds like you and not a robot. We'll develop a social media strategy and automate the process with AI. Teach you how to build an effective cash flow forecast so we can project our year's income and outgoings and ensure things are profitable while leaving room for growth. And we'll finish up by creating a time management plan designed to boost productivity while protecting a healthy life balance. Throughout this class, I'm going to be building these systems around my own business right alongside you so you can see exactly how you implement and put these plans into action. This class is going to be perfect for anyone starting their first business or for those who have already started and are ready to take things to the next level. Starting a small creative business has been one of the most gratifying, life changing things I've ever done. So I'm really excited to share with you have to build one, too. So I hope to see they on the class. 2. Class Project : Hey, friends. How's it going? Thank you so much for joining me here on the class. I really hope you get a lot out of it, have a good time and learn really cool stuff about starting a small crowd business with the help of Chachi BT. So just before we jump in, I very quickly wanted to talk about our class project. So throughout the class, you're going to learn loads of cool stuff about creating and running a small business. And I would love to just see what you get up to. So anything you create from this class, it could be a business plan, cash flow forecast, maybe you've got some cool sales copy that you're proud of. And you can post that into the class project, and it's going to be like a safe learning space where we can all sort of talk about each other's ideas, give some critique and feedback if you want to. And it would just be really cool to hear about what everyone's little businesses are and what they've sort of taken away from the class. And I'd love to help you with any feedback or questions you may have. So if there's anything you want answered or critiqued or spoken about, please feel free to post it into that class project. Okay, so without further ado, let's jump into the class. I'll see you in the next lesson. Oh 3. Business Plan: Hey, guys, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about a plan, specifically a business plan. I want you to think of your business plan as the Holy Bible of your business. It's going to lay out what your business is, why it exists, who's it for, and how you're going to make it work. It's a little bit like a roadmap which helps you stay on track, measure progress, and just really get a good grasp on what your business is all about. I know business plan sounds like a really stuffy corporate term, but trust me, it is such a game changer. As not only does it give you a ton of clarity on exactly what you're doing with your business, but it also feeds Chat GBT so that it knows all about you and your business, so you don't have to always constantly give it prompts like, please write this blog post for my business that's blah, blah, blah blah blah. It already knows all about you, what your target audience is, and everything it needs to know to we really effective suggestions and feedback. Going to act like a gold mine to source from whether that be website information, your emails, social media content. On that note, the first big top tip of the class is that AI and hat GBT is really only going to be as good as the information you feed it. It's a wonderful tool, incredibly helpful, but it's really all about what kind of information you feed it and the more personal and more detailed information you can feed it about yourself and your business and whatever you're doing, the better the feedback and the more sort of individual the sort of responses are going to be. And it's just going to be way less AI. And on that note, it's really important to turn on the memory function on Chai Bit sort of remembers what you're telling it about your business. So let's break this business plan down. What I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you five questions about your business or your idea, and each of those questions is going to have three prompts to help you get the most juice out of the answers. Then what I want you to do is write that down as it's going to form the basis of our business plan and it's also going to feed into chat GBT in just a bit. The answers to these questions really can be as broad as you like. If you haven't got exact answers for any of these questions, honestly, don't worry about it. A business plan is something that is molding and changing all of the time. We're just trying to give it as much information as we know right now and then that can change and develop as we learn more about our business and what we're trying to do. Oh, question number one, what's your thing? What is your business? So what are you selling? So are you selling music or courses or music lessons and your audience, is that going to be Genzy teenagers or is it going to be ms or who is going to be the person you really want to sell to? And what makes it unique? So is it maybe many other people are doing in your area? Maybe you're making, say like vegan cakes in your area where not many other people are doing something like that. Question number two is who wants it? Who's your market and your audience. Similar to before, who are your dream customers. But let's think a bit more deeply about it. Is it like maybe you're selling music lessons to schools and you want to focus more on activity managers at that school, or maybe you want to focus more around online content where you're making YouTube videos for 25 year olds about gym and nutrition and things like that. What problem do you solve or what joy do you bring through your business? So if you're making YouTube videos on how to clean gutters, you are solving people's problems on how to clean their guts, you know, where does your dream customer hang out? Is it online? Is it on Instagram or is it events, say, local community events or wedding fairs, if you've got a wedding business? Where are those people that you want to get involved? Where are they hanging out? Number three, how will they find you? Maybe you're going to post lots online to YouTube and social media and they're going to find you through your social media channels, or are you going to go to more events and hand out flyers, things like that? Will you sell directly through a website or through your email or will you sell through a platform like Etsy what's your main way of attracting people? Is it going to be your content on your social media? Are you going to make ads? Are you going to do collaborations? Are you going to give out flyers? What's your way of getting people in? Question number four is, how are you going to make money? So a bit of a financial plan here. So what are your main income streams? Is it going to be music lessons or is it going to be courses or selling things and what's your price points? This is where we can start to write down maybe what our services cost. Start