We’re wrapping up the week by looking at scaling and automation.

As we pick up more clients there will be a limit to how much of the work we do ourselves.

At this point we want to automate and outsource as much as possible - remove ourselves as a blockage.

Don’t remove yourself too quickly though - you need to work in the business at least initially so that you understand the processes and how the work gets done.

You can’t systematise what you don’t understand so to start with it’s good to fulfil the work.

When you notice that you are a block though we’ve got to systematise. Let’s look at a prompt to get started:

Act as a business systems automator for my social media marketing agency

Prepare a SOP for the service package I outline below


Include operational as well as administrative/communication tasks.

Provide checklist of tasks with substeps. For each task assign a person.

Identify if task is one off or recurring. If recurring indicate daily, weekly, monthly or annual.

Output in a tabular format. 

Service package details begin:
- [copy package details]

Prompt Output:

ChatGPT will work through the package details and provide checklists of what exact work needs to be done.

Your job is to now go through the standard operating procedure (SOP) and correct it based of your knowledge of the work. This why we started with freelancing in an earlier Part so that we could build up our skill base.

For each step and sub-step continue to ask for more details. This will allow the SOP to become more and more granular.

For best results do this one step at a time as ChatGPT’s quality will decrease if you ask it to do everything at the same time. Instead build from the ground up, checklist by checklist. The smaller the tasks the better for the next step.

We now want to use our detailed SOPs to create job descriptions for hiring.

First step is to break the SOP checklists into the roles we need.

Extract the roles from this list and create job descriptions for each

For each job description generate
-role name
-description
-tasks outline
-hours per week to complete based on [x] clients

Fill in for the number of clients needed - add a little headroom for expansion. For instance if you have 3 clients currently hire for 5.

The prompt will generate the basic outline of a job description for each of the roles for you. Amend as required and then for each you need ask ChatGPT to expand and create a full job description.

To save on overhead also try asking ChatGPT to combine roles where there’s a skill overlap. For instance here’s a combined account and brand manager role which becomes your one point of contact for clients:

Premium Prompt - Automation with AI

As you begin to scale it’s important to look at how you can utilise AI at each step.

The exact tools and prompts here will depend on your workflow which will depend on the specific client.

However, it’s useful to have a framework for AI expansion in your growing business. This is applicable to SMMAs and beyond.

Here are the basic stages:

1. Ad hoc use
2.
Prompt libraries
3.
Workflows
4.
AI App
5.
Own AI

Ad hoc use is simply having your staff members use ChatGPT and other AIs for their day to day work.

Much like we use Google daily we need staff members to automatically think “ah I can use ChatGPT for this”. This comes from basic training and then making sure they have access to the tools and are encouraged to use them in their workflows.

Prompt libraries are a more structured way of working with AI in your business. Instead of simply writing out prompts each time in ChatGPT you build a central shared repository of prompts that your team use.

This allows for repeated use of quality prompts without wasting time recreating them each time. Because the prompts are repeated you can spend time refining them for best results.

This library can be a simple as a shared Google Doc. As long as it’s easy to navigate and your team has shared access a more complex system is not necessarily better here.

The third step is to start to build AI into workflows. Do this with your most used prompts from the library.

Let’s say you do a lot of proposals for work and find yourself using the same prompt template again and again. Instead of having to manually copy and paste the template into the ChatGPT interface each time we can set up AIs to work inside our workflow.

For instance, a new email request arrives in our inbox. This can automatically trigger ChatGPT to write up a proposal and send it over to the requester.

These sort of workflows can be connected using no-code tools like Zapier easily and without expensive developers.

The next step is developing Apps built using AI. These will be self-contained pieces of software for your team to use for specific tasks. These, for the most part, require developers to build. Because of this I’d recommend only creating purpose built apps for high-value tasks.

The final step for a business is to create your own AI. This means feeding all your company’s information into a training set. This AI will be deployed for your business alone and can be tweaked and customised to your specific needs.

Each step in this ladder is more sophisticated than the last and requires more time, money and expertise than the last.

For this reason I suggest starting at the bottom of the ladder and working up it.

Any tasks that benefit from AI can be increasingly automated by moving up the ladder. Only the most important, time/cost saving should proceed at each step.

This is where AI and your business sense combine. We don’t just automate with AI because we can!

Instead we need to continuously analyse the cost-benefit of applying AI to any particular task to make sure we stayed focused on only the most valuable work.

Pulling it together

Over this week we’ve gone from identifying a niche, testing it as a freelancer, building our packages, running outreach and then putting in place systems to scale up.

This has been high level to give you a basic structure. If you need more detailed deep dives I’ve written Prompt Playbooks on both starting to freelance and creating a service business. Those are great next steps.

A reminder of what we covered this week :

Part 1: Find Your Profitable SMMA Niche (Niche Finder prompts)

Part 2: Gain Experience Through SMMA Freelancing (Freelancing prompts)

Part 3: Create Compelling SMMA Service Packages (Package Maker prompts)

Part 4: Use Outreach to Attract SMMA Clients (Client Catcher prompts)

Part 5: Scale Your Agency With SMMA Outsourcing (Biz Booster prompts)