Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here with Renita Manley, another episode of Women in Motion and this is going to be a good one. This is part three in our AI series. And today we’re going to be talking about Content, Is that you or AI? And we have with us once again our subject matter expert, Stephanie Nivinskus with SizzleForce Marketing and author of the book Sizzle Or Fizzle. Renita, we’re wrapping up the series. This has been a great topic to talk about.

Renita Manley: Yeah, it really has. I’m really, really thoroughly happy with all the information that I’ve gotten from Stephanie, and I am looking forward to hearing how we all can keep our voices authentic while using AI.

Lee Kantor: All right, Steph, so why don’t we just jump right in? What are your thoughts about this in terms of keeping your authenticity while leveraging an inauthentic tool like AI?

Stephanie Nivinskus: It’s so important to do this, and a lot of people don’t do this, and that’s why their voices are getting diluted by the different AI tools. So, I actually have a method that I recommend people use when they are generating content and they want to check and see, does it sound too AI-ish or does it sound actually like me?

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, I’ll tell you what the method is. It’s really easy to remember. It’s called the SPOT method, S-P-O-T. And the S stands for Sounds nice, but it doesn’t have any punch. The P stands for Personal touch is missing. It doesn’t have any stories that are authentically yours. It doesn’t include the verbiage that you tend to say. It doesn’t have your personality. Like if you’re a really energetic and friendly and conversational person, it might sound dry instead of the way that you really show up in the world. And it lacks nuance.

Stephanie Nivinskus: The O stands for Overused words, and I think we touched on this in the last episode, but I have a list of over 1000 no-no words for AI. And I think everybody should have a no-no list. And what’s going to be on your no-no list is probably going to be a little different than mine, because it’s dependent on the type of content you’re having it create. But there are some no-no words just across the board that everybody should forbid ChatGPT from using. And a few of those are the word delve, the word tapestry, the word unlock, unleashed, and fluff.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Those are five words, that if you see those, get rid of them. It’s not that they’re bad words. I mean, I’ve been a copywriter for 30 years, and those are words that we’ve used in copy over the years, but they’re overused by AI. They’re way overused right now, so you don’t want them in your copy right now, not forever, but not right now. And then, the last one is T, too much redundancy and rambling. AI loves to ramble. So, that’s the SPOT method for you.

Lee Kantor: Now, what are some of the mistakes you’re seeing people, when they’re using AI, is it that they’re just prompting and then they’re just kind of cutting and pasting and they’re not kind of giving it the once over and adding back the humanity to the content?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, I see that all the time. And it’s the biggest way to make it say your brand fits in with the masses. And that is the opposite of what we’re going for. We want to differentiate. We want to set our companies apart. And so, if you take AI’s first output and you copy and paste it, you’re just going to get regurgitated garbage.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody say they’ve never used AI for content and they’re doing a social media post on LinkedIn, what would be kind of your SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, to create a LinkedIn post using AI?

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, the first thing I would do is I would tell the AI what role it’s playing. And this could be, you know, in the case of writing a post for LinkedIn, you would want to say you are a LinkedIn social media marketing expert. So, you assign it a role so it knows, okay, I’m looking at this from this vantage point. And then, you would say, I want to write a post about blank. Then, you would say my audience is blank. Some of their pain points are blank. I sell whatever product or service, and this helps solve their pain point by blank. Now, that’s obviously for more of a promotional post. But giving it that information will help you start to generate where you need to go.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I have a tool that I developed called The Bot Boss, and a whole bunch of training went into this. So, when it generates a LinkedIn post, you’re going to go way deeper, and you’re going to get something that’s on brand, and something that is really designed to convert and attract people much faster than going generic into, you know, ChatGPT out of the box. But that’s a good way to start by giving it that information.

Renita Manley: Hey, Steph, I do have another question about finding your voice by using AI. So, let’s say I’m a WBE, what if I don’t quite know what my voice is? I’m professional, but what if I don’t know what my voice is, how do I discover my voice in order to use it properly with AI?

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s an awesome question, and I have good news for you, it’s really easy. You can actually take a few different things that you’ve written. They could be social media posts. They could be blog posts. They could be a report that you wrote. You know, really anything. And you take a few of those things and you upload them into ChatGPT or the AI of your choice, and you ask it to analyze what you’ve written and to identify your voice for you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And instruct it to say things like, I don’t just want a generic tone, I want to know what are the intricacies of my voice, what are the things that I’m frequently saying? What is the the style? What is the tone? What is the personality? What’s off limits, blah, blah, blah? And then, you can also ask AI, What else do you need to know from me in order to continue defining my voice?

Stephanie Nivinskus: I mean, originally when I first started using Claude about two-and-a-half-years ago, I had it generate my brand voice for me. And one of the things I asked it was, if my voice was any celebrity, who would it be? Because it just kind of brings it to life outside of yourself. And mine told me it was Ryan Reynolds, which I thought was hilarious. So, apparently I sound like Ryan Reynolds.

Renita Manley: Did it tell you why you’re Ryan Reynolds?

Stephanie Nivinskus: It sure did. I don’t remember all the details. I just thought it was hilarious and started laughing.

Renita Manley: So, let’s say I have no idea what my voice is. I’m going to listen to your tips that you just gave me. But is it possible for me to go on Claude or ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I don’t know what my voice is? Can you help me discover my voice?”

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, exactly. Just doing what I just said. Yeah, you ask it to analyze what you’ve written and tell you what your voice is. Now, as a copywriter, I’ve helped people create their voices forever. And I will tell you that the traditional method of determining a voice is much more in depth than what you’re going to get from ChatGPT doing a once over.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, that being said, consider this a start. But if you really, really want everything written in your voice, this is when you’re going to want to bring in a human to help you create a brand voice guide. And that is something that, you know, ChatGPT or whatever, they’ll do a high level. You could think of it as a 30,000 foot overview of a brand voice.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But if you really, really, really want to dial it in, if it’s super important, which most of the time it is, that’s when you’re going to contact somebody like me, or me, if you want to contact me, and we can create your voice for you or we can create your voice with you. And there’s a whole process that goes into it. It’s a long interview. It’s about three hours long. Because we just ask you one question after another after another after another, a trained copywriter can spot these patterns. And we also know what questions to ask you to get to the brand voice.

Stephanie Nivinskus: It’s not just like, “Oh. Well, how do you want to sound? Do you want to sound friendly and conversational? Great.” So does everybody else. You know what I mean? We’ve got to get into what makes you you. And that’s what happens when you have a human doing this part of the job.

Lee Kantor: And when you’re working with your clients in and around perfecting their voice or getting a handle on it, what is the output you deliver back to them and how do they use that kind of moving forward?

Stephanie Nivinskus: When I’m done with it, they get a brand voice guide. And it is – oh, goodness – probably 15 pages going deep into their voice. I’ve actually seen brand voice guides that have been over 100 pages. I don’t do that because I think it just overwhelms everybody. Fifteen pages sounds like a lot to most people. And it’s in a PDF form, and I tell them, upload this to your AI and enter the prompt, you would say something like, this is my brand voice guide, read it, analyze it, tell me what you understand. And then, it will spit back an output for you and you can review that. And if anything doesn’t seem quite right, you can tweak it. You can say, “Okay, you got all that right. Here’s where you, you know, went off the rails. You got to dial this back in. This is what we’re looking for.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: The brand voice guide, it gets into so much of the psychology of marketing the persuasion techniques. And those are the things that AI is just not doing a very good job at, at this point, that’s why you need that human.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re working with your AI and you’re uploading the brand voice, you’re uploading these forbidden words, you’re explaining who your target market is and what you sell and all that stuff, is that something you have to do every single time you prompt it? Or is this something that happens one time and then it knows who you are and you don’t have to kind of reiterate that over and over again?

Stephanie Nivinskus: That depends on how you use the tool and which tool you’re using. So for example, if you’re using ChatGPT, you can tell it to save this in its memory and it’ll save it in its memory. If you’re using it in Claude, you can create a project, and you can do that in ChatGPT as well. But you can create a project, and in the process of creating that project, say you must reference these source documents every time you generate anything for me. So, yes, you can absolutely do that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Will it remember things by default? For a time it will remember some things. But then a day will come and it won’t remember it at all. And you’ll be like, “What happened to you? What did you do last night? Because you apparently don’t remember anything about me even though I’ve been talking to you every day for, you know, the last year-and-a half,” whatever. You want to avoid those scenarios from happening, because then you’re going to have to go through the whole retraining process, and it takes time and care and attention to really do it right.

Lee Kantor: Now, is that a reason to kind of have all of these documents that are about your past history and what you’re trying to achieve somewhere, that if it does forget, you can remind it and then just quickly upload it to get it back top of mind. Is that just part of how you have to deal with AI at this stage?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, absolutely. I always tell people, you know, I use Google Drive, whatever you guys use, have a folder on your computer with all of these key guides that it might need to reference on more than one occasion. So that, if by chance, at a certain point when you’re using a free model or even the paid models, it will run out, the thread will run out of room, and it will say you can’t do anything else in here. And it makes people really upset and really sad, and rightfully so. However, if you have a Google Drive with your core training material in it, then you can just start a new thread and upload all of it again and start over and you’re good to go.

