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Spa Marketing Made Easy | Spa Business Growth
SMME #477 Stop Repeating Yourself: How to Build an AI Onboarding Assistant That Trains Your Team For You
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Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. If you are new here, welcome. I'm so glad that you found us. And this podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals like you to build a business that is profitable, sustainable, and built around the life that you want to live. Now, today's episode, you're definitely going to want to take notes. So if you're listening in the car, make sure that you're going to come back to this, because we have a lot of teaching that's going to happen in the next 30 to 40 minutes or so. And this is an episode that if you actually implement what we are sharing with you, it will completely change the way that you are operating your business. Now, before I jump in, I want to just highlight something, I want to say something that I want you to hear, not as a tech tip, but, but as a business strategy. AI is not just a tool that's going to help you write a carousel post. It's not just a tool that's going to help you create an email in five minutes. Yes, of course it does those things, but if that is all that you are using AI for, you are leaving so much on the table. Now, I want you to think about AI as the. And specifically the GPTs, the custom GPTs, or what the projects that we're building inside of Claude or ChatGPT. Whatever AI tool you're using, these are. Think of them as employees in your business. Not metaphorically, but literally. These are tools that can be trained on your systems, your voice, your protocols, your culture, and they can show up, answer questions, train your team, do the work without you having to stop doing what you're doing to manage any of it. The shift in how you're thinking about AI, how you're incorporating it into your business, is going to change everything. And listen, I have been deep, deep in the world of AI for the past few years. Like, deep end of the pool deep, trying to learn everything that I can. I've played with ChatGPT, I've tested Syndra, I've explored Lindy. I've tinkered with tools I don't even know how to pronounce. I've tried so many things, I've messed up so many times, but I've also made some really incredible wins. And I've drastically improved the productivity of my team, the output of our marketing, and we are seeing the difference in our profit margins. And that is what I want for you as well. Okay, now, this is genuinely one of the most important shifts in our lifetime. It's like, it's like I remember when I was, gosh, I was probably in the eighth grade or ninth grade when the Internet became this big thing. Nobody was using email addresses, nobody had cell phones. Right. We had beepers, pagers, whatever we're calling them. We are in that transition now that we're going through, but it's, it's so much more vast and drastic than we can even comprehend. So know that, acknowledge that, that you know things are changing. And I know that that's hard. I know that, like I'm not trying to undermine that. But when, when you're struggling with, oh, I just got this figured out and now I'm having to learn something new. We're all going through that. And the difference is that, you know, some people are going through and just being adaptive as things change and just comfortable with the fact that they're going to change. Those are the people that are going to win. Are they going to mess up at things? Sure, of course. But there's going to be a lot of things that they are going to win at that's going to help them dramatically in their business. Okay. So as I said, I've played with all these tools. Where I've kind of landed, where I'm at right now is I pay for a chat GPT subscription. I pay 20amonth. There's still things I find useful and I think that they were kind of the, the first ones to market. They're coming out with a lot of different tools. The $20 a month is absolutely worth it for me because you do get other features like the ability to build a custom GPT that are very important. But when it comes to the day to day in business, we decided to go all in with Claude. Claude is the AI tool by Anthropic. And we actually invested in the teams version and that made it so much easier for me because in the team version I can share, I can create projects and create custom GPTs. I can share it. I can share this project with Lucy on my team. I can share this project with Christie on my team. And it really, I can share one project with everybody on my team. I get to decide now the Claude version, that's just the personal plan is $20 a month that the team's plan. It's a minimum of five team members and I believe it was around $1,200 for the year. Now here's the reframe because a lot of, a lot of what I've heard from our students on our coaching calls is like, oh, I don't want another subscription. And again I want you to think about these softwares as an employee in your business. So if you could say I'm going to hire someone that's going to write all of our social media posts, that's going to streamline our marketing, that's going to analyze my reports, that's going to help me with my email, that's going to onboard my staff, all of these things. Is that worth twelve hundred dollars a year? For me it was like such a no brainer. And so that's a shift is like we're thinking