Using Claude to Build Procedures Your Team Can Actually Follow

Transcript

The Problem With Procedure Creation

Good day. My name’s Mike and you are listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed. Today I’m going to show you that it’s not so difficult to create procedures that people can follow.

We’ve talked a lot about procedures on this podcast before, and yes, it is one of those really boring, laborious things that has to be done when you’re systemizing your business — but not so much anymore.

I’m going to explain how I’m using Claude to produce run sheets for people in my team. That helps me set up things more regularly, such as webinars, and saves me time in the long run because I’m not the one doing it. It gives the person doing the job certainty about how they can get it done, right the first time.

I was at a business lunch yesterday and a lot of people were talking about one of the pain points they have this year, particularly around people and process — their systems just aren’t up to scratch for the size their businesses are. Building up systems does take skill and specialists, but it doesn’t have to take that much time anymore.

The Procedure Skill

I’m going to walk you through a skill I’ve built into Claude that produces a procedure structure. I believe this is already on my website — you can find it at lonewolfunleashed.com/4p-dash-procedure, or on my resources page along with all the other resources there.

So I’m going to open up my Obsidian workspace. If you haven’t seen Obsidian, it’s basically where I have Claude interfacing with all my markdown files. I manage and review things there, then interact with Claude through VS Code to make changes. I can also update small things directly in Obsidian itself. This is where I’m managing a lot of my ecosystem now and it is an absolute game changer in terms of my efficiency.

The skill takes a task description, a recording transcript, some process notes, or an existing rough procedure as input. The idea is that these things have enough context for Claude to produce something of high fidelity — meaning high quality that people can actually use.

The output is a single markdown document containing a complete SOP with all sections filled in, delivered as text for review before saving to file.

Stage Zero: Clarify the Scope

Before generating anything, we establish what we’re documenting.

What is the task? Can we name it in three to five words — typically verb, noun, because we’re doing something. Who will do it — is it a VA, a contractor, a staff member, your future self? Does this task require judgment or just knowledge? We’ve talked about this in a prior episode where tasks with high judgment have a lot of decision logic, and we want to make sure people are equipped to handle those decisions when they arise.

Stage One: Gather the Raw Material

What are the inputs? Is it a prior procedure, a verbal description, a video transcript of you doing the task?

What systems are involved? What are the typical steps — the URLs, menu paths, commands used, techniques — not just “click save” but “click save, then wait for the confirmation banner before proceeding.” That’s the level of instruction we’re going for.

We also establish a definition of done. How do we know the task has been completed? Who are we handing over to — if anyone? I covered this a couple of episodes ago when talking about communication as performance. If you don’t tell the next person it’s their turn, you didn’t actually complete the task.

And we think through edge cases. When might things go wrong? When might there be an exception?

Stages Two Through Five: Build, Review, Present, Save

Stage Two is building the procedure. There’s a template structure: task name, properties including version number and owner, the trigger, inputs, prerequisites, steps, decision tables, definition of done, handover chain, FAQs, and revision history.

Stage Three is review and sharpen. I put a review stage in most of my Claude skills because the first document you write is never right first time — you write it, review it, and make tweaks. We’re getting Claude to do the same.

The quality checks include a delegation test — could someone follow this procedure tomorrow without asking you a single question? An observable outcome check — every definition of done item must be something a delegate can see, count, or verify. Action verbs — click, open, navigate, check, verify, enter — not “the system will do X.” Decision coverage — if there’s a decision table, check it includes an escalation row for situations outside the delegate’s authority. And a missing steps check — a simple task often has ten to fifteen steps or more. If your procedure has fewer than five steps for anything beyond a trivial task, you’ve likely skipped the obvious ones that trip up delegates.

Stage Four presents the document for review as a markdown file, plus a brief editorial note covering gaps flagged, assumptions made, judgment calls, and recommended next steps.

Stage Five saves it to the dedicated folder.

The skill does not execute the procedure or automate the task — it’s purely a document creation tool. I don’t want Claude interacting through an MCP server to actually create Asana tasks when I’m writing a procedure about how to use Asana. It does not produce extra training materials, checklists, or process maps. And it does not replace testing — the procedure must still be tested with a real delegate.

A Real Example: Webinar Setup with Boomcaster and GoHighLevel

This week my wife joined the business, which is very exciting. I’ve had a lot of trouble finding time to set up events — I completely skipped the event I had planned for March because I’ve been so busy on project work. So I want to be able to run more webinars, and handing that setup off is part of making that happen.

I said, look, I want to set up these webinars in GoHighLevel. Walk me through what you need to be able to build this procedure.

My conversation with Claude was interesting — I discovered that the tools I currently have don’t meet the requirements for managing webinars properly. So I had to go find a tool. Thanks to my producer Neal, he recommended Boomcaster. I’m now on a trial, which is great.

I fed all of this information into Claude and asked it to produce a procedure on how to set up webinars in GoHighLevel using these tools. What it produced is an entire run sheet that my wife can now go through and use.

The procedure uses three platforms: Boomcaster, YouTube Live, and Growth Monster (which is GoHighLevel — the marketing layer with the registration page, email and SMS reminders, CRM tagging, and so on).

The trigger is me requesting a new live webinar to be set up. The prerequisites include login access to GoHighLevel, Boomcaster, and YouTube, and confirmation that credentials have been tested. The required information from me is the webinar title, date and time, expected duration, speaker names and bios, a webinar description — a whole list that the person needs to gather from me before continuing, because these are the inputs the task can’t proceed without.

Then there are the steps. Part A: schedule the YouTube Live event. Log into YouTube Studio, create a stream, schedule for later, fill in the stream details, click create stream, copy the YouTube Live URL into Asana, copy the stream key. Part B: create the registration form in GoHighLevel. Navigate to forms, create a form, name it, add the fields — first name, last name, and so on. And it continues through Part C, D, E — create the webinar funnel, customize the pages, build the automation workflow.

You might say that’s a lot, Mike. And in a lot of cases I’d agree — this is almost a process in itself. But I want someone to sit down and do all of this in one go. I don’t want someone setting up the YouTube stream and then parking for the day and coming back tomorrow for the rest. What I want is for the webinar to be set up completely in one sitting.

The result is a four-and-a-half thousand word procedure. I’ve criticized customers before about procedures over three thousand words, but sometimes it’s appropriate. I could pull the testing section out into a separate procedure — build webinar and test webinar as separate documents. The content exists now, so separating it out would be easy.

What I have is a procedure skill that defines the structure, the skill gathers the right inputs, and then produces something of high fidelity that someone can follow — knowing how to escalate, what decisions to make, and what steps to take.

I did something similar for another customer: a detailed setup procedure for Power Automate within a SharePoint ecosystem, about 148 pages. It was 85% correct. For a novel setup, following that procedure in a company would have probably taken about three weeks. Instead we set up the run sheet and delivered that part of the project within a few days — a really great outcome for the client, who got to reap those benefits earlier.

This is how we create an ecosystem where people are set up to succeed. If you’re going to have people in your business, procedures are going to be necessary. Using AI and these Claude skills to do this is going to help you set up that ecosystem very quickly so you can hand off work to other people.

Head over to lonewolfunleashed.com/resources. You can find a whole bunch of stuff on there about how to get started with AI and more. Thank you so much for joining me today — you could have been doing so many other things, but you decided to hang out with me and learn how you can use Claude to delegate your work in a fast and easy manner that’s going to get the outcome you need. I’ll see you next week.