Why Everyone Suddenly Wants a Business Brain

When I started getting really serious about implementing AI into my business, I started hearing a phrase that was really interesting. "Building a business brain." Turns out, every AI expert out there is very excited about teaching you how to build a business brain, and once I understood what they were referencing, I was kind of laughing at that, because turns out I already have one.

I've had one for decades. It lives in my Google Drive. We didn't call it a business brain, we just called it our business hub, because that's where all of the foundational information about my business lives. Every detail that anyone on my team would need to know about the business, about our ideal client, about our brand, about our strategy, about all of our systems, all lives in one place.

And every time I was going to hire someone or going to delegate something, the first thing I'd do is check the business hub, make sure it's all accurate and up to date, so that everyone would be on the same page. I didn't build that for AI. AI was nothing that existed in any sort of usable form when I started that Google Drive almost 20 years ago.

But this is the reason I've been able to move as fast as I have been able to in implementing AI into my business. And here's what I want you to know about building a business brain or building a business hub, whatever it is that you want to call it. Doesn't really matter if you're building it for AI or if you are building it for an actual team.

Either way, this is one of the biggest missing pieces of the puzzle for small business owners, and it's one of the pieces that can really make or break whether or not you can effectively get things off of your plate, hand it over to someone else to implement on your behalf, and sustainably scale your business.

Let's get into it.

Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective® and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO® podcast. Today, we are getting into the next profitable, practical piece of the puzzle when it comes to implementing AI into your high-trust business. But before we get into that, before we talk about what needs to go into your business brain, I want to give you some context about why I already had one without knowing that some people were calling it a business brain.

The "Office Bible" in My Dad's Agency

I had my business hub, and if you remember from the first episode in this series, I shared with you that I grew up behind the scenes in a small business. My dad has had an insurance agency since 1985, and I remember working in that small business behind the scenes in middle school and high school. There was a woman who worked for him, and she created a three-ring binder that we called the "Office Bible."

The "Office Bible" was everything you needed to know about how to run the day-to-day of the office. Basically, everything she did for her job, there was a checklist in the "Office Bible." So if she wasn't there, someone else could come in and handle that role, because in the '90s, as you can imagine, someone's gotta be there when people open the door to the office to pay a bill.

Somebody's gotta be there to answer the phones. There's gotta be someone in that front seat. So that's a role that needed to be covered quite often if she couldn't be there. Well, that told me so much about what it takes to have a sustainable business, is having documented systems, having a source of truth where anybody could review it and be able to take on the responsibility for that job.

Anybody could look at it and cover that role. Anybody could go through the "Office Bible" and know how to do the thing that needed to get done. So I always took that into my own business. Now, I don't have a three-ring binder. I don't have tons of paper. I have a Google Drive, and I have my business hub.

What Actually Lives in a Business Hub

But my business hub, over time, has become really the source of truth of everything about my business. And the goal for the business hub is that not only does it have all of the SOPs, so standard operating procedures, how we do everything from produce the podcast to onboard our clients to deliver our programs to everything that we are actively doing. It also has the source of truth, the context about our business.

It has details about the vision and the values and why that matters, how we operationalize the values, how we make decisions with the values. It has details about each of the products, programs, and services we have. It has details about who's our ideal client. It has details about our brand guidelines, our voice guidelines.

It has everything that anyone would need to know, and this is incredibly valuable for any small business to have. It becomes part of the resources the team can call back on when they are taking action on things and doing things for your business. It also becomes part of your onboarding and part of your training process.

So having a business hub is just one of those incredibly valuable things that I find a lot of small businesses don't take the time to do. They don't take the time to do it 'cause let's be honest, most people don't get excited at the idea of slowing down to document step by step how they do what they do.

It seems just faster to do it. The problem arises when it comes time to hire someone, to delegate things, to cover when people need to go to the doctor, take maternity leave, or go on vacation. If you don't have things documented, your business truly isn't scalable. Your business is only as scalable as your systems can handle.

So building a business hub is one of the most important things I think that you can do for your business. So today I want to talk about three specific files that will help you begin to build your business hub, and these are gonna be helpful whether or not you decide to use AI. Doesn't matter to me if you decide to not use it at all.