Lee Kantor: So, that’s a best practice to create a Google Drive folder or some sort of folder that has all of this key background information at the ready so that you can use it. If you switch to a different AI or whatever, everything’s there ready to go, and you don’t have to go searching for all this stuff.

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s right.

Lee Kantor: So, now, where do you see kind of the biggest opportunity for the WBEs when it comes to branding in AI?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Where do I see the biggest opportunity for the WBEs when it comes to branding in AI? I think really in differentiating. I think that’s the biggest opportunity. I think that there’s so many WBEs that could be positioned as thought leaders in their industry, that could be positioned as the go-to authorities in their space, but they’re not, and it’s because they’re not differentiating themselves well enough, and they’re not really doing what’s required to create a personal brand that stands out and attracts attention. And I think that’s something that so many WBEs are just leaving so much money on the table by not doing that.

Lee Kantor: And then, would a way to do that be what you mentioned earlier, is you upload a bunch of stuff that you’ve done and ask it for help, in helping you kind of identify what it is that is your secret sauce or the differentiating features?

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s a place to start. That’s very much a starting point. Honestly, if you really want to do this, you need to get my book. You need to get my book because I wrote 251 pages about how this works. So, there’s not a quick answer that I can just give you right now and say, oh, if you just do this, wave the magic wand and it’ll dial everything in. It’s a process, and there’s a lot to it. But I have a book. I’m sure there’s YouTube videos out there that talk about stuff like this. I talk a lot about this stuff on my TikTok profile. So, yeah, that’s what you need to do.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Think of when you’re using an untrained AI, meaning nobody has custom trained it for your brand, including you. When you’re using something like that, you need to expect that you’re going to get first level stuff from it, first draft is another way of saying it. You should not expect to get final documentation from an untrained AI, because if you’re considering that final documentation, I guarantee you, you are leaving so much money on the table and you are sounding like everyone else.

Renita Manley: So, Steph, I’m glad you’re bringing up money because that was actually going to be a part of my next question. So, let’s say I’m using AI properly. I got my voice down. I got your book. I’m doing my thing. Can you explain to all our business owners out there how using AI to perfect your voice and your brand voice translates into more money and more contracts?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. Well, we all know the old saying people do business with people they like, know, and trust. And so, when you are perfecting your brand voice using AI, it’s going to make you more likable. It’s going to make you more likable. You’re going to be consistent, meaning not just your frequency will be consistent, but the way that you show up will be consistent. People like that. People like that because it makes it easier to trust you. It makes it easier to believe you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like, know, and trust, when you are using AI to create content for you, it will also really help you dial in that sector on how you can and should be known in your spot. All of those things, if you make people like, know, and trust you, they want to do business with you. It’s just the way it is.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I mean, yes, there are some organizations that it’s all about lowest bidder gets the deal. But there are a lot that are like, “You know what? We would pay more if it was someone that we liked, knew, and trusted that was going to do the job,” because that carries a lot of weight.

Lee Kantor: Now, how would you help the WBEs, we’ve talked about this in the past, that storytelling is an important component of communication and persuasion and differentiation, how would you leverage AI to improve your storytelling? Like, would you just kind of write out one of your anecdotes and then ask AI to make it better? Like, how would you use AI to improve storytelling?

Stephanie Nivinskus: I would probably start by asking it to tell me what it knows about storytelling. And I would say, tell me what you know about storytelling in this capacity? And then, it’ll spit something out and say, and what makes the stories really resonate? What are the elements that make it resonate? And are there any storytelling frameworks that are proven to attract or convert or both? And if so, what are they and why do they work?

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, I would almost more flip the switch on this one, and I would be asking the AI to tell you what it knows, as opposed to letting it ask you for more stories. Once you go through this process of kind of you’re almost interviewing the AI to find out what it knows about storytelling, then you can say, I really want you to integrate my personal stories into what you write for me, but I don’t really know what they are. I can’t really think of any off the top of my head that are super important to tell you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, knowing the type of content I’m writing, what type of stories would be helpful for you in order to give me the results I’m looking for? And then, let it tell you. And then, say, okay, ask me whatever questions you need to know about this. This is the beauty of conversational AI, you can go back and forth and back and forth until those stories are discovered.

Lee Kantor: So, kind of you’re giving it a framework or understanding its framework and then asking it to interview you to kind of uncover interesting anecdotes or points of view.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. So, have it interview you, and then after you answer it’s questions, say, Which of these would be good stories to integrate into the content you’re creating for me? Which ones do you think are the most relevant, the most riveting, the most memorable? And use that, use the AI to do that. You as a human, as always, as I’ve said in all three podcast episodes, you absolutely need to be the human that looks at everything. Don’t just say, “Oh, AI said it, therefore it’s right,” because that’s not true. AI said it, and that’s what happened, AI said it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: You’re the human. You understand the nuance. You understand the cultural expectations. AI is not very good at that. It’s not very good at that. And here’s a good thing, most of the time, if you ask it, let’s say you wanted it to write a LinkedIn post again, but you wanted it to write something political that happened, like recently we had the the No Kings Protests. Most of the time when you ask it to write something about that that relates to your business, it will say, “I’m sorry. I’m restricted from writing about that because it’s a hot kind of political, highly controversial topic.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: And so, that’s when your humanity comes into play and you have to say, okay, AI’s not going to do this one for me, or it’s going to put out something that’s super generic, so I really need to think about this using my human mind and my human understanding of what my audience needs to hear from me about this topic.

Lee Kantor: So, Steph, thank you so much for all of the information you’ve been sharing. If somebody wants to connect with you and learn more about SizzleForce Marketing or get a hold of your book, Sizzle Or Fizzle, what is the best way to learn more?

Stephanie Nivinskus: You can find my book on Amazon, and my website is sizzleforce.com, sizzle like bacon, force like may the force be with you, sizzleforce.com.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you. Renita, before we wrap, is there any upcoming events or anything that the folks should know that’s coming up in the WBEC-West world?

Renita Manley: Well, if you’ve been listening to this series, you know I’m going to say it one more time, make sure you go to wbec-west.com, go to our events calendar and sign up for our upcoming Unconventional Women’s Conference, happening July 23rd in Newport Beach, California.

Lee Kantor: All right. Well, this is Lee Kantor for Renita Manley, we will see you all next time on Women in Motion.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here with Renita Manley, welcome to another episode of Women in Motion. We could not be doing this show without the support of WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories and covering these important topics.

Lee Kantor: And today, we’re digging in deep again on the topic of AI, and today’s episode is Build Smart Using AI with Purpose to Beat Overwhelm. And once again, we have our resident expert in AI, Stephanie Nivinskus, and she’s with SizzleForce, and author of the book, Sizzle Or Fizzle. Renita, this is going to be a great show.

Renita Manley: Yeah. So, this is part two of our AI series, and like Lee said, we’re discussing Using AI with Purpose to be Overwhelmed. So, we’re diving into how to thoughtfully integrate AI into your business, how to choose the right tools for your business goals, and how to avoid AI overwhelm and overload.

Lee Kantor: So, Stephanie, you want to kind of get us started on this topic, AI is everywhere but does it belong in everything?

Stephanie Nivinskus: AI is everywhere for sure, Lee. Does it belong in everything? I don’t think so yet, but yet is the key word in my answer. I think right now there are specific applications in life and business where AI is critical, and some other things not so much.

Stephanie Nivinskus: You know, for example, my daughter is almost 18, and she wants to get into the child care industry. And I don’t really see a place for robots running a classroom with 25 three year olds. You know what I mean? I don’t really see that happening. I could see it assisting in some ways, but there’s still going to be a human that’s needed in that space. But in terms of your typical office routines, your administrative operational tasks and marketing tasks, I think AI is a must.

Lee Kantor: Now, you’re using AI and robots kind of side by side. Are they a similar thing? Like, how are you kind of discerning the difference between AI and robots?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Well, when I’m thinking of AI, I’m thinking of bots, which is short for robot. So, you know, this is a complicated question, it’s kind of a funny one for you to ask this. Have you ever been to Vegas?

Lee Kantor: I have.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. Have you met Aura, the humanoid?

Lee Kantor: No, I have not.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. What about you, Renita, have you?

Lee Kantor: You’re muted, Renita.

Renita Manley: Yeah, I sure am muted. No, I have not met that robot.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. All of you guys, the next time you go to Vegas – actually I think it was when I was in Vegas with WBEC the last time that I went to the Sphere, and they have a whole exhibit where you can meet the humanoid robots. And humanoid, meaning they’re built to kind of look like a human frame, and they talk and converse with you, and do all this stuff. That’s super kind of sci-fi-ish right now, right? It’s very entertaining. It’s fun to think of it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like I asked it – her name was Aura – and I said, Aura, are you funny? Like can you laugh at a joke? And she went, “Yes, I can. Ha. Ha. Ha.” So, that’s a robot. It’s a humanoid. When I’m thinking of bots in an AI sense, they can also just be little worker bees behind the computer.

