Stephs Digital Ambassador | 00:00
Okay, let's just let's unpack this we are standing at a really weird very noisy intersection right now if you're a consultant and I'm talking specifically to the boutique crowd here the firm of one the firm of five maybe you know the firm of 20 right operators?
Andrews Mindmate | 00:17
And The.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 00:18
The operators. You are being bombarded with a single deafening message from every corner of the internet. Yeah. And that message is... AI is your new intern. It is this magic wand. It's the thing that's going to let you write 10 blog posts in the time it used to take to write one. It's going to write your emails while you sleep.
Andrews Mindmate | 00:37
The content firehose.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 00:38
The content firehose. And the subtext of all of that noise is basically, finally, the hard work is over.
Andrews Mindmate | 00:44
And if you listen to that message, I mean, if you actually believe that the goal of AI is to turn you into a content factory, you're going to go out of business.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 00:52
Whoa. Okay. That is a hard pivot right out of the gate.
So you're saying this whole AI is a productivity miracle narrative is... It's actually dangerous.
Andrews Mindmate | 01:01
It's the most dangerous narrative in the market. Right now.
Look, you have to stop and think, who is that advice actually built for? Right. Most of the A.I. Advice, all the 50 prompts to write a book in an hour, stuff. It's built for the crowd. It's built for the masses. OK. And what do the masses want?
I mean, really. They want to do average work but faster. They want to sound competent without you know, putting in the real effort.
So they use AI to generate these very average emails and average reports and average You get the same result.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 01:32
Strategies. And so if you as a boutique consultant jump on that same bandwagon.
Andrews Mindmate | 01:38
You use AI like the crowd uses AI. You will generate average outputs. And here's the kicker. When you generate average outputs, you are actively training your buyers to treat you like a commodity. You're training them to price shop you.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 01:51
Because if your work sounds exactly like everyone else's, why should I pay you a premium? If your proposal looks identical to the one I got from the guy who's charging half your rate, While I'm going with the cheaper guy.
Andrews Mindmate | 02:00
Exactly. That's the logic. If I can get that same, you know, generic strategy document from a $50 an hour freelancer who is just using ChatGPT, why on earth am I paying you $300, $400, $500 an hour? Right. The real danger isn't AI replacing consultants. I want to be really clear about this. The robot is not coming for your job in some sci-fi Skynet sense. Okay. The danger is that consultants are using AI to become faster producers of mediocrity. It's a race to the absolute bottom. It's like you're using a Ferrari to deliver pizza.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 02:36
So, okay, the stakes are pretty high here. This isn't just about, you know, tech adoption. This is about survival in a market that is just getting flooded with cheap AI-generated noise.
Andrews Mindmate | 02:45
It's about operationalizing a real advantage. You have to think about what a boutique serum actually sells. We don't sell text. We don't sell content. We are not selling word count. We sell judgment. We sell speed. We sell outcomes. We sell the ability to walk into a totally chaotic room, look at this mess of data and politics and fear and say that the problem is that fix that one.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 03:06
Thing. Right. And that's really the core thesis of our deep dive today. We're looking at this whole stack of sources that argue for what they call a boutique advantage. And the thesis is this. Consultants have to become AI first. But not in the way that people are talking about. Not at all. We need to use A.I. To handle the data, the patterns, the grunt work.
So we can reserve our human bandwidth for judgment and accountability.
Andrews Mindmate | 03:31
That is the divider. If you take one thing away from this whole introduction, it's this. AI creates options. Humans make decisions. I like it. AI detects patterns. Humans hold clients accountable. If you try to outsource the decision making or God forbid the accountability to the bot, you're finished. You're just a Passengers don't set the price.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 03:50
Passenger. And passengers don't set the price.
Andrews Mindmate | 03:54
Yeah. If you use the bot to surface all the options so you can make a better, faster, sharper decision, that is an asymmetric.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 04:01
Advantage. So our mission for this deep dive is to walk through six specific hacks to get there. And I want to be clear, right? These aren't just prompts to These are structural changes to how you actually run your firm.
Andrews Mindmate | 04:08
Try. No, these are systems.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 04:14
We're going to look at the common move, what the sheep are doing, and then the opposite move, what the operators are doing. And I know you, so you're going to red team everything.
