How I Use AI Reports to Reveal Hidden Business Bottlenecks | Ep 286

Please note: This transcript was generated using automated transcription tools and may contain typographical errors or inaccurately captured words or phrases.

Dr Steve Day: This week, I used Claude to create an awesome report that allowed me to turn up to a renewal call with an existing client. With total confidence that I felt working together more going forward would be the right thing for us to do. To be convinced of myself and to be able to demonstrate to the client the great work we\'ve done together.

And it allowed me to have such a natural and stress-free conversation where we just discussed all the things that have happened. We had a point of reference. It made it effortless to go through. And the client was excited about working together in the future. So it was an absolute win-win.

I wanna talk today about how I did this. And also some of the other amazing reports I\'ve been creating using Claude. Which have directed so much of my business and provided so much value that I just never thought was possible to get. Without spending countless hours trawling through old data. And wasting myself and my staff members\' time on gathering all this stuff in the first place.

So let\'s look at how Claude is starting to revolutionize the way that I coach, I sell, and I actually work in my business. 

Okay, so today, I wanna talk about how I\'m using Claude to analyze data to give meaningful, actionable reports. That allow me to work better, both in terms of my sales, in my coaching environment. And also in my marketing and other areas of the business as well. How it\'s identifying holes which I may or may not be aware of. And how then it suggests ways to then plug those holes.

This is where I see a massive benefit for small business owners. Because I know so many people struggle to know how to prioritize what to work on next. And I hold my hands up, that\'s definitely me. And when I speak to clients, they wanna see, you know, a dashboard of like what\'s going on.

Like, what are their staff actually doing? Are they working on important stuff? Like, knowing this stuff lets us sleep better at night. But also allows us to take the business in the right direction. To focus resources on areas of need, and to double down on things that are working really well.

And using Claude or whatever AI tool you\'re using can speed up this process just more exponentially than I ever thought possible. And produce results that are just mind-blowing. It\'s like being able to design your own reporting apps and action points or whatever you wanna call it. Within your own systems in minutes, or many minutes, maybe hours.

But get something that\'s massively bespoke, that\'s completely unique to your business. That is built just on your business data, and provides exactly what you want. And is fully customizable. Because you built it, you can just change it by chatting with your AI. And that\'s exactly what I\'ve been doing lately, and it\'s been absolutely phenomenal.

So the first thing, actually the trigger for this episode, was this amazing report I produced. Which was looking at the coaching experience or the experience my clients have had working with me. And it was for a sales call coming up, a client coming up for a annual review. I\'ve worked with him for a couple of years.

And I asked Claude to go through every transcript of every conversation we\'ve ever had. To extract everything from there in terms of the challenges they were having, the wins they\'ve had. The obstacles that we\'ve overcome, the mindset shifts we\'ve been through. The looking at the journey that we\'ve actually been through as well. And how that\'s evolved over time. Identifying the key successes we\'ve had. And the remaining challenges that we really need to focus on.

And it produced this in literally minutes. About an hour before the meeting, I started this task. I literally asked Claude to produce a report. And it then produced it. And the way I do it is to actually present it as an HTML document. So it just opens up in my browser, but looks like a really nice webpage.

So it looks like a bespoke thing you\'ve spent hours and hours creating. But actually Claude just writes it up in a minute. So rather than using a table or anything boring like that, it just allows you to create something super beautiful.

There\'s a few things that have to be in place when you\'re producing any sort of report like this. And I\'ll come to what those things are in a minute. I just wanna just cover quickly some other cool reports and things I\'ve been creating.

So, I\'ve also been looking at my marketing. And one of the things we did this morning, in fact, was to take our old spreadsheets. Which are full of all the things like our email open rates and our download rates for our podcast. And our click-through rates for emails and all that sort of relatively dull, marketing stats.

And they\'re currently in spreadsheets, and we\'ve created a few graphs of them and all the rest of it just for, you know, just to see what the trends are. But to get real, like, knowledge and data from that was difficult. It would be me looking at them and sort of, with the 10 minutes I got in a meeting, to analyze it. And just really making sure there wasn\'t anything majorly going wrong. That they were ticking over and slowly improving over time. And that\'s really what I ever use that data for.