Lee Kantor: And then, these worker bees are just code, though.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: I mean, for the listener who is not – you’re immersed in this technology all the time, so a lot of things I think that you maybe just take for granted or understand just through being in the world that you are so much, I don’t know if everybody who is working in another area understands it in the level you do. So, I just want to get clarity around some of the terms that we’re using.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, I think that the best way to break this down is to say that all bots are actually robots, but not all robots are bots. Okay? So, if that’s not clear as mud, here’s the difference. A robot has a body, not necessarily a beating heart body, but it has the figure of a body. It can move. It might have arms. It might have legs. It might have a head. It could be in the form of a dog. It could be in the form of a human, whatever. A bot is digital. It is. It’s just code. So, it is what automates the tasks inside the computer.

Lee Kantor: And then, by leveraging that code, we’re able to have the computer, we can lean on its knowledge base of lots and lots of data that it’s kind of accumulated, plus maybe some of our specific data in order to help us think through strategic questions or tactical questions, and help us physically create tools that can help us grow our business faster. So, the topic is overwhelmed, so this can help us kind of lessen our overwhelm, because we have this partner here that’s helping us with some of the things that are overwhelming us.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, a lot of people will refer to a tool like ChatGPT as an AI assistant.

Lee Kantor: And that’s how we should be treating it, right? We should be asking it to do things for us. We should ask it questions of things we don’t understand, maybe. And then, its job is to just answer the questions and be useful to us.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Renita Manley: Okay. So, I have a question for you, what’s the easiest way to gut check your current business operations to see where AI can actually lighten the load instead of overwhelming yourself?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Great question, Renita. Oh, so good. I think the best place to start is really by thinking about the tasks that are very repetitive in your business, and which of those tasks could an assistant help with little training. It could be something like, you know, summarizing a meeting or drafting a proposal or following up on a lead. If it feels repetitive, if it feels like a time suck, there’s a very high likelihood that AI will be able to help with it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, I always say, you know, you’re never going to know if it’s really going to help you unless you test it, right? So, run a small experiment with a tool or a workflow and see if it helps you. If it helps you, great, do more of it. If it doesn’t help you, figure out if it didn’t help you because maybe you didn’t give it the right instructions, or if it simply wasn’t helpful for you. Because even though there’s a million AI tools out there that can help people, that doesn’t mean every single tool can help every single person.

Renita Manley: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, right before we hopped on today’s podcast, Steph, I was actually scrolling on Instagram and I was getting bombarded with ads telling me that I’m almost 100 years old because I’m still using ChatGPT, and there are 50 other apps that I should be using. So, what do you say to WBEs and other small business owners who are like me, still on Instagram or scrolling on Instagram and we’re just constantly seeing, “Hey, you’re using ChatGPT. You suck”?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. Well, that’s funny that you’re saying that. I have not come across that, so I must be 200 years old and they’ve just given up. But no, I mean that’s ridiculous.

Renita Manley: Let me explain it, I don’t know what actual ad it was, but if there’s anyone out there listening and maybe you have experienced this same thing with me. So, Steph, I’m scrolling on Instagram, there’s actually a horsy call, something that’s telling me that I can learn 50 AI tools in four weeks if I try.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I’ve seen that, yes.

Renita Manley: Okay. Well, what do you say to a WBE who sees that, and then they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. What am I supposed to do?”

Stephanie Nivinskus: I think it’s total overwhelm. I think it’s designed to give you the highest level overview of a whole bunch of tools, and you probably only need three or four of them. And so, I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to learn about all these things and you’re going to be like, “Oh, my gosh. I can do this. I can do that. I can do the other thing.” And, “Oh. Well, that’s not really relevant in my business. I don’t really need that.” Or, “No, I already have a system that’s working just fine for me in this capacity.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s my take on those things. I don’t think really anybody needs to know that many tools, unless this is your life like me, right? I need to know that many tools because this is my livelihood. But the rest of you guys, no. It’s silly. And it’s also like, okay, well, you can learn a tiny bit about a million different tools, or you can learn to use two or three or four of them really, really well, and you will get far better results if you do the latter.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you know if it’s better to hire an expert like yourself or just kind of dig in there? Because a lot of folks are feeling the overwhelm of this is too hard, there’s too many choices, and these ads are probably trying to do that and create kind of that fear and overwhelm. But as a business owner, how much should I be diving in and really having knowledge and ownership over this? Or should I just say, “You know what? I don’t do my taxes. I hire an expert for that. Why don’t I just hire an expert for this?”

Stephanie Nivinskus: I think it really depends how much you intend to use AI, as well as how much time you have to put into learning it. Because anybody could get on ChatGPT and enter in a couple of, you know, basic prompts and get something mediocre out. That’s easy and anyone can do that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But if you really intend to integrate AI into multiple facets of your business, AI and automations, then I think you probably need to bring in someone like me. If you don’t have the time or maybe you just don’t have the interest, maybe you’re just like, “You know what? I don’t want to do this. I want to go play pickleball” or “I can’t do this. I need to be in a meeting closing a sale,” that’s when you bring in someone like me to come in and do the heavy lifting for you, and then simplify it into step-by-step solutions that we can teach you how to implement on a daily basis really easily and really fast, so it will shorten the learning curve substantially.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And really, for you to get the most out of these tools, there is quite a bit of a learning curve. Sometimes people will be like, “Oh, I’ve got ChatGPT figured out,” “Why do you think you have it figured out?” I’ll say, and they’ll say, “Well, you know, I know how to prompt. I tell it my tone of voice. I tell it a couple things about me, and I get great stuff. I’m really happy.” Okay, if that’s where someone’s at, well, more power to them. Run with that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But I will tell you, you do not have ChatGPT figured out at all if that is what you’re saying, because it goes so much deeper than that, so much deeper, and it is capable of so much more. But you don’t know it because you don’t know the intricacies, and that’s where a professional can be helpful.

Renita Manley: I think that your book Sizzle Or Fizzle might be the perfect bridge between should I hire an expert or can I do this myself? Shameless plug, but do you think so too?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, I think it’s definitely an option for someone that’s in the middle, someone that’s like I want expert guidance. Because otherwise, what are you left with? You’re either left just kind of pushing buttons on your computer and hoping something works, or maybe you watch a random YouTube video here or there, or you go to a session at a conference once in a year, and then you try and implement it at home, you’re like, “Well, I don’t remember half of what I learned.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: My book, definitely, because it’s filled with these 30 day implementation plans at the end of every chapter. It will guide you through learning how to use AI if your goal is to build a personal brand, grow your influence, and become the go-to authority in your industry, because that’s what the book is about.

Stephanie Nivinskus: If you want to learn things like how do I make an AI avatar of myself, how do I make a clone, a digital clone of myself so I can have a YouTube channel, but I never have to actually show my face. I can have a digital replica of myself and my voice running the whole channel. If you want stuff like that, that’s not in my book, and that’s probably stuff that you don’t want to try and learn on your own, but it is so stinking powerful, oh, my word.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I have a girlfriend who did this. She’s actually a pretty big name in AI, and her name is Julia McCoy, if you guys want to look her up. She’s very much a thought leader in this space. And she started a YouTube channel, I want to say it was in January of 2024, if I remember correctly. And I think it was around June or July, we were on the phone one day chatting about all the AI nerdiness, and we started talking about her YouTube channel, and I think at that point she had something like 80,000 followers.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And I was like, “Oh, my gosh. Your YouTube channel is cranking. You did that in seven months. That’s great.” And she goes, “Oh, that’s nothing. No, no, no. I need to get it to a million.” And she’s like, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it by January.” And I was like, “All right. You know what? If anyone’s going to do it, it’s you, Julia. You go, girl.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: Well, fast forward and it’s now January of 2025. And Julia came down with this very mysterious, debilitating illness, to the point where, like, in bed for months unable to do anything. Now, turn back the hands of time a couple of months, and she had been working on creating a digital clone of herself on YouTube. Just experimenting with this.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay, so now we’re back in January, she’s super sick, but she has this clone and she’s like, “Hmm, what can I make the clone do while I’m sick?” The clone has since run her entire YouTube channel, and it has absolutely exploded, absolutely off the charts explosion. And she doesn’t get in front of a camera, ever. She does behind the scenes stuff, but there’s literally a digital clone of her. Does that make sense?

Renita Manley: It does make sense. That’s so cool. Sometimes I watch YouTube videos and I wonder, like, how does this person never sick? Like, they are always pumping out videos. I just wonder if they’re using AI clones.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, she has videos that are getting 113,000 views and it’s not her. It’s not her. She’s at home resting and healing her body.

Renita Manley: Definitely that’s so cool.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. So, it’s pretty amazing what’s possible. If you want to do stuff like that, bring in a professional. Don’t try and figure that out on your own.

Renita Manley: So, who do you think your Sizzle Or Fizzle book or what type of WBE is that perfect for? So, let’s say our WBEs out there listening and they’re like, “Hmm, I want to be an AI industry expert,” what kind of WBE do you imagine your book would be ideal for?