Andrews Mindmate | 04:21
I will. It's my job. I'm going to look for every single failure mode. Because if we don't stress test these ideas, they're just, you know, they're just nice theories and boutique firms don't have time for theory. We need to know where the trap doors are. Absolutely.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 04:36
Okay, let's jump into section one, the mindset shift. Hack number one is called Go.
Andrews Mindmate | 04:41
Plus. Go Plus. It sounds so simple, But it is the first most important filter. It separates the hobbyists from the.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 04:49
Professionals. The common move here is, I mean, it's surprisingly common. I talked to consultants who are making six figures, sometimes even seven figures, and they are still using the free version of ChatGT2 or Claude.
Andrews Mindmate | 05:00
It's mind boggling.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 05:01
Or, OK, maybe they pay the $20 a month, but they treat it like a search engine. They use it to look up synonyms.
Andrews Mindmate | 05:07
Or a toy. Or Which is fun, sure.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 05:08
A toy. Exactly.
Like a slot machine. Hey, write a funny poem about supply chain management.
Andrews Mindmate | 05:15
But it is not business. That reluctance to pay the monthly fee It is a poverty mindset. It drives me absolutely crazy. But The opposite move here is to reframe this entirely.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 05:23
It's $20. People see it as another subscription, though. It gets lumped in with Netflix. Do I really need another subscription?
Andrews Mindmate | 05:32
You have to stop thinking about it that way. Treat the $20 a month not as a subscription, but as payroll.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 05:38
Payroll.
Andrews Mindmate | 05:39
For who? Payroll for a junior strategist. Let's just play this out for a second. Imagine I came to you and I said, look, I have a candidate for you. They have read the entire internet. They know every coding language. They can analyze a 50-page PDF in about four seconds. They never sleep. They never complained. And they cost $20 a month. Would you instantly.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 05:59
Hire them? I'd hire 10 of them. I'd hire a whole department of them.
Andrews Mindmate | 06:02
You'd hire them instantly. And once you hire them, would you turn around and say, hey, welcome to the team. Now, I want you to work for me, but I'm going to restrict your tools. You can't use the Internet. No data analysis for you. Just use your memory. And by the way, I need you to work really slowly.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 06:18
No, of course not. That would be insane.
Andrews Mindmate | 06:20
Of course not. You would give them the absolute best tools possible to get the maximum ROI. That is what Go Plus means. It means upgrading to the paid tier and you turn on everything. Voice mode. File upload, advanced data analysis. You use the full stack because this is a seat for a fast Exactly.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 06:37
Operator. So stop treating it like it's magic or, you know, a toy. Treat it like a seat in your office, an employee.
Andrews Mindmate | 06:45
And once you have that seat filled, you need a constraint strategy because the other mistake people make is they get the shiny new tool and they immediately try to do everything.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 06:53
Yeah. The I'm going to automate my entire business this weekend plan.
Andrews Mindmate | 06:57
Right. And then what happens? They get completely overwhelmed and they end up doing nothing.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 07:01
So you get paralysis by analysis.
Andrews Mindmate | 07:02
Correct. So the rule for hack one is this. Pick one money task for week one. Not five, not ten, just one. What is one thing you do that actually generates revenue or moves the client project forward? Maybe it's summarizing client discovery calls. Maybe it's drafting statements of work. Pick one.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 07:20
And you've got a very specific workflow for this. You call it the timer.
Andrews Mindmate | 07:23
The 10-10 split. This is designed to prevent you from falling down the rabbit hole. It's very simple. You spend 10 minutes drafting with the AI, max. Then you spend 10 minutes editing that output yourself.
And then you ship 20 minutes.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 07:35
It. 20 minutes total. That's it.
Andrews Mindmate | 07:38
If you can't get it to 90% good in 10 minutes of interaction, Your process is wrong. You're giving it the wrong inputs. Don't tinker forever. Ship it. The goal is speed with quality.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 07:50
OK, but how do we know if it's good enough? Because fast can very easily become sloppy.
Andrews Mindmate | 07:56
That's the key question. You need a benchmark. You have to keep one gold output as your standard. Let's say you're working on proposals. Go into your files and pull up the best proposals you wrote last year. The one that closed that huge is the gold standard.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 08:08
Deal. OK, the winner. That.