to get a bit of a price list going, if you have an idea of that. No if not. And what are your key expenses, materials for your business. Do you pay a website subscription? Are you paying for ads? Any little bits like that to note down here, really useful. Lastly, question number five is what's next? What's your next goal? Now we're going to go into this in a bit more detail next. But it's really handy to write down what you're thinking of doing next. That might be to launch your website, make your first product or set up your social media accounts. I also want you to set a one week goal. So this time next week, what is your business going to have done that is moving it forward? Do we just want it to be one thing? I could be your Instagram account or start your website or set up an email? Anything like that. I also want you to write down a weekly thing you can do to grow. This could be to post content, it could be to network, it could be to improve your skills. What simple thing can you do every week to ensure that you're growing and your business is developing. Hopefully, you've written down those answers now. I just want to reiterate that this doesn't have to be permanent, our business plan and these answers are always going to be changing alongside your business. I think it's actually a good thing the old business plan is always changing and developing it shows that you're growing and you're developing a business. Always will let you can come back and change any of these answers very quickly going to write down my own answers to some of these questions now. I'm going to use my company time as a bit of an example. I'm going to simplify it a little bit and change certain things so it makes a little bit more sense. This isn't exactly how my business runs. But yeah, here we go. What's your thing? What are you selling and who is it for? I run a business called time. We specialize in music lessons for SDN, adults and children in schools, day centers, and homes. We run inclusive music events, lessons and workshops that are personal to the client and what makes it unique? So we are the only company in the local area that are working within this niche and we focus around sort of songwriting projects and recordings and music videos in the community, and no one's really doing that in the area. So yeah, the number two, who wants it. The dream customers for us are going to be school activity planners, parents, people with SEN ks, and what problem do we solve with this? So we are really for people that want to inject some fun into their school or their care home. We offer bespoke music workshops that caters to really individual needs, and we help people in a therapeutic way through making music. So I'd say they'd spend time on things like LinkedIn, a lot of local community events, SEN events, things like that. Also Instagram, and social media's Facebook is really popular with the people work with as well. So put that down. Three, how will they find us? I'm going to focus on social media content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, I'm going to post there three times a week. We're going to attend local events and use word of mouth. We're going to hand flyers out and we'll also run a bit of sales campaign, email and schools and homes and different centers in the area, and we'll offer out a free first session. Number four, how will I make money. I'm going to be charging for music sessions. Let's just say for this example, a group music session is going to be 100 pounds, one on one music lesson is going to be 35 pounds, and we're also going to be applying for various funding and we'll sell directly. That would be our website, our number, email. Then when we think about the costs, I've written down some of our basic costs here. Our insurance every month is 42 pounds, Spotify is 18, website 725 for my What's next, my first goal is going to be to set up social media channels and a website. And my week one goal is going to be to book my first community sol to promote app. And the ongoing plan is to be to post three times a week to social media, reach out to five schools or homes every week and offer them that discount we spoke about earlier. So there are answers. So if you want to, this can just be your business plan. It really is that simple. We just want to be outlining exactly what our business is, how we're going to achieve our goals, who's it for. And that's perfectly fine. This is mainly a document for you and ChatBT. However, if you want to turn it into a more formal business plan, let's say you want to send it to a partner or someone who's interested in the business. We can copy and paste this into ChatTBT and we can ask it, please turn this into a formal business plan. Then it's going to really nicely throw this together in a more formal cleaner business plan. It's just throwing everything together really well, written out really nicely, and there's just a load of good, juicy info it can pull. What I'm going to lastly do now is essentially ask Chachi Bitty, I want you to be a business assistant and I want to use you for lots of different business things. Can you please remember this business plan so that we can pull back from it later when we're doing bits and pieces. So perfect. Thank you. Can you please remember this business plan for the future? I want to use you as a business assistant, and this information is great to pull from when asking you to help with different things. So you can use a similar prompt if you like, and that is going to update its memory, so it's going to yeah act as our business assistant moving forward. Okay, so we've got a really good sold business plan in place there. Let's next talk a little bit more in depth about our goals and how we want to achieve them. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Goals & To-Do Lists: All right, so now that we've got a solid business plan, let's next talk about goals, specifically, smart goals. It's just saying things like, I want to grow my business isn't really enough. We need clear, actionable steps to get those goals. So what I want to do for a second is just think about where you want to be in a year from now. Where do you see your business and yourself. And this doesn't have to be like a millionaire working full time. It can literally just be, I want to work three days a week on my business, and I've got another job on the side. So I want to be able to work three days at, let's say, 150 pounds a day, something like that, or maybe you want to hit 10,000 followers on its the ground. So having that bigger goal is great, but what we want to do is turn it into a smart goal. And now, I'm going to try and talk about this without sounding like a cheesy, sort of, like, business info video. But what Smart Goal stands for is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound goals. Sounds cheesy, but super, super effective. So what we're going to do is take those goals we spoke about and sort of put them through the Smart goal blender. So first of all, our goal needs to be specific and clear. Think