You should still have these things documented because they become the foundation of how you train your team, how you keep everybody on the same page, and how you make sure that the work that is happening in your business is all happening at the same standard across the board.

Choosing Where Your Business Hub Lives

The first step is to decide where this is going to live, and I think this is a crucial step a lot of people do not take. And this is how we end up with a lot of different files and documents saved in a million different places. That isn't useful for you, it isn't useful for your team as you start to hire and onboard people, and it's not useful when you're trying to use this information with AI.

So regardless of if you use this for AI or not, you want to have one core business hub in one location, ideally, that is accessible by everyone on your team. So I use Google Drive. I have seen people use Notion, I have seen people use other systems. Does not matter to me. The most important thing is it is in a location where you can easily find it, update it, share it, and use it.

So again, I use Google Drive. Once you set up a folder in Google Drive that says Business Hub, then we are going to create three files inside of that, three Google documents. And honestly, the reason I love Google Drive is because it is so easy to share, it is so easy to keep updated, and inside of Claude, I can link my Google Drive directly to this folder, and it will automatically sync any updates to any of these files.

That's really exciting. That didn't used to be the case. Now, it's automatically updating it.

File One, Your Business Overview

But we're gonna create three Google documents. The first is going to be your business overview. Now, I'm gonna walk you through what I would include in this business overview, and over time this might become multiple individual documents as you get more detailed.

But keeping it in one document to get started is perfectly fine. I would rather you keep it simple and straightforward than overcomplicate it and never get your business overview created. This is something that is perfect to hand off to anyone on your team, especially when they are onboarding into your business, because it's gonna give them the lay of the land.

They're gonna understand exactly what your business is all about, and the best part about that is now you don't have to go back and explain again and again and again all the different moving parts of your business. So the way I design my business overview, surprise, surprise, is 100% aligned with the way we structure the 90 Day CEO Operating System®.

Vision, Mission, and Values as Decision Rules

So there's a few core parts of how we structure our business overview document. The first is your vision, your mission, and your values. Why is this so important? Your vision tells people in your team, anyone who's a part of your business, where you are headed. If you don't know the direction you're taking your business, it is so easy to get swept up into shiny objects.

It is so easy to follow the dopamine, and suddenly you're off on another tangent. Your vision sets the direction for your business. It tells us what you want this business to look like in three to five years. So having that vision in place is essential. You want everyone to be on the same page, not only about where you're going, but so that they can help make smart decisions to help you get there.

Then you want to have your mission. This is the why behind why you're doing the work that you're doing. It's really important, I feel, that this isn't just about you. Inside of The CEO Collective®, when we go through this exercise, I talk about the difference between the owner's intent and the vision that you actually share and the mission that you actually share with your team.

Because at the end of the day, your team doesn't really care that much about what you personally get out of your business. Let's be honest. No one wants to work for a business owner where their biggest mission is completely self-serving. They want to work for a business owner whose mission is something they can get behind, whose why is something that they can get behind, because it also affects them.

It helps them. It helps the people on your team. It helps the community at large. So you want to make sure that you're really clear about your mission or your why, especially the why that your team can get behind. And then we want to make sure you've clearly articulated your values.

I'm not gonna get into a whole exercise here around vision, mission, and values. Again, this is something we go very deep into inside of The CEO Collective®. But I like to think of my values as the rules of the road. This is how we operate, and understanding my values in this way takes your values from being something that sounds nice, like we all love to have our core values of honesty or integrity.

Great. Those should be the default setting, in my opinion. Your values are the things that you are operationalizing in your business. They inform every decision that you make, how you run this business, how you move through the world with this business.

So that's the first part of your business overview. I think it's incredibly important that you take a little bit of time, even if it's just a few lines each, about your vision, where you're headed in three to five years, your mission, your why, especially as it pertains to your team and your community, all the stakeholders in your business, and your values, how you are going to run your business.

Mapping Your Offers, Pricing, and Positioning

Then we are going to get into the next piece of the puzzle. And again, this is coming directly out of our 90 Day CEO Operating System® framework. We talk about the Client Growth Engine™. Inside of my Client Growth Engine™ training, there's the six Ps that directly tie to what goes into your business overview.

