This week we show the exact difference between asking Claude to "build me an estimate template" and giving it real context about how you price jobs. The second version comes back with flat-rate pricing built in, after-hours adjustments, and a PDF export already formatted so the client only sees what they need to see. 🧠 What you'll learn: - The side-by-side comparison of a generic AI template vs. one built around your actual trade, pricing model, and workflow - How to package any template into a skill so Claude uses your format every time, without re-uploading or re-explaining - How to upload community-shared skills (and what to check before trusting one from the internet) - How Claude Projects let your whole team work from the same AI foundation - When to use NotebookLM vs. Claude for sharing documents with people outside your team The full session is attached. Follow along with your own business as you watch. By the end you'll have a skill built around how you actually price work. 📁 Resources mentioned: Claude NotebookLM Next in person 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 build this for you? Start with the End State Audit: scelta.ca/ai-for-contractors/audit

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

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

Thank you to everyone who attended our 2nd in-person event yesterday! Photo Gallery of the Day Most contractors don't know their exact profit margin. This workshop shows you how to change that with a simple AI finance setup that tracks every dollar across your company and your projects. 🧠 What you'll learn: -How to set up two Claude projects that act as your full-time CFO — one for your company (overhead, cash flow, bank statements) and one for each active job (budget, draw schedule, labor hours, change orders) -A receipt-capture workflow that replaces hours of manual line-item sorting: snap a photo of up to six receipts, upload to Claude, and get every expense categorized and allocated to the right job instantly -How to calculate your real monthly overhead in minutes by uploading your bank and credit card statements and prompting Claude to flag every recurring charge — including subscriptions you forgot you were paying for -A progress billing method that makes it nearly impossible for a GC or client to dispute your invoice: feed Claude your scope, budget, and timestamped site photos and it generates a branded completion report with percentage breakdowns and photo proof attached -How to turn off AI training on your financial data in Claude's privacy settings (and why enterprise accounts have it off by default), so you can upload bank statements and credit card data without it being used to train the model Resources mentioned in this video: - Claude Projects: claude.ai - Claude Cowork (desktop app): claude.ai/download - Google NotebookLM (for learning): notebooklm.google.com - Perplexity AI (for research): perplexity.ai - Claude connectors: accessible via the + button in any Claude chat

Clients can't buy what they can't see. A line-item quote asks them to imagine the finished job and imagination loses to whoever shows up with a picture. AI changes that. This week John walks through the full workflow: record your site visit, let a Claude skill extract the client's specs, generate a photorealistic render in Google AI Studio, and drop it into a branded proposal all before a competitor has even followed up. 🧠 What you'll learn: - A Claude skill that reads your site visit transcript and outputs a ready-to-paste image generation prompt (including materials, colours, camera angle, and lighting) - 8 prompting techniques that make AI renders look photorealistic: referencing actual product SKUs, marking up images to scope the exact area to change, using negative prompts, and specifying camera settings and time of day - A live backyard transformation demo in Google AI Studio, from unfinished construction photo to fully rendered pergola and landscaping in under 30 seconds - Why editing and rerunning a prompt beats retyping in chat, and how to iterate without burning context or tokens - How one company cut their proposal turnaround from 2 to 3 weeks down to a single day using this exact workflow Three skills are attached: the site visit to image prompt skill, the branded proposal skill, and a standalone photo to image prompt skill for quick renders without a full transcript. Drop them into your Claude project and run the workflow on your next site visit. 📁 Resources mentioned: Claude: claude.ai Google AI Studio: aistudio.google.com Granola: granola.ai Otter: otter.ai Want us to build this for you? Start with the End State Audit: scelta.ca/ai-for-contractors/audit