AI for coaches and small businesses: the setup I install for clients (with prompts)

If you've been reading the AI Brain posts on this blog, you'll have noticed they lean towards founders. That's not because founders are the only people who benefit. It's because they're the ones who tend to find me first, usually after their tenth investor conversation about "AI strategy."

But in the last six months the conversations have shifted. A career coach with 200 active clients. A bookkeeper running a one-person practice. A small agency owner doing the work of four people. They all pay for Claude or ChatGPT. They all use about five percent of what they're paying for. And honestly, the setup I install for them is faster to build, easier to maintain, and pays back inside a fortnight.

So here's the version of the AI Brain framework that's been hiding behind the founder-shaped posts: what changes when you're not raising a Series A, and what stays the same.

What's different when you're not a founder

The diagnostic is the same. You probably already know the feeling I described in Why Most Founders Are Getting 5% From Their AI Tools: every new chat starts from scratch, the outputs need rewriting, nothing accumulates. The principle is the same too, three things working together: context, workflows, and voice.

What changes for coaches and small business owners is the shape of the setup:

• Fewer integrations, more depth. A founder's stack might include Linear, Mixpanel, Stripe, HubSpot, Slack, Notion. A coach's stack is usually three things: Calendar, email, and notes. That's it. Less surface area, more time per integration.
• Voice matters more, not less. Coaches sell their voice. Small business owners build relationships on their voice. There's no marketing team to flatten it out. The persona file is the entire game.
• Repetition is heavier. A founder does an investor update once a month. A coach does session prep three times a day, every day. The compound time savings are bigger.
• The wins are softer to investors but harder to your evenings. No one needs to walk a VC through your meeting prep workflow. But the hour you save each evening on session notes is the hour you get to spend with your kids.

That last bullet is the one that lands most often. The founders who hire me are doing it for leverage. The coaches and small business owners who hire me are doing it for their lives back.

Move 1: Pick the right tool, not just the right tier

Most people pay £20 a month for one AI tool and ask it to do everything. That's the first thing I change.

The honest answer is that different models are good at different things, and the difference is bigger than the marketing implies. Here's what I steer clients to, depending on what they're trying to do:

• Claude for reasoning, writing in your voice, long documents, building workflows that need consistency. It's my default for almost everything client-facing.
• ChatGPT when you need images, infographics, or video (it owns Sora). Also strong for tasks where you want a slightly more confident, faster-to-an-answer style.
• Gemini if you live in Google Workspace. The way it pulls from your Drive, Gmail, and Calendar is genuinely smoother than the third-party connectors on the others.
• Grok when you need something with fewer guardrails. I rarely recommend it for client work, but it has its niche.

The tier question matters too. The basic £20/month plan is enough for most coaches and most small businesses. You'll know you've outgrown it when you regularly hit usage caps mid-afternoon, or when you start running two or three workflows in parallel. The £100 tier is for heavier daily use. The £200 Pro tier is for people running a business through the tool, not just using it for work.

Within Claude specifically, you've got three models to choose from: Haiku is fast and cheap for simple tasks like summarising a meeting note. Sonnet is the everyday workhorse, balancing speed and intelligence. Opus is what you reach for when you need deep reasoning, complex synthesis, or a piece of psychology-style analysis. The default should be Sonnet. Promote to Opus only when you need it.

Move 2: Connect the boring stuff

This is the move that most people skip and then regret. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all have native connectors to the tools you already use. Set them up once and you stop copy-pasting context for the rest of your career.

For a coach, the three I always wire up are Calendar, Gmail, and Granola (or whatever your meeting recorder is). Claude can now answer "what's the rest of my week look like?" without you describing it. It can draft a follow-up email and reference the actual conversation you had. It can prep for tomorrow's session using last session's transcript.

For a small business owner, add Stripe and a bookkeeping integration if you have one (Xero, FreeAgent, Quickbooks). Suddenly Claude can answer questions like "which invoices are overdue?" or "draft a chase email for everything over 30 days." That's the kind of question you'd otherwise spend twenty minutes pulling together yourself.

One thing nobody warns you about: most of these integrations are one account per integration at a time. If you've got a personal Gmail and a business Gmail, you'll need to pick one or do some account-switching gymnastics. Plan around it.

Move 3: Build the three workflows that move the needle

The mistake most people make is trying to set up fifteen things at once. The trick is to find the three things you do most often and turn just those into workflows. Everything else stays as ad-hoc chat for now.

For a coach, the three I install first are usually:

1. Session prep from notes. Yesterday's notes go in. Tomorrow's prep comes out: where you left off, the question to open with, the thing the client said they'd think about, and the one risk to watch for.
2. Post-session capture. A transcript or a voice note goes in. Out comes a structured client record (themes, breakthroughs, blockers, agreed actions) and a short follow-up email in your voice.
3. Programme design from a discovery call. Discovery call transcript in. A draft 8 or 12-week arc comes out, with session themes and the questions you'd use to open each one. You'll rewrite half of it. That's fine. The half you didn't rewrite is the half you got back.