These are the decisions you have made about the people you're going to serve, the products, programs, and services you're going to offer, the promise of those products, programs, or services, the outcomes that they lead your clients to, your pricing, your positioning, the way that you promote your products, programs, and services, and the proof.

So let me go through those really quickly, 'cause I know I just rattled them off really fast. First, your ideal clients. I think this is something that often people do a quick worksheet a long, long time ago when they first started their business, and they never return back to this. And this is actually one of the most important things that you need to have documented, and it's something that you'll probably need to adapt and adjust as you change and evolve as a small business owner.

Think about the clients you had when you very first started your business and how things have evolved now. Chances are you have up-leveled your criteria for who is an ideal client simply because of trial and error. We have all gone through experiences where we're like, "Oh, I really don't want to work with clients like this anymore."

And maybe it's a certain characteristic about them. Maybe it's something about the stage they're in on their journey. It doesn't really matter. You want to get clear about what are the top 10 characteristics of your ideal clients that makes them ideal, because that is who we want to be attracting into our business.

And if you're not speaking directly to your ideal clients, then guess what? No one's going to resonate with it. This is honestly one of the most important pieces of the business overview. In my business, it's actually a completely separate file, because I have gotten into such detail about who my ideal client is.

But if you're just getting started, I would start with your top 10 characteristics of who your ideal client is. What is the through line between your absolute favorite people to work with, so that your marketing can find more people just like them?

Then we want to map out what are all the products, programs, or services that you have. Again, you don't have to include every single detail about what it is, but you want in your business overview that there is a description that clearly articulates what each offer is, what the promise of each offer is, meaning what is the result that people are getting, who it's for, if it's a specific part of your ideal client, maybe a specific segment of your ideal clients, what the pricing is for each of those products, programs, or services.

And then we also want to know what the positioning is for each of those products, programs, and services. The positioning is all about what makes this unique or different, what makes this stand out. You want your positioning for your business as a whole, but I also like to have the positioning for each individual offer because let's be honest, there's a lot of people talking about small business.

There's a lot of people talking to women business owners. There's a lot of people talking about service-based business. I want to make sure that I am coming at it from an angle that is uniquely mine, that's a little spot that I can carve out on the internet that I stake a claim on. And when people are talking about if you are the system, you are the ceiling™, they know that that came from me.

That came from The CEO Collective®. That came from Racheal. So your positioning is all about what makes you unique and different. The promise is all about what is the outcome, what is the result that people are going to get when they go through that product, program, or service. What is the promised outcome?

And you want to be really clear about this. This is one of the areas where, especially for the businesses I work with that are a little bit more on the transformational side, sometimes the promise is really subtle, and it can feel really hard to make it a more tangible, concrete outcome. But we want to be clear about what are the outcomes our clients are looking for, because if they're not understanding that your product, program, or service is what is going to lead them to that outcome, they're not gonna be wanting to sign on.

They're not gonna see the value in it if they don't clearly see that your offer is taking them to where they want to be.

Then we want the proof. The proof is all of your testimonials and case studies. Again, over time, this can become its whole separate document, but you want to make sure that you are keeping track of the testimonials, the case studies that prove that you have worked with your ideal clients, that they are getting the promise of your offers.

I think this is one of the small things that a lot of people don't consider when they're putting together their business hub, but when you hand this off to a copywriter or someone working on your content with you, if you can give them a file that includes testimonials, that includes case studies, they are gonna have such an easier time writing copy and creating content for you.

Same thing with AI.

Mapping How Clients Actually Find You

Now, the final piece of your Client Growth Engine™ here is the promotion. So how do you actually get clients? If you don't have that in your business overview, then it could give you a million different ways to go out there and get clients, and that is actually a big red flag. If you're trying to be everywhere, you're going to exhaust yourself, and honestly, you're not gonna get the results that you want.

I think that's one of the biggest mistakes a lot of small business owners make, is they try to be everywhere, be everything to everyone at all times. It's so much easier when you get really, really laser-focused. So I want you to be thinking about, how do you actually get clients? How are they finding you?