Andrews Mindmate | 08:10
Now, if the AI output doesn't match or beat that gold standard within your 20 minute window, you refine the process. You don't blame the tool. You assume you failed to give it the right context, the right examples. But having that benchmark prevents you from accepting average work just because it was fast.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 08:28
I love that. It keeps the quality bar incredibly high. But all right, let's red team this. What's the trap? Where does this whole go plus idea fall apart?
Andrews Mindmate | 08:37
The trap is the prompt engineer fallacy. You see these guys all over Twitter and LinkedIn selling their perfect prompt guide. And you see consultants spending three hours tweaking a single prompt to get the tone just right.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 08:50
Guilty. I've done that. Make it a little more professional. No, wait. A little more witty. Now back It does.
Andrews Mindmate | 08:54
To professional. It feels productive, right? Because you're working with AI.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 08:59
It feels like you're doing this high-tech advanced work.
Andrews Mindmate | 09:02
It is procrastination disguised as work. I mean, let's be blunt. If you spend three hours tweaking a prompt for a task that takes you one hour to do manually, you are destroying value. You're burning your own margin. The goal isn't the perfect prompt. The goal is removing one bottleneck this week. If the AI gets you 80% of the way there in five minutes, take it. Rewrite the last 20% yourself and send the damn thing. Do not get addicted to the tinkering. Right.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 09:29
We're operators, not coders. We don't need to perfect the code behind the scenes. We need to ship the outcome to the client. Precisely.
Andrews Mindmate | 09:37
If you find yourself spending more time talking to the bot than you are talking to your clients, you've completely lost the plot.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 09:43
OK, that's a perfect transition to section two. This is arguably the most transformative hack on the list. Hack number two, the accuracy engine, which you call the client truth.
Andrews Mindmate | 09:52
File. This is where 99 percent of consultants fail with AI. This single thing is the difference between generic and boutique.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 10:01
The common move here is what people call the master prompt, where you just talk about yourself. I've seen people do this. They write this like, 500 word bio. I am a visionary thought leader with 15 years of experience in cross-functional synergy. And they paste that into the top of every single chat thinking it's giving the AI context.
Andrews Mindmate | 10:20
And they think that helps. But here's the cold hard reality. The AI does not care about you. And more importantly, your client does not care about you. Right. When you prompt it with "I am an expert", the AI just accesses its training data for "What do experts say?" And do you know what the average expert on the internet says? What's that? Generic, polite, completely safe platitudes. It is important to align stakeholders. Communication is key. We should optimize processes for efficiency. It gives you the bland, boring average of the Internet. And that is death for a boutique have to document the buyer's world, not your resume.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 10:56
Firm. So the opposite move is to just stop talking about yourself entirely. You.
Andrews Mindmate | 11:03
This is what we call the client truth file. It is not a branding exercise. It is an accuracy engine.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 11:08
Okay, break this down for us. What does a truth file actually look like? What goes in it?
Andrews Mindmate | 11:12
First, you pick one ideal customer profile. An ICP. Just one. You cannot have a truth file for small businesses. It's way too broad. It has to be something like dental practice owners with three to five locations in the Midwest or chief technology officers of Series B fintech startups. Specificity is the fuel write 20 specific truths you have personally seen in the field.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 11:30
Here. OK, I've got my specific avatar. Let's use that one. The CTO of a Series B fintech startup. Now what do I write? You.
Andrews Mindmate | 11:40
And the number one rule is no theory. No textbook stuff, no best practices, only things you have observed with your own eyes and ears.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 11:48
Okay, and there's a structure for this, right? How do we format a.
Andrews Mindmate | 11:51
Truth? Yes. We use a very specific data chain for each truth. Trigger, break, failed fix, fear, what they really pay for, and finally the proof that calms Okay, perfect.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 12:00
Them. Let's walk through an example. Let's build one right now for that FinTech CTO.
Andrews Mindmate | 12:04
So for that CTO, truth number one might look like this. Okay. The trigger. The board of directors demands a 20% reduction in cloud spend by the end of the quarter.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 12:12
Ouch. Common problem. The.
Andrews Mindmate | 12:14
Break. The engineering team is already completely maxed out. They cannot refactor the legacy code to save that kind of money without stopping all new product development. The The failed fix.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 12:24
Classic dilemma.
