Claude Cowork as your executive assistant ($5,000 to $20)

Summary

a few months ago I was paying someone $5,000 a month to run my inbox, calendar, and to-dos. today Claude plus two simple files does 70% of the job for $20 a month.

what to build: a Claude skill called daily admin routine. set it on a schedule or trigger it on demand. it processes email, checks the calendar, sorts to-dos, drafts replies, and hands me a briefing before I sit down at my desk.

prerequisites: Claude desktop, connectors for Gmail, Calendar, Monday.com, and Slack.

the HIRE framework for turning any role into a Cowork employee:

• H, hand it a real job description. treat the skill file the way you’d treat an onboarding doc for a new hire.
• I, install it as a skill. upload to the skills section of Claude desktop. it now lives as a callable role.
• R, run it with a trigger. on a schedule, on a Slack message, on a connector event. give the employee a reason to show up.
• E, evolve it over time. every time you’d correct a human EA, update the skill file. it gets better month over month.

the mental shift: stop thinking of Claude as prompting software. start thinking of it as the cheapest level-one employee you’ll ever hire. hire roles, not employees. a book researcher. a content manager. a sales strategist. set each one on a schedule and let them run.

don’t chase shiny objects. make sure AI fits into the bigger plan.

Transcript

intro: replace your $5k/mo admin with claude

You can now use Claude as your executive admin assistant, but only if you set it up correctly. Several months ago, I was paying someone $5,000 a month to run my inbox, my calendar, and my to-do list. Today, Claude, plus two simple files does 70% of the job for $20 a month. I’m going to show you exactly what I built and how you can customize it for your setup. So, in this video, I’ll be going over three specific things.

First, I’ll show you exactly what I built so you can copy it today. Super simple. Second, the two files you need to make this work. And don’t worry, I’m going to give you mine if you need them. And third, the mental shift that will change how you use AI in your business on a daily basis. And if you don’t know who I am, my name is Jerred Moon. I’ve hit the Inc. 500 twice. I run two AI startups, five total companies, and I am optimizing all of them with AI one week at a time and showing you exactly what works.

So, if you’re ready to build something cool, let’s dive straight in. Now, quick thing before we start, the exact BIOS I use in today’s video are pinned in the description. So, go ahead and grab those, plug it into your cloud, and you will be up and running. No need to rebuild any of this from scratch. I’ve made it very easy. Okay, let’s get into it. All right, a couple of prerequisites you’re going to need to get this up and running.

First, you will need the desktop version of Claude. So, it looks like this. You can download it from Claude’s website. After you have that, you will go to customize, and you’re going to go ahead and set up your connectors. It’s easier to go ahead and do this upfront. So, my executive admin needs access to several things to be able to do its job well. It needs access to my Gmail. It needs access to my calendar. It needs access to my monday.com account.

And then it also needs access to Slack. Now, this might not be your exact workflow. So, go ahead and add the connectors that make sense for you, but I will be going over my specific workflow and how it’s acting as an executive admin in my account. Now, after we’ve built the skill file, which I’m going to give you a copy of mine, you can upload that here in the skills portion right here. Here are different skills that I have.

Ultimately, we are working on the daily admin routine.

what we’ll cover

You’ll hit this plus button right here.

prerequisites: claude desktop & connectors

Once you have the final skill file, you’ll go to create skill, upload a skill, and then you will have your skill file uploaded, and you will have your daily administrative executive assistant. So once you have all of those things set up, this is the last step that you will do, but make sure you have Claude desktop and those connectors going, and you will be ready to rock and roll. Okay, let’s dive in to making Claude your executive admin assistant.

what we’re building (a claude skill)

This is a pretty simple process, but I’m going to talk about kind of the framework and how we go about it. So, first, what are we building? So, ultimately, we are building a clawed skill. And so, I showed you where you can upload those skills, but that is what we are building. Nothing more complicated than that. We don’t even have to get into clawed code, which can be, you know, a little overwhelming for some people. Now, once you have the Claude skill installed, there are two ways to run it.

You can do it on demand.

two ways to run it: on-demand or scheduled

So you can type in the trigger slash daily admin routine and it will run it if you want to run it on a manual basis if you don’t want it doing for this for you automatically. You can also inside of clo claude Cowork after you have the skill file implemented just say that you want this on a schedule say hey go ahead let’s run that every day at 7 a.m. and it will do it automatically before you even get to your computer and I really like that version as well.

Really whatever works for your workflow. Now, what this Claude executive admin assistant is doing for me, this is what happens. It pulls my calendar and you know, everything that’s coming up, it lets me know. It reads my inbox, all of the emails that are filtering in. It drafts replies to anything that it deems important. It scans Slack to see if there are any messages I need to be looking at, and it checks Monday because that’s my project management software.

what my executive admin actually does

And it goes through and finds all the important things and surfaces them to the top for action. Then after that, it compiles one briefing document that has my calendar, things that need attention, actions taken, financial summary. I have a lot of financial emails that come in, some FYI information, and then how many total emails that it drafted for me. And here’s my favorite part that I had to add. It extracts every important date from every source and it drops it onto my calendar automatically.

And I really like that because I have a lot of information from, you know, multiple different companies, multiple different people. Um, there could be things with taxes or kids soccer games, everything. It pulls it all and adds it to my calendar, so I never miss anything. It only takes about 90 seconds for it to run this entire process. It’s one skill file and it does three jobs each and every single day. Now, let’s talk about how to build it.