Are they coming from referrals? Are they coming from networking? Are they coming from public speaking? Are they coming from ads? Are they coming from SEO? How are they actually finding you? What happens next after they find you? This is the engage step in our Client Growth Engine™. Are they booking a consult, or are they requesting content?

Once they take that step, how are you nurturing those people? Are you sending out newsletters? Are you having conversations in the DMs? Are they engaging with you on social media? Like, how are you building that relationship between them taking the action of requesting the consult or requesting content and then ultimately saying yes to working with you?

How do you sell to people? So what does the invitation look like? Are people going to a page on your website to buy, or are they having a sales conversation? Are they going to attend a webinar, or are they attending a live in-person workshop? Going through the entire promotion process is really helpful because now you're giving whoever's gonna take this business overview an understanding of how actual humans engage and interact with your business.

Now, the final piece that you might have in this business overview is your Team Growth Engine™, and that really depends on if you have a team or not. If you don't have a team, it's just you or just you plus an assistant, you probably don't need to have a whole detailed description of what your team looks like right now.

But if you do have a team, let's say you have multiple people serving different roles on your team, you would probably want to have a brief overview of who's on your team, what they do, what they're responsible for. That tidies up the entire business overview. I think to get started, like I said, this could be a single file, and it doesn't have to be super long.

It could just be a few pages to get going. Over time, as you build out more of your business hub and as you get more detailed, you might find that each of these individual pieces of your business overview become their own documents. And that just makes it easier for you to ensure that everything is updated and that you're always putting the most recent version in front of your team or in front of AI.

Okay, I know I just gave you a lot, and that was just for the first out of three documents that we are talking about today. So I'm gonna go ahead and include a starter pack of these documents. I'm going to put it in the show notes where you can find a starter pack, starter documents with these sections outlined so that you can fill them in for yourself and your business.

I know you're probably listening to this podcast while being out on a walk or running your kids around. You're probably not taking super detailed notes. That's okay. Just head over to the show notes, and you'll be able to get the outlines that I'm giving you so that you can fill them in for your own business.

File Two, Your Brand Voice Guidelines

Now, the next document that is incredibly important is your brand voice guidelines. The reason I'm including this is because one thing I know for sure is one of the biggest bottlenecks for a lot of small business owners is their marketing. This is one of the biggest pain points for a lot of us, right?

We know we've gotta do our marketing so we get enough clients in the door, but we're so busy taking care of clients that it can feel really, really hard to keep up with all the marketing. This is one of the first areas a lot of small business owners want to get support. And this doesn't matter if you are outsourcing to a copywriter, you're outsourcing to a content person, you're outsourcing to a social media person.

They need to have these guidelines in order to help you do your marketing. But these are guidelines that often are really hard for us to put together on our own. So the first thing I would recommend when putting together your brand voice guidelines is to go out and get examples of your existing content, of your existing copy.

This could mean pulling together maybe five of your most recent newsletters, pulling together transcripts from client calls, transcripts from trainings you've delivered, transcripts from if you, like me, have a podcast. If you have blog content on your website, pull three or five examples of that. If you have social media content, pull examples of that. You want to have total probably anywhere from 10, 15, 20 pieces of content that you can review in order to create your brand voice guidelines.

So choose your top 10 to 20 pieces of content that you really like, that you think are the best representation of how you want to show up in your space.

The first area of your brand voice guidelines you want to put together is your brand personality and overall feel. So what are the characteristics somebody would share about your brand personality to someone else? How would they describe it? Are you particularly funny? Are you really direct? Are you someone who's really polarizing?

These characteristics are unique to you and your business, and you want to infuse your business with some level of personality. If you're not giving your business a personality, it is gonna come off very dry, very beige, very bland. No one wants to be bland. You want to stand out with your personality. So what are the parts of your personality that need to be incorporated into your brand voice?

Now, keep in mind that there are levels to this, right? There's the brand personality that is the forward-facing, like what's on your core website pages, and that might be a little different from the brand personality that shows up on your social media feed. Maybe your brand personality on your website is a little bit more reserved, but the one on your social media feed is a little bit funnier or a little bit sillier, a little bit more lighthearted.

