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Join for freePosted: Mon 21st Sep 2026
Does it feel like everyone around you is getting 10 times more out of Claude than you are?
In this Lunch and Learn, Charlotte Boundy takes you through how to turn Claude into the operating system running behind your business.
Charlotte starts with the fundamentals: prompting, scheduled workflows, knowledge and skills.
From there, she shows you how to build five custom AI team members covering ops, sales, marketing, social media and finance, each one set up to know how your business works rather than starting from a blank page every time you open it.
The difference between AI that saves you an hour and AI that saves you a week is in the setup. Charlotte looks at how to build automated workflows, so Claude stops being a chatbot you occasionally ask questions to and becomes an expert assistant you delegate to.
Charlotte covers where to start, what to hand over first, and how to build something your whole team can use, drawing on three years of building AI workflows for companies from one to 200 people.
Meet the operating system behind six- and seven-figure businesses
Five custom AI team members: Ops, sales, marketing, social media and finance
Make Claude your expert assistant with automated workflows
Charlotte has over 12 years of operations experience in fast-growing businesses and six additional years running Bright Spark Collective, an agency supplying the UK's best PAs and EAs to founders on a flexible basis.
Three years ago, she moved into AI consulting and has worked with companies from one to 200 headcount, auditing and building AI workflows, helping them to three times their revenue and demystifying AI for their teams.
Charlotte is a keynote speaker and has taught AI to over 1000 people in the UK this year alone.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending our Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Charlotte Boundy, who's the founder of BrightSpark Collective. In this session, Charlotte takes you through how to turn Claude into the operating system running behind your business.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please put them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Boundy: Thank you so much for having me for this half-hour session. Today's session is about how to use Claude as your secret weapon in business, and I put this together because many business owners are only using about 10 to 20% of what Claude can actually do.
As mentioned earlier, my name is Charlotte Boundy, and I'm an AI educator, speaker, and implementer.
A quick introduction: I was in operations for 12 years, working as a PA, then an EA, then a head of operations, before starting my first company, BrightSpark Collective. BrightSpark provides personal assistance to founders on a flexible basis.
Three years ago, I pivoted into AI, since that was a natural extension of the productivity work I was doing. I now help businesses ranging from solopreneurs going up to 200,000 headcount with their AI transformation journeys.
I live in Southend, and I have two cats, who act as my head of HR and junior HR assistant. There are a few companies I've worked with this year shown here.
Before we dive in, I'd like to know where you're at with AI right now – there's a QR code to scan if you'd like to answer on your phone, and the link will also be posted in the chat shortly.
I'd love to get a show of hands. Option one is that you've not really touched it much; option two is that you've used ChatGPT or Claude now and then for the odd task.
Option three is that you use it most days but feel you could get more from it, and option four is that you're a complete whiz – you've got projects, skills, automations, and maybe even Claude Code going. I'd love to find out more about where you're at, so I'm going to switch over to the poll now.
We've got some results coming in – I'll give it a minute to update. It looks like the strongest lead is that you use it most days but feel you could get a lot more from it, which is about what I was expecting.
AI has really moved on in the last six months. When I was running these workshops in January, I was getting most answers in the first two categories, and now a lot more people are using it every day but feel they could get more from it.
Fantastic – it looks like you're all in the right place. I'll press on with the rest of the presentation, and we'll get more out of Claude today.
For a moment, I'd like you to picture this: first thing in the morning, you stick the kettle on and pour yourself a nice cup of tea, coffee, or other beverage – maybe a pumpkin spice latte, since we're getting toward that time of year now.
You pop it in your thermos flask, start your computer, and watch Claude get to work while you head off for a 20- to 30-minute walk.
During that walk, you've got time to think and process the day ahead – your goals, your business strategy, and what you'd like to achieve that day.
And you know that while you're out taking the fresh morning air, Claude is busy working away on your desktop, doing everything you need for that first half hour. So when you come back to your desk, the first thing you do is just review what it's done, which is amazing.
It should buy you a lot more time to focus on the things that really matter in your business. But some of you might be asking how that actually works, because a lot of us use Claude by typing in a prompt, asking it something, and getting an answer back.
