Why My Custom GPT Tools Are the Best $20 I Spend in Business (Sorry, Airtable)

If you’ve ever wondered how I’m actually using AI in my day-to-day business (beyond the buzzwords and tool fatigue), today’s solo is your backstage pass. I’ve got my Disney ears on and I’m diving into the three custom GPT tools I’ve built that are now irreplaceable in my business. Spoiler alert: ChatGPT just bumped Airtable as my favorite $20 investment—didn’t think I’d ever say that, did you?

Custom GPT tools aren’t just helpful—they’ve completely transformed how I deliver client experiences, write emails, and repurpose content with ease. And now, I’m building an entire AI Systems Squad™ to bring those same strategic tools to my students.

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What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why generic AI features often miss the mark—and what to do instead
• How I use my custom Strategy Call Summary Assistant to streamline next steps and client deliverables
• The framework behind my Systems Professor Email Assistant (and how it writes emails that sound like you)
• Why building your own custom GPT tools can save you time and sound more like your brand
• How my Repurposing Content GPT tool helps me spin a single transcript into weeks of content
• The real talk on why AI won’t be replacing my team anytime soon (Kara, Haylee, and Sarah—you’re safe)

Why I Started Building Custom GPT Tools for My Business

Let’s start with a little confession: I was late to the AI party. While some of my peers were already knee-deep in prompts and automations, I was still eye-rolling at the idea. But now? There hasn’t been a day in 2025 that I haven’t asked ChatGPT something for my business. And the biggest shift? I stopped trying to make other people’s tools work for me—and started building my own custom GPT tools designed for real creative workflows.

These aren’t one-size-fits-all AI hacks. They’re smart, strategy-backed assistants trained on the same frameworks and systems I use with clients and students every day.

Tool 1: The Strategy Call Summary Assistant

You know those note-taker tools that promise to summarize your calls? Cute. But none of them captured what I needed—actionable insights, content ideation, and the building blocks of a customer journey. So I trained a custom GPT to:

• Summarize strategy calls in my own framework
• Deliver action steps for both me and the client
• Draft the first version of a client’s customer journey
• Identify email drafts mid-conversation (yes, I ideate emails live on calls)

Bonus: it works with Riverside, my preferred recording tool—something Fathom and HoneyBook’s AI didn’t support.

Tool 2: The Systems Professor Email Assistant

Writing client experience emails is part of almost every DFY system I build—but I’m not a copywriter. I needed a tool that could sound like my clients, not like me or a robot. Enter the Systems Professor Email Assistant, now available inside my mini-course Email Like You Mean It.

It helps you:

• Build an email voice snapshot (think: mini brand guide for email tone)
• Write replies to tricky client emails
• Create templates that use your voice and your CRM’s smart fields
• Get from blank screen to draft one without losing your personality

My students love this because it turns structure into style—without relying on fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs.

Tool 3: The Repurposing Content Assistant

This one’s meta: the episode you’re listening to right now? It came from my own repurposing tool. I fed in a transcript from a guest episode and the tool told me, “Hey Colie, you haven’t talked enough about AI tools on your own podcast.” So here we are.

Here’s what else it does:

• Generates short-form video scripts from podcast transcripts
• Suggests content angles for Pinterest, Reels, and blog posts
• Recommends new solo or guest episode ideas based on existing content

It’s like a content strategist in my pocket—trained in my voice and strategy.

AI Is a Team Member—Not a Replacement

Now let me be clear: these tools are enhancing what I do—not replacing my people. Kara still writes my blog posts (yes, including this one), Haylee still edits this podcast, and Sarah keeps everything moving behind the scenes. AI gives us all a better starting point, but it’s the humans who bring the magic.

Want Help Writing Emails That Sound Like You?

If you’re not ready to build your own GPT but you are ready to stop hating your client emails, check out my course Email Like You Mean It. Inside, you’ll find the Systems Professor Email Assistant waiting to help you craft messages that sound like you—on the first try.