about it as another subscription but what we need to think about it as a salary, right As a pay structure to really help us streamline our operations across the board. Okay. So that is a really, really important thing. Now if you are not utilizing AI in your business, if you're like oh this is challenging or it's, I'm, I'm so overwhelmed, I don't have time to learn about this. You are putting yourself at a real disadvantage and I don't want to scare you. I don't want you to feel like you have, you know, an additional thing on your plate that you're trying to learn when you're already overworked and overwhelmed. But what AI can do is, it's hard to even comprehend how fast this is moving. And if you are not using AI, it's, you are not going to be able to compete on any level with, with these other businesses that are using AI. Your payroll costs are going to be high. You're, the amount of content that you're able to be able to produce is going to be high. I know it feels like a lot and I don't think that you need to change everything all at once. But you do need to start paying attention to this. I want you to win. I want you to build a business around the life you want to live. And this is one of the easiest ways. I mean easiest, right. Like it's always challenging to learn a new technology or new way of doing things but when we're looking at the, how inexpensive this is compared to the old way of doing business, it's, it's not even comparable. So we're going to see in the next few years payroll costs declining. We're going to see sales expanding. I mean I don't think anyone in our growth factor programs are still using marketing companies. A lot of marketing companies were paying, you know, 15 to 20 $500 a month to take photos, to write copy, to do your reels, all of those things. It's not, not necessary anymore. I mean, just that alone, you're saving, you know, 24,000 a year approximately. That's huge. So I want to talk to you specifically today about a real life example of one GPT that you could create. Okay? So when we think about hiring, the onboarding process is so important and oftentimes we hire from a stressed out place. It's a band aid hire, we've got a problem, we just need somebody there to fix it because we're too busy. And employee turnover is extremely expensive. It's time consuming, it breaks trust, it breaks the cohesivity of your team. It's exhausting on you to go back and reiterate and say over and over and over again, what are your values, what are the culture, what are the services, what are the policies, what are the product lines that you're carrying? You know, all of the things that you're doing in the initial onboarding. And I look at the onboarding process for a provider, we typically do a two week, it's a 90 day probationary period, but the first two weeks are very heavy on training. So week one, we're going through week one, day one, we're going through all of the policies and procedures and employee handbook and all of those types of things. That's all taken care of by this GPT that we're talking about building today. Additionally, you can develop and train it more to give your employee your new hire that's being onboarded. You can quiz them on product knowledge, you can role play with them. You, the new hire, can ask numerous questions about different policies or procedures that you have. It walks them through a conversation and then you are just going in to check on that individual and ask if they have any questions. But I mean, this is freeing up such a massive amount of time. It's do it once then like the heavy lifting is once. You absolutely have to continue to tweak and train and edit this GPT to make sure that it's accurate and on brand and consistent and all the things that you need in there. Um, but the amount of stress and stress that you get rid of time that you get back, it's such an important piece for your business. Okay, so let's compare that to inconsistent onboarding. All right. So inconsistent onboarding is when you're going to see that employee turnover more and more and more. Because we are not setting our team up for success when we don't put them through a systemized, consistent onboarding process. Now this is also like side note, this is one of the custom GPTs that we are building together at our spa CEO intensive in Washington D.C. that's on April 19th and 20th. We're doing a very intimate event. We're actually shrinking it down to 30 rather than 50 so that we can have a higher coach to student ratio to help support with the tech in building this. If you have Claude, we can build it in Claude. If you have ChatGPT, we can build it in ChatGPT. And that's actually an important note because I've a lot of our growth factor students have started building custom GPTs in ChatGPT and they're like, it's working. And now you're talking about Claude. If ChatGPT is working for you, stay there. If you're happy with the results that you're getting, stay there. You do not need to shift every time a new technology comes out or advances, okay? So don't feel that you have to change everything. But we can help you whether that is whether you're building in ChatGPT or whether you are building in Claude. So if you're interested in that, if you're focused on team at all, the whole focus is going to be team and then we are going to be building this custom GPT together. Now, when you don't onboard properly, and I'm not just talking about the paperwork, I mean the full picture, the