However, this morning, I got on with my marketing VA. And I asked Claude, we did it live so she could see how I built the project. In fact, she built the project on her end, and I directed her. So I wanted her to learn through experience. And in about an hour or so, we got all the data, we connected it to the spreadsheets that it needed and any other data that we\'ve got stored. And brought it into this dashboard using an HTML dashboard. Which was a multi-page, like a website basically, a multi-page website. Which had all of our different stats on there.

The overview on one page. It had our emails on another page. The podcast on another page. It then had a page about the suggested improvements, the things to look out for. The spikes or the anomalies that we have to just look into in a bit more detail. It even came up with this idea of creating a podcast title generator. Not a generator, a podcast title analyzer.

So we put in a podcast or also an email subject as well. And it would then rank that against our best performing ones previously. And then it came with this idea, we didn\'t ask it to do this, and it said, \"We estimate you\'re gonna get X number of downloads based on this title.\" And if you change the title, it then actually adjusted that value. All completely designed and even invented by Claude. I didn\'t ask it to do that whatsoever.

The details aren\'t actually what\'s important here. The idea, though, is we just fed in the data we already had. It produced something that was super easy to look at. It was on brand. It was all, you know, beautiful colored, whatever, and looking really, really nice to look at. And it actually made or will make the process of analyzing and then actioning that data massively important. And the next step is then loop that back into our title creation, to our email subject creation.

So we\'re gonna be using the data to create or to update the new stuff that\'s coming out. To then feed back into the data in this loop that\'s going forward. Again, this was a suggestion by Claude about how we could improve things going forward. Not even something that we came up with.

Another thing we looked at was like the marketing analysis. So a little while ago, I was working with one of my coaches. And they were saying, \"Look, I\'ve got this skill that you can use to look at all of your marketing. So we can decide where to focus on next.\"

So I fed it like everything. I fed it my website stats, I gave it to all my pages, I gave it my sales call stats, my actual cash flow. The revenue that was coming in, subscriptions, my client data, how long they\'ve been clients for me. So I linked up with Stripe to get some reports from that as well, into my Xero account.

And what it produced was this incredibly detailed, incredibly insightful report of the current state of my business. In terms of, you know, my retention rates, my sales stats. Like all the stuff that basically should derive the decision about where I should focus on next. Was just laid in front of me in black and white.

And to be honest, I kind of knew this stuff. But seeing it there presented to me. And presented in a way that actually said, \"Yeah, you need to focus on this area, Steve, because of, you know, X, Y, and Z.\" It just made me think, \"Gosh, I actually have to do something about this now.\" And so I have.

I\'ve started putting things in place based on this. And I was able to ask Claude, \"Okay, based on this, what do you think, what do you suggest I do next?\" And it\'s like, \"Okay, you need to launch, you know, a funnel for this purpose,\" et cetera. So that\'s what I\'ve been doing and working on. But it all came from this report that actually was produced in minutes by Claude. Just by connecting in the data that he needed.

And then the same thing for SEO and GEO. So there\'s a skill that we actually got from the marketplace. Which was something like, SEO, I can\'t remember exactly what it\'s called, SEO skill. And there\'s loads on the marketplace, you can have a look for them. But it also did GEO, which is like the AI version of SEO. And it basically went through, looked at our website, looked at all the stats. And then gave us this big detailed step-by-step action plan to go through and improve our website performance.

I then, well, actually, this was entirely done by my virtual assistant. Who got no experience in SEO or GEO or in using Claude for anything complicated. Or doing any website updates or anything.

But the guide was so clear. She was able to run with about 90% of it. And that\'s fine by me. If we can get 90% of the jobs done, absolutely brilliant. Again, all driven by Claude just using the data we\'ve got available, feeding in, using plugins or skills as they\'re called. To be able to get something absolutely brilliant

Another one, and final one I\'ll just mention here, is about business planning. So once you actually get data available. And you put it into Claude, it can actually start looking at how you should be focusing. Or where you should be focusing your efforts internally as well.