You get to make those calls, but I think it's important that you come up with a list of anywhere from three to five descriptors of your brand personality.

Then we want to make sure we are talking about your audience and your relationship to your audience. Who are you talking to, and what is that relationship you have with them? Do you consider yourself more of a teacher, more of a coach, more of a peer who's, like, shoulder to shoulder with them along this journey? Do you consider yourself more of an advocate or a challenger or a curator?

A copywriter would need to know if you are speaking to beginners who need a lot of reassurance and a lot of encouragement versus maybe more experienced or sophisticated people who need to be challenged and who need sharper thinking. This is a subtle but important distinction, so understanding what your relationship is between your audience is really, really a great piece to have in your brand voice guidelines.

Point of View and Language to Avoid

Then we want to get into your point of view. This is something AI cannot come up with for you. You have to come up with your point of view, and one of my favorite ways to do this is to think about, what pisses me off? What do I disagree with that is conventional wisdom in my industry? What is something that I believe that is opposite of what the majority of people in my space believe?

So your point of view doesn't always have to be polarizing, but to be honest, as AI is making more and more people sound more and more generic, the stronger your point of view, the stronger your message is gonna get out there.

So having a section here that's like, "Here are the top five things in my industry that I don't agree with," that's really important information. So you want to consider what are important elements of your point of view and core beliefs that need to be woven throughout your message.

Next is your tone and your emotional range. So your voice is pretty consistent across all the different ways that you are communicating to your audience, but tone could change, right? There could be a difference between how you speak when people are overwhelmed. When you are communicating when people are overwhelmed or they're feeling stuck, we might need to focus on calming down and being more direct and simple and clear.

But we might need to hype people up, and that's where we get more motivational. So how are you using tone and emotional range in your communication?

I love having a language bank in my brand voice guidelines. And again, this is something that's harder to pick up yourself, but the more you pay attention or even the more you record yourself, you will find there's phrases you use again and again and again.

So come up with your own language bank. Like, what are distinctly you phrases that your clients know that you are going to say? I have a whole list of them now. For example, something I just said to a client the other day was, "Bless and release." And that's kind of a mantra I give my clients when something is clearly not working and it is time to let it go, whether it is an employee, somebody on your team who you have been dragging your feet on hiring for forever, or it's a product that it's time to retire.

Bless and release is something that I come back to over and over and over again. So do you have a little mini language bank of some phrases that you're pretty well known for with people who work closely with you?

On the other side of that, is there language to avoid? This is really helpful for AI and for humans. This could be any cliches that you hate being used in your content. This could be industry jargon. This could be phrases you just don't like. It could be words that are opposite of your worldview. It could be language that you think is cringe. You can get really, really specific here, so actually having a great list of words and language to avoid, I find really helpful.

Like, I don't like using language that is hustle culture-based language. I don't like anything that is like, "Go boss babe," things like that. That's on my language to avoid list. I think sometimes that's easier to come up with than the language to include, to use from your language bank.

Writing Mechanics and Storytelling Boundaries

Next, you want a section that's about your writing mechanics and rhythm. So this is what your writing actually looks like and sounds like. How do you structure paragraphs and sentences? How do you use questions, rhetorical questions, and direct questions? Do you use repetition? Do you use lists? Do you use em dashes? We've all talked about em dashes are the giveaway for AI now.

Are there any other anti-AI writing rules that you want to include? Do you use emojis? Do you use profanity? It's also helpful to document whether you use more punchy, snappy statements, or if you tend to be more conversational with, like, longer sentences, longer thought development.

Storytelling style is another area that is helpful in your brand voice guidelines. How personal do you get? What kind of stories do you tell? How much context do you give? This is something you get to decide, and I think you get to decide and put boundaries around the type of stories and the type of personal information you're going to disclose. There might be categories of personal information that you decide are going to be private, okay?

And this matters because we don't want anyone writing on our behalf or creating content on our behalf to turn personal stories into some sort of manufactured vulnerability. So for example, I don't talk about my marriage. I don't talk about what's going on with my kids. There's a lot in my personal life that is not available for storytelling for my business.

