Small Business AI Mastery for Speakers

You may use AI most days, and you’re keeping up as well as anyone can while running a business and getting on stages. Then, you hear about AI running someone’s entire business. You try to copy it, get lost, and conclude that AI is either over-hyped or is beyond you.

Neither is true. What’s missing is not your effort, and it’s not your aptitude.

What’s missing is a way to measure where you are today, to see what becomes possible at the next levels, and most importantly, how to get to the next level without chasing every new tool, trend, and shiny object that comes along.

And you need the workflow, prompts, time, and support to build what your business needs to move towards your next level.

That is what this day gives you.

Morning Presentation:

• • Finally understand what is happening when you have a conversation with AI: where it excels; where it breaks down; and what all the terminology you keep hearing actually means.
  • Learn to stop AI from confidently making things up: why it guesses instead of telling you it does not know, why it agrees with you when you are wrong, the two rules that stop both, and the settings that keep your business data out of AI training.
  • Determine where you stand in implementing AI in your business and what is possible. Map yourself on the AI Competency Ladder, and watch a real behind-the-scenes walkthrough of a small business whose daily admin runs on AI.
  • Paste your own standing rules into your Claude settings, so every chat from that point on keeps your tone, admits what it does not know, and pushes back instead of agreeing with you.
  • Find out what a skill is, where skills live, and how to make one, so you stop re-explaining the same job every time you sit down.

Working Lunch

Bring your own food. During lunch, we’ll make sure you are setup and ready to build, so the afternoon starts with everyone in the same place. Coffee, tea, and water provided.

Afternoon Build Workshop:

• • Build, Style, and Publish a Sample Speaker Landing Page (Zero Coding Required): Walk in with your bio, talk topics, testimonials, and brand colors. Walk out with a sample speaker web page, published.
  • Learn the Art of Rapid Prompt Iteration (“Vibe Coding”): Experience how to direct AI using simple, conversational English to change layouts, restyle colors, move sections around, and rewrite a headline on the fly.
  • Build a Working Post-Event Audience Follow-Up App & Testimonial Dashboard: Create a complete app at one web address. Your audience scans a QR code from your closing slide, rates the talk and leaves their name and email, and their download appears on their phone before they leave the room. You get a private dashboard, protected by a password, listing everyone who signed up with their ratings and their words, and a button that downloads the whole list as a spreadsheet.

Bonus Digital Takeaways

Six resources, sent to you as one link.

1. The Claude Product Reference: Chat, Cowork, Design and Code. What each one is for, what it can reach, how Claude remembers things, and a table comparing all four.
2. The General Instructions Template: A block of text you paste into your Claude settings one time. Three sections: how you want Claude to work with you, how you want it to write, and the facts about you and your business. Every chat after that follows it.
3. Teaching Claude About Your Business: Copy one block, answer the thirteen questions it asks you, paste the result into your settings. Nothing to fill in, and you only do it once.
4. Prompts and Ideas for the Speaking Business: 90 jobs you can hand to AI, in seven groups, each written out in full as a prompt you can paste. Plus a worked example and how to turn one into a skill.
5. The AI Glossary: Fifty AI terms explained in plain English, in alphabetical order. Built to look one thing up, not to be read. Prints on two pages.
6. The Website & App Prompt Vault: The exact prompts we use during the workshop, each with a copy button, so you can rebuild or change your page and your app any time.

Attendee Prerequisites

Mandatory Must Haves:

• A one-month $20 Claude subscription. https://claude.ai We will build using Claude, in your browser. What you learn about writing instructions carries over to the other AI products.
• A free Vercel account. https://vercel.com Sign up before the workshop and choose the Hobby plan. Hobby is the free one, and it is all you need. This is where your web page and your app get published, and you will connect it to Claude during the build.
• A free Zoom account. https://www.zoom.com We will be using Zoom periodically, so please make sure you are ready.
• Laptop, laptop power cord, and extension cord.
• Headset/Airpods. Needed if using Wispr Flow (https://wisprflow.ai) or if you want to block out distractions during work sessions.
• Bring your own food for lunch. During the working lunch break, we will make sure everyone is signed in to Claude in a browser and has their files ready to use. Coffee, tea and water will be provided.
• A folder on your desktop with the words for your new webpage: your bio, your talk titles and what each one is about, your testimonials exactly as people wrote them, your brand colors and the name of your font, and every way to reach you including your booking link. Text only. Images or video files not needed – we will not be doing that step during the workshop. If you want a video on your page, bring the YouTube link to your sizzle reel or speaker intro.
• A digital giveaway file to use in your audience app: slides; whitepaper; tips; instructions, etc. Any file type up to 100 MB. If you don’t have something, then any file will do as a placeholder.

Highly Recommended:

• Wispr Flow. https://wisprflow.ai This app facilitates thinking with AI. Instead of composing carefully constructed prompts at the keyboard, you can talk through context, nuance, corrections, half-formed thinking, and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. It automatically cleans up your brain dump into coherent English – without having to type. Test out the free version or grab a one-month subscription for the workshop. It’s a gamechanger.

Got Questions? Need Support?

You have 2 opportunities to ask questions, get help downloading Claude, and/or getting familiar with it:

1. AI Day Pre-Session (1 hour, virtual) with Synthia Smith on Wednesday, September 23 at 11:30 Central.
2. During the Working Lunch before the afternoon build session begins.

Meet Carey Rouse

Carey Rouse is an endurance athlete and the founder of Velo Escapes, which runs small group cycling trips. 

Carey runs his business on AI systems he built himself, and he is not a developer. 

His back office has no code in it: AI jobs run around the clock on his email, seven publishing channels, and a 2,000-clip video library – all on $100 a month.

Before that, Carey spent 28 years managing large technology projects.

Carey wrote Find Meaning Through Relentless Discipline and has published ten guides on how he built an AI-first company. When he’s not leading cycling trips, Carey speaks and consults on putting AI to work in a small business.

Learn more about Carey at careyrouse.com and linkedin.com/in/careyrouse.