Angelina Darrisaw Talks Building Success, Empowering Teams, Harnessing AI For Efficiency + More
What's up.
Its way up at Angela. Ye, and it's our favorite time of the week. It's Wealth Wednesday. I'm it's Stacy Tisday, my partner.
Happy Wealth Wednesdays everybody. It is almost end of year and we have a great end of view boost for all you entrepreneurs out there. Angelina Dara Saw the founder and CEO of c Suite Coach, which is just an incredible, incredible platform is here and Angelina founded it. She's helped so many people. She also has some interesting relationships that she's going to tell us about and not those kind of.
Relationships, but.
Here Wednesday.
But today she's here to teach you guys all about AI and what AI can do for small businesses. Thank you so much for coming.
Yeah, thank you for having me Angela.
You know I'm big fans Stacy also, so I'm excited. I think this is one of several Wealth Wednesdays we've done together.
Yeah.
No, clearly we're big fans also, Angelina.
And before we even get into the AI with c Spee Coach, I just want you to give people some insight again on what your business is because I know you've gone through a lot to grow the business.
The way that you have.
Yeah, absolutely, c Suite coach. We're almost approaching a decade and I'm really really excited about that.
Next year will be ten years. We are an.
Organizational development consultancy. So essentially what that means is we work with large companies on people solutions, upskilling their talent, on leadership skills, offering executive coaching services, and also building programs that foster community. One of those programs includes the Growth Google Digital Coaches program, which we've been working on since twenty seventeen, So really making sure that we're thinking about resources that communities need to upskill themselves and to develop themselves as leaders.
Yeah.
Google's not going anywhere, right, No, And it's definitely like who doesn't use Google every single day?
You know?
So, and I had no idea how many different ways you can use it, especially with AI. So first of all, tell us how you have used AI in your own business.
Absolutely well.
One of the big things that we've been focusing on for the near term is doing a better job at submitting for RFPs. And I don't know if you've ever looked at a government RFP, but they are.
Like ninety pages long.
Yeah, and so it'd be like, I don't, I can't.
Most people don't do them exactly.
They're so specific.
And that's also a great opportunity for more small businesses to be thinking about because as industries experienced a lot of change, government tends to be a little bit slower. But in any case, the RFPs are really long, and I could pop my RFP into Gemini and ask it give me my deliverables that I have to do to answer this, RFP also tell me the timeline important dates I need to know because RFPs also have dates like when to submit for questions, when you have to propose, even down to the hour of day, and so it goes through all that information for you.
So that's one of the ways.
The other way it cuts down days.
Of work days of work, and also make sure that you meet those deadlines.
Yes, yes, absolutely, And then make sure that my talent, my quality employees who have a great array of skills, they're not spending their time reading ninety pages.
Right, that's like a whole day of work.
Yeah, so now I can repurpose that time back and have them do something else. And then one other thing I will call out that's been really helpful is notebook LM, which is another tool where you can actually put in a web address and have it scan a website and tell you what it finds. And we did this. We put our website in there and asked it to come up going through our website looking at what would the commonly asked questions be for our website, and it populated a list, and now, without having to us much thought power, we're adding frequently asked questions to our website to answer some of those questions for our customers.
Wow, exact too, and I were talking AI is here. Eighty percent of small businesses are using it, and especially when I hear you describe how you're using it, it's almost hurts your bottom line not to absolutely.
Yeah, the businesses who aren't using it are putting themselves at a disadvantage really because it's here, and as you call out, businesses are already using it. Those businesses that are using it are saying it's helping them increase productivity, they're gaining more sales, and also they're reducing cost.
Right.
So when you look at that and you're just getting started and you're not leveraging some of these things, it's like you're actually it's not even that you're behind. It's like you're taking steps backwards and not using AI.
Some people are really scared of it, right, and some people are also nervous, like, well, it's this going to take my job? Does this mean that people are going to lose in the workplace and pretty soon they won't need us? What would you say for people who are scared of using AI.
Well, a couple of thoughts.
The first would be you have to continue to upscoe yourself throughout your career. That's one of the things my company helps people do, and so you want to make sure you're tapping into trainings to keep leveling.
Up your skills. But the other piece of it is AI is.
Really your companion. That's how we should be looking at it. It's not creating or replacing your critical thinking or your unique perspective. But what it is doing is cutting down on some of that time it would take and for those really administrative or sometimes repetitive tasks. And so I would actually be encouraged and not discourage my AI.