about the why and how of the goal. So, for example, instead of just increase sales, we could be more specific and say, I want to increase sales by 20% in the next four weeks by reaching out to five different schools, just as an example. Next, we want to make sure it's measurable. So how do we exactly know when we've achieved that goal? For example, grow my social media presence, it's very vague, so we could put a number to that, some way of really measuring it. I want to grow my Instagram following by 300 followers in the next four weeks, for example. We want to make sure that our goal is achievable. So we may want to become a world leader in music therapy, but that is a bit more that's a big goal. Instead, we could say, this week, I'm going to sign up to a course on music therapy, for example. Next, we want to make sure that our goal is relevant to our wider business. So for example, optimizing our website SEO is great. It's relevant to our business and getting more traffic into our website. But writing that novel you've always dreamed of may not contribute to the growth of the business. Lastly, we want to make sure that our goal is time bound. This creates a sense of urgency and a clear deadline for that goal to be achieved. For example, rather than just find new clients, we could say, book three new clients within the next three months. Now we've spoken about smart goals. What I want you to do next is write down three goals for yourself that fit into that criteria. For me, my first goal is going to be to sign three new clients by the end of the month through email sales campaign. Second, I want to try and gain 100 new followers on Instagram in 30 days, three, I want to make and build the website by friday. Okay, so now that we have those smart goals in place, what we can do is ask HATGBT how to break those goals down into actionable, easy steps. Because even though these goals are meant to be achievable and smaller by nature, it's still easy to think, well, how do I achieve 100 new followers on Instagram the next 30 days, for example. What we're going to do is ask HATGBT. Now, because it knows so much about our business from our business plan list it's going to know how to help us the best. We can ask HAGBT Hey, can you help me create a strategy to increase my Instagram following by 130 days? What should I take? What steps should I take each week? And so let's ask and see what it comes back with. And so it's broken down a ton of really easy bite sized actions that we can take that are totally relevant to our business specifically. So, for example, it said about following local schools, SEN organizations of parents groups. Again, if this was a different business, it would say something different and give us loads of good things to do optimizing our profile has suggested that we try and make a real about our client success story, which is a great idea, and behind the scenes look at music session, all just really clear actionable steps that we can take right now that don't seem too overwhelming to get that bigger goal of yeah, increasing your insta grad following or whatever it is. It's even prompted us there to track the progress of what we're doing. So posts are performing the best, checking when your followers are most active. So a really good action plan there on how to achieve some of those bigger goals. We can also use Chat GBT to brainstorm different ideas about how to reach our goals. So for example, what are some creative marketing ideas to get more customers per time let's see where it comes back with. So it's come up with a list of really interesting, really relevant ideas for our business. Free introductory music sessions, different partnerships, different schools I said about reaching out to five local schools, offering discounts, parent educator music night. Really good idea. I've never thought about that before and streaming it on Facebook and Instagram, really good idea. SCA Music subscription box, something I've never thought of before. Really good idea, partner with different therapists in the area, speech therapists. Again, just tons of really relevant ideas. Hadn't even thought of before for my own business that's spent ten years making. Let's think again about our three smart goals. Now underneath each of those goals, I want you to write three actionable steps that you can take that are going to get you to that goal. For example, our smart goal was to boost our Instagram following and through the help of Jack GBT, I'm going to put on my to dolis for this week to post three pieces of content. I'm going to update our bio and information and put some information about free session in there. I'm also going to follow ten different schools, SNO organizations, and parents groups this week. For me, having that clear cut to do list makes these bigger goals feel so much more easy and achievable and bite sized. We've got some really easy steps to follow, and that's just going to ensure that we've got a really productive week ahead of us. Whatever goals you may have, it's really important that we write them down. A study conducted by doctor Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University found that people who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve than those that don't. That crazy. If I could sell you a pill that made it 42% more likely that you were going to achieve your goals, I would be a billionaire. So simple as it seems, honestly, write these things down. I highly recommend using something like Notion, and that means we can pull in our business plan, our goals, and those are the things we talk about into one place where we can keep them, look at them and review our progress and all that jazz. Great job in this session, guys. I'll get to next one. 5. Email & Copy: Hey, guys. Welcome back. In this next ssson, we're going to talk a little bit more about writing emails, sales copy, and responding to customer messages or being made extra useful with ChatCBT. So we're going to use it today to analyze and refine our tone so it really sounds like us and has a clear branding to it. We're going to automate some email templates so you don't have to write the same thing out over and over again. We're going to talk about really effective sales copy to send to potential clients, and we're also going to talk a little bit about personalizing individual messages and emails as well. First off, how do we keep our emails and our sales copy sounding consistent and like us? The easiest way to do that is to feed it again with good information. