How I Use Claude to Run My Business Without a Team |

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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is “typical”, and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.

I want to be honest with you about something.

I was a ChatGPT girl for years. Maybe two years, maybe three. I don’t even remember exactly when it launched — I just know it became my everything and I wasn’t looking to leave.

So when Claude came out, I poked at it the way I poke at every new tool. I tested it a little. Nothing blew me away enough to switch. I moved on.

Then early 2026 happened and Claude leaped so far forward that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Now it runs my business while I swim.

Let me explain how.

Why I Switched from ChatGPT to Claude

I’m not here to trash ChatGPT. It built a huge chunk of my business and I’m grateful for it. But here’s what I noticed when I started actually using Claude:

It’s a better writer.

Not a little better. Noticeably better.

It also learns me faster. It picks up my tone, my style, my way of thinking quicker than any tool I’ve used. And honestly? I just enjoy talking to it more. That matters when you’re spending hours with a tool every single day.

But what really got my attention — what made me go all in — was two things.

First: Claude can publish my blog posts directly to WordPress.

Second: Claude can build apps.

Not “here’s some code, go figure it out” apps. Actual working apps. My ideas, my functionality, my vision — Claude and Base44 handle the rest. No coding required on my end.

That was it. I was in.

What Claude Co-Work Actually Is

Before I go further, I need to clear something up because a lot of people confuse these.

Claude Chat and Claude Co-Work are not the same thing.

Claude Chat — what most people think of when they think of Claude — is what you’re probably using right now. It’s great for writing blog posts, building apps, daily conversations, one-off tasks.

Claude Co-Work is different. It lives on your computer. Locally. And it actually drives your computer the way a human would.

It opens your browser. It navigates tabs. It logs into tools. It downloads files. It uploads images. It does the physical, manual work that you normally sit at your computer and do yourself.

That’s not automation running in the background like a Make flow. Claude is literally sitting at your computer doing your job.

If you want the deep automation power, Co-Work is where you go.

My Morning Workflow — Before Claude

For the last couple of years, my mornings looked like this.

I’d get up, make coffee, sit down at my computer. I had about 90 minutes before I wanted to be done and moving into the rest of my day — my walk, my swim, the gym.

In that 90 minutes I’d pick a blog post — either an old one I wanted to refresh or a new one to write. Then I’d use AI to generate prompts for Pinterest pins. I’d take those prompts into my image tool and generate the images. Then I’d push them to my scheduler. Then I’d go in and manually update the titles, descriptions, boards, alt text, and URLs for each one.

One blog. That’s what I could get done in a morning if everything went smoothly.

It worked. It’s how I built this thing.

But I was the bottleneck.

The Day I Realized Claude Could Do All of It

The very first day I seriously opened Claude Co-Work, I tried to set it up to run my whole morning flow.

And it couldn’t do it.

Not because it wasn’t capable — because I hadn’t taught it yet.

It kept stopping. “Hey Lori, I need you to download this folder.” Every few steps, it needed me.

And here’s what I figured out fast: if I kept jumping in to help it, it was never going to learn.

This is exactly like training an employee.

Your team member’s output is only going to be as good as the expectations you set. If every time they get stuck you come in and do it for them, they never learn how to do it themselves. You’ve just created a dependency, not a system.

So I stopped helping.

I told Claude: figure it out. You have to be able to do this without me because I need to be able to set this task, walk away, and come back to finished work.

And here’s what surprised me: Claude has a million workarounds.

When it couldn’t download a file folder the normal way, it found another way. When it needed to pass images to my scheduler without physically downloading them, it figured out how to do it. When it needed to send an email recap, it learned to open Gmail in the browser and do it from there.

Would I know how to tell it to do any of that? Hell no. I know the basic way — the way I’ve always done it. But Claude knows things I don’t. You just have to push it to use them.

The Email Recap That Changed Everything

Once I got the basic flow running, I added one more instruction.

After you finish a task, email me.

Send me the link to the blog you worked on. Send me every step you completed. Tell me what you learned. Tell me what you’re going to do differently next time to make this faster.

Every single run, it gets better. Every single run, it uses fewer resources, moves faster, hits fewer walls.

Yesterday I ran the same task all day. By the end of the day I had 10 new blogs written and 10 old blogs rewritten.

I could have never done that sitting at my computer myself.

Three Computers, Three Workflows

Right now I have Claude Co-Work running on three computers in my house simultaneously.

• One computer handles my Pinterest and blog content workflow.
• One computer handles tasks for my digital marketing blog.
• One handles analysis work — YouTube channel reviews, influencer product management, export reports.

Could I run all of this on one computer? Probably. You can absolutely set up a single machine with scheduled tasks — 9:00 AM work on this blog, noon run analysis, 3:00 PM push new pins. Claude will do all of it in sequence.

One tip: if you’re using the same computer Claude is working on, open a separate browser window and let Claude run in its own. The one time I accidentally used a tab Claude was working in, it swapped out the images for the wrong blog. Stay out of its lane.

Why I’m Not Just Using Make Automations

I know what some of you are thinking.

“Lori, why aren’t you just setting up a Make flow and running everything in the background?”

I am. Eventually.

But here’s why I started with Co-Work first: I wanted every single step documented and tested before I asked Claude to build the automation that runs without my computer. Train it manually. Then automate it. That way when the flow runs, there are no surprises. We’ve already solved all the problems.

There’s also a cost angle. Running Co-Work is cheaper than API-based automation for certain things. Some tools charge per image or per API call. For where I am right now in building this out, letting Co-Work drive the computer is more cost-effective than burning API credits on every step.

I like understanding what I’m building before I hand it off. That’s just how I work.

What This Actually Looks Like in Real Life

My day still starts with 90 minutes at my computer with coffee.

But now Claude is working during those 90 minutes too — on a different computer.

When I sit down for my afternoon block, I have email recaps waiting. Links to finished blogs. Lists of what Claude completed, what it learned, what it’s going to do better tomorrow.

I’m not doing the repetitive manual work anymore. I’m reviewing. Strategizing. Creating the things that actually need me.

The walk still happens. The swim still happens. The gym still happens.

The business is still running.

How to Get Started

If you want to set this up yourself, here’s the basic path:

1. Get Claude Pro. Co-Work requires it. When you’re running multiple tasks or longer flows, you’ll want the resources.
2. Install Claude Co-Work on your computer. It lives locally. Set it up, connect it to your browser.
3. Map out your manual workflow first. What do you do every morning? Write it out step by step. Be specific. The more detailed your instructions, the better Claude runs.
4. Run it manually with Claude driving. Let it try. When it gets stuck, don’t jump in. Tell it to figure it out. Watch what workarounds it finds.
5. Add the email recap instruction. After every task, have it email you what it did, what it learned, and what it will do better next time.
6. Schedule it. Once it’s running clean, schedule the task and walk away.

One More Thing

I want to be clear about something before I wrap this up.

I was already making multiple six figures before AI.

AI didn’t build my business. Systems did. Years of content, affiliate strategy, digital products, showing up consistently — that built the foundation.

What AI did — what Claude specifically is doing — is buying back my time. It’s letting me do more with the same three hours. It’s handling the repetitive work so I can stay in the strategic work.

If you’re just starting out, AI is an incredible accelerator. But it needs something to accelerate. Build the thing. Learn the system. Then hand it to Claude and let it run.

That’s the model.

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