Andrews Mindmate | 12:27
The CPO tried to implement a cost awareness policy, sent some memos, but the developers just ignored it because their bonuses are tied to shipping new features, not saving money.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 12:37
Right. Misaligned incentives.
Andrews Mindmate | 12:39
The fear. The deep down 3 a.m. Fears that the CTO will have to fire good engineers to hit that budget number, which will kill the product roadmap and probably get the CTO fired in Q4.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 12:49
Wow. Okay.
Andrews Mindmate | 12:50
Yep. What they pay for, They don't pay for cloud optimization services. That's a commodity. They pay for saving the budget without stopping the roadmap and getting me fired.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 13:00
Survival.
Andrews Mindmate | 13:01
And finally, the proof that calms them. A one-page case study showing how we cut a similar company's cost by 25% using automated spot instances, which required zero developer time.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 13:11
Wow. That is wildly specific. That's not something you can just.
Andrews Mindmate | 13:15
Guess. That is a truth. That is not a theory. Now imagine you have 20 of those. You paste that file into the AI's context window. And your only instruction is use only these truths. Ask before you invent. What happens then? The AI stops hallucinating. It stops giving you that generic useless advice like you should review your AWS bill. Right. Instead, it says something like. Given the CTO's stated fear of firing engineers, we need an upgrade strategy that requires zero downtime during the day shift. We should position the spot incense strategy as a roadmap protector, not just a cost It reasons within the specific, painful reality of that one client.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 13:52
Saver. It starts speaking the client's actual language. It's speaking directly to their fear.
Andrews Mindmate | 14:01
That is how you escape the price shopper. A price shopper buys cloud optimization. A serious buyer pays a premium for roadmap protection. The truth file forces the AI to understand and operate on that absolutely.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 14:12
Distinction. And this isn't a one and done thing, right? You have to maintain it.
Andrews Mindmate | 14:17
Monthly. Reality changes. Your market shifts. A new technology emerges. A competitor makes a move. Your truth file has to be a living document of the market's real-time wrong?
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 14:28
Pain. OK, red team time. This sounds powerful, but what's the failure mode? Where does this go.
Andrews Mindmate | 14:34
The failure mode is a complete lack of intimacy with your market. If your so-called truths are actually just industry best practices that you read in a blog post or theories you think are true but haven't actually speculation.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 14:46
Observed. It's all just speculation. It's.
Andrews Mindmate | 14:49
Yeah. And the AI will fail. CTOs want to save money is not a truth. It's a truism. It's noise. If you haven't been in the room and that CTO is sweating bullets about their board meeting, you cannot write this file. This hack requires you to actually know your customer deeply. If you don't, AI will just amplify your ignorance and it'll do it faster than ever before.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 15:08
That cuts it deep. But it's the absolute reality of the boutique game, isn't it? You are paid for that intimacy and that insight. If you don't have it, no prompt is going to save you.
Andrews Mindmate | 15:17
Exactly. You cannot prompt your way out of a lack of genuine expertise.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 15:21
Okay, let's move to section three. Hack number three, scaling quality with something you call stencils.
Andrews Mindmate | 15:28
This is my personal favorite. It's so practical and it kills the blank page jacks.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 15:32
Forever. We've all been there. You're just staring at that blinking cursor on the screen.
You know you need to write a proposal. You know you need to do it, but you just dread those first ten minutes. The common move is to have like a folder of saved prompts. Write me a proposal for a new client.
Andrews Mindmate | 15:48
And as we've established, that generates generic, unusable garbage. The opposite move is stencils. And the core mechanism here is not creation. It's reverse engineering.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 16:00
OK, walk us through the steps. How do you reverse engineer with an AI?
Andrews Mindmate | 16:04
Step one, don't ask the AI to write anything from scratch. Just stop it. Instead, you go into your sent folder. You go into your company's archives. You find the single best artifact you produced in the last 90 days. I'm talking about a proposal that you actually won. A scope document that saved a project from disaster. A DM thread on LinkedIn that closed a five-figure deal.
Something that actually worked in the real Yes.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 16:25
World. So we're back to that gold output idea again.
Andrews Mindmate | 16:29
You must start with proven success. You take that human-created masterpiece. You copy and paste the entire thing into the AI.