Stephanie Nivinskus: I think it is ideal for somebody who is really in a place of needing and wanting to establish themselves as a leader in their space. Maybe they’ve got, you know, a decent amount of experience doing what they do, but they’re kind of still a secret. You know, they have some clients, but they’re capable of so much more, they want to have a voice that’s bigger, they want to be known as a thought leader in their space, this book is perfect for that person. And that person has to have time to actually do the 30 day exercises. That is the ideal person.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And, you know, I mean, some of this stuff while I break it down and I make it step-by-step, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be done in 30 minutes. You’re learning a whole new technology. You’re learning an entirely new way of positioning yourself. So, you know, it’s a time investment, and if you have the time or you can make the time, and you want to be positioned as a leader, a thought leader, you want to become a bigger influencer, then, yeah, my book’s a perfect fit for you.

Lee Kantor: Is there any actionable advice you can share for the person other than get your book and follow the 30 day plan? But some things, the low hanging fruit they can be doing, you know, when they’re frustrated of being that best kept secret, what are some of the things that can elevate them a little bit, at least the baby steps? And maybe it’s kind of sharing some of the big kind of chunks that, that 30 day kind of game plan will allow you to do.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing that somebody needs to do when they’re kind of on this mission is you need to figure out what your place is. Like, what is the unique value that you bring to the market, and how are you going to strategically position yourself, right? This isn’t an AI question. This is a you question. This is a, well, what do I want to be a thought leader for? What do I want to be known for? Where do I want to plant my flag, so to speak? That’s step one, and that’s something that you do without AI. You’ve got to figure out not just where you want to plant your flag, but also why people should trust you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: For most of us, you can throw a nickel and hit ten competitors, right? So, you’ve got to figure out where are you going to plant that flag and what makes you trustworthy. And that could be anything from, you know, your education, it could be your experience working with certain clients, it could be awards that you’ve won. There’s a million different differentiators, but you got to get clear on that stuff and you’ve got to be able to articulate that, and then you jump to the next steps.

Lee Kantor: And that’s where they should start before even attempting to kind of plug AI into whatever system.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Clarify your unique value proposition. Figure out why they should trust you. Oh, and one other thing, identify the unique problems that you solve for people. So, everyone’s got problems, what problems do you fix or solve really, really well? And what do you really like to solve?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like, I love to solve the AI overwhelm problem. When people are overwhelmed, they’re like, “Ah, I’m pulling my hair out. I don’t know what to do” or “I’m just getting this mediocre regurgitated fluff from AI, and I want good stuff that sets me apart.” I love working with someone like that. Who do you love to work with? What fires you up and makes you feel like, yeah, today was a good day at work?

Renita Manley: I like that approach. So, what are two or three questions that a small business owner can maybe just go to ChatGPT, since we’re all so familiar with that, what are two good prompts that we can write down and save for later? Or, you know, ask ChatGPT to help us get started with integrating AI into our business.

Renita Manley: So, let’s just say, “Hmm. Steph is right. Let me see what I can do. I’m going to ChatGPT and I say, hey, ChatGPT, how can you help my business grow?” I know I wouldn’t start with that question because, you know, it’s just way too bland, but what are two very good questions that an unfamiliar WBE to AI can use to start off her prompt experience with AI.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Okay. Well, here’s something that I’m going to tell you about prompting that a lot of people don’t know. Most people will do prompts that are one to three sentences long. Unless every word of those one to three sentences is like sharper than a sword, you’re going to get very mediocre results from those kinds of prompts. They might sound better than something you could write yourself if you’re not a writer, but it’s going to be mediocre because you’re not giving the AI enough, in this case, ChatGPT, you’re not giving ChatGPT enough to work with for it to really give you the good stuff.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, a proper prompt is going to be longer. That doesn’t mean it has to be, you know, like I talked about in the last episode, my 46 page prompt, that’s not what I’m talking about either. But you need to think of it the same way you would if you were training a human being to do something for you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: You wouldn’t hire an assistant and say whatever – you wouldn’t hire an assistant and say something like write an email to this client. They would be like, “Well, who’s the client? What’s the email about? What’s the tone? I mean, are we happy and friendly? Are we congratulating them on something? Are we angry with them? Are we demanding payment on something?” You would tell them, otherwise that person would just sit at the computer and be like, “I’m supposed to write an email to this person, but I have no idea what to say.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: ChatGPT is the same way. It doesn’t know what to do unless you tell it what you want. And the more detail you can give it, the more it will dial in exactly what you’re looking for. So, yes, you’ll give it the command to write this email, but give it all the background information. Give it all the tone information. If you have a desired length for the email, tell it that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: If you want it formatted in a certain way – like a lot of people when we were growing up, most of us learned you have to have five sentences in a paragraph. I don’t know if you guys remember hearing that as as a kid, but that’s what makes a paragraph, five sentences. And you never, ever, ever have one sentence has its own paragraph.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Well, the digital world has completely changed that and turned that on its head. And now, one sentence paragraphs are the easiest way for people to digest information. So, if you want your emails written like that, you got to tell ChatGPT that’s what you want. So, I don’t have a specific prompt to give you to start with. I have more the concepts of the things that you need to share with it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And like I said in the first training that we did here or the first podcast, sharing examples of what you want it to do for you will do so much more than anything else. So, if you have an example of another email that you’ve written, or maybe another five emails that you’ve written that have gotten the desired result that you want from this email, feed it to ChatGPT. Let it see it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: You can upload a PDF, you can upload different kinds of documents and you can say, “Analyze these emails and tell me what patterns you see.” It will say, “Oh. Well, I see that you have a friendly greeting, and then I see that you bring up a shocking statistic, and then you talk about an action, or you explain why something is happening, and then you talk about a suggested solution, and then you have a call to action in it, and then you sign off the email.” It might say something like that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And then, you say, “Great, let’s make that a framework for how I write emails for this particular reason. And so, now, I need you to write this email using that framework with this kind of tone, to this kind of person, in this length, in this style, blah, blah, blah.” Making sense?

Lee Kantor: Do you think that it’s possible to ask the AI to write the prompt for you, like you mentioned, like in a general way, I would like to write an email about this, can you write the prompt that will help me prompt you better, so that you will write the prompt that’s going to get the outcome I desire?

Stephanie Nivinskus: You can, but you have to be very clear, again, with the outcome that you desire to get the right prompt, because it’s going to give you mediocre at first.

Lee Kantor: Right, but then you can edit, once they gave you a prompt, now you’re not working off of a blank sheet of paper. Now you have a framework that the AI kind of understands. So then, now, you can take that framework and then change the words to get the outcome you desire.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, you can do that. It’s just that’s kind of like a step one thing. If you want something that is better quality and going to be more effective, then that would be your starting point, but not your finishing point. You can always ask ChatGPT, “I want to do this, what do you need to know in order to help me get this task done?” That can be a great place to start with all of this if looking at the blank page is overwhelming. That gets you started.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But you’ll notice the more you start using tools like this that it’ll give you an answer to something. And then if you push it, it might change its mind. It might take you in an entirely different direction. And what a lot of people do is they take that first answer and they’re like, “Okay. Not bad. I’ll take that and then I can dot I’s and cross T’s on it and make it my own.” But it’s like you’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Stephanie Nivinskus: You can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and you can say, “What is it about this email that’s not going to be effective? Tear it apart. Tear it apart like you are my biggest competitor that’s trying to outsell me.” And ChatGPT will take the email it just wrote for you and destroy it and tell you all the reasons it won’t work. “Oh, okay, ChatGPT, well, let’s go a step farther then. Tell me this.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, don’t say tell me what you need. Give it exactly what it says and then take that output and run with it, unless you think it’s absolutely spot on. Because by default you’re going to get mediocre from it. It was trained to be mediocre.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I don’t know if you guys know this, ChatGPT and many of these – they call them – LLMs, these were trained to be mediocre. They were trained to not offend people. They were trained to kind of just be please all generic kind of outputs. And so, if you don’t want generic, if you don’t want to sound like somebody that’s regurgitating the same information everybody else is saying, you’ve got to learn to prompt differently. And that’s a whole workshop in and of itself.

Renita Manley: So, LMS, that is Language Model System for anybody listening, is that correct?

Stephanie Nivinskus: LLM, Language Learning Model.

Renita Manley: LLM, Language Learning Model. Okay, got it. So, if you’re using ChatGPT, you can go in there and say, “I need you to sound edgy and rough. You can offend me if you need to.” And then go on with the prompt since it’s been trained to be, you know, mediocre?

Stephanie Nivinskus: You can say it —

Renita Manley: Or not be mediocre?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, you can, definitely. I train versions of ChatGPT for people that are so spot on. You would be shocked, that if you met this person and you talked to them in person, you would be shocked that they did not personally author every single word of what has been written, whether it’s a book or an email. But that that doesn’t happen with a few sentences.