Do I mention my husband? Do I mention that he works for my business? Yes, but I'm not giving you the nitty-gritty details of our relationship. That's none of your business. Same with the details about what my kids are going through. That's none of your business. I talk about my kids, though. So I think it's helpful to put boundaries around these things.

Persuasion and Selling Style

The final thing that I really like to include in this brand voice guideline is your persuasion and selling style. What does ethical persuasion look like for you and your brand? I think this is so incredibly important, especially because so much direct response copywriting, which is really where a lot of people learn copywriting, is based on these social triggers that have us taking action, and they actually kind of like shortcut our critical thinking.

So I'm really clear in my brand voice guidelines that I don't like to use thought-terminating cliches. I don't like to use fake urgency, okay? If I'm saying something is being sold right now and it won't be being sold later, that's because there's real urgency, like we're having a retreat on this date, and I need to know who will be there.

I'm not gonna create fake scarcity, saying we only have so much of this left if we actually have unlimited, or on the reverse of that, if we're filling a room, an in-person room, there's actually a limited number of seats. So I have really clear guidelines about how we handle that.

I have guidelines around how we use social proof. So one of the decisions I made for our testimonials and case studies was that I didn't just want to focus on revenue only as the only criteria for success for our clients. I wanted to look at other elements of success that I think are really important, and that's why when you go to our success stories page, you will find we actually have a lot of different examples, a lot of different types of case studies and social proof.

I make sure that I'm defining, like, how do I want to position myself as an authority? I don't like the fake authority building out there. There's a lot of that, like people who basically pay to end up on The New York Times bestseller list by doing all sorts of crazy pre-sale tricks and things like that. People who claim that they've made a million dollars, but really, that was over multiple years.

Like, there's a lot of fake authority building out there. I have a real hard time with that, so I make sure that is a no-go in my brand voice guidelines. So this is where you can get really, really granular about what is okay for you and what is completely off limits.

Again, one of the ways I figured that section out was actually reading through content and copy that turned me off, that I did not like, because then I could say, "I don't like that there is this countdown timer, but I know that there's no actual live component, so this is fake urgency."

That really helped me to come up with those details. So again, I'm going to give you a document with these different categories so you can fill it in for yourself. I don't expect you to have taken notes just listening to me talk through this. But the best way to get this is probably gonna be pulling 10 to 20 examples of your own content and using that as the baseline as you are filling this all in for yourself.

File Three, Your Story File

Okay, the final file that I would recommend putting in place is your story file. This is one that almost no one does, but it's the one that I find over and over again becomes the most important, especially as AI is taking over so much content. Because AI can't come up with your stories. It can maybe hallucinate and come up with some stories.

But I find that our stories are so much more powerful, and when you can thread your own personal stories through your content, through your copywriting, that's how you connect with people. Humans connect through storytelling. So the more that you have stories that are uniquely yours documented, the easier it's gonna be to tap into them and build that connection.

So the first story I would build is your origin story, your founder origin story. This is why you exist. This isn't your resume, okay? This is what happened that made you decide to build this business in this particular way. It could also be the origin story of a specific pivot in your business.

So I've been in business for over 18 years, but I launched The CEO Collective® in 2020, so I can have the original origin story of leaving corporate and starting a business, and I could also have the origin story of this huge pivot I went through, this huge rebrand I went through, and why I started The CEO Collective®.

I find that when I am talking to people, especially when I am being interviewed on podcasts, I am asked, "Tell me about when you started your business," all of the time. So I have an origin story. This is something you can pull from again and again and again.

Your origin story, I think of it often as, like, this is... If you think about superheroes, this is your hero's journey. So your origin story is when Spider-Man got bit by the spider and decided he was going to fight crime and fight for the underdog. Well, just like every superhero, there's a villain, and this is what are you fighting against? This is the opposite of what you're fighting for.

What you're fighting for is the origin story. The villain story is what are you fighting against? Now, this doesn't have to be an actual villain, right? We don't have to turn somebody into the villain. That's not necessary, but there's usually something bigger out there that you are fighting against.