It'll help you a lot, Yeah, because.
It's like it can actually make me better at my job because now I have more time to showcase.
My experts and if you don't know how to use it, you probably won't have a job at some point in the future because that's a skill that I think everybody is going to expect their talent to be able to do.
Yeah, people hear about it, though I know someone who would. I used to be a technophobe, but hear about new technology and be like, oh, I have to get trained in this. It's not that at all. Chat GPT has become like my best friend. You ask it anything and it's giving you research information, proposals that would take me days to write. It's writing in a couple of minutes. The key is asking the right questions. That's being trained in AI. Talk about how important that is.
Yeah, absolutely So.
We actually have a workshop that's free on demand online that's available for anyone g dot co Slash Girls, Slash AI for SMB's completely free, and that workshop is all about the quality of a good prompt. I always say, if you want a good answer, you really have to ask a good question. And so when we're leveraging prompts, we need to be thinking about who's the audience of whatever the end deliverable is, what is the format I want that deliverable end. Do I want bullets? Do I want it in a summary or social media post? What's the tone? So I'll adapt a persona I am a middle career social media manager, or I am the CEO of an executive a big corporation for example, right, and add those things in there and give it some context and of course to ask what do you want it to do?
And those help create that good quality prompt.
It's crazy.
I do financial wellness for corporations and I asked chat GPT what would be a good outline for Stacy Tissdale to do a financial wellness program for this company for this maney employees. And it was like in seconds the full outline. It's not replacing you because you take that and you tweak it.
Yeah, you can't just take it copy and paste.
Now, it's definitely some tweaking that has to happen in all what platform?
So I use Gemini and I'm like listening to.
You, and it's built in our phones by the way, it.
Is, Oh you must have Android.
Oh no, this is it. I thought it was built in the iPhone.
It is too, It's in the Google app.
Okay, it's built in here.
Because when I go on here, it always is Gemini, and then I can put in whatever exactly exactly.
So I do use Gemini, and I use it for a number of reasons. I am a small business owner. I leverage Google Workspace to run my email accounts, our cloud, our docs, work, you know, everything, slides, everything, and so Gemini was a natural tool for me to adopt because one of the things I love about it is within Gemini, I can sync it with my Google Drive and say, even like look at past articles I've written, and now in my voice, like train it on my voice and then now write an email in my voice. Right, So there's really cool features like that. It's also embedded into the spreadsheets Google Spreadsheets, It's embedded into Google Slides, and so I can create right there within those tools that I'm using already for work, and I love that.
Yeah, Gemini has its own app. It does and you can go on, well, no, I'm.
Here too, okay, good Yemi.
Change every day.
I even I think it's relatively new. Oh that's great, yeah.
Because right, well, so for Gemini, there is a free uh standalone tool. Right, so when you think about Gemini.
It exists within Google products.
But then there's also what Ange is talking about, which is that free standalone tool where you can use it to ask things.
You can even talk to it.
I don't know if that feature is available. Yeah, so you can even talk to it, which I love because.
Friend, we've lost her.
But the app now and I'm not sure how new that is. But when I was on in the Google app and then it has Gemini on top, and then it says it now has you can get the app.
That has to be I haven't even let me upload update my phone.
That's incredible.
And see what you just did, though, is when you talk about being a technophobe, that's what we should be doing, is when we hear about things exactly immediately diving into it, playing with it, trying it. You're not gonna lose when you do that, You're only going to gain. So I love that you already down.
And Angelina also has so I was actually on a work trip and she sent me because I was like, look, I'm trying to figure out like how to get better at AI because I don't want to be the person that's like, oh you know, I'm scared of this.
I'm not doing that. I do things the old fashioned way, I want to make.
Sure that I'm always up in my skills as well. And so she actually sent me her course on YouTube that I was watching, and while I was on this trip, other people were asking me about it and I was like, Angelina, is it okay if I share your information? Because everybody right now is trying to figure out how can we make this something that is attainable for people, because sometimes it can be intimidating. Like you said, people felt like, ooh, I don't want to, you know, try something new, and we've heard so many I think negative things about AI too verrier. Yeah, but the truth is that if you don't know how to do it, you are going to get left behind.