hours that you explain your culture, walking them through the service menu, how you like things being done, answering the same questions for the 17th time, you know, like that is going to take you probably 10 to 20 hours of direct time. If you have a system, okay, maybe more. And if you're just winging it, like you don't have any of that documented, which, listen, there's a lot of people out there doing that and that's like no fault, no shame if that's where you're at. That's just an area of opportunity that we found in your business that needs to be cleaned up. Okay? What we're wanting to do is build a system around that so that once that system is there, you no longer have that problem every single time you have turnover, because you will have turnover. It's the nature of the business. You're not going to have the same front desk for 10 years. You are likely not going to have the same providers for 10 years. Right? There's, there's kind of ebbs and flows in different seasons in your business and that's okay. But we want to make sure that you Have a clear onboarding process. Because every time that a team member doesn't know the answer to a client question, your client experience is going to take a hit. Every time someone describes your signature facial in a way that doesn't match your brand, you're losing trust. Every time a new hire feels lost in week one, you increase your risk for turnover. And it is so incredibly expensive to replace a good employee. So inconsistent onboarding creates inconsistent teams, and inconsistent teams create inconsistent client experiences. And in this industry, your client experience is your brand. That's your differentiator. Okay, so this is getting rid of the binder, right? The, the employee handbook, the operations manager manual. Those are valuable. I'm not knocking them. We like, we have, you know, like something like a 45 page employee handbook as one of the resources inside of growth factor, but they're important, but we need to make sure that we have tools that are accessible, that are easy to use, that your team can get the answer right away. Okay, so I want to talk, I want to walk you through, like, how we build this in Claude and what we're going to do is use a feature called projects. All right, so if you think about Claude by itself like Claude as a tool, it's a incredibly intelligent, thoughtful assistant who knows a little bit about everything. Okay, so it's got, it's brilliant at reasoning, at nuance, at truly understanding your question. But a Claude project is where you take all of that intelligence and you aim it directly at your, at a particular, particular task in your business. You give it knowledge, your voice, your rules, your documents. And now instead of general purpose AI, you have something that functions like a trained member of your team. Now, to make it even better, there's something called Claude skills that can help with the structure, with the always using your brand voice, with the formatting of things. And there's actually apps that Claude can build within Claude to walk through. That's a whole other thing. But we'll, we'll talk about that more at the DC event. So for this podcast, I want to walk you through a project and what that is. Okay, so when you set up a project in Claude, you are essentially doing three things. You are first, writing custom instructions. Okay, so this is like the orientation speech that you give every new hire, except it never changes, it never gets forgotten, it never gets, it is getting delivered perfectly every single time. So you tell Claude, who is in the context of your business, what the job is, how it should speak, what it should and shouldn't do. Second, you're going to upload your documents. Now, I recommend connecting Google Drive to Claude and I recommend uploading, connecting a single document inside of Claude rather than copying and pasting or uploading a PDF. And the reason that I recommend that is because if you are making edits to a document or to a policy, let's say you have a change to your cancellation policy, you still, if you do it this way, then you are making the change on the Google Drive document, which is your living document, but it's also then automatically updating your onboarding document. Does that make sense, your project? So that can be a huge time saver in the long term of the way that you are kind of creating the system around your AI tools. All right, third, you set the guardrail so you want to make sure you tell it to stay on brand. This is, I find the guardrails are best set with skills. But if you're new to Claude, just start with the project, start with the project and start testing that out there. Now, to use Claude projects, you do have to have a Pro subscription. It's $20 a month or like $200 a year if you're not ready to invest in teams. So you know you get to decide on that Claude projects lives in your account. So if you are going to have your team use that account, the cleanest setup is to create a dedicated Claude account for spa and just share that AI logon. But if they have that AI logon, they're going to have access to every one of your projects. Now with Claude teams, you as the owner, you get to control who has access to which projects. Right. And then your team is also using Claude where you've set it up with the skills, you've set it up with your brand voice, all of those things. So they're not having to do that on their own. Okay, so just kind of throwing