🔗 Links Mentioned

• Brand Blueprint from Authentically AI (affiliate link)
• Listen to my guest episode on This Can’t Be That Hard with Annemie Tonken
• Email Like You Mean It – Mini Course + Systems Professor Email Assistant

Review the Transcript:

Colie: Hello, hello, and welcome to another solo episode on Business First Creatives. I’m in a mood today, which means I have Disney ears on. So today’s episode came to me in a moment of I need to bridge the gap, which is honestly what a, a lot of these solo episodes have been doing recently. Next week, I am going to be on the podcast with my real life bestie, Kate Hejde.

She joined me in Episode 101, and we talked all about what your website really needs. Well, in next week’s episode, we are gonna dive deep into AI tools, what she’s using, what I’m using, and how we have both been creating new AI tools for our clients and students. And I realized that I haven’t really talked a lot on this podcast about how I use AI in my daily, weekly life in terms of business.

So the first thing that I wanna say is ChatGPT, is now the best $20 that I spend in my business.

Yes, y’all. It has even surpassed Airtable. Did you think I would ever say that? I didn’t. But, I have realized that in the last couple months, and I mean, I guess I could even be bold enough to say in all of 2025, I’m not sure that there has been a single day where I have not created something or asked a question of chat GPT for business on any given day.

I just don’t think it’s happened. Now before you roll your eyes at the fact that I am just all in on ai, I can admit when I am wrong. And in comparison to many of my friends, I was very late to the AI game, but now I just can’t live without it.

Okay, so I wanna kind of kick off this conversation with why I am choosing to build my own tools instead of using ones that already exist. So if your inbox is anything like mine, you’ve probably received emails on a weekly basis, introducing a new AI feature into the tools that you already use. This week alone, I’ve gotten an email from Clickup, HoneyBook and Zoom.

Now, Airtable has some AI features, but I’ve never really used them, but I do know that they exist and honestly, some of them are useful. In particular, a lot of them are built around notetakers, which I find fascinating because, I mean, how many notetakers do you need, guys? But I prefer building custom GPT for my business because I want tools that match my brain and not what someone else assumes I need.

So in the case of the note takers, yes, they’re useful. Yes. They record your calls? Yes. They give you a summary. At the end of the day, they are not giving me a summary of the things that I need, which brings me to introduce tool number one, and this is my absolute favorite. I call it the strategy call summary assistant.

This is a custom GPT that I created because the other note takers just weren’t getting it done.

I needed the information from the call to be summarized in a very particular way, and so this allowed me to kind of build the tool around the way that my brain thinks. Also the way that I conduct the calls. So it gives me a few things that other note takers don’t . It gives me a summary of the call. It also gives me action items for both me and my client.

But where it takes it one step further is it will give me the first draft of my client’s customer journey for each of their offers. Because these strategy calls are really a, tell me how you want your clients to come into your world. Okay. Tell me what happens next. Okay. Tell me what happens next. We are building their customer journey on the call. We’re making, um, changes to what they currently do. I’m identifying assets that need to be created, like it is a call that is full of actions. And so I wanted to make sure that it gave me the information in a way that made it easy for me to move to the next step and begin creating and implementing these workflows for their customer journeys.

Now, the second thing that it gives me, and I, maybe I’m the only person that does this, but y’all, I will ideate an email on a call like no one’s business, I mean a full email from greeting all the way to closing. And so I wanted to teach my tool to automatically look in the transcript for moments when I have ideated a complete email and give me that first draft.

Now, I can’t get that from other note takers. I mean, maybe I could ask it a question and prompt it, but it wouldn’t be something that it was giving me as an output by default. That is why I love the strategy call assistant that I have created. The other thing is that I am starting to do my client strategy calls in Riverside, which is what I use to record this podcast.

Fathom won’t join my Riverside calls. The HoneyBook assistant will only join a Google meet or a Zoom call that was scheduled inside of HoneyBook, which I do not do for most of my strategy calls. So while note taker tools exist, they are not the best fit for me. Okay, let’s move on to tool number two, because this is the one, I mean, I’m not most excited about it, but I am excited about it for you.

So the next tool that I created is called the systems professor, email assistant. I mean, doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? This helps you write emails that actually sound like you. So let me give you a little bit of background. I write client experience emails for almost every single one of my done for you setups, but I am not a copywriter.

