Let the Machines Be the Machines: My Claude Setup for Business

Hi, it's Kaila. I'm one half of My Aligned Purpose, and I've decided to record a few solo episodes all about how we use Claude in our business so we can stop trading so much time for money, have really profitable quarters that lead to really profitable years, and get out of the weeds of doing everything ourselves. My whole philosophy here fits in one sentence: let the machines be the machines and the humans be the humans. This first installment is the foundation, how to set up your Claude and how to start speaking the Claude language, because if you're new to this platform, there's a lot of vocabulary that just doesn't make sense yet. What is an Artifact? What's a Connector? Where do the settings live? We're going to walk through all of it.

🎧 Prefer to listen? This post began as Ep 610 of the My Aligned Purpose podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts or listen on Spotify.

Why AI Is Not Replacing the Human Touch in Your Business

Before we get started, I want to address the number one thing I hear from people about why they don't want to use AI in their business: they don't want to replace real human connection and working with people. Let me set your mind at ease right now. AI is not replacing people. The mindset switch is that we're getting the machine to do the jobs machines do best, and then we're using people to manage what we asked the machine to do and take that work from 50, 70, or 80 percent complete up to 100.

Claude is an excellent thinking partner. It can do tons of research, pull data, and give you understanding of things that would otherwise take a really long time to put together, and then you make your own decisions. You'll look at the plan it gives you and refine it, ask for more of what you want, or say "this is pretty good, I'm going to run with it from here." Everything I recommend in this series comes from my own work with this tool, especially my concentrated work in Claude over the last two months. This is real time learning, and this is exactly how we use it at My Aligned Purpose to stay profitable and deliver amazing service to our clients.

How to Set Up Claude for Business: Subscription, Privacy, Connectors

First things first: go to claude.ai and buy the lowest tier monthly subscription, about $25 a month. You don't have to buy the whole year, and you don't have to jump all in. Just buy the month and see if you use it. I can't promise anything in this series will be compatible with the free version, so treat the paid tier as your ticket in.

Second, protect your privacy. Go into Settings, click over to Privacy, and turn off the toggle that says "Help improve our AI models." That means your chats aren't being shared to train the models indefinitely. I'll be honest, my trust level with software companies is quite low, but we also hand all our data to Google without reading a privacy policy. We have to keep up with the changing times and use the tools that will accelerate our businesses, and toggling that off at least means I said "don't do that."

Third, and this is where Claude becomes truly powerful: connect the software you already use. Go to Customize, scroll down to Connectors, and search for your tools. Ours are Canva, ClickUp, Descript, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Kajabi, Zapier, and Zoom, plus Claude installed in the Chrome browser so it can see what we're doing online. For my Kajabi queens: open a chat and type "Help me connect my Kajabi to Claude." It will hand you an MCP connector link, and you'll add it as a custom connector. I'm not a software developer and I don't know what MCP stands for, and here's the beautiful part: we don't need to. If you're going to get Claude to do real work for you, you need your software connected. Otherwise it won't have the depth of information about who you are, what your business sells, your website, or your socials. There's almost no point in using it without the connections.

Claude Terms Explained: Projects, Artifacts, Skills, Scheduled Tasks

When you pay for Claude, download the desktop app. The browser version doesn't have the same level of tools, you can't run scheduled tasks, and it doesn't remember conversations between desktop and browser. Once you're in, stay on the Home side. I never touch Claude Code except to peek at my usage.

Projects are containers for a specific topic. I have one called Kaila's fitness and macros, where all my races, recipes, and macro talk stays in one place. In business, I'd make a separate project for client work, like done-for-you Kajabi copy, so the machine never confuses a client's content with mine. But honestly, projects aren't strictly necessary. Most of my work lives in regular chats: team meeting summaries, email subject lines for August events, sponsorship pitch emails, an event sponsorship deck I can reopen and update anytime.

Artifacts are visual diagrams of whatever you ask for. I can ask for my week at a glance and get a chart with headers for my whole week, or turn a KPI conversation into a visual right inside the chat. Skills are repeatable processes you build once and run forever. We built one that forwards receipts to QuickBooks: I worked out the process in a chat, said "can you make this into a skill," and turned it on. You can even share a skill with clients so they have a starting point that already works.

The Scheduled Tasks That Got Me Hooked

Scheduled tasks are the biggest game changer for me, and honestly what got me totally hooked. Every day at 6 AM, Claude checks my Gmail, summarizes, flags, labels, drafts replies, and keeps me at inbox zero. And every time a podcast goes live, Mondays and Thursdays, it publishes a blog post based on our content, not hallucinating anything, linked back to the podcast, with the podcast links in exactly the right color. Then it pings my calendar so I can double check it. Fun fact: the post you're reading right now came from that exact system. I remember when repurposing content into blog posts was a multi-thousand dollar monthly expense if you wanted great SEO. Now Claude does it, and the people who used to cut and paste data can add value in bigger ways.

Pick the Strongest Model and Keep a Beginner's Mind

In the chat box, select your model on purpose. On our Max account I use Fable 5 Max, the best model available, and on a $25 account I'd use Opus 5 for complex work. Sonnet 5 is okay for everyday tasks, but it's not going to think with you, and I never use Haiku. Then set the effort level. I usually run high or max, because I don't want mediocre work. I also work in Cowork rather than plain chat, since Cowork is the thinker that applies all your connectors to actually move business ops forward.

And my biggest tip of all: have a beginner's mind. Stop solving the problems before you ask. Don't say "I want to connect Kajabi and I tried these ten things." You're confusing the machine. Use the simplest sentence you can: "How do I do this? Do this for me now." When I look at that $25 a month next to everything else we pay to get things done, it's basically a business partner who can think with you, plan with you, draft in your voice, and ship work. I built an entire assistant skill live during this episode by answering a few pop-up questions and telling it to draft and never send. That's the experiment mindset I want for you.

Grab the free PDF that goes with this series at myalignedpurpose.com/claude. It has the step-by-step setup and the prompts for all those tasks you used to hire for, and you can literally hand it to Claude and say "help me set this up, do exactly what Kaila says." In the next episode, we're optimizing Claude as the VA for your online business. Okay, bye.

Ready to stop trading time for money in every corner of your business? Take the free quiz to find your fastest path to making more money, learn how we support women entrepreneurs inside the Aligned CEO Method, and join our newsletter for weekly strategy and soul in your inbox.