How we use Claude in a one-person consulting business
Most of what people call “AI in the business” at Birch Run is one setup: a folder tree in OneDrive, VS Code open on top of it, and Claude Code working inside that folder like a colleague who can read everything and never gets tired of the boring parts.
This post is the tour. Nothing here needs a developer. It needs a folder structure you already have and about an hour to set up.
OneDrive is the file system, and that is the point
Every client has a folder: contracts, transcripts, exports, the Power BI project, the notes from the last call. Marketing has a folder. Operations has a folder. They sync through OneDrive to the laptop, so on disk it is just files.
That matters because Claude Code works on files. Open VS Code in the client’s folder and Claude can read the statement of work, the last three transcripts and the semantic model in the same breath. There is no upload step, no copying context into a chat window, and nothing leaves the folder unless we ask it to.
Two habits make it work:
- One folder per client, same shape every time. Contracts, transcripts, reports, invoices. When the layout is predictable, the instructions can be too.
- A short notes file in each folder. Who the client is, what the engagement covers, what “done” looks like. Claude reads it first, the same way a new team member would.
VS Code is the desk
VS Code is where the work happens, not because of the code but because of the terminal. Claude Code runs in it, alongside the file explorer and Git. A typical hour:
- Open the client folder.
- Ask for what is needed in plain words: “Pull yesterday’s transcript from Wispr, save it here, and propose the Linear updates.”
- Read what it did. Approve, adjust, or say no.
That last step is the whole model. Claude drafts, we decide. Anything that goes to a client, a customer or a repository gets a human look first.
The automations we actually rely on
These are small, repeatable jobs we taught Claude Code once and run constantly. Each one is a short instruction file in the folder it belongs to.
- Log my time. At the end of the day, in a client folder: it reads the session history, the calendar and the email thread, works out what we did for that client, and writes the Harvest entry with a sensible note.
- File the invoices. Drop the month’s PDFs in the invoices folder. It renames each one with the customer, the service month and the invoice number and moves it into the right folder.
- Turn a meeting into a backlog. After a recorded call it pulls the transcript, saves it to the client’s transcripts folder and proposes the Linear issues that came out of the conversation, with the decisions quoted.
- Keep this website honest. The site lives in a Git repository. Claude edits copy, runs the accessibility and SEO checks, and opens a pull request. Merging it is what deploys.
- The monthly SEO review. Once a month a scheduled Claude session reads our search data out of Fabric, writes a short review and opens a pull request with the safe changes already made.
None of these took more than an afternoon to set up. All of them run weekly or more.
What we do not let it do
- Send anything to a client without a read-through.
- Touch pricing, contracts or the legal pages of the site.
- Guess at a number. If the data is not in the folder, the answer is “I do not know.”
Where to start
If you run a small business and want the same setup, start with the folder structure and the notes file. Then pick the single most annoying weekly task and describe it in a paragraph. That paragraph becomes the first instruction file. Everything above grew from that.
The tools are listed with what they cost on our toolkit page. If you would like help doing this in your own business, that is exactly what our AI Starting Point session is for.
If you want to try Claude first, this Guest Pass gets you started. It is a referral link: we get a small credit if you sign up, and you pay nothing extra.