There's actually so much more that Claude can do. I'll go over a few prompting fundamentals very briefly in this workshop, since we've only got half an hour.
If you'd like to know more, you can look at my previous workshop with Enterprise Nation, where I go into a lot more detail on the fundamentals. In this session, we'll move through them quickly so I can get to the skills-based content at the end.
First of all, if you're a Claude user, it's always best to have the paid account, for a range of reasons I won't go into here. Whichever account you have, go into Settings, then Privacy, and untick the box that says ‘Help improve our AI models’.
Unticking that box prevents your data from being sent to Claude's staff to train with, which you probably don't want if you're putting anything sensitive in there. So make sure that's unticked.
The second thing to mention is that a lot of the secret to getting the most out of AI is prompting well. There are a lot of different acronyms people use for prompt frameworks, but the one I like is SCALA.
Any time I write a prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or whatever AI I'm using, I use the SCALA framework. First is the source – where is the information coming from? Is it a spreadsheet, a website, or a document?
Then there's the context, where I explain the situation I'm in, followed by the aim of what I'm trying to achieve – for example, creating a PowerPoint for today's session, or writing an email to a difficult stakeholder.
Then I give it the length. For today's presentation, I didn't want 100 slides because I've only got 30 minutes, so I gave it that direction.
Finally, I talk about the audience – who's going to be looking at the output. Is it a difficult stakeholder, a client, or a lovely bunch of people like yourselves?
I appreciate I'm going through that quickly, but if you want to learn more, head back to the link from my previous workshop. The other thing to mention is that to really get the best out of Claude, you need to give it lots of knowledge about who you are and what you do.
To do that, I usually go into Settings, then Account, where there's a section for giving instructions to the whole of Claude. You can tell it about your business, what you do day to day, and who your ideal client is.
It's a brief description box, but it's a great place to tell Claude a bit more about you, so that in future conversations it can refer back to who you are and what you do. The other place you can add knowledge is inside the Projects folder.
If you go into Projects and create a new project, you can tell it you want a ‘project of me’ for it to refer to whenever you're speaking with it. Within that project, you can add things like your company vision, mission, goals for the year, and strategy.
You put everything in there so that in any future conversation, Claude knows to refer back to it. That's a little bit on giving Claude knowledge – now we'll move to the main part of this presentation, which is how to get Claude to be your intern.
I want you to imagine Claude is your intern. Interns know lots of facts about the world, but what they don't have much of is life sense, common sense, or an understanding of what other people's worlds – or in this case, businesses – are like.
To fix that, we need to instruct the intern and give them feedback. One of the biggest things I hear from people when they find out I'm an AI consultant is that they tried it and it just produced generic output, so they don't think it works.
But actually, you need to teach that intern – you need to teach Claude to behave the way you want, and give it regular feedback. To do that, you give it a set of instructions, which is what's known as a Claude skill.
A Claude skill is a set of instructions that tells Claude how to do something – hopefully you'll appreciate the IKEA instructions comparison, since I always enjoy their illustrations. The great thing about skills is that once you combine them with Claude's built-in connectors, the possibilities are endless.
If you don't know how to add connectors, my previous workshop covers that too. Essentially, you hit the plus button, then Connectors, then Add Connector, and browse the full range – including diary, email, Canva, Asana, and Trello.
It's worth checking your own contracts and AI policies to make sure you're not putting anything in there you wouldn't want to, especially sensitive client information. So let's talk about creating a skill – I'll show you a quick demo of one I made for myself.
This is my weekly LinkedIn post creation skill. I hit the forward slash key on my keyboard, which brings up a list of my installed skills, and select the AI weekly LinkedIn post tool.
This tool scrapes the news each week, looking for reputable sources with recent movement in AI relevant to my target audience. In this case, it found a recent survey by Deloitte of 25,000 UK workers on the use of ‘shadow AI’.
Shadow AI is where companies restrict access to AI tools, or simply avoid the subject, and employees end up running company data through their own personal accounts instead – which is obviously not something companies want. So it's in my interest to promote AI education, both for my own business and for the businesses I serve, so they don't fall foul of GDPR.