And then you use prompt number one, which is extract the rules and the structure that produced this document.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 16:41
So you're asking the AI to analyze your own winning style.
Andrews Mindmate | 16:45
The style, the logic, the flow, the persuasion architecture. The AI will come back and say something like, okay, This document starts with a direct acknowledgement of the stated pain. It then uses short declarative sentences. It presents pricing in a three-tier option format. It concludes with a negative constraint that creates urgency. It gives you the DNA of your own best Then you use prompt number two.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 17:06
Work. And then what do you do with that DNA?
Andrews Mindmate | 17:10
Now write the system prompt that would generate this exact format reliably in the future. You are asking the AI to write the instructions for love it.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 17:16
Itself. That is so meta. I.
Andrews Mindmate | 17:19
It's necessary. Let's be honest. We are bad at writing prompts. The AI is great at writing prompts. Let it write its own code.
So once it gives you that beautiful detailed system prompt, you have to test it. You say, okay, great. Now using only this new prompt, generate a proposal for a totally different client in a different industry.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 17:37
And you just watch what happens.
Andrews Mindmate | 17:39
You watch if it drifts, if it gets too wordy, or if it messes up the pricing to your structure, you correct it. You say no, you miss the pricing structure, fix the prompt to always include three tiers. You iterate like this three times until it holds steady. Once it's solid, you name it Proposal Stencil V1 and you save it somewhere safe.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 17:58
And now every Monday morning when you have to write a new proposal, you don't start from.
Andrews Mindmate | 18:02
Scratch. You never start from a blank page again. You just call up the stencil, you paste in the new client's details from your notes, and boom, you have a 90% done draft that sounds exactly like you on your very best day.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 18:13
This is how you actually scale quality without watering it down. Usually as a firm grows, the quality drops because the founder isn't touching everything. This locks that quality.
Andrews Mindmate | 18:24
In. It creates a quality floor. Your worst day is now as good as your old best day. That is the definition of operational maturity.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 18:32
Okay, red team critique. Where does this stencil idea break?
Andrews Mindmate | 18:36
The danger is the classic... Garbage in, garbage out. If your best artifact that you started with is actually just mediocre, If your proposals are actually kind of boring and you're only winning deals because you're the cheapest option. Right. Then you have just built a highly efficient machine to generate boring. Mediocre proposal.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 18:57
You've automated mediocrity.
Andrews Mindmate | 18:58
And you'll do it faster than ever before. Yeah. You must have a winning process first. AI scales the process you give it. It does not magically fix a broken process. If you can't close deals manually with your own words, AI won't help you close them.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 19:11
Automatically. That's a really sobering thought. You have to fix the human process first. Don't use AI as a band-aid for a bad business model. Amen to that. All right. Section four, context compounding. This is hack number four, which you call projects.
Andrews Mindmate | 19:24
Yeah, this is all about architecture. It's about how you organize your digital brain so it gets smarter over.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 19:29
Time. The common move is just Digital chaos. It's that long list of chats on the left sidebar of ChatGPT. New chat, copy of new chat. Or maybe some poorly named folders used for basic storage. It's like a messy desk where you can never find a pen when you need.
Andrews Mindmate | 19:44
One. That is how amateurs work. The opposite move is to run your entire company inside of projects. Now, if you're using Claude or the team or plus versions of ChatGPT, you have this feature. It allows you to create a kind of sandbox with specific knowledge files and instructions attached to Right.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 20:01
It. And your recommendation is one project per money lane. Explain that.
Andrews Mindmate | 20:06
Do not create a project for client A and another for client B. You'll end up with hundreds of projects. It's unmanageable. Instead, you create projects for the core functions of your business.
Like what? I recommend four to start. One, pipeline, which is all sales and business development. Two, delivery, which is the actual consulting work. 3. Ops for finance, legal, admin. And four, hiring for talent and recruiting.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 20:32
Why structure it that way, by function instead of by client?
Andrews Mindmate | 20:36
Because the context required for each function is completely different. In the pipeline project, I need the AI to be aggressive, persuasive, and hyper-focused on value propositions. In the delivery project, I needed to be analytical, cautious, and obsessed with detail and risk.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 20:51
So you're setting the rules of engagement for that specific lane of work.