I am not really great at pulling someone’s brand voice and making it sound exactly like them. I mean, I can get it done. I can get it done in a lazy way. I can go look at their website. I can make sure that the way that I’m wording things sound more like them than they sound like me. But I don’t really have the tools to analyze things that they’ve previously written and like build a brand voice, if you will, um, on the fly. I just can’t do that.

And so something that I started doing in 2025 was building a custom GPT for each one of my clients to create and craft a brand voice. So that when I went to write the emails for their client experience, it sounded more like them than me on the first draft. So that’s where this started.

So let’s just talk about emails for a minute. A lot of my students are struggling to write something from a blank screen that sounds like them, and that’s where my email templates were helpful. But if, I’m gonna be honest with you, I’ve always thought my email templates were very basic. Because I was giving you the structure of what needed to be included and not really a framework for how to write these emails with little bits of storytelling to make them sound like you.

I mean, yes, I defaulted to emojis and told you that you could put GIF in your emails and prompted you to tell certain stories and certain emails. When it came to actually writing the language, that’s just not something that I could do. I don’t think I would ever be qualified to give you a Mad Libs email where you could basically just feed in some of your own things and it would work for every single one of my students.

But when I started building these custom gpt for my clients, I started thinking to myself, okay, first of all, I feel like I now have a framework where I can start talking more about emails than workflows. I talked about this a couple episodes ago. Then I was like, if I’m gonna be talking more about emails, I would absolutely love to build a tool where my students could do what I’m doing for my clients and get a better first draft of my client experience templates, once that sound like you, but also include all of the important information and smart fields for your CRM so that you can put those emails inside of your CRM and start using ’em the very next day.

And that is why I created the Systems Professor email assistant , which now lives in my brand new email mini course Email Like You Mean It? Yes. I created a whole course, y’all. And here’s what that email assistant does. It helps you build an email voice snapshot. Now I do wanna be very clear. I. I am not helping you create an entire brand voice guide.

I have a few examples and a few suggestions inside of the show notes if that is what you want. If you are ready to create an entire brand guide that you can feed into your AI tool of choice to help you write better blog posts, email marketing. Emails, you know, craft trainings, all of that. I will have that linked in the show notes, but my AI tool is specifically helping you write an email voice snapshot.

So just a tiny bit of what a full brand guide would do in order to help you write emails for your client experience that sound more like you on draft one. It also helps you write both templates and one-off replies. So let’s say that a client writes you an email and you’re not quite sure how to respond.

You can take the email that you got from them, feed it into the tool, tell them a little bit about how you’d like to respond, and it is going to kick out a response for you that, again, sounds more like you on draft one now for the most part. I am not expecting you guys to take the output from this tool and immediately start using it.

Although a few people who have had early access to the tool, that’s exactly what they did. I was like, okay, but did you not like ask for some revisions and like that? And they’re like, Nope. I love the email, just like it was. So while that’s totally an option, I do talk about in the course how to effectively prompt the tool to give you a better second or third draft.

Okay, so the other thing that it does is it pulls from your blog posts, your prep guides, the past emails that you’ve sent to clients so that the GPT is getting a crash course in how you talk, and it drafts like you and not like a robot. So again, if you are interested in checking out the assistant professor, email assistant, there is a link to the wait list for the course or the active sales page inside the show notes.

Now the third tool is one that I’ve talked about before, but I’ve actually really beefed it up since I’ve mentioned it previously, and that is my repurpose content tool. Now, it’s one thing for you to buy a repurpose content tool from someone and try to craft it as yourself, but for me, I didn’t like the outputs that I was getting from other people’s repurposing tools.

So I created one of my own and taught it exactly what I, what I wanted it to do because for myself. My long form content is this podcast, and so what I am most frequently doing is taking a transcript of a podcast episode, whether that’s a solo, whether it’s a guest episode on my podcast, business First Creatives, or it’s an episode where I was the guest on someone else’s podcast.

I like to take that transcript. Feed it into my repurposing content tool and have it give me additional content ideas based on that transcript. Now. I have it, do it in a couple different ways. I wanna make sure that I’m hitting all of the angles for what I could talk about from that episode. I like it to give me many topics.