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste some emails that you've already sent and use that as a reference for hat GBT to make other emails and other templates. We're going to say JatGBT. Here are some of my past emails, analyze the tone so that when we rewrite new emails in the future, it matches the style. I'm going to copy and paste an email I've sent before. I think it's also helpful at this point to give them any relevant information about yourself, your age, where you're from, and just any core bits of information. I've said there also to further define the time. I'd like to know I'm 30-years-old from Essex and the UK, I love music, and I'm a pasionate teacher, just to give an extra little bit of information. So it's analyzed my previous email and said it's warm, friendly, and professional, conversational engaging style, naturally, build rapport, express enthusiasm, keep things clear inviting and use emojis to keep things approachable and personal. And it has already written out there a really nice template for new inquiries. So yeah, just really, really great, really, really useful. But obviously, at this point, we could say we want it to be more professional or more. Use any other words we want to further refine the tone. I really employ you to spend a lot of time here putting in as many emails as you can, so it really refines how you speak so it doesn't sound like an AI, like chat JibT, it sounds like you. Like you've got an assistant to understand your tone and your style when it's just helping you out. Now what we can do is use this to write really effective email templates. Rather than writing out the same email over and over again, we can use Chat GBT to write a reusable one that we can just use for common inquiries. Let's say, for example, we get a lot of emails asking about music sessions. Rather than typing out a custom response every single time, I could just ask Chat JBT at a professional warm email response to someone asking about group music sessions, including pricing and how to book. So there we've got a really nice template that's taken from some of the information we fed it earlier in our business plan, about the free 1 hour session, 100 pound an hour for group music session, and just a little bit about time. This is just a really good starting point. We can obviously change and shift any of these details and even just ask Chat DBT to further refine it, maybe say expand a little bit on what we do in the group sessions maybe, or we can offer discount for bulk bookings, whatever we want to do to feed it and then refine it ourselves. But to have something written up that quickly, it's just to timesaver. No, we can also use this for a really good personalized customer interaction. So let's say I do a session with a guy called Alex and I was writing a follow up email just to feedback to his mom about how well it went and maybe ask if they want to book on for another session. So we could say Cha Ji Betty, write a warm, friendly follow up email to Karen, mentioning how engaged Alex was in his session. He played guitar to smile like teen spirit so well, and we'd love to invite them to book another lesson. And really quickly, we can get a response, and a nice, kind, friendly, well constructed message back to Karen. It's also really good at writing effective sales and cold outreach emails. Let's say I want to reach out to some new customers, maybe some schools or a local care home, and we could give it an effective prompt to write a good sales email. Specifically with any sales emails, I think it's really important to have a clear cut call to action. This makes it really easy for people to respond to the message and gives a clear cut. Well, what do I do next? For example, rather than just saying, thanks for your time, see you soon. Instead, we can replace that with a clear call to action that's something like we've got a free slot on Friday morning for you to book in a free trial session. Let us know and we'll get that booked in. It makes it really easy for people to reply to or just say yes to when you've already sort of laid out, it's perfect, sort of, yeah, this option for them. So, for example, we could ask Cha GBT, please write a warm, professional, cold outreach email to schools, introducing my music sessions for children with additional needs. Keep it engaging and include a clear call to action. And I just said on the in there. We've got a free slot next Friday for a free trial session. Then we've got a really engaging introductory email that's perfect to send out to schools, really nice and brief, yet engaging, short and sweet, really nicely lists some of the things we offer and gives a clear call to action to be in there. Lastly, we can use JatTVT for really effective website content and general copy to using things like about sections or Facebook bios, anything like that. Let's say this week I'm building my website and I want to include an about us section as to start a time and what it's all about. Just a bit of voice to text there about why I started time and a little bit of a background. We're going to ask Cha GBT now to write us about section for our website. If I had more time, I'd load some more information in here, but just for now, this should be fine. I've just asked Cha GBT at the beginning, write about us section for our music business website, focusing on why I started it and who I help. Let's enter that in and see what it comes up with. And then we have a really nice bit of text to copy and post into our website. Now what we can also do with this, if you're happy with that, we can say condense it down for a shorter bio. Let's say, for example, your Instagram bio, we can ask it to change it into something more appropriate. Now an Instagram bio is 150 characters, so we can ask it to condense it into that amount of characters. There we have a short snappy Instagram bio using that information. This could be used for all sorts of things, like for example, FAQ section on a website can be really helpful. So we could ask it, please generate a list of FAQs for my music business time, including session prices, benefits, and how to book. And there we have an incredibly detailed list of FAQs that we can copy and paste into our website. Now, again, obviously, a lot of these things can be changed and alter depending on exactly what you're offering and what exactly your business is. Again, the more we feed ChachibT, the better it understands our business, so that when we give it these proms, it's going to become more and more specific and further focused around what it exactly is that we do. Great job on this lesson, guys. Next we're going to talk a little bit more about how ChabT can help us craft really effective social media campaigns and newsletters. I see that. 6. Social Media: Hey, friends. Welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about how to develop a social media strategy using hatGBT. In this day and age, having an effective social media is so vital to running an effective business. It's a really fantastic way of getting the word out about what you're doing, and we can make the whole process so much easier using AI. In this lesson, we're going to talk about brainstorming good content ideas, writing captions that are good for engagement, writing good hash tags and optimizing SEO, we're also going to talk a little bit about writing newsletters, too. One of the really key factors when it comes to social media is consistency, posting on a regular basis so that you're constantly connecting with your customers and people that may be interested