Andrews Mindmate | 20:55
Exactly. Inside the pipeline project, you upload your client truth file from hack two. You upload all your stencils from hack three, your offer documents, your pricing constraints, and you pin the rules inside the project's custom instructions. Always use a professional but direct tone. Never discount below X amount. Always reframe feature requests as value outcomes.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 21:14
So when I enter the pipeline project to work on a new lead, the AI already knows everything about my sales process. I don't have to remind it.
Andrews Mindmate | 21:20
It starts at 100% context. You don't have to say, hey, remember, I'm a consultant and I sell X. It already knows. You just say, draft a reply to this prospect's objection. And because it has all that curated context, the reply is spot on first try.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 21:35
And the compounding part of the name comes from keeping all the work for that function in that one.
Andrews Mindmate | 21:40
Place. Yes. This is the discipline part. All sales-related work happens in the pipeline project. You don't start a random chat for a quick question. You go to the project. Why? Because the AI remembers the files you uploaded. But here's the secret sauce. At the end of a session, let's say you just successfully negotiated a tough contract using the AI in the pipeline project, you take the final best version of that negotiation script and you save it back into the project's knowledge base as a new file.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 22:08
So you're constantly updating the brain with your latest wins.
Andrews Mindmate | 22:11
You're updating the brain. You treat it like a living database, not a disposable chat log.
So the next time you log in, the AI is literally smarter than it was yesterday. It has more context. It knows what wins. Over a few months, the speed becomes an unfair advantage because the AI doesn't have to relearn your business every single time.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 22:30
Okay, red team. This sounds incredibly powerful, but it sounds like it requires a ton of discipline.
Andrews Mindmate | 22:37
It does. The failure mode is the messy desk problem. If you just upload every call transcript, every random note, every half-baked idea into the project's knowledge base, you corrupt the context. How so? The AI gets confused. It starts seeing contradictions. Wait, do we charge $5,000 or $10,000 for this service? I see documents for both. You You have to be a ruthless curator.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 22:56
Have to constantly prune and curate.
Andrews Mindmate | 23:00
Once a week, you go in and you delete the old pricing sheet. You delete the failed proposal draft. You only keep the current best version of any document. If you don't prune, the context degreeds into noise. And once it's noisy, you're right back to getting generic hallucinatory.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 23:14
Outputs. So treat your project files like a pristine operating room. Not a junk drawer or a storage locker.
Andrews Mindmate | 23:22
That's a perfect analogy. If you want high performance surgical outputs, you need a clean, sterile environment.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 23:28
Section five. This one is really about the interaction itself. Hack number five is custom instructions and something called the thinking block.
Andrews Mindmate | 23:36
This is where we protect the most valuable and most fragile asset you have as a consultant. Your time to actually think.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 23:43
The common move for custom instructions, which is that setting in the background of ChatGPT that applies to all chats, is to say something like, Be nice, be concise, explain things to me like I'm a fifth.
Andrews Mindmate | 23:54
Grader. Which is, you know, it's cute, but it's weak. We are boutique consultants. We don't want the AI to be nice. We want it to be effective. We want it to be sharp.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 24:03
So what's the opposite move? What do we put in there instead?
Andrews Mindmate | 24:06
You use the custom instructions to install what I call a thinking block. You intentionally build in a step that forces the AI to slow down and in turn forces you to slow down. How do you do that? You add a simple rule in the instructions. Before providing an answer, you must always ask me three clarifying questions.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 24:24
Always? For every single prompt?
Andrews Mindmate | 24:26
Always. Let's see how it plays out. The common way I type, write a marketing plan for this new product. The normal AI just vomits out a generic 10-point plan. But with the thinking block installed, it stops. It comes back and says, I can do that. But first, please clarify. One. What is the single biggest constraint here? Time, budget, or team skills. Two, what level of failure is acceptable for the first version? 3. What one thing needs to be true about the market for this plan to actually work?
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 24:57
Wow. So it forces you to answer those hard strategic questions before it even starts writing.
Andrews Mindmate | 25:02
Yes. And that 30 seconds where I have to pause and answer those questions, that is where the real consulting happens. That is where I have to actually think, wait a minute, what is the real constraint? You know what? It's actually speed. We don't care about the budget on this one. We absolutely have to launch by Friday.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 25:16
And if you hadn't clarified that, the AI would have given you some balanced six-month plan that completely missed the critical deadline.