that out there. Now you're going to log in, you're going to upgrade to Pro if you don't have it already, or you're going to upgrade to teams if you don't have it already. And then you're going to click new project. And ours is called Coaches Onboarding GPT. So we have, and I actually just built this myself a couple days ago in Claude to show you guys an example of how we are planning to use it and, and will be using it as we bring new coaches onto the team to really streamline and standardize the onboarding process, the training process. Right. So I want you to give it a name so you know your spa name. Onboarding Assistant or something along those lines. Okay, now where this is you, you've got to make sure that you give Claude the tools to set it up for success. Okay? So we're gonna walk through six different categories, but when I say you're gonna hear this term a lot. Garbage in, garbage out. If you don't give Claude the right information or any GPT, if you're using ChatGPT or whatever, Gemini, whatever tool you're using, if you don't give it the right input, it's not going to be able to give you the right output. Okay? So keep that in mind. Now, category one, your story, your culture, all right? This is your origin story. Why did you start this ball? What's your mission? What do you believe? You know, who are your clients? What does your brand stand for? This is the stuff that's going to. It's creating the culture. Right now, if you are in growth factor and you have your company bio, this is going to be a great document to upload into into this GPT. And don't just bullet point it, tell the story. And if you feel there's a lot of tools out there, Whisper flow, there's granola, there's different apps that can record what you're saying and transcribe it so that you can then just copy and paste that transcription or put that into a Google document and upload it that way. It's a really, really great way to be able to tell the story in your own words and tell it in a great detail. Excuse me. And tell it in great detail so that you're. It's adding the human component to it. Those little nuanced details in the way that we speak, in the stories that we tell and the things that are important to us. That is what's going to really make it your own and make it really connect with your team members. Okay, so category two is going to be your team expectations. So what does showing up at the spa actually look like? Dress code, Communication standards. How you greet your clients, how you handle complaints, what you do and what you don't do. Okay, so this is a lot of. This is going to be in your employee handbook. Category three is going to be your service menu and protocols. So not just a list of services, but a description of each one. What makes your signature facial different from anybody else in town? What's the experience? What language do you use to describe it? How do you explain the benefits? This is going to be the foundation for every single team member. And this is where you can ultimately end up training The GPT to quiz you on the particular services and how your team member is describing them. Category four is your product lines, your skin care. This is huge. Okay, so you want to include key ingredients, skin. The concerns that they are addressing, you want to explain, like how you explain them to clients without being salesy. So real talking points, real benefits. All right? We don't need your. Your provider to become an expert overnight, but we want them to understand the philosophy and structure around the skincare products. Now, the other GPT, this is going to make you guys so excited. The other GPT that we're going to be building at our DC event is a home care recommendation. And what this is is, you know, another big problem that I see in spas is if you have multiple providers, you don't want provider A to be recommending one home care regimen and then having provider B recommending something totally different. We want to be able to promote that. It's a patient of the practice, not, you know, Susie's patient. It's the patient of the practice. And if Susie goes to provider A and buys all these products and then goes to provide provider B and feels like, oh, now provider B is telling me something totally different. That breaks trust, right? So by having clear alignment in this Fitzpatrick type, this skin condition, this is what we recommend as a practice that is like consistency, clarity. It. It's such a powerful tool to have for your providers to understand your philosophy around skincare, why you're making certain recommendations. Right? Really, really important piece policies and procedures. So this is going to be your cancellation policy, your social media policy, your confidentiality expectations, how to handle scheduling, how to handle unhappy clients or negative reviews, any situation that they may not be sure about, all the stuff that protects your business and your clients, we're putting that in there. And then category 6 is frequently asked Questions. Okay, so think about this. Specifically, what are the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks? Write those down. Write down the answers, put them in the project. Every time that someone asks you a question that you think, you know what, we should put that into the onboarding. Update it, get it in there. Okay? So you don't have to build this all at once. You can start with just the things that you have and continually add more to