How to Actually Use ChatGPT in a Small Business

Most advice about using ChatGPT in a business is a list of prompts. Copy this, paste that, watch the magic happen. Almost all of it is written by people who have never run a business and have no idea what your week actually looks like.

So here is the practical version. Four things it genuinely does well, three it does badly, and how to tell the difference before you waste an afternoon.

What it is genuinely good at

Writing the thing you have been putting off. The awkward email to a client who has not paid. The description for a service page. The reply to a complaint that you keep rewriting because you are annoyed. It is very good at getting you from a blank page to something you can edit, and editing is far quicker than starting.

Turning a mess into a structure. You have got twenty scribbled notes about a job. Paste them in and ask for them as a scope of work. It will not be right, but it will be organised, and organised wrong is much faster to fix than unorganised.

Being the person you think out loud at. This is the most underrated one. Describing a problem in enough detail for it to be useful usually shows you the answer halfway through. It is rubber ducking with something that occasionally pushes back.

Explaining something in language you can use. A contract clause, a bit of legislation, a technical spec a supplier sent. Not as advice, as a translation, so you know what you are actually looking at before you ring somebody who does know.

What it is bad at

Anything where being wrong matters and you cannot check. It will state a figure, a date or a rule with total confidence and be completely wrong. If you cannot verify it, do not use it. This is the single biggest way small businesses get burned.

Sounding like you. Out of the box it writes like a press release. If you send a client something it wrote unedited, they will know, and it makes you look like you could not be bothered. Every useful thing it writes needs you to take a pass through it.

Anything that has to happen reliably, on its own, every time. This is the important one and almost nobody says it. ChatGPT is a tool you sit at. It is not a system that runs. If the job is "every enquiry gets a reply within five minutes whether I am awake or not", that is not ChatGPT, that is something built.

The test that tells you which is which

Ask one question. Am I going to be sat there when this happens?

If yes, ChatGPT is probably the right tool and it costs about twenty pounds a month. Use it, get good at it, and do not pay anyone to teach you.

If no, if the thing has to happen while you are on a job or asleep or on holiday, you need something built. Those are completely different problems and conflating them is how people spend money on the wrong thing. There is more on that distinction in do you need a website or a system.

Where most people go wrong

They start with the tool and go looking for a use. It always produces the same result, which is a subscription nobody opens after week three.

Start with the job that is eating your week. Then ask whether it is a sitting down job or a running by itself job. That answers what you need, and quite often the answer is nothing at all.

I set out how to find that job in what to automate first in a small business, and how to spot a tool that solves nothing in is this AI tool solving a real problem.

What I actually tell people

Get the paid version. Twenty pounds a month is nothing against an hour saved. Use it for the writing and the thinking. Do not trust a single number it gives you without checking.

And when you find yourself wishing it would just do that thing automatically while you are out, that is the moment the conversation changes from a subscription to a build, and that is worth a proper look.

If you have hit that point, get in touch and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth building. The prices are on work with me.