For a small business owner, the three are usually:

1. Quote from enquiry. Customer email goes in. A polished quote comes out, in your tone, with your pricing logic baked in.
2. Invoice triage and chase. The inbox of receipts, invoices, and "remember to follow up on this" sticky notes goes in. A prioritised list comes out, plus drafted chasers for late payers.
3. Daily ops brief. Today's calendar, the unread emails, today's Stripe activity. Out comes a 30-second read that tells you what needs your attention today and what's just noise.

Here's the meeting-prep prompt I give coaches as a starting point. It assumes you've created a small about-you.md file in your Claude Project with two or three paragraphs on who you are, who you work with, and how you write. (The full library at the bottom of this post has the prompt for building that file, plus the rest of these workflows.)

Coach · Session prep from notes
You are helping me prep for a coaching session in the next hour.

Inputs:
<client-notes>
[paste the last session's notes, the client's latest message,
or a transcript]
</client-notes>

<goal>
[one line on what I want to achieve in this session]
</goal>

Use about-you.md for context on how I coach. Use style.md for tone.

Output, in this order:
1. Where we left off (3 bullets, max)
2. The one question I should open with
3. Two things the client said last time that they probably haven't done
4. One risk or watch-out for this session
5. A 2-sentence intention for me as the coach

Keep the whole thing under 200 words. No buzzwords.
If anything's missing from the inputs, ask before you draft.

You can lift that into a Claude Project today and have something working before the next session. It will not be perfect. The fix isn't a better prompt; it's iterating the about-you.md and style.md files in the project's knowledge base. After three or four sessions, the outputs stop needing edits.

Move 4: Tighten the discipline

This is the move that separates "I use AI sometimes" from "AI is genuinely part of my operating model." It's also the one that nobody talks about because it sounds boring.

Three small disciplines do most of the work:

Keep your project instructions tight. About twenty lines. If you write a thousand-word prompt up front, every single request gets that thousand-word tax on top of it. The outputs get slower and worse. Cut to what you actually need every time. Promote optional context to the knowledge base instead.

Don't upload raw documents to your knowledge base. Summarise first. Take your 60-page coaching manual, run it through Claude once with a prompt like "extract the key principles, frameworks, and decision rules as a structured reference document." Upload the structured reference, not the original. Smaller, tighter, more useful.

Write a style file. Two short sections: how you write (sentence length, voice, what you sound like) and what you never write (banned phrases, AI tells, the words that make you wince). Mine bans "delve," "in the realm of," "leverage" as a verb, and any sentence that starts with "It's important to note." Yours will be different. The point is that you have one.

If you want a template for the style file, it's in the prompt library at the bottom of this post.

A side project that shows what's possible

Over a couple of weekends earlier this year I built Stack Almanac, a personal project to scratch an itch. It's an AI-powered supplement tracker and advisor that adjusts recommendations based on your data, your goals, and your physiology (rather than the supplement industry's default assumption that everyone using it is a thirty-year-old man).

The reason I mention it: it took about 32 hours of focused work, mostly in Claude Code. Five years ago it would have been a six-month engineering project costing more than a hundred thousand pounds. That gap, what one person with Claude can ship now vs. what a small team used to ship, is the part of this story that most people haven't quite processed yet. It's also why my engagements look the way they do: an installation, not a permanent retainer.

Anyway, you don't need to build a supplement tracker to feel that gap. You'll feel it the first time the AI you've set up properly drafts a session note in your voice while you're still pouring the next coffee.

Where this builds on what's already covered

This post sits on top of three earlier posts on this blog. If you haven't read them yet, they're the foundation:

• Why Most Founders Are Getting 5% From Their AI Tools — the diagnostic. Why most setups aren't compounding.
• Stop Asking One AI to Do Everything. Build a Stack Instead. — the architecture. Why you want multiple narrow agents rather than one wide one.
• You Don't Need a Content Team. You Need a System. — the pipeline pattern, applied to content but generalisable.

This post is the one I'd send to a coach or a small business owner who's read those three and wants to know "OK but what's actually different for me?"

If you want help installing this

If you'd rather skip the trial-and-error and have someone install it properly with you, that's what AI Brain is for. The Audit is a half-day diagnostic. The Starter installs your single highest-leverage workflow over two weeks. The Sprint is a four-week build that installs the whole framework, including a joint session with your co-founder or business partner. See the four ways to start if you want pricing transparency.

Or just book a 30-minute call and we'll talk through whether AI Brain is actually the right fit for what you're trying to do. If it isn't, I'll tell you, and point you at something that is.