it. Add more to it, Add more to it. I'm telling our growth factor students to just add 15 minutes at the end of every shift to train their GPTs, to review their GPTs, to add content to them, whatever they need to do inside of their GPTs to make them better and better. Okay, so when you are going through in setting up the project, you're going to log into Claude, you're on the pro plan, you're going to click new project, you're going to name your project, then you're going to write your custom instructions. Okay? And I'm going to read these custom instructions for you. So here is a starting point, an example of what custom instructions are. Now, here is like the crazy part. You can actually talk to Claude and say, here's what I'm trying to build. Can you help me write custom instructions to ensure that I am getting the outcome desired? So here's an example. So you are an official onboarding assistant for and you're inserting your spa's name. Your role is to help new team members learn about our spa, our culture, our services, our products, our policies, and our expectations. Always respond in a warm, professional tone that reflects our brand. When you don't know the answer to something, let a team member know that they should check with the owner or the manager. Do not make up information. If it's not in the documents you've been given, say so. The last line matters because you want the assistant to stay in its lane and only pull from the content that it's been given. Okay? If it's not in the documents that you've been given, say so. Now, step three, you're going to upload your documents. So inside of the project, you're going to see an option that says add files. You can use your PDFs, you can use text files. But as I said before, we recommend that you upload a Google Drive file into Claude so that you can always update that. Then test it before you hand it to anyone. Sit down. Ask the hard questions. Ask it for. You know how to walk me through like I'm a new hire. Walk me through the onboarding process and give it feedback. Okay? Give it feedback and say, no, we should, you know, put it through this way or change this or whatever it may be. Okay? So we have an example of the way that we have our setup is it will say, enter your name and job title to get started with your onboarding process. It'll say Auto Aesthetics GPT. And then the little description under it that you have to say something to get it started. Right? So you are then going to say, I'm Daniela. I'm a new coach at Auto Aesthetics. And then it's going to say, hey, welcome, Daniela. And it's going to take me through these different processes okay, now let me, let me tell you the difference between a reactive assistant, which is where I'm able to ask questions, and more of an assistant, or a proactive person, where instead of waiting to be asked, it's actually guiding you through each stage. Right? It's quizzing you. It's. It's really guiding the conversation rather than the new hire guiding the conversation that you can do inside of Claude as you're training it. Start here, cover this, ask this question. Don't move forward until they confirm they're ready. Follow this sequence every single time. So when it is well written, it's going to stop functioning like a search engine and it's going to be a personal onboarding coach. Okay, so she asked a question, it answers. She says she's ready to move to the next step. It's going to walk you through every single thing. Now, one important piece is that if you don't have this built in or you don't have a little more advanced agent, you need to make sure that you are asking Claude. Like, say you're starting on day one and you don't finish the entire onboarding process. Claude doesn't carry memory across separate chat sessions by default. So if your new hire only gets through half of the onboarding process and then comes back, Claude's automatically going to start at the beginning. If you don't have it trained in skills or you don't have it trained to pick up where you left off, the simple answer is to say, where did we leave off? And it can go back and search from where you left off in the previous chat. Okay, so let's talk about common pitfalls. So I want to talk about what goes wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. All right, so you want to make sure that you are putting the right information in. If you don't actually have culture, protocols, policies written down anywhere, that's going to be a problem. Right. If it's all in your head, then what you're going to need to do is get it out of your head. And that might be doing a manual on board with somebody and recording everything and then putting that content in there. It may be just having a conversation with chat and getting that information in there, but you've got to start and once it's documented, you're going to have it for forever. And it's going to help you with so many different aspects. But remember, think of these GPTs as an employee. You can't just tell the employee something once and never tell them again. You've got to continue to Grow and develop what your desires are. Also, don't become over reliant too soon, okay? So don't just say, oh, I built this and then hand it to them. And then, you know, never check back in. Right? You've got to. There's always going to be places where you need human judgment. All right? So make sure that you're still handling the relationship. The, the GPT is going to be giving the information