You are and you know the key The scary pieces come from people not being responsible in their uses. But when you're responsible and your use you talked about not copying and pasting right, so for example, and you want to add your own tone and your own voice to it because it's going to make it really truly reflect what you.
Want to say.
But I even think just the fact checking before you send things out, or if you are going to be using AI for certain things, maybe let people know if it's going to have an impact on them. That makes a huge difference. But ultimately it's here, it's our companion. I use it for pretty much everything. It's embedded in things that we already do.
When you go on these social media sites and you're looking, like the way that I even do my stories on a daily basis is it'll put together like top trending stories and it will give you a summary that they pull from everywhere on what's the top trending story, so that you can have information that they actually like put together in one paragraph for you to make.
It a lot easier to understand.
It just gave me a journalist hack.
No.
And you know what else is great?
And you know we're talking about this and you have to take her course if anybody can go on to how can people get the course?
G dot co, slash grow, slash ai for SMBs okay, And the other thing that's great that you can do too is like say, you're not good at public speaking and speaking in front of people, right, and there's capabilities with that.
Talk about that.
Oh so I think okay, so Ange really did take that?
I did, I really did.
I'm telling you she's gonna get.
I was on a trip and I was literally but sitting there and watching it because first of all, Angelina has a very soothing voice to listen to and it makes you feel like, Okay, I can do this.
But people were really like, oh, what's that? Oh I need to learn about that.
And that's how I even was telling you, Oh, this person's asking me, you know, can can I give them your information? But just even learning how to say you don't like public speaking?
Yeah, So there was a what you're referring to, and we do the case study of the business owner and that training as there was a business owner, Nico agui Lar, who was struggling with public speaking and he hired an expensive coach and he was like, wait, there's so many business owners struggling with us. Let me create an app or figure out a way to scale out these tools.
And so his app it's called Speako.
It's powered by AI, and essentially what it does is it detects when, for example, you're using filler words, or you need to slow down or your pace as really this is how advanced AI can be. And what's really great is he leverages Gemini also as a tool to update content and that are exercises in his library for his users.
So think about how helpful that is.
Right.
AI can't go and give that speech for you exactly, but what it can do is assist you and make sure that you're more comfortable, make sure that your speech is as great as it can be, getting rid of those filler words, helping you, having somebody there that is objective.
So the REV a companion.
Yeah, it is for those mundane tasks or for those repetitive tasks, right, And I just think about how these days seem to get shorter and shorter, and how we need more capacity and AI really help with giving us some of that time back that we ordinarily would have spent researching and pulling things.
So Google is taking the lead with us with Gemini. Gemini Business I know is for small businesses. And if people want to get trained on all of this, you are a Google Digital coach. Tell us what that means.
Yeah, So since twenty seventeen, I'm really excited. I've been working with growth Google Digital Coaches program and I serve as the national coach. Essentially, what that means is we create trainings and deliver trainings like what Ange went through and all across the.
How long is that training.
It's like, how long is it?
Like that one is about forty five minutes.
I was like minutes.
Yeah, you can learn and it's so helpful.
And also, because I'm gonna be honest, it's a lot of different options to choose from, and this is really great at giving you, like things that have been vetted out that are useful, because it is sometimes you can get like oversaturated with different programs and you're like, I don't even know which one should I be getting this one popular today, this one's not. I've never heard of this, So this was really helpful and helping kind of, you know, put that together, because I think it's important to have somebody that you trust that's kind of guiding you along this and then you can obviously branch off and figure out how to do things on your own, but it's a nice base for you to figure out how you can do things and how to get started.
Yeah, and I love that you called out trust because that's essentially what grow with Google Digital Coaches are. They're trusted local community business owners who also have marketing expertise, and they're really focused on throughout the whole country figuring out how to help more small business owners, and they do this.
With free We do this with free skills based.
Training, no cost at all, and you can sign up for free training anytime. We're in seventeen states and trainings are happening throughout the country every day.
So really glad that that's a resource.
We've been able to support over two hundred and fifty thousand small business owners at this point, and the numbers will just keep growing. And next year we're going to be supporting a lot on AI because it's going to keep changing and we're gonna have to keep business owners up to date on these things.
How do people sign up for that?
So you go to grow dot, Google Slash Digital Coaches and you can find the coach that's nearest to you.
You can also, as.
We called out, take some of my on demand courses that are available, but there are workshops again in all the markets, both virtual and in person, completely at no cost.
