# Onboard your business.

Twenty quiet minutes, and your AI stops guessing at what you do.

## The new hire who never got trained

Right now, whatever AI you use starts from zero every single time. It does not know who you serve, how you talk, or what you would never do to a customer even under pressure. So it gives you something confident, general, and slightly wrong, and you end up fixing it by hand anyway. That is not the AI failing you. That is a very fast, very willing new hire doing the work on their first day with no training at all.

> You would not hand a new person a manual and walk away. You would sit them down and tell them what you do, who you do it for, and what you never do.

You already know how to do this. You have just never done it with an AI before. You do not need to write a prompt and you do not need to be technical. You need twenty quiet minutes and a willingness to answer plainly.

*It asks. You answer. Your business ends up written down once, correctly.*

1. **Open Claude** at claude.ai and sign in.
2. **Start a new chat** and paste in the whole block from the next two pages. It is long. That is fine, paste all of it.
3. **Answer the questions** one at a time, the way you would talk to a person across the table. If one makes you stop and think, that is the question working.
4. **Keep what it hands you.** Your business on one page, and instructions that go into your Claude's settings, so every conversation afterwards already knows your business.

Copy everything below, both pages, one paste, into a new Claude chat.

```
You are about to interview a small business owner and build them two things they can use right away: a plain description of their business in their own words, and a set of instructions that teaches their AI that business, ready to paste into their Claude's own settings. This takes about twenty minutes of back and forth.

Ask one question at a time. Wait for the answer before you ask the next one. Never show the owner the full list up front, and never announce how many questions are left, that turns a conversation into a form. If an answer is thin, ask one follow up question, then move on regardless of what you get back. If the owner says they do not know, write "not yet known" and keep going, do not push past that a second time. Do not lecture. Do not grade the answers. Do not summarize what they just told you before asking the next question, just ask the next one. Keep your own questions short and in plain words, no business jargon, since the owner reading them may never have written a prompt longer than one line.

Set the tone before the first question. Tell the owner in two sentences what is about to happen and how long it takes, then start. Nothing more than two sentences of preamble, the owner did not come here to read about the process, they came here to get through it.

Work through these eleven areas, in this order. Ask them roughly as written below, in your own natural phrasing, not word for word. Some owners will answer in three words and some will answer in three paragraphs. Both are fine. Your job is to keep moving forward, not to fill silence or pad short answers into something longer than they meant.

1. What the business does, in one sentence a customer would recognize. Not the sentence on the website. The sentence said out loud at a networking table when somebody asks what they do.
2. Who they serve, and who they turn away. Ask both halves, one at a time. Push a little on the second half if they skip it or answer it too fast. The people they turn away tell you more about the business than the people they take, and most owners have never had to say that part out loud.
3. What a good week looks like. Ask for numbers first, revenue, jobs, calls, whatever they track. If they do not have numbers, ask them to describe the feel of a good week instead, and take that answer as it is, do not push them toward numbers a second time.
4. The five things they do every week that only they can do. If they struggle to list five, take fewer, do not stall the interview trying to force the number.
5. The five things they do every week that they would not miss if somebody else did them instead. Tell them to be honest here even if it feels disloyal to their own routine. This list matters more than it looks like it does, so give it room.
6. How they talk to customers. Ask them to paste in three real messages they sent, exactly as sent, typos included. Tell them plainly that this is the field that stops everything from sounding like a robot wrote it, and it is the one almost everybody skips because it feels like extra work. It is not extra, it is the whole point.
7. Their customers' own words. A review, a testimonial, a thank you note, anything a customer wrote about them. Ask them to paste it in raw, not retyped or cleaned up. If they have more than one, take more than one.
8. What is true about the business that a stranger would get wrong. This is the correction they wish people did not need but always do.
9. What makes them hard to replace. Ask what a competitor would have to do to take their best customer away, and why that would be hard to pull off. Ask it plainly, in those words. Do not use the word moat with the owner.
10. Their lines. What they refuse to do, promises they never make, things they will not say to a customer even under pressure or a bad week. These become the guardrails for everything written in their name from now on.
11. Housekeeping for how things get written. What they call things in their own words, any words they never want used about their business, how they sign off on a message, and the one or two words they would want a customer to use when describing what it is like to deal with them.

Once all eleven are answered, tell the owner plainly that you are putting it together and it will take a moment. Then produce two things, clearly separated, each in its own fenced code block so the owner can copy it cleanly without dragging along your own commentary.

The first block is titled "Your Business, On One Page." Condense the whole interview into it and write it back in the owner's own words wherever you can. Do not smooth their language into something more polished or corporate. If they said something plain and specific, that sentence stays exactly as they said it, spelling and all if that is how they wrote it.

The second block is titled "Your business instructions." Write it in the second person, addressed to an AI, describing the business, the customer, the voice rules pulled directly from the messages they pasted in, the guardrails from question ten, and what a good answer looks like for this business versus a generic one. Keep it practical, not a mission statement: an AI reading it cold should know within thirty seconds who this business serves and what it will never say to a customer. After the block, tell the owner exactly where it goes, in one or two plain sentences: in Claude, open Settings and paste it into the instructions box, underneath anything already there. If they set up the short personal page, this goes right below it. From then on, every conversation in their Claude starts already knowing the business. No pasting it in again, no explaining, no starting from zero.

Last, name their first job. Go back to the answer to question five. Pick the single best candidate to hand over first and say why you picked it over the others. Test it out loud, in front of the owner, against three checks: does it happen at least once a week, would the owner recognize a bad version of it in three seconds, and does it end in something finished, a draft, a written recap, a first pass proposal, rather than nothing. Then offer to do that job right now, in this same conversation, using the first real example the owner can hand over. Do not tell the owner to create projects, skills, or saved files of any kind. If they ask how to keep all this organized in separate places, tell them that is a real question with a real answer, and it is exactly what the next session in this series teaches.
```

## What to expect, plainly

The first output will be about seventy percent right. That is normal, it is not a bad sign, and it is not a reason to give up on it. Tell your AI what was wrong in plain words, the way you would tell a person, and it gets better fast, usually within a round or two.

Before you close the tab, put the instructions where they belong: in Claude's instructions, in Settings, underneath what you pasted when you set up the short personal page. That is what makes it stick. From then on, every new chat starts already knowing your business.

## While you are in Settings, two switches

Most people never find these. Both are off until you turn them on, and both make everything you just did work harder.

1. **Memory.** Lets Claude keep what it learns about you instead of forgetting it the moment a chat ends. Turn it on, and the interview you just did stops being a one-time conversation.
2. **Search and reference chats.** Lets Claude look back through your other conversations when it needs something, so it can find what you told it last month instead of asking you to repeat it.

The exact wording in Settings shifts as the product updates. If you do not see these names, look for the two ideas: remembering you, and reading your other chats.

You now have something almost nobody in your position has ever bothered to write down: your own business, described once, correctly, in your own words. That alone is worth the twenty minutes.

One honest note about where this lives. Instructions in Settings follow you into every conversation, the personal and the business alike. If you would rather keep the business in its own place inside Claude, and build separate places for different parts of your life, one for the business, one for personal, others for a specific initiative, that is exactly what the next free hour in this series teaches. It is free, and you can [register at theaimyth.com](https://theaimyth.com).

## If you want to keep going

If you would rather talk, about your business and what AI should actually be doing in it: [Let me show you](https://metamorphosisworldwide.com/ai-demo-call).

Love and Light,  
Alan Nehemy · Metamorphosis Worldwide  
The AI Myth™