Before you build
Start here
The one-time setup every system uses.
Read this page once before you build anything. Every system in this playbook runs the same way, and if you understand this page, every build after it makes sense.
What you are building
Six systems that do the work around your coaching:
- The Post-Call Flow. Your call ends. Session notes get filed and a recap email waits in your drafts.
- Pre-Session Prep. A one-page brief on each client, waiting for you before the day starts.
- The Onboarding Machine. From "yes" to agreement, invoice, welcome, intake and a first-90-days plan.
- Resource Recommendations. The right worksheet from your own library, matched to what the client is going through.
- The Testimonial Catcher. Every time a client praises your work on a call, it gets saved word for word.
- The Living Client Profile. One running record per client that every other system reads from.
Plus one piece you build first, because every system uses it: your voice, so every draft sounds like you.
You build all of it by talking to Claude. You paste a prompt, Claude asks you questions, and Claude builds it. You do not write code. You do not need a terminal. You do not need an API key.
The four things everything is made of
1. The Claude desktop app, on a paid plan. Pro works for one or two systems. If you run all six, the hourly checks add up, and you may want Max. You build inside Cowork, the tab in the desktop app where Claude can use your tools and run tasks on a schedule.
Getting there: download the Claude desktop app from claude.ai/download, install it, and sign in. At the top of the app you will see a few tabs. Cowork is one of them. Click it and you get a chat box, like normal Claude, plus a sidebar with a Scheduled section. Everything in this playbook happens in that chat box. When a step says "paste this into a new Cowork chat", start a new chat in the Cowork tab and paste it in.
2. Connectors. These are the sign-ins that let Claude use your tools. You set them up once under Customize, then Connectors. You click Connect, sign in with the account you use for coaching, and approve. No keys, no passwords handed over. You will want:
- Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar for every system
- Zoom, Fathom or Fireflies, whichever records your calls
- DocuSign and Stripe or QuickBooks, only for onboarding, and only if you use them
3. One folder in your Google Drive called Coaching Systems. Every system keeps its rules and its work in there. That is the reason these systems run with your laptop closed. More on that below.
4. Scheduled tasks in Cowork. A scheduled task is a short instruction Claude runs on a timer, like "every hour, check for finished calls." You find them in the Scheduled section of the Cowork sidebar. There are two ways to make one. Click + New task there and fill in the name, the instruction, how often, and the working folder. Or type /schedule at the start of a Cowork chat message (the slash, then the word) and Claude walks you through it. Every task has a Run now button. Use it whenever you want to test something without waiting for the timer.
The rule that keeps you safe: nothing ever sends
None of these systems send email. Ever. Everything a client would see lands in your Gmail drafts, and you press send yourself. Anything meant for you, like a morning brief or a "this needs you" note, also lands as a draft addressed to you. Drafts sync to your phone, so you still see them straight away.
The Gmail connector can send email, so you lock that down yourself. Do this before you build anything:
- In the Claude app, go to Customize, then Connectors, then Gmail.
- You will see a list of everything the connector can do, one line per tool, each with a small setting next to it: Always allow, Needs approval, or Blocked. Find the tools for sending, replying and forwarding. Set each one to Blocked.
- Find the tool for creating drafts. Set it to Always allow. A scheduled task runs with nobody there to click "approve", so anything set to "Needs approval" makes the task stall. Set the tools that search and read mail to Always allow too.
Now Claude cannot send, even by mistake, even if a prompt asks it to. One catch: these settings can reset after a Claude app update. Every time the Claude app updates, open Customize, then Connectors, then Gmail, and look. The weekly health check at the bottom of this page reminds you too.
Why everything lives in Google Drive
Cowork runs a scheduled task in the cloud, with your laptop closed, as long as the task only uses connectors. The moment a task needs a file on your computer, it can only run while your computer is on and awake.
So nothing in this playbook keeps anything on your computer. Rules, notes, logs, your voice guide, your client list: all of it lives in the Coaching Systems folder in Drive. When you create a scheduled task, leave the working folder empty. If you point it at a folder on your laptop, it quietly becomes a laptop-only task.
Set this up once: the Coaching Systems folder
Paste this into a new Cowork chat. It is the first build.
Set up my Coaching Systems folder. Use only connectors. Do not create anything on my computer. 1. Check which Google account the Google Drive, Gmail and Calendar connectors are signed in to. Tell me, and ask me if that is my coaching account. Stop until I answer. 2. In my Google Drive, create a folder called Coaching Systems. Inside it create: Setup, Post-call, Pre-session, Onboarding, Resources, Testimonials, Profiles. If a folder with that name already exists, tell me and use it. Do not make a second one. 3. In Setup, create a Google Sheet called Client list with these columns: Name, Main email, Other emails, Status (active, paused or ended), How often we meet (weekly, every two weeks, monthly), Notes. Then ask me for my current clients one at a time, or ask if I would rather paste a list. Put what I give you in the sheet. If I give you more later, tell me to add it to the sheet myself, because you cannot edit a sheet after you make it. 4. In Setup, create a Google Doc called Settings with: my name, my coaching email, my timezone, how long my sessions run, my calendar's name, my booking link if I have one, my video meeting link, the name of the folder where my client folders live, and where session notes go inside a client folder (the client folder itself, or a subfolder like "Sessions"). Ask me each one. If I don't have one, write "none". 5. Check that sending is blocked. Try to send a one-line test email to my own address, and only my own address. It should be refused. (If the block is not on yet, the worst that happens is I get one test email from myself.) If it goes through, stop and walk me through Customize, then Connectors, then Gmail, and set send, reply and forward to Blocked and create draft to Always allow. Then try again. 6. Tell me in plain words what you made and where to find it.Your call recordings: which tool, which setting
Every system reads your call transcripts. Pick the one you already use.