So this data I\'m talking about here is say, for example, the transcripts from your company meetings. Or your meetings with your staff. The one-to-ones you\'re having with your staff. It could be the data from your task management app. So we link it to our Asana, for example. Any other data you\'ve got that you can pull in and then say to it, \"Okay, what are we missing? Where are the constant bottlenecks? Like, what are the recurring questions that come up? Where are we not as efficient as we could be?\"

So feeding it. I fed it also in my time sheets of my staff as well and their task boards. And so it could see everything they\'re actually doing and working on. And then be able to then guide us on where we should be focusing on next. It also identified some tasks that actually it thought weren\'t particularly valuable for us. And we could then look at those and decide whether or not we\'re gonna ditch them or otherwise.

Again, this is just simple stuff using- we use Claude Code. You probably do a lot of this stuff in Cowork as well. Or whatever LLM or whatever GPTs you\'re using. But the thing is here, and the most important takeaway from this, is actually the Claude is only as good as the data you give it. And one of the biggest things that I\'ve been working on over the past few weeks is about getting that data ready.

So for example, I\'ve got a tool that automatically not only transcribes the videos that I, or sorry, the meetings that I have. But then categorizes them. It then automatically anonymizes if it\'s a private call. I keep the transcripts, for example. The raw format for my coaching calls. So I can do things like run my coaching reports.

But anything that\'s, you know, got any sensitive data in it, it\'s cleaned out and just the key things are taken out. And that\'s fed into a wiki, which is constantly growing and building every time I have a new meeting or there\'s a new data point. It all feeds in. And then when I run these reports, I just run it on that wiki.

So getting that data set up clean. And actually organized has been made creating these incredibly powerful reports incredibly easy going forward. So at first I was, like, literally giving it links to files, to spreadsheets, to different data stores, whatever. But now I\'m building this wiki, which is self-populating

For example, I\'ve also got another app that I built which goes into my Circle community. Which is where I host all of my courses and my community. And it extracts everything from that. It\'s like a daily backup that I use it for. But I then use that daily backup as another big data source. Because all of my client questions go into there. All of the knowledge that I have, the podcast episodes, everything goes in there. All my courses, the workshops I do.

So it can now access all of that stuff. And have that, again, as a big data point about like this is basically what Steve knows. And so therefore, it can then say, \"Hey, this question was asked before. I can\'t find any reference to this in any of your knowledge base.\" Like, this is something you need to actually document. And put somewhere that your staff or your clients can find. So in future that won\'t come up again. Again, this is only possible when you\'ve got really good, clean data that sits somewhere accessible to your AI. So that it can pull stuff as needed.

One of the caveats I would say here is, and one thing I say to my- I have said to my clients many, many times over the years, is duplication is evil. Like, you have to absolutely avoid this. Because what we don\'t wanna do is start duplicating lots of data to give it to the AI.

And I\'ve seen people do this. They\'ll have all their folders and their files or whatever, and they\'ll have the data. And then they\'ll sort of create a copy of it then give that to the AI. So uploading a file to a chat, for example. But now you\'re creating a static copy that unless you sync that somehow, it\'s gonna become outdated. So giving Claude or giving your AI access to the source data as read-only, if you don\'t want it to edit anything. Means if that data gets updated in the future, it will stay consistent.

And that, to me, has been the biggest gain so far in terms of getting tangible value. In terms of helping me to prioritize what I\'m working on, plan for the future, correct things that are going wrong. And just see insights into stuff that I wasn\'t aware of. And be a better coach, a better salesperson, all the rest of it in between.

So that\'s it for today. I just wanted to share a little what I\'m doing right now in aI using Claude. As I said, I do this all through Claude Code. But this stuff will similarly work through whatever channel you\'re using in terms of Cowork or Chat. Maybe not Chat, but Cowork and Code should work quite nicely.

So that\'s it. Short and sweet today. I just wanted to share that with you today. And hopefully that\'s helpful. If you have found it helpful, please do remember to hit subscribe. And do share this episode with anybody else that you think might find this useful. Who wants to live with more presence, purpose, and peace by getting Claude to do all the hard work for you.

Have fun. Cheers. Bye.