So like if it was a full 45 minute podcast episode, is there anything that was really interesting in there that would make a good 10 minute? Solo podcast episode. Um, hit. Guys, this is so meta, but this episode is actually a repurposed content idea from the guest episode where I talked about AI on This Can’t be that hard with Annemie Tonken.

If you did not listen to that episode, it is linked in the show notes. But when I fed that transcript into my repurposing content tool, it told me. That I hadn’t talked enough on my podcast about the AI tools that I was using and creating inside my business, and so here we are. Now it gives me Pinterest pins.

For each one of the episodes, I have started asking it to give me short form video hooks, and then any of the hooks that I find interesting. I have it. Write me an entire 60-second video script so that I can record it and repurpose it as a Pinterest video pin or a reel on Instagram or a YouTube short. And then finally I have it ideate additional episodes that I could do on the podcast beyond solos, like maybe there’s a different angle that I need to cover and find a guest to interview about it.

All right, so those are my three tools, and I just wanna recap them first. It’s my strategy call assistant, which I literally could not live without. The second one is the brand new email assistant, which is now recreated as the systems professor, email assistant available inside of the email, like you mean it, mini email courts.

And then finally my repurposing content tool. Now these tools have allowed me to stop spending a lot of time ideating and creating the content. Now, one thing that I thought about mentioning inside of this episode was that. It may seem like I could actually replace my team members with AI tools. I mean, do I really need a blog writer?

If I can get my AI tools to write me like a really good blog post? The truth is, um, I’m never getting rid of Kara, so. It is beyond what the tool can write for you. I mean, Kara is doing the research on the SEO. She is checking my analytics. I mean, there are a lot of things that a human still needs to do at this point in time, and so I do not plan to replace the blog post that Kara writes with blog posts created from the AI tool.

Um, Haylee Gaffin of Gaffin Creative edits this podcast? Yes. In Descript there is an AI editor. I could give it a whirl. I personally don’t like what it does. It cuts it too closely. It like cuts the last little part off of a whi. I mean, there’s just, there’s a lot that I don’t like. And so yes, if I was in a pinch and I was looking for tools that would do things, um, that my team is doing, that might be one thing that I would consider.

But again, Haylee is not going anywhere. And then there’s Sarah, my virtual assistant. Um, yes, I am ideating a lot of emails. I am having my tools, write the captions for the pins and the YouTube descriptions, which is some of the things that Sarah used to do.

I still need somebody to schedule it. I still need somebody to put it in YouTube, put it in Metricool take the email, put it in Kit, um, tag it appropriately. I mean, these are all things that I still need a human to do. So while I feel like ChatGPT is like my new favorite team member, she will not be replacing my actual human team members.

I just wanted to make sure that I put that out there. Okay. So real quick, I wanna end with the fact that I recently had a working weekend with a few of my photographer educator friends in Palm Springs, and while none of us came with like a goal, I ended up teaching many of them how to create custom gpt for themselves or for their clients and students. I mean, that’s not where I thought I was going. And you know, don’t worry.

There are a lot of people out there that are currently trying to teach you guys how to make AI tools. That’s not where I’m going with this. I am simply telling you the tools that I have created inside of my own business, that are helping me be more efficient with the time that I have, so that if this concept helps you, you can move forward in order to do that.

So if you want to write better emails and you want help and you’re not ready to build your own custom GPT, uh, please go to the show notes and check out Email Like You Mean It, which has my Systems Professor Email Assistant inside of it.

So I know that AI can feel overwhelming. I know that in the beginning, if you just. Ask it a prompt and it gives you a response. You feel like you wasted your time, but it doesn’t have to be complicated and it can actually be a very powerful team member for your business. Sometimes one really well-trained tool is all it takes to get your best employee to show up to work.

And if you don’t currently have any team members, I mean, I think about this in the same way that I think about your CRM. Your CRM costs you $40 a month and it manages all your client projects. Chat GPT is $20 a month. And with these custom gpt, you can finally put the stress of creating content in your rear view mirror.

Alright, so don’t forget if you are interested in learning more about ai, please come back next week when I am chatting with my real life bestie, Kate Hejde, about all of the AI tools that we’re building for clients and not just ourselves. Alright, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.