In this case, it found a recent news article on that topic and wrote the first version of the post for me to review. It's done a pretty good job – I probably wouldn't tweak it much more.
The reason it's done such a good job with tone of voice is that I've also installed a tone of voice skill, which I'll come to shortly. You can see it's given me two versions – one for video and one for a static post.
I'd love for you all to think of something you do almost every day or every week – it can be anything you do at a computer. Claude can't make you a coffee or pick up the kids from school yet, but go ahead and pop your answer in the chat.
I'll have a quick look at some of the answers coming in. Someone said weekly LinkedIn posts, someone said ‘panic’ – I know that feeling – and someone said deciding what to cook, which is a great one.
I've actually taken a photo of the inside of my empty fridge before, and Claude managed to come up with a recipe from it, which was really helpful. Other answers included making more profit – that's finance and strategy – and creating handouts for classes, which is a good one too.
Someone mentioned adding products to their website or Etsy – there are some great Claude plug-ins for that, which I'll come back to at the end. Other answers included exercise, contacting people on the CRM, scanning a mail inbox for invoices, and creating social media content, reports, and marketing approaches.
The good news is that pretty much all of these are things Claude can do with skills attached, which is very useful. Basically, you teach Claude to do something once, and it does it that way forever, unless you give it updates and feedback, in which case it adjusts.
So how do you write a skill? The best way is to get Claude to help you write it.
This is a really useful prompt, so you may want to screenshot it: ‘Hey, Claude, can you help me write a skill for [insert the thing you're writing the skill for]? To do this, I normally do X, Y, Z. Ask me any questions before writing the skill, and do not guess or presume anything.’
The ‘do not guess or presume anything’ part is really useful, because it stops Claude from jumping to conclusions. AI is programmed to please you and get things right, but sometimes it jumps to the wrong conclusion.
The best approach is to write out your instructions as you normally would, and then get Claude to ask you any follow-up questions. An intern would do something similar – you'd explain the task, and they might ask a couple of questions about the process before going off to do it.
So you might think, ‘Great, I'll write one for a sales agent: Hey, Claude, can you help me write a skill for getting better at sales? I want you to read my transcripts anytime I ask and give me feedback on how I could improve.’
That might sound like a good prompt, but – to borrow a Lord of the Rings meme – one does not simply march into Claude and write such a simple prompt. Many of you, running a business, will know there are countless advisers, gurus, and sales or pitch frameworks out there.
If you just give Claude that instruction, it'll go off whatever it thinks or whatever biases have been programmed into it, since all AIs have biases because they're programmed by humans. So to get a good result from a sales feedback agent, you need to think about whose standards you want it to judge by.
Does your next-door neighbour think you did a great job on that sales call? Or would [name unclear in recording], Alex Hormozi, or Sheila Beelah, or a sales skills book see it differently? There are so many different frameworks you could pick from, and AI has too many options, so it just picks the most likely one.
If you want real value from the skills you build, especially for sales or marketing, you need to think about whose framework you want Claude to follow. You might be following your own strategy, but whose framework do you want it to use to give you feedback or work from?
A better skill might look like this. This example is for a fictional beauty company, using Sheila Beelah – who I think is brilliant – as the reference point, even though I don't run a beauty company myself.
The updated prompt reads: ‘Claude, could you help me write a skill for getting better at sales calls? At the start of each week, on a Monday at 10am, I want you to check my calendar for any sales calls from the last week, then read my transcripts from those calls.’
‘This is very important – I've connected Granola, which is the tool I use to take notes in calls; you might use something else, so make sure that's connected in your connectors. Give me feedback on how I could improve this week on sales calls, marking me according to a framework that Sheila Beelah would recommend, and provide honest feedback – do not sugar-coat it.’
That's really helpful too – if you're asking for feedback, tell Claude not to sugar-coat it, because AI can sometimes be overly nice and give you a false sense of confidence. Having said that, Claude's got quite bolshie recently, so it's worth being specific about what standard you want feedback measured against.
