Most contractors carry the whole business in their head. Every workflow, every cost, every quirk of how a job moves through the business lives with one person, and that's the bottleneck. This week we walked through the exact process of getting that knowledge out of your head and into Claude, so it can perform specific roles in your business without you explaining everything from scratch every time. 🧠 What you'll learn: - How to build a Business Context Document so Claude knows your team, your trade, your region, and how a job moves from lead to close - How to set up a Claude Project for estimating: what goes in the files tab, how to write the instructions, and why updating those files is the same as training a new hire - How to build a brand design system in Claude Design so every pitch deck and proposal starts with your actual fonts, colours, and visual style - How to create a Cowork scheduled task that reads your Gmail every morning, flags sales leads, and drops a briefing in your chat at 7:30 AM - How to use the "what do you mean by that?" interview method to pull the real operational knowledge out of your team before it becomes a context gap The full session and the Business Context Document template are attached. Steal the template, run through it with one team member, and you will have your first company brain file ready before the next call. 📁 Resources mentioned: Claude Claude Design Go Full Page (Chrome extension) Wispr Flow Next event — July 7th at 2PM, Scelta Windsor office: Building Your Company Brain. Sponsored by Libro Credit Union. Register here: luma.com/q3bsltrg Want us to audit where AI can plug into your business? Start with the End State Audit: scelta.ca/ai-for-contractors/audit

Problem: Every time you ask Claude to help with your finances, it builds you a complicated dashboard with buttons and KPIs you don't need and don't know how to use. Solution: Tell it exactly what format you want before it starts. Add one sentence to the end of your prompt: "Output this as an Excel spreadsheet." That's it. Excel outputs are editable, shareable with your accountant, and verifiable. You can click any total cell and see the actual formula behind the number. They use fewer tokens to generate and they're easier to work with than any dashboard Claude will build on its own. The result: a clean, usable financial document you'll actually open instead of an app that sits there looking impressive and doing nothing. Tool: Claude Try this: 1. Next time you ask Claude to analyze your finances, end your prompt with: "Output this as an Excel spreadsheet" 2. Once you have the sheet, click on any total cell. The formula bar will show you exactly how it got to that number 3. Use that sheet as your running template. Upload it each month and ask Claude to update it 4. Pass the Excel file to your accountant instead of trying to explain an app they've never seen. What other outputs could you simply in your usage of Claude? Drop it in the comments.

Problem: You're building something with Claude across multiple sessions. The conversation gets too long, Claude starts losing track, and you have to start a new chat from scratch. Solution: Work within Projects or Claude Code Instead. If you're building something across multiple sessions, set it up inside a Claude Project from the start. When the context fills up, just hit "start new thread" the project memory carries over automatically. No handoff prompt needed. If you're building with Claude Code, there's a command called /compact that automatically boils down everything in the conversation to just what's needed to keep going without losing the thread, without starting over. The result: longer builds, no lost progress, and no more writing summaries to hand off to yourself. Tool: Claude Code + Claude Projects Try this: 1. If you're building something across multiple sessions, set it up inside a Claude Project from the start 2. When a chat gets too long, start a new thread inside the same project, the memory stays 3. If you're building with Claude Code, run /compact when the session starts to slow down 4. Never manually copy-paste context between chats again Running into walls while building with AI? Drop your problem in the comments. Chances are someone's already found the shortcut.

Problem: The outputs I’m getting from Claude sound too much like AI instead of sounding like me. Solution: Don't type out how you talk. Just talk. Record yourself in three different scenarios: how you'd speak to a client, how you'd speak to a team member, how you'd speak to another contractor. Walk through those conversations naturally. Download the recording as a file, upload it when you create your skill, and tell Claude: "This is how I normally talk. Here's an example of me in each of these situations." That file becomes your voice document. Claude picks up on the nuances— the way you phrase things, the tone you use with different people, the words you actually reach for. It's faster and more accurate than trying to describe your own voice in writing, because most people can't. The result: a skill that writes in your voice, not AI's. Tool: Claude https://claude.ai Try this: 1. Record yourself in three short voice memos: one to a client, one to a teammate, one to a peer contractor 2. Download each as an .md file and upload them to Claude 3. Ask Claude to create a writing skill based on how you naturally speak in each context 4. Test it. Ask it to write something and see if it sounds like you What's one thing you've been trying to get Claude to do that still doesn't feel quite right? Drop it below, someone in this community has probably already solved it.

Most contractors think AI is a chat window you open when you have a question. An agent is AI that runs your workflows in the background. Reading your emails, routing approvals, pushing to QuickBooks while you're on site. This week's office hours covered agents from the ground up, a finance workflow that actually holds up under scrutiny, and a sneak peek at a field interface the team is building to get job site data into AI with as few taps as possible. 🧠 What you'll learn: - What an AI agent is: a persistent, app-connected workflow that runs on Anthropic's servers while you're on site. Walked through with a full invoice example. Email comes in, OCR reads it, routes for approval, pushes to QuickBooks. - Ask for Excel, not dashboards. AI defaults to building interactive apps you'll never use. Excel saves tokens, you can edit it, hand it to your accountant, and click any cell to see the formula behind the number. - How to build a financial rule set so Claude stops misclassifying transactions. Walk it through your statements once, answer its questions, and it builds rules it carries forward every time. - Claude Code's compact command for app builders automatically boils down your context window so you stay in one session instead of copying prompts between threads. - How to install a skill from GitHub in three clicks. Download the raw .md file and upload it directly into Claude. 📁 Resources mentioned: Claude: claude.ai Claude Code: claude.ai/code Granola: granola.ai Vercel Labs Skills Repo: github.com/vercel-labs/skills Next event - July 7th at 2PM, Scelta Windsor office: Building Your Company Brain. Sponsored by Libro Credit Union. Register here: https://luma.com/q3bsltrg Want us to audit where AI can plug into your business? Start here: scelta.ca/ai-for-contractors/audit