in what you're doing. But it can be really hard to come up with lots of fresh ideas as to what to post if you're posting three or four times a week. Again, we can use Chat GBT really effectively to come up with some really great content ideas. I'm really simply just going to ask you, please give me ten in the grand Post ideas for music business time. It's listed a load of really nice ideas. They're behind the scenes, testimonials, supposed about meeting the team of participants spotlight, educational posts, some really good core ideas here that we can expand and play around with. Again, we can make these more specific by saying, I run a weekly club night on Monday. Can you also write some social media ideas for I've said hat GBT here. That's great. We run a SE and nightclub on Mondays with karaoke live bands and a raffle. Could you also create some posts for that too? It's going to give us some more specific feedback that reflects the prompt we've given it there also really helps us out there by making a caption already. We're going to go in a bit more detail in a sec, but it's really nice that's lined us up with that caption in case you want to just dive straight into that post. Also, it may sound obvious, but always be taking photos and videos. Seriously, even if what you're doing feels boring or mundane, trust me, people love to see the behind the scenes stuff. You'll be surprised about what grabs attention, and it's all about keeping your audience in the loop and showing them what you're up to. The more content you have, the easier it is to say consistent with post yeah, getting a habit of filming everything, posting as often as you can. And like we pointed out a second ago, we can use hagipa to write really effective captions, too. So this can be another quite tricky thing, knowing what's a really effective grabbing caption that works on the platforms like Instagram. So let's say we've got a post in mind. Let's say, I've worked with a group of dementia patients last week and we want to make a post using a picture of them, and we want a caption that goes alongside that. Talking about the benefits of music therapy within dementia. So we could ask it friendly and engaging Instagram caption, for a post about the benefits of music therapy for dementia patients, keep it under 150 words and include an engaging call to action. So if you remember what we spoke about earlier, that call to action is so important when we're trying to sell a product or trying to engage our audience. I'm also going to ask GPC on the end. Please match this to my writing style that I pasted in earlier. It's written out a really well written, really nice caption there. But we can change this even more if we want to. Let's say if we want to make it shorter. Let's say I want to keep it under 100 words and I also want to include some scientific backed data around the effects of music within dementia. We can ask it that too. I've asked it, please keep it under 100 words and include scientific study about music within dementia. T's see what it comes up with. I think this is a really effective thing to do. I think backing up what you're saying with proof of some scientific study or an external body proving what you're saying is a really effective way to convey a message. We can see here, a study by outside society found that music activates multiple brain regions, even in late stage dementia, improving cognitive functioning and emotional well being. It's really interesting really boosts the validity of what we're saying there. And we can also use Chat GPT for really effective hash tags, which is going to help the SEO a little bit within different social media platforms. So it's already given us some ideas music therapy, dementia care, music for all. We can ask it for some more trending hashtags and see what it comes up with. As you saw there at the top, it said searching the web, it's going to be looking for the most effective hash tags over the web. As you can see here, it's also brought up the Sources tab for us, which is showing us where it's found the results from. As we can see here, it's used information from IQ hashtags and it's listed the most effective hashtags under the dementia umbrella. We can see a load of interesting stats here too. Really effective, really quick, really easy. Rather than hands all the research yourself, it just pulls in all of them for you, we've got a load of really effective hash tags there to use all over our socials for this post. Another really effective thing we can do with HAGBT is to use it to repurpose old content. For example, I've got this old blog post here that we used a while ago about how music affects people with dementia. Let's say we want to turn that into some more usable content and spread it over all of our different channels like our Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, LinkedIn. What we can do is copy and paste this into ChaGBT and at the end, we're going to say, please write this into an Instagram caption, a Facebook caption, and a linked in post. Because a lot of those platforms work very differently, a linked in post. Generally speaking, the tone of that is very different to the thing you post on Instagram. Let's see what it comes out. As you can see, there, it's linked in the tone, so the Instagram is going to be more engaging and concise. The Facebook caption is going to be a bit more conversational and a bit longer, and the LinkedIn post is going to be more professional and insightful. We can stick with what's suggested there. But what I really like to do is dive a little bit further in and make it a bit more personal to me and my brand and maybe things we've written out before. For example, we've written out some LinkedIn posts previously. For example, we've write out this LinkedIn post before. That is going to have a bit more emojis in it, and it's going to be a little bit more personal to sort of how we post online. So we can just copy and post that straight in and we can ask JGBTPlease make the LinkedIn post more similar to this. So please make the LinkedIn post more similar to this style. I'm going to copy and post that in. It's going to re jig, well, it's already written but in this style that we've pasted in. It's broken down each point into a line of its own, use some more moods and we've got a really nice post there really for linked in. But again, I really encourage you to go in and tweak and play with this as much as possible. There might be some wording in here you don't really like or you want to change the tone even more. For example, this is a little bit Americanized, just the way that certain things are written make me feel like it's an American person saying it. We could say instead make this more into a British tone, for example. It's really subtle, but certain wordings, certain phrasings are just going to be a little bit more appropriate to the British audience that we have and the way that we would naturally speak. Let's say you wanted to post this Twitter, we could easily just say, please make this post into a Twitter