to your new hire, but you still need to build a connection with them. You still need to have a human to human connection. Okay? This is especially important in the first two weeks. You just don't have to spend your time repeating over and over and over and over again. All right? And what I like about this, you know, what we had taught previously before we got so involved with AI, was actually filming videos and having your new hires watch the video and then you going in and checking on them periodically. With videos, people lose their attention span right there. They won't watch more than 12 minutes of a video. So by having a custom GPT that they're actually engaging with, I believe that they're going to be more present and more focused on what it is that they're doing because it's interactive instead of just sitting and watching a screen. Number three, team resistance. So it might not be the new hire who pushes back, it's your existing team. They might feel threatened, they might feel like they're being replaced, they might just be uncomfortable with AI in general. This is something that you've got to continue to consistently have open conversations about AI, about change, about transformation, about how and why you're using things. Really, really important pitfall number four, conflicting information in your documents. If your handbook says that your cancellation policy is 24 hours, but your FAQ sheet says that it's 48 hours, the GPT is going to just pick one, right? So you need to make sure that you have consistency in your documents. And if you're not sure and you have a lot of documents, you might just ask the GPT to scan through and identify any inconsistencies in these documents. Okay? Number five, build it once and never update it. Okay? You launch it, your team loves it, and then eight months later, you change a service. You change a service, you update a policy, you bring in a new product line and nobody touches the product or the project. That is not good. You've got to build that into your system. That anytime you bring on a new product line, anytime you, you add a new service or change a policy, you've got to make sure that it's also being updated in this GPT. And number six, uploading sensitive information. Okay, so your project is living inside of a third party platform. So we want to keep any type of client data out of it entirely. Keep staff compensation details out, keep anything legally sensitive out, stick to operational content, culture, services, products, policies, training. Sure, there's all kinds of people that are putting their financials into GPTs, but when it comes to your staff, that is their information. And I think it's important to be able to honor their privacy request. So anything that's legally sensitive, keep it out of there. When we're focusing on training for, we're talking about skin conditions, we're talking about Fitzpatrick types. We're not talking about a particular patient with their, you know, personal identifying their health information, right? We're just talking about a condition, a Fitzpatrick type. How are we addressing that concern? Okay. All right, so I know that was a lot of information. Go and test and try and play with these projects. Remember, the AI is just, it's not a shortcut for writing social, it's infrastructure for your business. When you figure that out as a spawner and you start thinking about these GPTs as employees in your business, you are going to just move light years ahead. Okay? And this onboarding assistant built inside of Claude or Chat GPT, however you're going to build it, this is something that is just one idea, right? You can have a social media one, you can have an onboarding one. You can have the home care recommendations that we talked about. You can have like I have one. That's coach Daniela. So what would Daniela say about these types of things? There's so many different aspects that you can do with this. So what I want you to do, your homework is to write down the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks. Just do that, right? Figure that out, start to gather your information, capture the questions you know, and don't be afraid to mess up. You don't have to be a coder, you just have to be speaking clearly, asking questions, knowing the right questions to ask. Now, if you want to do this together, I want to invite you to our spacio intensive that is April 19th and 20th right here in Washington DC. It's going to be a intimate event, it's going to be very high touch and we are going to be building these two GPTs together. So I highly encourage you to check that out. If that's something that you're looking for additional support on. Okay? That is it for today's episode. If this resonated with you, you please share it with a spa owner. We so much believe that a rising tide floats all boats, and we very much appreciate every share every review that we get for this podcast. All right, my friends, thank you so much and we'll catch you on the next episode. Quick reminder before you leave, if your spa growth still depends on you doing more, it's time for a shift. Watch the System Shift, a free training designed to help spa owners break past that 25 to $35,000 month plateau without adding more treatment hours. You'll learn the CEO level systems that help you scale while protecting your time, your values, and your piece. Go to grow.autoesthetics.com podcast and watch the systems shift. That's grow.autoesthetics.com Podcast.