And you’re going to be thinking about this in a new way and not just nuts and bolts. And so, this is how I want you to think about skills and the process in your business.

the hire framework

And it’s not just for admin work. So the framework I have laid out is the hire process. H I re e. So the first thing that you need to do and this is going to be uh you know for the entrepreneurs who have hired somebody who do have a job description laying around. So pull up the last admin executive assistant chief of staff job description that you wrote. And if you don’t have one you can use mine.

I have an entire 27page playbook I’m going to give to you again linked in the description so you can read through this and refine it to your role. But ultimately, you’re going to go through this file if you’re using it step by step and you are going to customize it to your exact environment.

h: hand it a real job description

Like I said, I run Slack and Monday. What if you don’t use either one of those tools? So, swap them out and make sure that makes sense for you. And this is the part 90% of entrepreneurs are going to skip because the job description is what makes Claude dangerously effective. It’s not generic. Hey, I want you to be my admin. when you start handing it actual job descriptions, it becomes so much more powerful. So, if you can start thinking about, okay, I want to create a skill.

I’m not just going to go tell Claude, hey, I want this skill. Say, I need a job description. I want this to act as an employee in my company. What does an employee need? An employee needs a job description. So, the H is hand it a job description. The second part is I install it as a skill. So hand the job description to Claude Cowork and say turn this into a skill and Claude has a specific skill writing skill.

It’s very meta. So yeah, the has a skill that builds skills and it will spin something up and propose to you what the skill should look like based off of the job description. So the more job descriptions that you have, the better and the more effective that these skills will be. Then you’re going to run it with a trigger. And ultimately, I already kind of covered that you can either just run the trigger or you can set it up on autopilot and let it go and then evolve it over time.

And I’ll talk about some of the things that I’ve hit into that you want to you want to tailor and evolve. So, some of the things that I’ve had to change in my evolutions, I had to reply in my voice like, “Hey, I don’t want any in dashes. I need it more casual response.” So on and so forth.

i: install it as a skill

And you just tell it to append and add that to its skill file. I also had it adding things to my calendar automatically, but it was getting a bit excessive. And so now I say, “Hey, list all of the things that you think should go on my calendar, and I will prove them one by one. That way, it’s not adding every single tiny thing like a credit card bill that’s due on the 27th, you know, when I ultimately don’t really need that on my calendar.

Maybe it’s autopay or something already.” And then tighten the briefing. I’ve had it, it was popping out a very long, you know, document each and every single day that I had to read through. I had it shorten it, shorten it, tighten it ultimately to where I get most of what I need in the executive summary. Find out what I need to take action on and I go through there. Now, the ultimate thing that you need to focus on here is no generic instructions.

Give it a real job description. Like I said, you can use mine. The longest part of setting this entire thing up would be taking that this executive admin playbook. My recommendation is you take this, you give it to Claude, and you say, “Hey, I got this playbook cuz I’ve already made it generic for you. I got this playbook.

r: run it with a trigger

I want to tailor it to my business. So upload the PDF and then say ask me all the necessary questions to make this completely tailored and you know customized individualized to me and my business. That’s the first step. And then Claude will take this document and it will start asking you all the questions that it needs even as like a multiple choice and you just start answering it. Maybe takes 5 10 minutes depending on how detailed that you want to get.

After that, you have a badass job description that you can give to Claude. And that’s when you can start to initiate it as a skill. Now, this is plug and play and deploy. So, do not get overwhelmed. Like I said, I have this entire job description f file for you.

e: evolve it over time

And I’m also going to give you my entire clawed skill file. Now, again, this one is tailored super specific to me. I’ve stripped out some of the unnecessary things. So, you will have to take the skill file that I give you and plug it into Claude and, you know, optimize, put in your information, your writing style.

plug-and-play deployment (grab my files)

But you can see exactly how mine is written. It’s in the description. Go ahead and download that.

the mental shift: use hire for every role

Now, the main thing that you need to be thinking about the mental model is this higher framework isn’t just for admin. It’s how you should be using AI for everything. So stop just random prompts and start employing AI in your business because if you need a content manager, don’t just tell it I need a content manager. Ultimately, go get a job description. You can even have Claude help you write a job description or find a free job description online.

Again, tailor, craft it to your business, then take it to Claude. Claude, go ahead and initiate this or install it as a skill and then you can start to run that and then tweak it, evolve the process, right? And you can do it for any type of job. A lot of people are talking about AI employees that kind of run autonomously, but I’ve seen those cause more harm than good in a lot of different companies and take more work than is necessary.

So, if you can just start thinking about hiring out roles on, you know, if you want to get really gran granular, just hire a role, hire a book researcher, a content manager, a sales strategist, these roles within Claude and then set them on schedules to run for you. Now you’re starting to make some significant progress because it is ready. AI can do a lot. A lot of people tell me it’s not.

don’t chase shiny objects: watch this next

They’re not impressed or whatever and it’s just because you haven’t gone through the hiring process. Now I know real operators, they’re saving 10, 20, 30 hour 30 hours a week doing exactly this process and it’s so easy to do. So that is it. That is how you can ultimately implement AI into your business. And if you are trying to implement this, but you’re afraid that you’re chasing shiny objects or whatever, the next video that you need to watch of mine is the 1330 planning process.

You can click here to watch that video or click the link in the description because you want to make sure that you’re implementing AI in a smart way and it’s not just distracting you from ultimately all the things that you want to do. So don’t chase shiny objects. Make sure AI fits into your bigger picture. So, watch the 1330 system next and then go hire your first AI employee.