thread. It's going to break all of that post down into a nice little Twitter thread in it. It's even numbered the lines for us so we know how to post it. Another really effective thing I like to recommend to people starting their own business is to start a newsletter. It's a really effective way to engage with regular customers and just keep in the loop with people outside of social media. You're always reaching their inbox, letting them know about certain sales that are happening or new products. Whatever it is, I think newsletter is a really, really engaging way to stay in touch with your customers. We don't even need to do them very regularly. A monthly newsletter is way better than nothing at all. And with HGBT that whole process is just made super quick, super easy. So to get some ideas off the ground, we could ask JGBTPlease give me five newsletter topic ideas for my music business that would be valuable for my audience. I'll see where it comes back with. So it's given us some really good ideas, a bit more information about how music can support SEN individuals, a bit more of a spotlight on our SEN nightclub we spoke about earlier. Again, that's why feeding this information just makes it more and more useful. Music therapy with dementia, behind the scenes, exclusive offers. So, some really good ideas to get off the ground here. I think number three is a really nice one, how music therapy helps dementia patients unlocked memories. Can ask GBT, write a friendly, engaging newsletter about how music therapy helps to mentor patients, reconnect with old memories, keep it warm and personal. Around 300 words, include a call to action to book your free session now. I've just copied and pasted in its prompts there so it knows what we're talking about. And so there it is written out a pretty lovely, simple, readable newsletter. Okay, so what it's given us there is really, really great, great foundation to work from. If I was going to post this myself, what I'd do is dive in and give it a bit more of like say, an example of a time I've worked with someone with dementia or give it a bit more personal sort of information so it can further refine and make it more personal to me and the business. W newsletters, it's also really important to get a really tight, engaging subject line. So what we can also do is ask GBT, please write five engaging subject lines for this newsletter and see what kind of thing comes out. I think it suggested us before the power music winter, dementia cab, I think we can get something a little bit better. So by listing, some different ones there. Yeah, we just get some more options. So we can ask you for ten if we wanted to, or I'm happy with song bring back memories. The science says, Yes, I think I like how that kind of sounds. It ties in well with the newsletter. Scientific back stuff always just works well within this kind of industry, so we can go ahead and use this one. Okay, so if you chat GIPT there for some really effective social media stuff, next we're going to talk a little bit more about cash flow and forecasting and the finance side of things. So I'll catch at the end of the next lesson. 7. Cash Flow Forecast: Hey, friends, welcome back. In the snake esson, we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about finances and specifically cash flow forecasting. This is another thing that can sound like a really stuffy corporate business term, but trust me, it is absolutely invaluable when it comes to making a really sustainable, proper business for. It can accurately forecast things like your income, your outgoings, understanding your key expenses, how to adjust your pay, identify areas where you may need some extra money, or you can determine how you best reinvest the money you've made back into your business. For example, through cash flowing, you might find out that you have 300 pound profit after paying yourself at the end of the month. A small business owner, it's really tempting to think, Oh, I'm in profit, I can take that money for myself, which obviously you can't do. But through cash flow forecasting, we can instead say, Oh, okay, well, what if I want to employ someone to do my social media? I could pay someone 300 pound to spend a day doing that for me. It's something I hate and I want to get them to do it. That should give us a good boost, could bring in more sales. Therefore, bringing more money into the business. So we've used that 300 pound really effectively. Not only contributing to the long term plan of the business, but it's also making things more enjoyable for us. Like I said, if you hate doing social media and you pay someone else to do it, you've made the job more fun and more engaging for yourself. It's also great for things like paying yourself for sick days, working out if you can afford to take holiday and working out material costs. It's just such an important, efficient way of running a business and which HGBT's made super super easy. It only takes 10 minutes. Let's talk about that in a bit more depth. What I first want you to do, write down any expenses you have or expect to have. This could be subscriptions to things, insurance, paying you or paying your staff, and then I need to think about your income. Where's your money coming from? How much are you roughly getting at the moment? If you haven't started your business yet, that's totally cool. We can just make a really rough prediction. Let's say if you're selling flowers at a stool and you're hoping to do three sols a month and each of those stools you're hoping to make 100 pounds at. That for now is absolutely fine. All the cash flow is doing is really taking an educated guess as to what we think we're going to achieve, what income are we expecting to have roughly. But it is just a forecast at the end of the day. It's not going to be super tightly accurate necessarily. Obviously, depending on what kind of business you run. There are all our costs, Spotify, website, insurance, all that stuff. I've also included my wage. Just for example, for the sake of this cash flow, I'm saying, I want to make 100 pounds a day from my business and I'm going to work three times a week. 100 pounds a day at three times a week, 300 pounds a week. Then next, we're going to put in our income. Let's just say for this example, I have six sessions a week at 100 pound per session. Let's say I also have 21 on one sessions at 35 pound twice a week. So I find it really helpful to keep things really simple at the start, start with these really raw incomes and then we're going to alter it and change it and make it more accurate with more questions in just a minute. But for now, I'm going to ask HGBT. Please write this into a yearly cash flow forecast for my business. It's given us a monthly forecast there, but I want to break it down even more specifically than that. I want to see the individual costs on the cash flow and I also want to see the opening and closing balance so we know how much we've got in the account towards the end of the year. I'm going to ask you. Please break it down more