An excerpt from last week's VIP that I felt was important to share with everyone! How to get your first check/increase customers and bring in cash from the FOUNDATION of business.

Just off the phone with another business owner, an existing MSP client. We are starting a paid engagement on Tuesday. He has some crews on the road installing a product. Those crews are going to start taking before, during, and after photos of the jobs, to help illustrate the transformation that this product makes. He has asked me to come up with a way to help the guys on site manage the upload of the photos and related job information - hard working guys with not an awful lot of time or much IT inclination. I then suggested.... 1. Helping his guys with his initial request ➕➕ AND ➕➕ 2. Improving the quality of the information uploaded to make it more useful 3. Automating the process of those job photos being compiled in the correct order and a social media post about the job being drafted and presented for approval of both the photographs and the content of the social media post to the business owner (style based in his previous posting history) 4. And auotomating the posting to multiple social media accounts of the photos and the approved post content. 5. He doesn't know it, but I'll throw in automatic blog post creation as a bonus. I already have a fair idea of how I'm going to do it. The key point here is I didn't sell this to him. He called me for advice about a simple technical matter and I simply suggested that the rest COULD be done, and suggested a framework only (no specific tools or much detail) He then sold himself and spontaneously decided that, despite his own AI use, he needed us to do it for him because it souned a bit complicated.

My workspace keeps a logbook of everything it does, and it is three separate records rather than one file. Each has a different author, a different job, and gets written at a different moment. - Prompts - one record per job, written by the Claude Code job itself as its last act. - Sessions - one narrative per feature, written by the Claude chat when the work is finished. - Traces - one record per loop run, written by the loop script. A prompt record is the build record. Every Claude Code job I run closes by filling in a template: what it was told, what it did, which files it touched, how it went, and anything that broke. It is deep in two places only, how it went and what went wrong, and terse everywhere else. It also grades itself out of five and says whether the instruction it was given would have produced that result unaided. Nobody writes these by hand. The job writes its own before it is allowed to finish. A session is the story. That one comes from the Claude chat I design the work in, not from the job, and it gets written at the end of a feature rather than at the end of a task. It covers what the feature was, what got built, the calls that mattered and what each one ruled out, and what bit along the way. The job knows what it did; the chat knows why it was asked to. A trace is the system's own record. Every time the loop runs it writes one file: which records arrived, what it applied, what it queued, anything odd it noticed, and the full state of the system at that minute. No prose, no opinion. It is there so that when something looks wrong three weeks later I can read what the system actually did rather than reconstruct it. The split is by author. The job, the chat and the loop each know something the other two do not, and one combined log would have to serve all three and would end up serving none. There is also no status field anywhere in it - a record's folder is its state, so unprocessed, processed and needs-a-human are three folders rather than a flag that can go stale.

This is a brain dump turned into a post, summarizing the work I've done with Jake's ICM method. I want to share what I've learned to see how these use cases resonate and what I could do better. It took me probably two months of reading through the community and using the resources available before this actually clicked. What did it for me was a post @Curtis Hays wrote a few months back (https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/the-folder-system-became-my-agency?p=1e30aba0). Reading that post is what helped me understand how this actually works, and I'm hoping this post can do the same for someone else. There are a lot of different ways to come at this. >>>How I wrapped my head around this I lead development teams, and I also do what I'd call typical project or product management work. So a lot of how I thought about this started with a simple question: what are the most common things I produce or share, at a daily, weekly, or even monthly level? I wrote those things down. From there I asked how they actually get created, where they start, what the process of drafting or iteration looks like, and where they end up. About 50% of my day is spent on the phone, and most new ideas, action items, and questions come out of those calls. Sometimes it's email, but most of the time it's calls. Before, I'd use AI to help draft or compile something, but I was feeding it context manually every time, sometimes a brain dump on the call itself, sometimes a brain dump afterward. I'd work on the thing, it would spit something out, and I'd save it or send it. What I realized was that I needed a way to take the information from those calls and actually store it, so I could recall it and use it again for whatever needed to happen next. Here are 4 different use cases of how I use this ICM framework. The first 2 are functional, I use them everyday. The last 2 are more ideas, but only because the opportunity to implement has not presented itself just yet.

Hey Clief Notes! I'm Patrick and I'm stoked to be here. 🙋 A little about me: I'm working in IT support and consulting and have recently started my own business. 🎯 My current goal: Currently I'm learning how to integrate AI in your business or personal live in a meaningful way, to be able to teach that to others and help them implement and get real benefits using AI. 💪 What I'm currently building/working on: My main focus and challenge ist building out systems for myself, that are secure and helpful. 🤔 My biggest struggle or question right now: My biggest struggle is to not get carried away with building systems, trying out new stuff instead of finishing and using them. I'm constantly distracted by posts that claim "this is the best new thing". Let's get it! 🚀