Another example for a sales agent: ‘Claude, can you help me write a skill which turns sales call notes into a PDF proposal ready to send to the client? It should use my proposal template’ – and you'd link the template you normally use – ‘but change the information for the client I've spoken to, under the relevant headings. Ask me any questions about this before building the full skill, and do not guess or presume anything.’
That's a great way to take notes from a sales call and put them straight into your proposal template, without needing to edit too much afterwards. Again, to stop it sounding like AI, you'd want the tone of voice skill installed, which I'll talk about shortly.
So, your voice is important. One of the biggest problems with AI at the moment is the ‘AI slop’ going around – things on LinkedIn like ‘it's not X, it's Y’, or ‘this is real leverage’, or ‘this really hits home’, or ‘I totally agree with you, Mark’.
Those are all phrases none of us would probably ever actually say, which is why it's important to teach the AI – whichever tool you use – how to speak in your voice. To do that, you need to create a tone of voice skill.
You might say something like: ‘I want you to help me create a tone of voice skill. Please ask me questions; do not assume anything. I'm also keen to avoid em dashes, words like leverage, sentences like this hits home, and no jargon or fluff.’
That's a good way to get Claude to help you write a tone of voice skill. It's also worth noting that your tone of voice for a social media or TikTok post will likely be very different to your tone for emailing a stakeholder or an upset customer.
So it's a good idea, while working on this skill with Claude, to say you need slightly different tones for different situations. Once installed, any time you do a piece of external-facing work, Claude will reference your tone of voice for that specific context.
I promised to talk about other agents – sales, marketing, ops, social media, and finance – but the framework will differ depending on your industry, business size, and the size of the businesses you serve. So rather than give you a fixed framework, the best first step is to map your week.
Think about sales, ops, finance, social, and marketing. Sit down for 10 minutes, write out those headings, and list what you do each week for each one, because I can guarantee at least 60% of it can be automated using Claude's skills and scheduled skills.
Feel free to screenshot this – the specifics for your business might differ, but a lot of this will apply to most businesses, and a lot of it could become a skill. For example, following up on open leads and proposals.
You could set up a skill to scan your emails each week for anywhere you promised to send a proposal, or check your call notes for the same, and mark off whether it's been done. It could follow up with people you've already sent proposals to and ask how things are going.
You could get it to write and send proposals, update your CRM or pipeline tracker, or chase referrals and ask clients for introductions. There's a whole host of things you can get it to do if you set the skills up in the right way.
I appreciate that writing these skills can feel like a big task, so I've written a few to help you get started. These have been tried and tested with various clients and have produced good results.
For Enterprise Nation, there's 50% off all of the pre-written skills for the next few days – scan the QR code or visit the URL, and at checkout, enter the code ‘ENTERPRISE NATION’, in capital letters, as one word.
There's a tone of voice skill included, along with a full list of ‘Claude-isms’ to steer clear of, such as leverage and this hits home – I've spent quite a long time putting that list together to make sure we don't sound like AI. I can see a few share requests coming through for those folders, so I'll make sure those are shared with you shortly.
Finally, if any of this resonates, or you'd like to talk more about how AI can work for you as a solopreneur or within a larger company, feel free to scan the QR code or use the link in the chat to book in a quick virtual coffee. I hope this has been a useful session for you.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen now, so we have some time for questions, and we'll go from there.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Charlotte. Let's take this question from Martin: ‘I've got the paid version of ChatGPT, I've trained it on my business and tone of voice, and automated some tasks, but Claude seems to be far ahead now – is it worth transferring across?’
Charlotte: That's a really good question, and I get asked it a lot. I think there was a mass exodus from ChatGPT to Claude as soon as Claude introduced Claude Cowork.
Having said that, ChatGPT now has its own version, called Work, so you could apply all of the same approaches there using that function.
Caitriona: Thank you. Is it safe to let Claude scan your inbox?
Charlotte: That's also a really good question, and other AI consultants may disagree, but for me it depends on the level of sensitivity of what's in there. If you work a lot with big corporates, banking, or lawyers, I'd venture not to do it; if your clients are less sensitive, I think it's okay, but it's up to you to decide.
One helpful step is to specify exactly how you'll use AI in your client contracts. For us, I've stated that we use AI to scan my own inbox to check for information, and if anyone has an issue with that, it's something to deal with on a case-by-case basis.