See that's amazing.
Now I want to ask you, Angelina, because obviously since you've been a digital coach, things have been changing, growing, evolving. When you first heard of AI, do you remember early on, like what were some things that you were thinking and how you used it early on?
Yeah, I think the very first thought that I had was I'm a business owner. I don't have time for this, like I'm gonna have to yep, So that you said, right, like there's.
A learning curve. I'm gonna have to learn how to do this.
Who has the time to learn something new? But again to that point, more and more I started to hear about like out or see real life examples like how you went from never creating social content so you have calendars ready full of posts, or people putting more and more blogs on their sites because they're leveraging AI to help them produce more content. And so as I was hearing more and more from other business owners, I was like, I need to just engage with it. And then the thing that was crazy is I didn't realize that AI has already just been a part of things that we already do, so it's not this big thing.
For example, when you're.
Watching YouTube yeah or yeah, any streaming. When you're watching these things, it is serving you up recommendations based on your past viewing history and that.
Yeah, yeah, that's why sometimes you look at somebody else's account and you're like, what the hell a day watching right?
Messing up my recommendation.
But yeah, it is something that you use whether or not you're aware of it, and so you might as well figure out how can you use it to the greatest advantage possible. Even coming up with logos, you know, business plans, putting together a deck, all of those things that take so much time.
This can really help you with that.
I know people who are not good at writing emails, so they say, and you know, I hate when somebody sends an email out and things are like spelled wrong or improper grammar. It can help you, you know, fix that up so that at least you have the base of what it is that you want to say. And now a lot of times it'll finish your sentence for you too.
I even ask to check my tone. So I remember I was writing.
I was writing an email to someone and.
You know how things can be misread, and I was like, I'm wondering if this.
Is sounding passive aggressive.
So I popped the email into Gemini and I'm like, how is the tone on this?
Is it passive aggressive?
And it says it gave me exact language that I could change.
Wow, to shift the tone a little passive aggressive?
It was?
It was so I had to change a couple of things around and be a little more direct, so you know, better relationships.
See, Gemini can give you better relationships.
So Gemini the sign is a little crazy, but Gemini to focus on the nuts and personally. I want to talk about art because now I said that you did something at your home with art in your house, and then obviously I went to the art show that you helped to curate the other day. So can you talk to us about your in this art world, what it is that you're you're doing.
Yeah, I would just say what I'm doing is the same thing that I'm doing with technology and everything else. I'm taking spaces that have felt really uncomfortable for me, and also because of just my personality and my mission and life, I'm bringing community along with me and trying to drive more comfort in these spaces. So I have always engaged with art in some capacity or been interested in it. My mom was the educator, taking us to museums on trips. And then as I got older and started thinking about how to decorate my apartment, and I knew that I was beyond cutting out the I used to have the Jacob Lawrence calendars and cut out the photos and put them in frames. I was like, you can't really do that anymore. How are you going to engage? I said, let me take this seriously, and I joined Black Arts Counsel at MoMA, founding member of Studio Museum of Harlem and started just engaging meeting artists. And then there are some amazing groups that exist, like Art Noir that's who hosted the event in my home, that really focus on making art less scary for us because a lot of times we go into galleries, we historically haven't had a lot of the resources to buy art. And it is about listen. You can walk into a space and learn when you're ready. At least you're building up the knowledge that you need to engage in art, and in the meantime, you should feel included in these spaces. And this is really I don't want to get too crazy ahead, but what I'm also learning is that there's also an you know, you're building your financial portfolio if you do diversify, if.
You're engaging in art the right way.
So that's the advanced place, but I think the starting place is how do we get.
More of us in spaces?
And that makes a difference, right when the Met Museum sees that everyone is going to the Ancient Egypt the new exhibit that just came out, They're like, wow, people do respond to more black art in our museum. Maybe that should do this more right. So it's like us engaging has an impact.
Absolutely, and we've tried to bring a lot of attention to that art. Was one of the first alternative investments that allowed micro investing. Also, that's the same thing that brought a lot of people of color into the stock market, all those micro apps. I think we had master works up here. There's really ways to engage with it. But awesome, Great on you as always for bringing the community and community into those spaces and arming them.
Yeah, I just thought that was fascinating. And I want to make sure again I took the course. I don't play, and I'm always about educating myself, So I want to make sure that people again take this absolutely free course, because why wouldn't you this year play.