Stephanie Nivinskus: When I’m doing stuff like that, I’m usually spending at least three hours developing my prompts for what it’s going to do. And that’s me as someone who’s been writing copy for 30 years. If you didn’t have 30 years of experience as a copywriter, this would take you weeks, months. I don’t even know if you’d be able to do it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, yeah, it’s an interesting thing that we’re talking about, but, yes, you can say things like write something edgy and whatnot, but again this is subjective. What does that actually mean? You know, what’s edgy to you might be mild to me. And I’m like, “Oh, Renita wants to be edgy,” and then I read it and I’m like, “This is so soft,” because you left it to ChatGPT to figure out what the heck that means. That’s where giving it examples is going to be a huge difference.

Renita Manley: Understood. So, before we head out of here today, well, in our previous episode, you mentioned that in addition to ChatGPT, you use this other app. It starts with the letter P. I can’t quite remember what you said.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Perplexity.

Renita Manley: Perplexity. Okay. So, besides ChatGPT, I’m going to ask you to share with us two or three AI tools that we all should absolutely be using and why.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, okay. I will give you the ones that I think most WBEs could really benefit from quickly. And the reason that I’m going to share these is because they’re pretty easy to use, even if you don’t consider yourself techie at all, and you’re not going to have a big old learning curve, and they’re going to help you do things that most of us have to do.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, obviously ChatGPT, you need to have that. For anybody that is writing a lot of stuff, Claude is much better at writing what we call long form content than ChatGPT is. So, for example, a blog, an ebook, an actual book, Claude is going to do that a lot better than ChatGPT. So, ChatGPT is great for your shorter writing tasks. Claude is better for your longer writing tasks.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Another one, and this isn’t going to take any training – these two don’t take any training on your end at all – Fathom. I love Fathom. Fathom is an AI that you can use to record and summarize your meetings that you’re in online, when you’re on a Zoom meeting or Teams or Google Meet, whatever it is. The thing I love about it is that it’s not just recording the meeting, it’s recording the video, it’s recording the audio, it’s summarizing all of it. Once it’s done, then you can send that summary to the other people that were on the call or you can just grab a clip.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, let’s say you were on an hour long call, and there was one part of that conversation that applied to somebody in your organization who wasn’t able to be on the call. You could just pull that one clip from that hour long conversation out and share it with that team member.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Something that’s saved my backside more than once is when I’ve been on these long, long, long, long calls and I’m like, “Gosh, I know we talked about something -” you know, it might be a week later, I’m like, “Gosh. I remember we talked about that one thing, but what was it that they said? Ahhh.” You know, I’ll bang my head against the wall a few times and it won’t come to me, and I can go on the Claude and I can literally enter the words that I do remember, or even one word, and it will search the transcript and find it and give me that clip. And then, I can watch it again and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. That’s it.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: So Fathom, amazing. Also, it gives you like – I sound like I market for it. Maybe they should hire me. I promise I’m not involved with these financially at all, but maybe I should be. Fathom also will give you action lists. So, you know, you’re talking with someone, you’re like, “Okay. I’m going to do that. You’re going to do this. I’ll do that part. You do that part.” You can go into it after the call and it will say, “Who’s doing what?” I mean, it’s just so helpful.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Another tool that I love is – there’s not a lot of people that talk about it, and I don’t know why because it is awesome, it’s called Tango, like the dance. And you can use this tool to create SOPs effortlessly.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like with my company, we have so many different SOPs. This is how we do this and that and the other thing, da, da, da, da, this needs to be involved. And that’s really important for all of us, because if you’ve got an employee that has a lot of knowledge in their brain, and then God forbid that person gets hit by a bus and nobody else knows the stuff that was in their brain, your business is very vulnerable. And so, you need to get everybody doing brain dumps.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And writing SOPs is painful for a lot of people, so any tasks that are done online, you can actually get Tango and it will watch what you do online. You just go through what you normally do every day. It will watch what you do, and while you do it, it will capture screenshots and summarize step-by-step exactly what you’re doing. It writes the entire SOP with screenshots, pictures, italicize things, bold things. It’s like a dream. I got 100 SOPs from that thing in a matter of less than an hour.

Renita Manley: That’s amazing. I’ve tried to create SOPs with my own screenshots and I never finished, so that sounds amazing.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there’s a million other tools, but you asked for two or three, so there you go.

Lee Kantor: So, as we wrap here, is there anything you can share, maybe, to kind of differentiate between the overwhelm of a big picture I should learn about AI strategically and kind of in a macro view, and then tactically, there’s so many things within it, are there some do’s and don’ts when you’re kind of working kind of big picture and then small picture?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. I think big picture, you don’t need to become an AI expert at all to stay on top of what you need to know in the changing landscape of business right now. What you need to be is an expert in what you need to perform at the best capacity that you can, to be the most efficient and the most productive.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And you’re probably not going to know that off the top of your head, so that’s when you want to align yourself with someone who does this for a living that can teach you. Not teaching you generalities that apply to everyone, but teaching you what actually applies to you for your business.

Stephanie Nivinskus: On a micro level, I would say just learn one tool at a time, and maybe you make it a ten minute habit every day and say, for ten minutes today, I’m going to learn how to write better prompts, or I’m going to learn how to create better data sets. That’s the information that you feed it when you’re showing it what to do. And maybe you do that for ten minutes every day until you’re like, you know what? I’m writing killer prompts. And the reason I know that is because the outputs I’m getting, it doesn’t sound like what anybody else would say.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Can we talk real quick before we wrap? I have a list of over a thousand words that I have forbid my ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, from using, because these words have become synonymous with you use AI, don’t you? I think everybody should have a list of forbidden words. They change, but in the beginning of all of this stuff, when it started taking off, the words – what were they? – unlocked, harness, leverage, those were words that everybody was putting in everything that they were writing. Unprecedented, that was a huge one. I will say now the word fluff is what unprecedented was two-and-a-half years ago. Everybody is saying fluff. Just look for it, you guys. Look at emails. Look at text messages. Look at blog posts.

Renita Manley: You know what I dislike?

Stephanie Nivinskus: What?

Renita Manley: You know what I dislike while you’re talking about this since we’re calling things out? I hate when I get an AI generated email from somebody, and I can tell because they just didn’t take out the bolded words and they leave all the hyphens in it, I’m like, “Come on, you could have at least unbolded it and took out the hyphens.”

Stephanie Nivinskus: And all the emojis, right?

Renita Manley: Oh, yes. Yes. AI social media post with numerous emojis, like AI goes emoji crazy. Take out your emojis, WBEs. If you’re using AI for everything, take the emojis out because it looks very AI-e.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Now one thing I will tell you, like you call them hyphens, some people call them em dashes or en dashes, that’s that long dash, right? It’s very trendy right now to rip on the em dash. A lot of people are doing that saying, “Oh, my gosh. I know you use ChatGPT because blah, blah, blah.” And ChatGPT does use those all the time.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But I will tell you also, as someone who has written copy for a living for three decades, the em dash is a beautiful, beautiful punctuation symbol and it carries great weight. And I’m in love with the em dash. Don’t kiss it off and say it’s evil because it’s not. It’s a beautiful friend. Just use it properly. Do I sound like a total word nerd? Yeah, I kind of.

Renita Manley: You sound like a writer. That’s exactly —

Stephanie Nivinskus: Thank you. That’s better than a word nerd.

Renita Manley: Okay. Well, any last parting advice for WBEs who are still feeling the overwhelm? Just one little piece.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Well, stop talking about how you’re feeling overwhelmed. Because the more you say you’re overwhelmed, the more overwhelmed you’re going to feel. And instead say, You know what? Today I’m going to spend ten minutes learning something. And every time you’re tempted to say “I’m overwhelmed by this. I’m not techie. I’m not blah, blah, blah,” say, “Ah, today I spent ten days learning how to do this, and I was able to get something better. Look at me. Yay, me.” Give yourself a high five and then take yourself out for lunch.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to learn more, Steph, for your firm and your book, website, what’s the best way to connect?

Stephanie Nivinskus: My website is sizzleforce.com, sizzle like bacon, force like may the force be with you. And you can follow me on TikTok. I’m doing a lot of stuff on TikTok right now. Really, really, really short tutorials. I’m going to move them all over to YouTube and whatever eventually, as soon as I get my act together. But for right now, they’re on TikTok. And my book, Sizzle Or Fizzle, you can find on Amazon.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: And, Renita, before we wrap, can you share about that upcoming conference, the Unconventional Women’s Conference that’s happening at the end of July?

Renita Manley: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. July 23rd, Newport Beach, California. Make sure you guys go. Guys and gals who want to be WBEC-West. Wbec-west.org, go up to our events calendar and make sure you’re registered. And don’t forget to go on Amazon and look for the book Sizzle Or Fizzle. That’s what I’m doing as soon as we’re done recording because I’m in the gray area stuff. I need to be the bridge.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I got you, girl.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor for Renita Manley, we’ll see y’all next time on Women in Motion.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women in Motion. I’m so excited to be doing this series that we’re about to launch, it’s a three-part series on AI, and this episode is Adapt Now or Risk Being Automated. I’m joined with my co-host, Renita Manley. Welcome, Renita. How are you doing?

