Workflow 003: The Business Skill

I run three businesses. A virtual assistant agency, an AI systems agency, and a book publishing company.

Three businesses means three completely different sets of context. Different customers, different offers, different voices, different processes.

A Business skill is a context file for one company: its vision, offers, customer journey, brand rules, team, and where its documents live. It loads whenever you work on that business, so AI stops guessing and starts answering from what's actually true. I have one for each of my three companies, each pointed at that company's own workspace. Yesterday's Me skill workflow teaches AI who you are. This one teaches it what you run.

What this replaces

Explaining the business from scratch in every conversation. Or worse, not explaining it, and getting output built on assumptions.

That second one is the expensive failure. AI fills gaps when it doesn't have information. It invents an audience, guesses at your offer, writes in a voice that belongs to nobody. The output looks finished, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.

With the Business skill loaded, everything comes out of one uniform set of facts. Nothing gets built from scratch. Nothing gets filled in.

Blueprint

One file per business. Each one holds the full picture of that company, and points to where the rest of its material lives.

Trigger: loaded whenever you work on that business. Inputs: vision and mission, offers, customer journey, brand guidelines, audience, team, and a pointer to that company's workspace. Output: AI that answers as someone who works inside that specific business.

I keep each business in its own workspace rather than one giant shared one. Three companies in a single space gets chaotic fast. Separate spaces, separate files, clean context every time.

Organize

What goes in each file:

• Vision and mission
• The offers, what each one costs, who each one is for
• The customer journey end to end: how you acquire, market, sell, onboard, deliver, retain, offboard
• Brand guidelines, voice, and the words this business never uses
• Audience details, including anything you know from surveys
• The team and who owns what
• A pointer to the company's workspace, where the SOPs, templates, and assets live

That last line is what turns the file into a doorway. The Business skill doesn't hold everything. It holds the map, and points at the rest.

Systematize

Same approach as the Me skill. Don't write it cold, get interviewed for it. Paste this:

We're going to create a Business skill: a context file for one of my
businesses that you'll load whenever we work on it, so you always have full
context on this specific company.

Interview me first. Ask questions a few at a time, covering:
- What this business does, who it serves, and what makes it different
- Vision and mission
- Every offer, what it costs, and who it's for
- The customer journey end to end: how customers find us, how we market
  and sell, what happens when someone says yes, onboarding, delivery,
  retention, offboarding
- Brand voice and guidelines, including words this business never uses
- What I know about the audience, including anything from surveys
- The team and who owns what
- Where this business keeps its documents, SOPs, templates, and assets

Ask follow-ups when my answers are vague. Push for real specifics and
examples, not general statements.

When you have enough, write the file organized in clear sections, ending
with a section that points to where this business's documents live. Show
it to me so I can correct it before we save it.

How to set it up

1. Give each business its own workspace or project. Do not pool them.
2. Run the interview once per business.
3. Correct the draft, then save it as a skill inside that business's workspace.
4. Point the file at the document library: SOPs, templates, assets, playbooks.
5. Update it when the offers, team, or journey actually change.

What if I only run one business?

Build it anyway. The value is not in managing several. It's in having one place where the truth about the company lives, instead of it being scattered across your head, a few docs, and three people's memories.

Assign

What the AI does: run the interview, structure the answers, hold the context, and apply it to everything you ask afterward.

What stays human: the answers, the corrections, and the decision about what's actually true. AI will happily write a mission statement for you. That's not the same as your mission.

Here's the part that took me years of client work to see.

When we onboard a client, this is the process. We walk them through their customer journey start to finish. We interview their employees about how the work really happens, not how the org chart says it happens. We dig into their most successful customers. Then we build their SOP database, their asset database, their template database.

That's not AI onboarding. That's business documentation. The AI part comes after, and it's the easy part.

Around 95% of businesses lose money on AI. Not because the tools are bad. Because the systems were never in place to put the tools on top of. They added AI haphazardly to a business that was never written down.

Rule of thumb from this build: prepare the business for AI before you add AI to the business. Systems before AI. Systems before your next hire.

Integrate

The Business skill becomes the brain for that company, and it keeps working after you stop looking at it:

• It sits in the company's workspace, so anything built there inherits the context
• Install it where the team already works, Slack or your project tool, and new information flows into it as it appears
• Every new agent for that business starts with this context instead of a blank page
• Anyone joining the company, human or AI, reads the same version of the truth

There's a second payoff most people don't expect. Businesses that document like this are far easier to sell. When everything is written down, a buyer can evaluate the business instead of evaluating you.

Tomorrow: Ella, the inbox agent. She cleans my email an hour before Albus reads it.