Practical AI for Small Business
The parts of the job that were never the business.

For the owner-operator who is the marketing department, the front desk, and the bookkeeper after close. No staff to delegate to, no time to learn a platform. This course assumes you have a phone, an email address, and about twenty minutes a day that are currently going to tasks you resent.

What it is

Six short lessons, each built around a job you already do after close: answering the inbox, handling reviews, getting a month of marketing done, writing the thing you keep putting off. Every lesson has real prompt text you can copy and ends with one thing to do tonight, with your own customers and your own words.

What it is not

It is not a tour of products, and it is not a case for putting a bot between you and your customers. Nothing in here sends anything on its own; you read every draft and you press send. People choose a small business because a person is behind it, and that is the one advantage worth protecting.

What you need

• An AI tool you can type into, on any free plan. Whichever one is already on your phone is the right one; this course never asks you to choose a product.
• Your last thirty customer messages and whichever review pages you are listed on, open in another window. Every exercise runs on your own material, not on examples.
• A plain note you can copy from in two taps — the notes app, a text file, anything you already open without thinking. Four small files end up living there.
• Ten minutes of facts about your business: how long you have been open, your hours, your current lead time, the jobs you turn away. Lesson 1 turns these into the block every later lesson uses.
• About three hours in total — roughly thirty minutes a lesson, spread over six days, plus one two-hour afternoon a month afterwards if you do the marketing sitting.

How to work through it

In order, one lesson a day if you can. The order is not decorative: lesson 1 builds a short block about your business that every later lesson pastes in, and lesson 5 draws the line the first four work up to. If you only ever do two, do 1 and 5.

Pace it as one lesson an evening, six evenings, each about half an hour. Nothing here rewards binge-reading, because every lesson ends with something to do on your own material tonight, and the doing is where the learning is. A lesson you read without running is a lesson you will not use in a month.

Keep three things open while you work: the lesson, your actual inbox or review page, and one note you paste into as you go. That note becomes the four files the course builds — the shop block, the never list, "posts that sounded like me," and the back-office list. Keep them together in one folder, on whichever device you really use, backed up somewhere that is not the phone in your pocket. Lose the prompts and keep the files and you can rebuild this in an afternoon; keep the prompts and lose the files and you are back to generic output within a week.

The prompts themselves live twice: inside each lesson, where they are explained, and all together in the toolkit, in their finished form. Read the lessons to understand why each line is in a prompt; use the toolkit afterwards, on a Tuesday evening, when you want the text without the explanation. Anything in [brackets] is yours to fill in.

By the end you will have those four files and a twenty-minute weekly routine, rather than a set of notes you never open again.