SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're a woodworker trying to sell your work, you're probably doing everything yourself. You don't have a marketing team, you don't have an operations manager, you don't have a pricing analysis, you have you. And every hour you spend guessing, guessing your prices, overthinking your captions, or scrambling before a craft show is time that you're not building. AI can help you and your business do things faster and smarter. And here's what most people are getting wrong about AI is that it's not here to replace you, your voice, or your craftsmanship. It's here to remove the mental load that slows down your business. But if you use it wrong, you will lose your voice. You will lose your integrity and you start sounding like everyone else. Let me explain how I personally use AI. I don't use it to go fetch random information. I use it like an analyzer. I give it my thoughts, my rough draft, uh numbers, just rough ideas. And I ask it to help me organize them, structure them, refine them, and polish them. So AI doesn't create my ideas, it sharpens them. So let's start where this actually makes the biggest difference money. Before you use AI for just social media content, use it for clarity, not to tell you what to charge, but to help you organize your numbers properly. For example, let's say I bought a gallon of paint for $38 and I expect that to cover 20 large projects. So I can ask Chat GPT if a 38 gallon of paint covers 20 builds, what's my paint cost per unit? You can see it costs about $1.90 per project. So there's no guessing there. Or maybe you bought $35 worth of screws, or you bought $75 worth of stain. It can help you calculate those numbers. Once you get all those numbers together, you can say my cost per unit is $58 and I want a 40% profit margin, what should my retail price be? So you're defining your margin and letting AI run the math. You can also use it to compare pricing scenarios. For example, if I price this at $109 instead, what happens to my margin? Or maybe I want to explore wholesale prices. Then you would just pull up ChatGPT and say, my cost per unit is $58. If I want to offer wholesale pricing to retailers and still maintain a 25% margin, how should I structure my wholesale and retail prices? Then you can see wholesale price, retail price, margin differences, and whether that structure is even going to work for you. And then I can zoom out even further. If my net profit per unit is $42, how many do I need to sell to hit $3,000 this month? So a lot of different ways you can go with this. And it helps you set targets if you need help doing that. But AI isn't setting your prices, it's just helping you run numbers clearly so you can make better decisions. And when your pricing and your margins are clear, selling becomes a lot easier. You're confident in your prices. Now, let's apply that same clarity to production. Let's say you have a craft show in six weeks and your goal is you have a list. Let's make a simple list. Five porch leaners, five planners, and five scroll saw cutouts. You can talk to chat GPT instead of trying to juggle that mentally in your head. You just say something like, I have a craft show in six weeks. I want to build five porch leaners, five planners, five scroll saw cutouts. I can dedicate about five hours per week. Help me map out a realistic production timeline and material checklist. So then I'm organizing the work and then I can refine it. If you know each porch leaner takes about one and a half hours to build and finish, and then each planner takes so much time, and then each scroll saw only takes, you know, 20 minutes. So based on that, does my timeline even realistically fit within those six weeks? So AI isn't building anything for me, but it's helping me structure a plan. And when the plan is structured, the mental load drops. Anything you can do to reduce your stress, go ahead and do that. It's so much better waking up knowing what needs to get done that day or that week. Now let's take it another step further because during that six-week prep, you can do a weekly check-in every Monday morning. I can open Chat GPT and say, last week my production goal was this, this, this, and this. But I only completed half of that. Help me evaluate what slowed me down and adjust this week's plan. Now I'm reviewing intentionally. And it can even ask, ask me three questions to help me stay on track this week. Or based on my current pace, am I still on track for the show? So ChatGPT isn't chasing you, but it'll help you think clearly when you show up. Before I talk about the third way to use it, let's talk about using AI the right way. So AI should organize your thinking, speed up execution, improve clarity. AI should not be your personality or just replace learning the craft or replace real-world testing because AI doesn't have that. So here's the truth: if you give AI generic input, you'll get generic output. You lead, it supports. Now let's talk about the area most people immediately jump to social media content. I can spot an AI-generated post from a mile away. It's usually a generic prompt. Somebody gave it and it gave it a generic output. If you just open Chat GPT and type, write me a caption for my garden planner, that's not strategy, okay? That's just outsourcing thinking. Instead, you need to give context. You need to explain who you are, what you sell, your price range, who your buyer is, and your unique selling position. For example, you can put this in a chat GPT. Based on my business details, write five Facebook captions for a raised garden bed that highlight durability and long-term value for homeowners. Now, all the context that you've given it beforehand, that combined with your prompt, that will get the output that reflects your voice and your business. And you can even refine it further. Whatever it gives to you, you can say, make this shorter, make this longer. This needs to be more direct, remove this uh salesy language, or add a sentence that addresses buyer hesitation. An AI won't create your voice, but it will refine it. And once your pricing is clear and your production plan is organized, communicating the value of your work becomes a lot easier. If you want the full brand voice guide and the exact system I use to apply AI inside a woodworking business, I do have that available inside the Woodcraft Blueprints membership. There's a link in the description for more information. Now, what not to use AI for? There are a few things I wouldn't recommend doing. First of all, don't copy competitor listings, it just never works out. Second, don't generate designs that aren't yours because you can plagiarize with it, which is not ethical. Don't fabricate testimonials, don't ask Chat GPT to create fake testimonials for you. That's not with integrity. We don't want to fake authority either. So AI should enhance your business, not replace your integrity. Your craftsmanship still matters, your reputation still matters, and trust compounds over time. AI alone won't make you successful. Clear decisions and consistent execution will. But when you use tools like AI to remove mental clutter, it becomes much easier to run your business and sell your work consistently. AI is leverage. Used well, it helps you think clearly, plan better, and operate like a real business. But used lazily, it just makes you generic. So keep building, think clearly, use all your tools wisely. And if you want that brand voice guide for your woodworking business and a video training demonstration on exactly how to create your brand voice guide and use it to create social media content, then I have that woodworking business training inside the Woodcraft Blueprints membership. I'll have more information below.