AI Chief of Staff Starter Kit: the workspace I run my own practice on, as a template.

The AI Chief of Staff Starter Kit is a ready-made Claude Code workspace that you fill in with your own business, so an AI assistant knows your clients, your voice and your open work before you type a word.

Who it is for

You run a small business or work for yourself. You carry several clients or areas of work in your head, and things slip between them: a reply that waited four days, a decision nobody wrote down, an idea you had in the car. You already use AI for one-off drafts and you are tired of explaining your business to it every time.

You do not need to write code. You do need to be comfortable installing an app, following a checklist in order and editing text files.

What is inside

1. A blank workspace template. The folders and files the assistant reads, empty and labeled, ready for your business.
2. A full fictional worked example. The same workspace filled in for an invented owner with three invented clients, shown in the middle of a working week, so you can see a finished one before you write your own. Every name and number in it is made up.
3. An install checklist. The fixed steps in order: the questions that fill each context file, how to build the voice guide, what to connect and how to run the first morning.
4. A walkthrough video. 3 minutes, start to finish: the worked example taken through every step of the install, from copying the template to the first morning pack.

The template itself holds:

• Context files for who you are, what you sell, the people you work with, your goals and this week's board.
• One folder per client or area of work, each with its own tracker and drafts folder, and one agent file per folder so the assistant knows what belongs where.
• Four skills: the morning pack, meeting notes to tasks, brain dump, and proposal drafting from your own pricing and past work.
• A voice guide file that every draft starts from, with a check each draft must pass before it is shown to you.
• A memory folder and a decision log, so preferences, lessons and decisions carry from one session to the next.
• A follow-up sweep that lists who is waiting on you and who you are waiting on.
• Voice idea capture. Say an idea to your phone and a small script moves it into an inbox file at your desk.
• Two rules files: how the assistant talks to you, and how anything written for other people must read.

What you need

• A paid Claude plan that includes Claude Code, in your own name. The kit does not include one, and it does not run on a free plan.
• A computer you work from every day.
• For the voice idea capture only: a Mac and an iPhone. Everything else in the kit works without them. Without them, ideas go into the inbox file by hand.
• Five things you wrote yourself, for the voice guide.
• A few focused hours to answer the checklist questions and fill in the context files. The template is blank on purpose, because the answers have to be yours.

What it replaces

• Starting from an empty folder and working out the structure by trial and error. I built this one by using it every working day and fixing what broke.
• Explaining your business to an AI again at the start of every conversation.
• The morning scan across inbox, calendar and notes to work out what matters today. The morning pack does that read and hands you the list.
• A notes app full of ideas you never see again.

I am not going to promise a number of hours. What you get back depends on your week, and you can only know it once you have measured your own.

What it is not

• It does not send, book, pay or post anything on its own. The assistant drafts and stages. You read it and you send it. That rule is written into the template and I would not remove it. Why it matters is in my human in the loop AI guide.
• It is not an app or a hosted service. It is a folder of files that you run inside your own Claude account. Nothing in it is sent to me.
• It is not set up for you. This is the do-it-yourself version. You follow the checklist.
• It is not a course on AI. It is one working setup, with the reasons written next to the rules.
• It is not finished on day one. It gets better each time you correct it, because each correction becomes a line it reads next time.

Get the kit

Questions

If the problem is bigger than a kit

A kit gives you the system. It does not tell you where your business is losing time and money. If you want that answer first, book the Operations Leak Audit, or have me build the system with you.