Renita Manley: Hi. Hi. Hey, Lee. How are you doing?

Lee Kantor: I am doing well. I am so excited that we’re talking about this topic, it’s so important and so relevant today. And I’m excited that we’ve got an expert, a true expert in this matter. We have Stephanie Nivinskus, and she has been in marketing for many years, and she’s an author, she’s a speaker, and she’s done so much work in this area. But before we get started, Renita, why don’t you kind of explain what this series is about?

Renita Manley: Yeah. Okay. Great. So, you know, today is kicking off our three-part AI series. Part one is going to be focusing on awareness and urgency and what AI means for your business right now. And in part two, Stephanie is going to be talking to us about building your business using AI with purpose, how to choose the right tools for your company, and how not to overwhelm yourself, because this technology is moving at a rapid pace and it can get very overwhelming. And in part three, we’re going to tackle staying authentic while using AI tools for your content and brand. All right.

Lee Kantor: All right. So, Stephanie, why don’t we get into it? Do you mind for folks who aren’t familiar, just kind of giving your macro view of AI in general and where you see it fitting into kind of a person’s marketing or even just their business nowadays.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Honestly, I see AI fitting into every aspect of business starting now, starting two-and-a-half years ago actually. But for those that haven’t jumped on the AI train yet, it is critical. AI is infiltrating every sector of business and personal lives. And so, it’s really, really urgent right now for everybody to start learning about this, to start embracing it, start using it, and start seeing what’s possible.

Lee Kantor: And can you kind of define some terms, like what is AI? Is AI like my Alexa at my house? Is AI ChatGPT? Kind of can you define some of the terminology and what the tools are?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, absolutely. So, AI stands for artificial intelligence, and technically it has been in development for almost 100 years, which always kind of freaks people out. They’re like, “What? I didn’t know that.” But to your point, Lee, yes, your Alexa is AI, your Siri is AI, ChatGPT is AI. So, there are a lot of different versions of all of this. It is a technology that is learning about how humans reason, like how humans reason, how humans think.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And what we’re going to be talking about today mostly is conversational AI, which is when you can go back and forth with the AI and literally have a conversation and work through an idea.

Lee Kantor: And then, for folks who aren’t using this, are they just not using it because, oh, that’s too scary or I don’t understand it? Or are they not using it because kind of philosophically they think it’s cheating in some manner.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I think both could be true. I think it depends on the person. I think there is a lot of fear around AI. And I think there’s also a lot of misinformation. There’s a lot of everything really. There’s also a real persistent myth that circulates that you have to be techie to use this, and none of it’s true, right? None of it is true.

Stephanie Nivinskus: There’s another fear, too, that I’m seeing people have, like they’re afraid they’re going to make mistakes. I remember when the internet first started becoming mainstream and people thought, “Oh, my gosh. If I strikethrough this word in a Microsoft Word, I’m going to blow up the entire company.” Do you remember that when people were so scared? It’s the same thing, people are afraid that they’re going to make some huge, costly mistake by using it. But, really. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s pretty hard.

Lee Kantor: Now, when a person is beginning using it, what are kind of some of the baby steps to ease your way into the technology? Do you have to, like, pick one of the AI kind of platforms? Because it’s not just ChatGPT, there’s quite a few platforms out there, Perplexity, Claude, I mean, Google has one, Facebook/Meta has one, X/Twitter has one. There’s a bunch of them floating around, do you kind of have to just pick one and just kind of start playing with it?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, that’s usually how people start. Most people start with ChatGPT just because it’s the most popular one, and, you know, you can get access to it for free, and it’s gotten the most buzz. It’s very user friendly and you can jump in and start using it right away.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And how you start using it, I like to think of it as if you all turn back the hands of time and go back to high school, and when you were in high school, your English teacher would say, “All right. Everybody’s going to write an essay about what they did over the summer.” And the prompt is, what did you do last summer? AI is the same sort of thing, you’re giving it the prompt though, instead of the English teacher. Does that make sense, Lee?

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I mean, I understand, but for some people it’s challenging because the blank sheet of paper is scary, because that means I can ask it anything, but because I can ask it anything, I don’t know where to begin, and so I don’t ask it anything.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Right, right, right.

Renita Manley: I think we’re going to actually get into more of that in our episode two, aren’t we, where we’re going to be talking about how to use it? More specifically, you got a lot of gems to give us. Is that true, Stephanie?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. We are going to be talking about that. But, you know, to help the people right now who just want to get started, I think one of the best things that you can do is start using it for a personal task before you use it for something professional.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like literally, you can say to it these are the ingredients I have in my refrigerator, tell me what I can make for dinner tonight. That’s it and just see what it can do. That’s when you’re going to start to see that this tool actually works for you, not the other way around. And once you start doing some of these simple, simple tasks, then you’re going to feel more confident to start using it in a business capacity.

Renita Manley: So, what you’re suggesting to our WBEs and anyone else out there listening, if they’re feeling a bit overwhelmed just even introducing themselves to AI, just try using an AI tool, as you suggested ChatGPT, and just play around with it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah.

Renita Manley: Just play.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, just ask it questions. Pretend you’re going to coffee with your best friend and you have a question about something. You know, maybe it’s a question about what are people saying about the new movie, Mission Impossible. Throw that into ChatGPT, see what it says.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Or maybe let’s say you’re going to a dinner party and you don’t know what to wear, you don’t know what’s appropriate to wear, and you’re going to meet some big who’s who. You could go into ChatGPT and say I’m going to a dinner party, I’m going to meet somebody that’s very influential in my field, this is where the party is going to be held, what should I wear? What’s appropriate?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Don’t overthink it is my message. Don’t overthink it. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just ask it questions.

Lee Kantor: Is there an etiquette when you’re communicating with it? Like some people I noticed use like please and thank you. Some people just ask the prompt kind of directly. Is there some do’s and don’ts around that?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. So, it’s funny, this is a hot topic. Actually, there was a report that just came out probably about six weeks ago that talked about how all of the pleases and the thank yous are actually costing OpenAI, which is the company that owns ChatGPT, like millions, maybe even billions of dollars. So, they’re saying like, Don’t say that. But then, there’s all this fear people have that the AI overlords are going to take over the world, so they’re like I better be nice to them in case they do.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I don’t subscribe to any of that. I believe that this is a robot, and this is a robot that works for me, and so I don’t say please and thank you to it. I speak to it like I’m giving it commands because it is a tool that I am commanding, not a person.

Renita Manley: Oh, God. I’m one of those people that says thank you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: It’s lovely. It’s a lovely thing to do. It’s just funny. It’s very interesting, there’s like reports about how much more energy it’s taking, and therefore wasting, and that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re using AI in your business, there was something that somebody told me a while ago at the beginning of some of these automations, that if you can put your work in a checklist form, that’s probably something that can be automated. Is that kind of a similar type of thinking when it comes to AI? If you can write kind of a list of things and tasks to do then there’s a good opportunity there to maybe have the AI help you with that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, sure. But that’s not exclusively what it can do. But absolutely, if you have a checklist that is indicative of something that AI can help you with and oftentimes automate for you, making it so that you’re not having to do these redundant time sucking tasks that are just slowing you down and costing you money, because time is money, right?

Renita Manley: Yeah, it’s a lot of money and time is moving fast. So, I know we’re keeping everything light right now, but I do want to ask you one heavier question, I know you’re ready for this. But let’s say a small business owner refuses to adopt AI, are they risking sabotaging their chances of staying relevant? Like, if we don’t get with the program, are we going to fall behind as small business owners?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Absolutely. And honestly, it’s not just like you might fall behind kind of way. It’s more like you’re going to disappear from the conversation kind of way. AI, at this point, it’s not just a nice to have. It is a visibility tool. It is a decision making tool. It is a productivity tool. If you’re not using it, you need to be aware that your competitors are. And because they’re using it, they’re reaching your buyers faster. They’re showing up in more places. They’re pitching smarter. Their positioning is data backed. So, yeah, if you are refusing to adopt AI, it’s kind of like riding a tricycle in a formula one race.

Renita Manley: Okay. So, I’m thinking like a WBE right now, and, Steph, I heard you say I risk disappearing. So, with my WBE cap on, the first thought that I had was, how the heck am I going to disappear if I don’t use AI? So, can you explain what exactly you mean my business would disappear if I don’t start integrating AI? That scares me. I’m a WBE, it’s worrying me.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And I’m not trying to instill fear in anybody. I’m trying to instill awareness, all right? The reason the business would disappear – I said it would disappear from the conversation, to be clear, okay?

Renita Manley: Yes, you did. You did.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, your business isn’t technically going to disappear. However, if all of your competitors are using it and they’re faster and they’ve got more data and they’re doing more things than you are, then you’re just going to kind of slide back behind the curtain. You’re not going to be as seen. You’re not going to be as informed. You’re not going to be as fast. And that’s going to get in the way of you staying on top of things and staying a leader in your industry.