specifically with costs and a closing and opening balance. Okay. Amazing. This is exactly what we wanted. We can see a really detailed breakdown there of how much spend on wages, insurance, and how that reflects over the year. We can see here that with those costings, we're making a really, really big profit. Not saying your business has to do this. Mind isn't there. This is all just an example. But what we can do now is alter this with some sensible questions like, let's say you want to take a holiday. Let's say we need to account for sick days and we could think a bit further about other costs we might want or where we can potentially spend money on things like ads or whatever it may be. Let's say we want to take three weeks of holiday two weeks in December and one week in August. We won't be able to do sessions in that time. How does that reflect the cash flow? Let's ask it that. I've asked it, I want to say two weeks holiday in December and one week holiday in August, where I won't be able to run the sessions. How does that reflect in the cash flow? Let's ask it that and see how that changes the cash flow. Okay, so as we can see there, it's taken our income for December and August down as we're missing the sessions, but it's also adjusted our wages there, so it's paying us less. I don't want that to happen. I want to be able to take a paid holiday. Again, we can say to ChaGBT, I want to take this paid holiday, so please put my wages back to where they were. Okay, perfect. So you can see our wages are the same every month now. We're obviously going to be making much less, you can see in December there, we're barely making any profit, but we're enabling ourselves to take technically a paid holiday. So we can use this in just about any way we can think of. Let's say I want to adjust for sick days, say, I don't want roughly average I'm here, I don't know, ten days in a year. We can ask ChaGBT to consider that in too to assure we're accounting for those sorts of days. So please can we account for sick days, roughly ten days a year where I can't run sessions. Post that in and see what it comes back with. So just as a reformat it a little bit there. This way it looks a bit different. But as you can see there, it now reflects us taking that ten days sick pay. And now we can see that in December, for example, we're actually losing money because of those different costs we've accounted for. And that's okay because we're profiting so much in the rest of the year. But you can see, again, how this is really useful to properly plan over the course of the year. And now we can continue to ask you questions. Let's say we want to up our day rate to 130 pounds. How does that look in the cash flow? Can we afford that? So I've asked it to update it to 130 pound day rate as opposed to 100. Awesome. Okay, so it's broken it down there for us. We've got a slightly higher day right now. We're still in profit, but you can see how now where we were losing 20 pounds in December, we're losing 380. So we're making smaller profits throughout the year, but obviously we're making more, but we're still making a profit. Again, if we wanted to really go into this, we could think about, how do I pay new member of staff? Can I spend 100 pound a month on grands. Let's ask it that. Okay, amazing. Now it's updated and got a social media ads thing in there as well for 100 pound a month, we're still in profit, so we can afford that. It's now projecting we're going to make 7,800 pounds in a year profit. Hopefully, you can see how useful this is now. We can continue to experiment and play around with this cash flow. If you spread it out like this, what you'll end up doing is making the machine of your business far more productive and effective. When you have a more productive, effective business, it will make more money, and therefore rather than taking all the profit, you can just up your day rate a bit more. You can give yourself a bonus at the end of the year, like, sort of, however you want to work it. And like AGV has prompted us here, we can also download this into an Excel version if we want to send it to anyone or alter it ourselves. But anytime we want to adjust this or change it, we can obviously just come straight back into TATGBT and alter it. Let's say we lost the session, but we still want to pay ourselves the same. We can play around with that. The possibilities are really Edlers. So we've talked about how you can use a cash flow to plan what to do with extra money, but it's just as important for spotting when you don't have enough. If a shortfall is coming up, your forecast helps you figure out where you can cut back or make changes early so that you're not caught off guard and losing money. If this seems a bit overwhelming or a bit, unnecessary to an extent, we can just do much shorter cash flow, say for the next three months or the next six months, weather feels right for you, your idea, and your business. Okay, great job, guys. I'll catch in the next one. 8. Time Management : Hey, friends. Welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about time management and specifically time blocking. Running your own business is great, obviously. But like we've identified, throughout this class, it can also be quite overwhelming, like emails, newsletters, social media, sales, 1 million on one things to do. It's incredibly easy to get overwhelmed and distracted, particularly when you haven't got a boss telling you what to do, it's easy to procrastinate and get a bit lost in what's really productive. But I'm pleased to say that there is a solution. That solution is time blocking. Trust me, when I say spending just 10 minutes a week time blocking out your week and how it looks is probably the biggest productivity hack I've ever had in my entire life. To break it down, time blocking is essentially breaking down our daily and weekly tasks into small bite size chunks where we can focus on one specific task. Example, on a Monday, we can block in ourselves. The first 15 minutes 9-915 to write out our schedule for the week. The next half an hour could be for reading and responding to emails. We give ourselves a little 15 minute coffee break after if you wanted to, and we just go throughout the day like that blocking in what we're going to do and when. It's really refined in our mind as to what we're doing and the greatest things not only about time blocking but also about working for yourself is that you can make it work for you. If you want to go for a run at 12, go for it. That's fine. With time blocking, we can ensure that we have enough time to everything we need to do while getting in that run at 12. Or let's say you want to finish at four every day, we can play around with the time blocking to see if our week can allow for that. It really helps us build a week that is not only productive, but is one that we really enjoy that makes us love our job more it's just a way better way to live, again, all of this could be tied together so neatly and efficiently with hatGBT It's go to take us 5 minutes, 10 minutes a week, and