Andrews Mindmate | 25:23
Exactly. It would have given me the average plan from its training data. The thinking block forces me to provide the specific constraint that matters. It keeps the human in the role of director and the AI in the role of operator.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 25:37
You mentioned an anti-nice rule. What's.
Andrews Mindmate | 25:39
That? Yes. Another line you should add to your custom instructions. Stress test all of my assumptions. Politely flag any logical fallacies or risks in my requests. Do not prioritize being polite over being accurate.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 25:52
That feels a little risky for the ego, having your AI call you out.
Andrews Mindmate | 25:55
Listen, if your ego can't handle a chat bot pointing out a logical fallacy in private, the market's going to eat you alive in public. I'd much rather the bot tells me my idea is flawed than have a client tell me in a board meeting.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 26:07
Good point. Okay, red team on this one. What's the failure mode for the thinking block?
Andrews Mindmate | 26:12
The failure mode is laziness on the human's part. The AI asks, what's the real constraint? You just type back a one word answer. Budget. That's lazy. The output will still be garbage. The quality of the output is strictly, and I mean strictly, capped by the clarity of the constraint you provide in your answers. If you treat the thinking block as just an annoying nuisance to click through, you gain absolutely nothing. You have to actually engage with the questions it asks.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 26:39
So it requires you to expend some real mental energy. Which is.
Andrews Mindmate | 26:43
What you are paid for. That's the whole point of the boutique advantage. You are paid to think, not just to copy and paste. This system protects I call this the leverage point.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 26:50
That. Okay. That brings us to our final hack, section six. This is the big one, the custom GPT.
Andrews Mindmate | 26:59
The.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 26:59
Common move here is one of two things. Either people try to build these massive complex GPTs called the super consultant or something that tries to do everything. Total failure. Or they build a library of like 50 tiny single purpose GPTs that nobody on the team ever remembers to use because it's just too cumbersome.
Andrews Mindmate | 27:16
Both are dead on arrival. The do everything GPT fails because the instructions get too long and start contradicting each other. And the library of tiny tools fails because of cognitive load. I can't remember if I should use the email writer GPT or the prospect follow up GPT.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 27:33
So the opposite move is something you call the money printer. You.
Andrews Mindmate | 27:36
Build one operator that does one critical job end to end. You look at your business, at your daily workflow, and you find a bottleneck you absolutely hate. A task that drains your soul every time you have to do it.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 27:49
OK. For me that scope control that moment when a client emails and says hey this is great can we just add this one little thing. I hate writing the pushback email I procrastinate on it every time.
Andrews Mindmate | 27:59
Perfect. That is a perfect candidate for a custom GPT.
So you would build the scope control GPT. And here's how. One. You take the stencil you built for a perfect scope pushback email from hack three, and you paste that into the GPT's core instructions. Right. Two. You upload your client truth file from Hack 2 as a knowledge file.
So it knows your firm's tone and your value proposition. Got it. You clearly define the input. The instructions say the user will paste the client's out-of-scope request here. And four, you define the precise output. Your job is to generate a polite but firm email that declines the extra work, cites the relevant section of the original contract, and offers to scope it as a paid change That is all it does, but it does it perfectly every single time in 30 seconds without any emotional baggage or procrastination.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 28:43
Order. And that's all it does. It just does that one email.
And the rule for the rest of your team...
Andrews Mindmate | 28:54
The rule is... No freelancing. Run the operator. If a junior consultant on your team has to push back on scope, they do not write the email from scratch. They do not struggle with the tone. They don't have to guess. They run the scope control GPT, It ensures that your best judgment...
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 29:07
Period. This ensures incredible consistency across the entire firm, no matter who is handling the client.
Andrews Mindmate | 29:15
The judgment of the firm's owner is baked into that operator. You know exactly how to push back on scope without damaging the client relationship. If you let a junior consultant freelance that response, they might cave and give away free work. Or they might be too rude and lose the client. The GPT operationalizes your best, most profitable judgment.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 29:36
And it creates real leverage because it's so simple that it actually gets used.
Andrews Mindmate | 29:40
It's a single tool for a single high-stakes pain point. You build these for the things that move money. A client follow-up GPT, An internal project QA checklist GPT. A risk assessment GPT. Don't build a GPT that writes poetry. Build a GPT that writes change orders. Red The failure mode is the Swiss Army knife temptation.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 29:57
Team. Where does this custom operator model fail?