Renita Manley: Got it. So, if I heard you correctly, what you’re saying to all of our WBEs listening is, if you don’t start integrating AI, you’re going to be missing out on all the benefits of it, such as the data information that you can get. And other businesses are going to be using their data from AI to move their company forward while you’re still checking emails.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah.

Renita Manley: Okay.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Just for anybody that was around when the internet first became a thing, I always point people back to that. I know I touched on this a little bit earlier, but it’s so true, you guys. For the Gen Xers in the room that are listening and some of the older millennials, you guys might remember this, there were a lot of people that said I am not going to use that internet thing. I’m not going to do it. I don’t need it. I’m fine the way I’ve been doing business all of these years. And think about it, where are they now?

Stephanie Nivinskus: If there’s anybody on this planet that is still refusing to use the internet, how relevant are they? How much are they part of the conversation? They’re not. The same thing happened with, you know, social media, there is a segment of the population that’s I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to use it. I won’t do it, I won’t do it, I won’t do it. And the conversation continued, it just continued without them. I don’t think anybody in business wants the conversation to continue without them.

Renita Manley: So, I actually read a lot of articles, Steph, that kind of go into what you’re talking about. A lot of women – and this is not just me saying this. These are articles that I researched before coming on this podcast. I read these articles and women are more so not implementing AI. We’re implementing it. We’re integrating it at a slower pace than our counterparts. So, why do you think that’s happening specifically with women?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. I think women are more susceptible to being afraid of change than men are. And I know some people might be like, “What are you talking about? I’m not afraid of change.”

Renita Manley: We didn’t say this. It was the research.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I think that you are. I think that we are. I think we’re wired differently. We are. We’re wired differently. And that’s okay. That’s okay. But we have to decide, because we’re wired differently, how are we going to move forward.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And like I was telling Lee a little bit ago, you know, there’s so much fear around something new, something unknown. How is this going to work? Is this going to replace me? This is so overwhelming. You know, we have all of this negative mindset stuff, just like going around in circles in our brain, and we need to just stop. And we need to remember this is a tool. This is a tool that’s here to help me and I can start small. And no, I’m not going to blow up the world by asking AI the wrong question or giving it the wrong command.

Lee Kantor: Now, what are some kind of symptoms that I might be in a space in my industry or my work that others are using AI and kind of they’re out competing me? Or is there some kind of symptoms or signals maybe from the marketplace that are kind of telling you, but you may not be noticing it, that AI is around you and you’re slowly disappearing, like you mentioned earlier?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Well, I think, you know, sometimes when you get on a call for an RFP, you get on these group calls where they’re answering questions, I think those Q&A sessions are going to continue to look real different than they used to, because a lot of people are going to do their research with AI ahead of time so their questions are going to change.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And so, if you’re asking the same old, same old, and you hear other people asking questions and you’re like, “Wow. I didn’t even think about that. Oh, my gosh, that never occurred to me. Huh,” that’s an indicator that they’re using AI to help them come up with really insightful questions that will help them move forward. And that’s a red flag to you, like hurry up, get with it, get on the train.

Lee Kantor: And you mentioned that AI is extremely powerful. And it isn’t just for kind of some of the low hanging fruit, like you mentioned, regarding tasks or some basic automations. But you think that there’s also a place for it when it comes into, like, strategy and more of the kind of big picture thinking and maybe longer term thinking, like that’s an opportunity if you start leveraging in there.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s what I do. I’m an AI marketing strategist, and so I am constantly using it to help me play out different strategic initiatives. I’m constantly using it. I like to think of AI as my sparring partner. I actually tell it to act as my sparring partner. Because what I want it to do is not just give me answers to things, I want it to help me dig into a strategic initiative and a direction that I may be thinking of going.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And then, I want it to give me this different perspective and tell me all the reasons that might not work, or all of the blind spots I may not be seeing, things like that. And then, that makes my critical thinking process go even deeper and be more effective, because I’m not just thinking from one vantage point, I’m thinking from vantage points that are not like naturally at the top of my mind. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: Yeah. One of the things I like to also do is I want it to be the expert in the area. Like I’ll give it parameters in helping it help me. And I want it to be best in class or I want outside the box thinking that, you know, an average player wouldn’t think of. And I want it to push and I don’t just want it to answer.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. And there’s a couple things I’ll say about that, Lee. One mistake that I see a lot of people make is that they will say things like be a smart assistant and give me time saving solutions. A prompt like that or a parameter like that is pretty vague and it’s up for interpretation by the AI. And so, you could get exactly what you want and you could get something that’s totally off from what you’re looking for.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And I’m a huge believer that AI responds much better to being shown what you want than being told what you want. And so, what I mean by that is when you go into ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude, or whichever one you choose to use, whenever you can upload examples of what you’re talking about, you’re going to dial in the results so much faster.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, for example, if you want it to help you work on an RFP, give it an RFP with any private or sensitive information blacked out. That’s critical. Make sure you do that. Because I’m going on a little tangent here, but just so you know, do not act like anything you do on any AI is going to be private. I don’t care what anybody says to you. You need to be very aware of the fact that, especially right now, there’s a court order out actually right now that is requiring OpenAI to save all conversations, including deleted conversations for a certain amount of time. It might get overturned. Who knows what’s going to happen with that?

Stephanie Nivinskus: But back to the point, once you’ve blacked out any sensitive information, upload that into, let’s say, ChatGPT and say analyze this RFP that I won. Tell me what I may have said in this RFP that made the people that hired me choose me over my competitors. Like, have it analyze things and then say apply this same framework to helping me fill out this next RFP.

Lee Kantor: And so, the more specific you are upfront and give it source material, then you’re going to probably get a better output from it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Absolutely. You know, even if you want it to help you write something, well, don’t just say write something that’s smart. Give it a little sass and make it friendly. Don’t just say that because it’s so subjective. Give it an example of something that you’ve written already that you love that is those things. Or it doesn’t even have to be your own thing. It could be something somebody else wrote, and say, you know, I love the way that this was written. This stood out to me because X, Y, and Z. Try to mirror this tone. Even asking it sometimes, how would you describe the tone of this communication? I want it mirrored in what you do for me.

Lee Kantor: Now, where do you kind of draw the line when it comes to delegating kind of this type of job to your AI? Is it something that you ask it to do something and then you cut and paste the answer, or is it more of you’re still having to kind of put your secret sauce onto whatever comes out of it. Like, do you delegate or do you abdicate when it comes to the outputs from AI?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. The biggest mistake people make is putting something into ChatGPT or whichever AI they’re using, and copying and pasting it without giving it their human intelligence. The biggest mistake they make. Number one, it makes you sound like everybody else. Number two, it can often be filled with inaccurate information. Number three, can misrepresent things. Number four – I mean, I could go on and on and on.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I am a huge believer also that AI without HI, meaning AI, artificial intelligence, without HI, human intelligence is dangerous. You absolutely need to be supervising it, overseeing every output that it is giving you. Now, things are advancing very, very rapidly, and there are now things called AI agents that are much more hands off than the basic things that a lot of people have been doing the last couple of years, you still have to oversee it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: I built an agent probably two months ago, and this thing is insane. It’s amazing what it was able to do for me. However, I still went through every single word it gave me, and I found inaccuracies, and I found things that I had to shift to make sure that it was relevant, full of integrity, and useful for the purpose that I had for it.

Lee Kantor: Can you explain what an AI agent is for people who aren’t familiar with that term? And is it something you purchase or is it something you create? Like what is an AI agent and how can somebody use one?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, there’s a lot of arguments out there about what an AI agent is, and there’s a lot of people that are calling things agents that are not actually agents, so I’ll start with that. But I will tell you that an agent in the truest definition is something that can work autonomously. So, something like ChatGPT is conversational. You write something, it writes something, you write something, it writes something.

Stephanie Nivinskus: An agent, for example, there’s one called Manus that I use. This is what I did a couple months ago on Manus, I wrote a very, very, very long prompt. It was actually 46 pages in Google Docs. I wrote a 46 page prompt of exactly what I wanted it to do, and then I said, go to town, have fun, I’m going to bed, Manus. And I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and I received a product that would usually take me about a month of time to complete, but it did it literally while I slept. It’s crazy. That is a true agent.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like I said, I still went through it and redlined it because you have to. I mean, that’s just responsible use of AI. But the fact that it can do things like that, as opposed to just converse with you about things, write a social media post, write a blog post, respond to an email, blah, blah, blah, that’s the simple kind of starter point. The agents are more like, nope, we can do this from start to finish. Good to go without your involvement.

Renita Manley: So, what you’re saying is, if we have a more profound task for AI, we should be using Manus and not the conversational ChatGPT?

Stephanie Nivinskus: No, no, not necessarily. And again, that’s subjective, too, what makes something profound, right? You know, the reason I went to Manus was because I was testing if this could literally replace me in a certain aspect of my work. And so, I gave it an assignment that, like I said, takes me about a month as a senior level marketer. I’ve been in marketing for 30 years, you guys, I’m not new to this. As a senior level marketer, I laid out this 46 page long prompt explaining exactly what I do, how it needs to be done, da, da, da, and threw it into Manus and said, now do it and let me see how good you are. I wanted to evaluate my threat. And it was good, but it wasn’t good enough without human intervention.