it's going to make our lives so much better. So what I need to do to start is write down a rough to do list and the amount of time you think it's going to take you. I often like to give myself a little bit of extra time than I think it's going to take me to account for things like toilet breaks and phone calls. And we also want to think about anything else in our week that we generally have booked in. So like meetings, I you have a part time job somewhere, let's think about that as well. As an example, I've written down 15 minutes to write a weekly schedule, 30 minutes to check and respond to emails, 30 minutes on invoicing, an hour and a half on content creation, 30 minutes content scheduling, client outreach team meeting, two days of music sessions on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, let's say, I work part time on a coffee shop on Friday and Saturday. To five. Next, I want you to think about how much time you realistically have available to do these tasks. You may just have an afternoon. You may have your evenings or you may have scheduled admin days. For me, I'm going to say I have Mondays and Thursdays free and available to give to my business. And lastly, I want you to think about some of the things that you really like to include in your workweek. So for me, I really want to ensure that I go for a 20 minute walk every morning. And I really want to go to the gym three times a week, which takes me about an hour. And also, I want to make sure I have lunch hour every day from about 12. So we're going to write that down too. So we're going to copy and paste all that insta GBT and ask it to write out a weekly schedule for us showing where there's potential free time. So I've copied and pasted that ins chat GBT with the prompt. Please time block this into a weekly schedule for me showing where I have free space. Okay, here it's written us a really nice weekly breakdown of r to do list, and it has shown us where the free time is, as well. So for example, all of the tasks that I've asked to assign has managed to fit it all in on Monday. And actually see we've got free time from 230 onward, even if you wanted to fit more tasks in. And on Thursday, we've got all this free time. So we can go back to our todo list and think about how we can fill in some of this time if you wanted to, or we could think about, maybe aren't that Thursday could actually take that as a bit of a day off. But this week, we had a doctor's appointment on Thursday afternoon of one, and we wanted to find another 2 hours to build a website. As we've established, we've got some free time. Can ask GBT. I've got a doctor's appointment at one on Thursday and I want to find 2 hours in the week for building the website. And you can see here it's put us in for building the website in the morning. Again, we could change that. We can make that a little bit later in the day. We've got free time afterwards so we can maybe push that back to nine if you want to have breakfast at 8:20. And if you want to, we can stretch this further into more of a monthly schedule, and within that we can put on tasks that we don't necessarily to do every month, but still really important. So we could review our finances once a month or find all our receipts once a month. We could schedule that into a wider monthly schedule, too. And we can stick with hatchibT scheduling like this. But what I really like to do is to convert this into Google calendar. Way, it's just a little bit easier to chop and change things. We can share with the team. We can repeat certain tasks like morning walks, and we can also get reminders on our phone really easily when something's coming up. So nice it keeps us on track and makes things super efficient. So to do that, we're going to ask ChaGBT to make this schedule into a CSV file. We're going to download the CSV. We're then going to come to Google Calendar, hit the settings menu, hit settings again. Hit Import and Export, select file from your computer. We're going to select the CSV file and hit Import. Then when we come back to our calendar here, you can see everything that we scheduled in on Chat GBT is perfectly in place on our Google calendar. With this, we can move things around. We can change the times, we can easily make things like longer or shorter. We can see a glance where we have free time. We can go into each event and change the color. Let's say for the music sessions, we want to make these yellow and we can make certain tasks repeat, say like lunch, we want to make sure that that's booked in every day. We'll go and edit that and we can make that daily and we'll change it to green, hit save, we'll delete the old lunch breaks, and there we see for the rest of the time, we've got morning walks and lunch breaks scheduled in there. We do this for the school sessions, the coffee shop, all of our Monday tasks, things that we're going to be repeating like client outreach, content creation. Then when it comes to our weekly planning and scheduling session, we actually haven't got loads to do because it's very often the way that we have to repeat these tasks. So actually, what we're doing is just finding what we can do with these free chunks of time. So we can just schedule all that up into a nice weekly format. And it's just nice. Makes my brain tick in all the right ways, and it just raws nice and efficient and clean. Okay, so that is our lesson on time blocking and time management. Great jog and the Sasan guys, we're pretty much there. I'll see you in the next one. 9. Final Lesson: Mm. Hey, friends. Welcome back. So a massive congratulations on finishing the class. I really, really hope you enjoyed it, and you took some good information away from it. And again, I just want to emphasize that if there's anything you ever need help with, any questions, you want someone to look over your business plan or your ideas, please feel free to send it into that class project. I'd honestly love to see what you're getting up to, what your plans are, what your business looks like. If you want to keep in touch, feel free to follow me on Instagram or YouTube or any of these links appearing over here now. And although it's a completely different topic, if you're ever interested in music lessons, I've got a whole batch of music classes here on my profile. So if you ever want to go check them out, learn a bit about music, you can meet me. One last little thing sneak in there. If you did enjoy the class today, a positive review means the absolute world to me making these online classes and things. It really helps out in so many different ways, and it's just really helpful for me as well, knowing things that were good or things that were bad or things that you'd like to see, anything like that, feel free to put it into review. Hopefully, it was good. Hopefully, it's a positive one. But yeah, thanks in advance if you get the time to do that. Thank you again for joining me here on the class. It has been an absolute pleasure, really hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you very soon. Please, guys.