It in the background while you're, you know, washing your dishes. It's very quick, it's very efficient, and I would say most importantly impactful, and you'll walk away with a new knowledge of how to do something. You're using Google anyway, right, like everyone is, so at least figure out now how to adapt to that next stage, which is those AI tools that are embedded.
One another angle. I want you to talk about this.
Black businesses, we always know the trouble that we have access to capital that might even be changing and get harder. People don't make that link between AI and your bottom line and the whole access to capital situation.
Yeah, when I was starting a business, and now almost ten years ago is still crazy to me. But when I was starting a business, the biggest thing was.
I didn't have enough resources.
I needed help, I needed more time, I needed.
More people around it.
You have to pay people, right, And so when we think about AI, what AI can do is some of those tats. Like you talked about creating a business plan. People pay people to make business.
Plans, and now you need them a lot of money.
And I applied for grants and apply.
For a grant that can be very time consuming too.
All of that is very time consuming, and so leveraging AI is kind of affecting your bottle online by giving you money back right that you would have had to spend in other places.
And so that's one big piece of it.
And then to the point of as we think about our community in particular, we have been last at.
The table and a lot of spaces.
And I always think, every time something new comes out, this is our opportunity to jump to the front, right and really create something new, really figure out how to build with it. If I leverage AI, Like let's say I'm a local hair salon and I'm leveraging AI to take care of my pos or do financial help me with financial planning in some way. Now that's time back that I have where I can differentiate myself by having my people focus more on our customer services. There Paris, yes, yes, yes, right there, Yeah we do Paris hooks me up.
That's soft suppressed.
But yeah.
And scheduling all because we all know how hard it is like being a small business owner myself, just even hiring employees, keeping check of the schedules, even figuring out what you need to order if things are running low, how can we make sure that we stay on top of those things? And sometimes human error is a real thing. And if this can be something that helps somebody be like, oh it's time to order this or relow on that, or how can we also get a lower cost. Where can I find this so that I can buy it and bulk from here instead of spending X amount of dollars?
You can just ask at that, Yeah, because.
There's definitely ways, Like you know, we're always trying to shop around to get the best price or whatever it is that you're.
Trying to find.
Maybe you want to work with some black owned brands, some women owned brands. How can I replace my what other black owned brands you know? Can I use in my coffee shop? That's going to actually help because again we were talking about making sure that we spend money in our own as well, and that's an important thing too. And these are all ways that AI can help you find those find those resources.
Content and marketing too. All the time you think make you spend creating social media posts and all this other stuff.
Yeah, And so the point now that you say you're using AI for some of the things you call out for, now that front desk person or someone who was on your team who was doing that before, now they can spend the time focusing on something else that helps you be competitive and be really innovative in your space.
And even like you said, scheduling posts to go up with social media. Now you have content and instead of you having to be like, I gotta hurry up and do this by this time, you can just schedule it and you can have them do that. They can also put together the best language to use to get the best everybody's always talking about, okay, the algorithm, X, Y and Z, how do I get the most you know out of this post? And it can help you with all of that because people are always trying to figure out what's the best time of the data post?
You know, how long should this be in a carousel? How many?
Engagement is so important and a I can really help you with that too.
AI experts, No, I'm not many favorite things about Angela. She's such an avid learner and I learned from the stuff she's.
Learning and just hearing you and Ai.
You have given us a lot of websites for Google Digital Coaches and for c Suite. Promise that you'll put these on your social media and tell people how to find you on social media.
Yes, yes, yes, I am on social media at Lena darisaw and you can find all of our programming and we put when our schedules are going to be at Digital Coaches program So lots of updates and tips on there for small business owners, also on how to use technology for your business.
So they're following what on Instagram.
At Digital Coaches program.
Or Lena Darisa Alena Daris or at Wealth Wednesdays.
Because we're gonna post all of this stuff, but thank you.
We're gonna have you back, You're gonna you are gonna walk our community through AI.
Yes, that's our.
Twenty Angelina is like one of my favorite people and she always responds anytime I have a question about anything.
So I appreciate you so much for this.
Like I said, I'm a forever student and so this is important and I want to make sure anytime we get something that I think is great and valuable, we pass it on.
Big shout out to Angelina's mom.
That's my that's my girl.
Thank you, Happy Wealth Wednesdays. More to come.