Renita Manley: Yeah. Human intel, yeah, so that HI aspect was missing?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. The human intelligence, it was. It gets redundant too. That’s another thing that happens a lot. When you’re doing some of the more complex work, it will start to say the same thing 15 different times in 15 different ways. But then, if you read through it, you’ll be like, okay, I got it. I got it the first three times you said it. So, you’ve got to go through and you’ve got to edit. I like to think of AI is going to get you 90 percent to the finish line, the other 10 percent is where your human intelligence comes into play.

Lee Kantor: Now, for the folks that are going to do this now, they hear what you’re saying and they feel the sense of urgency. Is it something that you can just rely on the free versions of all these AI, or is it something that you have to really pay whatever, $20 a month or whatever it is for any given one of these tools?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. I think it depends on your usage, like what are you trying to do. I think that if you’re doing simple things like help me write an email response, you can get away with the free version of stuff. When you’re doing more complex tasks, when you are doing tasks – you know, I use probably about five different AIs every single day, multiple times throughout my day, and then I use other ones outside of that.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, for me, I might be considered a power user. And for me, I need to have the paid versions of these tools because I do get better results from them. I get access to different features than someone who’s just using the free version gets. I get access to things faster than a free user would get. Just like anything else, you can use an app on your phone, you can use the free version and you’ll be able to do some stuff. But if you want the really good stuff, you got to pay. AI is the same way.

Renita Manley: Okay. So, this might be a little bit intrusive, but I bet someone was listening and wondering what five AI apps is Steph using every day. So, don’t give us five because I don’t want you to give us all your secret sauce, but maybe share like two or three apps that you’re using every day. That already made me overwhelmed again.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, yeah. Don’t be overwhelmed. Be excited at the opportunity. Oh, my gosh. There’s so much I could do for you.

Renita Manley: I’m trying. I’m trying.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yay, AI. That’s what we’re doing. Okay. I have ChatGPT open all day, every day. I have Perplexity open all day, every day. For those of you guys that aren’t familiar with Perplexity, I am telling you it is your BFF. You will never use Google again once you use Perplexity. It is such a better experience.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Like you know how when you go to Google and you put in a query for something and it’ll serve up some ads, and then it’ll serve up ten different blue links that you can read the little Meta description of and decide whether or not you want to click on it to get more information, that’s the Google experience, aside from the AI overviews that they’ve started integrating up at the top.

Stephanie Nivinskus: When you go to Perplexity, it doesn’t give you a bunch of links that you need to research. It gives you the answers that you want, and then it gives you the citations that you can click on if you want more information on the topic. It’s so much more effective. It’s faster. It’s more thorough. Oh, my gosh. If Perplexity could be my boyfriend, it would be.

Renita Manley: It would be the perfect one, huh?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah. Right. Right. This coming from a very happily married woman for 25 years.

Renita Manley: Okay. Same. Hey, hubby.

Lee Kantor: So, let’s talk a little bit about your book. Can you share what kind of prompted you to write the book, Sizzle Or Fizzle? What was kind of the impetus for writing it? And what are you hoping the reader gets out of it?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yeah, the reason I wrote it is really because there is such a sense of overwhelm out there, and people don’t know how to use this stuff correctly, right? They’re getting a lot of mixed messages. And so, I wanted to write it as someone who is not just an AI expert, but a marketing expert, because those two skills combined make you see things from a different vantage point, if that makes sense.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, what I did in the book, it’s much more than just a typical book. It’s not something you’re going to sit down and spend a couple hours reading through and be done. At the end of every chapter, there are exercises for you to complete, there are terms for you to learn, there are step-by-step things that you’re supposed to do. Like it will say for the next 30 days, here’s what you need to do in days one through seven in order to reach this goal. All the goals are things about how to establish yourself as a leading voice in your field, how to build your authority, how to build your personal brand.

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, I have chapters on things like creating communities online, and a chapter on writing content, and a chapter on speaking, and a chapter on all these different things that people do to market their business, but I’m teaching you how to use AI to speed up the process.

Renita Manley: So, your book, Sizzle Or Fizzle, what you’re telling me is it’s all about how you can position yourself to be the go-to expert in your industry?

Stephanie Nivinskus: Absolutely. How to use AI to do that.

Renita Manley: Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool to know, but let me ask you this, why is it important right now for WBEs to be using AI to position themselves as the authorities in their industries, and specifically how can Sizzle Or Fizzle, your book, help our WBEs do that? And again, how can your book, Sizzle Or Fizzle, help us position ourselves as go-to authorities in our industry?

Stephanie Nivinskus: So, the book is going to help you with those 30 day implementation plans that are at the end of every chapter, starting with chapter three. So, that’s what it’s going to do, you’re going to read that chapter and then dive into the 30 day implementation plan. And it’s going to break it down into step-by-step things to do, so it’s going to crush that overwhelm. It’s going to crush that misinformation. It’s going to crush the lack of clarity, because I’m literally telling you day one, do this right, and when you read the chapter, you’ll understand how to do it.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Now, the one thing I did not include in the book that a lot of people are like, “Oh, how come you didn’t include a list of AI tools?” And I’ll tell you exactly why I did not do that. I would have loved to do that, but I’m telling you, my book would have been irrelevant by the time it went to print if I did that because the AI tool landscape is changing literally on an hourly basis.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And so, if I had written like, “Oh, yeah. You need to use Claude for this,” that answer would have been totally different today, right? You need to use, you know, ElevenLabs for that. Well, maybe, maybe not. So, I don’t have a list of recommended AI tools in there for that very reason.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But if anybody has questions about specific tools that I recommend for specific purposes, you know, please reach out. That’s what I do. I’m here to answer that question. I’m actually on TikTok, so those of you guys that are TikTokers should find me. My handle is @sizzlefrce, the name of my company, S-I-Z-Z-L-E-F-O-R-C-E. Sizzle like bacon, force like may the force be with you. I am on TikTok usually two or three times every single day dropping very relevant, very practical AI usage tips. And anybody, whether you’re a beginner or you’re an advanced user, anybody can learn from this.

Lee Kantor: And kind of the bottom line message from today’s episode, though, is don’t wait. There’s no perfect time to start. Today is the perfect time to start.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Yesterday was the perfect time to start. Today is the next best choice.

Renita Manley: Today is the perfect time to go to sizzleforce.com – is that what it is? – and get Stephanie’s book.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Oh, yeah. Actually, you’re going to find my book – I need to put it on my website. It’s not there yet. Just go to Amazon, because then if you’re a Prime user, you can get it shipped for free.

Renita Manley: Oh, that’s fancy.

Stephanie Nivinskus: And so you guys know, it’s available as an audiobook, it’s available as an ebook, it’s available as a softcover book, and it’s available as a hardcover book. So, however you like to read, I’ve made it possible.

Renita Manley: If you want to get started with AI today, then I recommend you all go check out our WBE certified Steph Nivinskus. Go to Amazon, type in Sizzle Or Fizzle and it should pop up, is that what you’re telling us?

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s exactly what I’m telling you.

Renita Manley: And that’s exactly what any WBE listening to this should do right now.

Stephanie Nivinskus: That’s right.

Lee Kantor: And, Renita, what is the second episode going to cover?

Renita Manley: Well, let me see here. Let me check my notes. I believe we’re going to be talking a little bit more about some current tools. So, I know she doesn’t have those listed in her books, but we’re going to be talking a little bit more about some tools that you can use to help with your overwhelm, and that’s pretty much it. That episode might be old in like three months, according to Stephanie.

Lee Kantor: Right.

Stephanie Nivinskus: But it’s going to be really helpful for people that listen to it right away. It’s going to be real helpful. And we can always do a follow up conversation. This is what’s neat, honestly, you guys, this is one thing, if I could just drop this before we wrap up.

Stephanie Nivinskus: It is so important to stay on top of all of this stuff. When you’re running a business outside of this space, it probably feels impossible. I tell you honestly, this is my business and it still feels impossible. So, that is my strong suggestion to you, find an expert who makes this their life, and look to that expert to summarize things for you quickly and what you really need to know. Because a lot of it you don’t really need to know, right? But there are some things that will absolutely change everything for your business, and make you so much more productive, so much more efficient, and honestly, so much more profitable if you use it right. It’s good stuff, you guys. The opportunity is amazing and I hope you will start using it.

Renita Manley: Today – or yesterday.

Lee Kantor: And, Renita, before we wrap, can you remind the listeners about the upcoming Unconventional Women’s Conference.

Renita Manley: Absolutely. If you are not registered to attend our Unconventional Women’s Conference, it is coming up July 23rd at Newport Beach in California. You just want to go visit our website, wbec-west.org, click on events at the top of the page, look for the month of July and register to come to Unconventional Women’s Conference, July 23rd, Newport Beach, California.

Lee Kantor: And, Steph, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Stephanie Nivinskus: Thank you for having me. It was a joy.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor for Renita Manley, we will see you all next time on Women in Motion.