I know quite a few AI consultants who don't scan their inbox, and I completely understand why – there might be things in there you don't want to put through, and that's fine too.
Caitriona: Building on that question – what about Copilot? Does that work as well as ChatGPT or Claude, and which is most secure for privacy?
Charlotte: Copilot is definitely the most secure for privacy, especially because it has a web mode and a work mode. If you switch to work mode, it only uses things from your own system and keeps them within it, rather than sending anything elsewhere.
That's because Copilot has an enterprise-level agreement, so as long as you're on the paid version, it keeps all your files local – that's the best, safest option. Claude and ChatGPT are also safe, as long as you have the right controls, the paid version, and the privacy box ticked.
Caitriona: Thank you.
Charlotte: Even having said that, the servers for Claude and ChatGPT aren't UK-based, so there are also rules and regulations around data and where it travels. That's where things get complex, and you're probably better off talking to someone who's an expert in data and law.
Caitriona: Thank you. Keisha's asking – in terms of what you've gone through today, can any of this be done for free on the free version?
Charlotte: Yes, some of it can, to an extent, but I'd still advise trying the paid version. It's about £18 a month, and it's a better, safer environment where you can do a lot more.
Caitriona: And Chloe's asking – if you're just starting out, which would you choose to settle on?
Charlotte: Just starting out, as in which platform?
Caitriona: Yeah.
Charlotte: Probably [name unclear in recording]. I think it's the most user-friendly, and I really appreciate the way it builds in ethical safeguards, like safeguarding.
In fact, the other day it told me to go to bed, which I was really shocked at, since I was working late – it said, ‘It's getting late, Charlotte. Let's wrap this up.’ And I was like, I'm still working here!
So yes, I quite like that Claude built in safeguards like that.
Caitriona: Thank you. And can Claude be set for privacy, to get around inbox-scanning issues?
Charlotte: Sorry, I can't hear you very well – could you repeat that? Can Claude be set up with privacy settings to get around inbox scanning?
Yes – if you tick the privacy setting, that helps. But the most secure environment for Claude is really an enterprise membership, which needs a minimum of two seats – that's probably what I'd recommend for maximum privacy.
Caitriona: And then we have a question from Kelly – how does Gemini compare?
Charlotte: Gemini's brilliant. I really like that, similar to Copilot, you can use it within the Google environment itself.
I haven't used it as much as the others, to be honest, but I've enjoyed it for things like fixing formulas in a Google Sheet – it's very quick and efficient.
Again, I believe it's all contained within your Google environment, so it might be a good one to use if you're trying to extract data from a sheet or similar tasks.
Caitriona: Thank you. And then Simon has a question – do video clips work with Claude? Can MP4 files be uploaded to create a video?
Charlotte: Not very well – producing, editing, or creating images or video content isn't something Claude is very good at.
ChatGPT recently released Astra, which is fantastic for that kind of thing, so I'd probably suggest using that instead.
Caitriona: Thank you. I appreciate we're heading towards the end of the session, but I've seen a few people ask this – how do you manage usage limits when using Claude for long periods?
Charlotte: That's a really good question – I'll quickly share my screen to show everyone where that setting is. Bear with me a moment... here we go.
So, down here, you can see where the model is displayed. I generally try to use Sonnet or Opus.
Fable is fantastic, but it's the most expensive and consumes the most credits, and you have very limited uses of it on the account. I only really use Fable for something very complex – for example, if I'm stuck on an automation, or writing a really long report or document.
Otherwise, I'll stick to Opus or Sonnet. You've also got the effort level – medium is normally fine, unless you're doing something really complex, in which case you might want to increase it.
If you stick to medium effort with Opus or Sonnet for most tasks, it'll do a really good job. The other time I use Fable is when generating social media content, since it's a bit better at writing in tone and understanding the tone of voice document.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, and thanks to everyone for their questions – we've had lots come through in the chat as well. Thanks, everyone, for joining today, and thanks to Charlotte for her presentation.
We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. Thank you.
Charlotte: Brilliant – thanks so much, everyone.
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