Andrews Mindmate | 30:03
You build your perfect scope control GPT and then someone says, this is great. Let's make it do the invoice for the change order too. And maybe you can suggest a good spot for the celebration lunch afterward.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 30:12
Scope creep on your scope control.
Andrews Mindmate | 30:13
Tool. Exactly. No, it must be narrow to be deep. If it tries to do proposals A and D quality assurance, it will fail at both, because the core instructions for those two tasks will inevitably conflict. Keep it single purpose.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 30:29
Simple is scalable.
Andrews Mindmate | 30:30
Simple gets used, complex gets ignored, and becomes shelfware.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 30:34
Wow. Okay, we have covered a massive amount of ground here. We've gone from the basic mindset of Go Plus all the way to building these custom GPT operators. We've torn down the prompt engineering myth. We've built client truth files.
Andrews Mindmate | 30:48
And hopefully we have absolutely destroyed the idea that AI is just a content machine for churning out blog The price shopper loves generic AI.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 30:53
Posts. Let's try to summarize the journey. We started with this looming fear of the price shopper, the client who just wants the cheapest option.
Andrews Mindmate | 31:03
They absolutely love it because it makes everyone look and sound the same, which drives the market price straight to zero. Boutique firms win by doing the absolute opposite. They do not win by producing more content. They win by making better decisions faster than anyone else in the.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 31:16
Market. And all of these hacks, the stencils, the projects, the thinking blocks, they're all designed to do just that. To clear away the noise so you can see the signal and make that better decision. To.
Andrews Mindmate | 31:27
Protect the human.
The empathy. The judgment, the courage to look a client in the eye and say, no, that's out of scope.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 31:43
We promised an asymmetry test at the end of this, a way for listeners to audit themselves and their work.
Andrews Mindmate | 31:49
Here's the test. It's very simple. Look at your last major output, the last proposal, the last strategy deck you sent to a client. Now ask yourself two questions. First, if 10 of my competitors got a copy of this, could they post it on their blog tomorrow and pass it off as their own? The answer is yes, you failed.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 32:06
And the second question.
Andrews Mindmate | 32:08
Second, if a price shopper looks at your output and says, " that's nice, but I can probably get that cheaper on Upwork," You failed. Raise the bar.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 32:15
It has to be so specific to the client's pain that it's undeniable. It has to be so specific, so insightful, and so deeply rooted in their reality, the reality you captured in your truth file, that a generic competitor couldn't possibly have written it. It should feel like it could only have come from you.
Andrews Mindmate | 32:32
And finally, we always end with a specific action, not go think about this, but go do this. The 15-minute decision.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 32:39
Here is your homework. You can do this in the next 15 minutes right after this.
Andrews Mindmate | 32:42
Ends. Choose one closed one deliverable from the last 90 days. A proposal that actually won. A strategy document the client loved. A report that got you a high five and a renewal. Okay, got one in mind. The action. One, open your AI tool of choice. Chat GPT, Claude, whatever. Two, paste that entire winning document into the chat window. 3. Run the stencil prompt we discussed earlier. Extract the rules and the structure that produced this. Then, write the system prompt that would generate this format reliably. 3. Run the stencil prompt we discussed earlier. 4. Save that system prompt somewhere you can easily find it. 3. Run the Stencil prompt we discussed earlier. Five, use it on the very next client interaction you have.
So don't try to build the entire six hack system today. Just build one stencil from your own best work.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 33:30
Just one. Make a decision to stop paying the blank page tax starting right chew on?
Andrews Mindmate | 33:34
Now. I love that. It's practical. It's immediate. It's valuable. Any final provocation for our listeners to.
Stephs Digital Ambassador | 33:41
AI can read the map. It can process all the data. It can see the optimal route. But only you can drive the car. If you take your hands off the wheel, if you let the AI decide the strategy, the tone, the level of risk you should take, you aren't a consultant anymore. You're a passenger. And passengers don't charge premium fees. Drive the car.
Andrews Mindmate | 34:00
Drive the car. That's it for this deep dive. Thanks for listening. Go build that stencil. See you in the next one.