You're fighting against a status quo. You watched this thing happen to enough people that it made you angry enough to create an alternative. For me, you might have heard me reference over the years that the reason I built The CEO Collective® is because the way building businesses and scaling businesses has been taught has not worked for women.

It hasn't worked for women because it has been built primarily through a hyper-capitalist, patriarchal, racist, misogynistic lens that didn't include women. It didn't include the needs of women. It only really works, a lot of the mainstream advice out there only really works if you are a white man and have full-time support managing your life, raising your family, keeping your household running.

So that's what I'm fighting against, right? That's a pretty big fight, and I'm here to say there's an alternative. There's a different way that we can build businesses that truly work for us.

Then I want you to have the transformation story. What actually changes for somebody who works with you? This isn't about necessarily the deliverable or the promised outcome. I want you to really think about the identity shift that's happening underneath that. What can your ideal client do now after going through this journey of working with you that she couldn't do before?

Maybe she has become more confident. Maybe she's enjoying her life more. Maybe she's actually feeling like she's finally achieved the life that she's been dreaming of. Whatever the transformation is, having the transformation stories with the identity shift really clear is incredibly powerful.

Now, there's so many more stories that you can document. I find myself thinking about stories a lot right now, especially as AI is becoming more and more powerful. Stories are the thing that help stand out. So I'm constantly adding to this file when I think of another story.

Why Context Is the Missing Piece in AI Marketing

So there's so many more layers that you can add into each of these files, but I want you to just start where you are, go to the show notes, and download these three file examples, and then you can take them and fill in the details as you have them right now.

It doesn't have to be perfect. You can always edit it. But this is the first things that you need to be able to hand to somebody if they are going to do any marketing for you. And if you're going to leverage AI to do marketing with you, then you're going to need to have this information ready to upload into AI so that it has context.

This is why so much marketing is failing right now and why so much AI marketing is failing right now. It's because you're trying to get the AI to step in without any of that context. And if it doesn't have any of that context, if it doesn't understand your business, if it doesn't understand your voice, if it doesn't know your history and the stories that you could tell, then they're going to give you back very generic, very templated-sounding content.

But if you tell them, "Here's the vibe. Here's what it feels like to work with us. Here's what it feels like when you attend our event. Here's what it feels like when we're on a call. Here's the stories that we tell in the rooms that we host," that informs everything. Once you document this, it's going to instantly start to elevate the results of your marketing.

So I know there's probably a good chunk of people who are still hesitant to use AI, and like I said, that's absolutely fine. If you do not want to use AI, you still need to take the time to begin creating your business hub, and if you want people to help you with your marketing, you still need these three documents to be created.

Whether you use them with AI or not really isn't the point. It's that you need to start getting these things out of your head and documented so that they are useful outside of just you being the one to run the marketing.

Where to Start Without Overthinking It

All right. Final thoughts as I wrap this up. Don't try to build all these files right away at one go. These might take time. I've created the templates for you to download because I'd rather you have a little bit in each section than absolutely nothing. But I don't want you to feel like you have to get this perfect, like you're gonna be graded on it.

This is something that you will continue to adapt and edit and update. I am constantly updating these, especially my story file. I am constantly coming up with ideas and adding it to the story file. That story might turn into something you find in a podcast episode or an email or a social media post.

But it's important just to get started, okay? So if I had to pick where to start, I want you to start with the business overview first. That's the most important thing to go ahead and start putting in place, even if it's just a couple lines at a time. Then you can work on the brand voice, and then you can work on adding in your stories.

Please don't turn this into an exercise of trying to make everything perfect. No one is grading this, and no one other than you is looking at this. But it's one of the best things I've ever found you can do for your business, is to start getting these things out of your head and documented so other people or other tools can start to support you.

All right, I can't wait to hear what you think about this one. This is almost the end of the Human First: AI for High-Trust Businesses series. I have a little bit more to share with you, including an interview with Gabi Day, who is just an incredible business owner and marketer. She runs my ads for The CEO Collective®, and we've gotten to be really good friends over the years.

So I'm excited to have a conversation with her and share with you how we have been using AI internally and her take on a lot of these things in terms of using AI in a very ethical, aligned way for your small business. I'll see you in that episode.