Claude Cowork: Set-Up & Training
One morning, you and me. We pick the one hire that would take the most off you, and recruit it together. Not a demo, not a course: by the time I leave, it's live, trained on your own data, and doing the job.
Five steps, and it's hired.
One question starts it: if you could hire one person to work alongside you, what would you hand them first? Not "what can AI do", the work that's eating your week, or the judgement-heavy stuff only you seem to touch. We start with the hire that takes the most off you.
We write the job description together, you talk, in your own words. It researches what a really good version of the role knows, does, measures and never does. You have final say. It's your hire.
It gets a folder that acts as its brain and an employment contract, identity, beliefs, decision rights with real caps on them, and what it does when information is missing.
On your real reports, real documents, real questions. When it's wrong, we correct it, and it writes the correction into its own instructions, so it's never wrong the same way twice.
You leave operating it, with voice set up so you talk to it like a colleague, and the working habits that keep it improving after I've gone.
By lunchtime, you've recruited, not prompted.
What a good hire actually does.
Yours gets built around your work, so it won't look exactly like these, but here's the kind of thing hires like this already do, every day, in my businesses and the ones I've set up.
"Which customers actually make us money? What's my real margin by product line?"
Asked in plain English, answered in seconds, every figure traced straight back to your own files.
Researches your market, sizes up your competitors, reads your own website with fresh eyes, and pressure-tests where the real growth is before you commit to it.
Sales, stock, cash and margin pulled into one place, with a plain-English note on what needs your attention. The half-week board pack, before your coffee.
A live cashflow that shows what's coming, where it's tight, and whether the big decision is safe, rebuilt from the spreadsheet that used to cost a day.
New-line setups, the EDI and portal work, the order paperwork for your big accounts, handled correctly and on time, instead of a week of someone's life.
What you leave with.
The morning covers one role, and that's a choice: one hire gone deep beats five gone shallow, and it's how every AI in my own businesses started. But the method is the real product, by lunchtime you've recruited once, and the process is the same every time, so plenty of owners go on to grow their own team from here. Where it becomes my job again is the joins between departments, where one hire's output feeds another's, and where the real money hides. That's what the Diagnostic maps.
An AI employee is only ever as good as the information you can give it. If the role's knowledge can be brought into a folder, orders, invoices, reports, emails, spreadsheets, you're ready. If it's locked in a system nobody can export from, tell me on the call and I'll give you a straight answer on whether this is the right first step.