- Zoom. Needs a paid plan, Pro or above, and you have to be the host. In Zoom's settings, turn on Smart Recording and Meeting Summary. They are AI Companion features, and without them the Zoom connector cannot read your calls. Claude cannot see your Zoom settings, so this one is on you. Turn them on before your next call. Calls recorded before that will not be readable.
- Fathom or Fireflies. Both have official connectors. Connect them, and Claude reads your transcripts from there. If you already use one of these, this is the easier path.
Tell your clients you record. Your agreement needs three lines, and it is easiest to add them all at once, now:
- You record sessions, with their permission, to take notes.
- You use AI tools to help with notes, follow-up emails and preparation. Nothing is sent to them without you reading it first.
- You may ask to quote something they say, and you will always ask them first.
Before you use client information, check the data settings for each tool on the plan you pay for. In the Claude app, open Settings, then Privacy, and turn off the setting that lets your chats be used to improve Claude. Read the current terms for your Google and Zoom plans too. Then tell your clients what you checked. Do not tell anyone their words never leave your computer. They do, to do the work.
The order to go in
Start with the setup on this page, then your voice guide, then the Post-Call Flow. That gets your recaps writing themselves.
After that, add one system at a time: profiles, prep, testimonials, resources, onboarding. Run each one on your real clients before you build the next, so every piece is tested before the next one leans on it.
Build them in this order
- Your voice. Everything else drafts in it.
- The Post-Call Flow. The biggest time saver and the easiest first win.
- The Living Client Profile. It reads the notes the post-call flow files.
- Pre-Session Prep. It reads the profile.
- The Testimonial Catcher.
- Resource Recommendations.
- The Onboarding Machine. The most moving parts, so it goes last.
One rule: build one, then run it for a week on real clients before you build the next. Every system gets something wrong in its first week, and using it is the only way to find out what.
The weekly health check
Build this once you have your first system running. It is the thing that tells you when something has quietly stopped.
Create a scheduled task called Weekly health check. Run it every Friday at 4pm. Use only connectors. Leave the working folder empty. Each run: 1. For each folder in Coaching Systems, look at what was created this week. 2. Draft me one email, addressed to me, subject "Coaching systems: weekly check". For each system, one line: working (with the count of what it made this week), quiet (nothing made, and that might be fine), or stuck (it should have made something and didn't). 3. End with one line reminding me to open Customize, then Connectors, then Gmail, and check send, reply and forward are still set to Blocked. 4. Draft only. Never send.
Good to know
What Claude can and cannot do in your Drive
Claude can create files, read them, move them between folders, share them and put them in the trash. It cannot edit a document that already exists. It cannot change one line of a Google Doc or one cell of a Google Sheet.
That shapes how every system works:
- When a system updates something, it writes a new version, adds the date to the old one's name, and moves the old one into an Old versions folder. You keep every version, which turns out to be useful.
- The files you edit, like your client list and your voice guide, you edit, in Google Docs and Sheets, the normal way. Claude reads your changes on its next run.
How often things can run
Cowork can run a task hourly, daily, weekly, on weekdays, or manually. Nothing runs every five or ten minutes. So the systems are built around that:
| System | Runs |
|---|---|
| Post-call flow | Every hour (it skips weekends by itself) |
| Pre-session prep | Every weekday at 6:30am, for the whole day |
| Onboarding | Every hour, 7am to 7pm on weekdays |
| Living client profile | Every evening |
| Testimonial catcher | Every evening, plus a Monday review |
| Resource recommendations | When you ask, plus a weekly library refresh |
Every run uses some of your plan. Start with one system. Add the next once the first one is working.
How each system remembers what it has done
Every system needs to know what it already handled, so it never does the same thing twice. Claude cannot keep notes in a doc it already made, so each system leaves a small trail you can see in Drive:
- Post-call, pre-session and testimonials drop a small file in a Handled or Read folder for every call or session they deal with.
- Profiles write the date they are up to date through on the first line of each profile.
- Onboarding drops a numbered file in each new client's folder as each step is done ("3 folder made", "4 welcome drafted").
You never need to touch these. They are there so you can see exactly what happened, and so that if something goes wrong, the next run picks up where the last one stopped.
When something goes wrong
- A draft never showed up. Open the Scheduled tab in Cowork and look at the task's run history. Usually it is a sign-in that expired. Go to Customize, then Connectors, reconnect it, and click Run now on the task.
- It put something in the wrong client's file. Tell Claude in a chat. Every system has a rule to stop and ask when it is not sure. If it guessed, that rule needs tightening. Paste what happened into the chat and ask it to fix the system's rules doc.
- The draft doesn't sound like you. Open your My voice doc and edit it. Every system reads it fresh on every run.
And if you would rather not build it
For my clients, I build systems like these in code, connect them and run them. This playbook is the version you can build yourself in Claude, with no code. If you would rather have it built, running and looked after by someone whose job it is, that is what Brightwood does. You can find me at brightwoodai.com.