Turn Any Process You Do Well Into an AI Prompt

There's something in your business only you can do properly.

Maybe it's how you size up a new customer. How you write a quote. How you handle the phone call when something went wrong. You do it well. You do it the same way every time. And it's never been written down anywhere.

That's a problem for two reasons. You can't hand it to anyone else, so you keep doing it forever. And if you ever step back from the business, it walks out the door with you.

Writing it down is the fix. The reason nobody does it is that sitting down to write a procedure from scratch is miserable.

So don't write it. Get interviewed about it instead.

What you need

ChatGPT or Claude. Thirty minutes. One process you know cold.

Step 1: Pick one thing

Just one. Pick the thing you do most often that nobody else in your business could do the same way.

Good examples: figuring out whether a new lead is worth your time. Putting together a price for a job. Handling a complaint.

Don't pick something huge like "run the business." Pick something that has a beginning and an end.

Step 2: Let it interview you

Paste this in:

CopyI want to write down how I do something so someone else could do it the same way.

The process is: [name it].

Interview me about it. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer before asking the next one. Ask about:
- What starts this process
- Each step in order
- The decisions I make along the way and what I base them on
- What a good result looks like
- What a bad result looks like
- What usually goes wrong

When you've got enough, write it up as a clear step-by-step procedure.

Important: The one-question-at-a-time part matters. If it dumps twelve questions on you at once, you'll skim them and give short answers. One at a time, you actually think.

Step 3: Answer honestly — especially the judgment parts

This is where most people short-change themselves.

When it asks how you decide something, don't say "it depends." Say what it depends on. If you turn down certain jobs, what specifically makes you turn them down? If you price some jobs higher, what tells you to?

Those judgment calls are the valuable part. The steps are easy. Anyone can be told to send a quote. Knowing what to put on it is the thing you actually know.

Step 4: Read what it wrote

You'll get a written procedure. Read it as if you were a new employee who'd never done this before.

Find the holes:

CopyStep 4 says to "assess whether they're a good fit." That's too vague. Ask me more questions until you can write down exactly what I'm looking at.

Go back and forth until someone could follow it without asking you anything.

Step 5: Turn it into something AI can run

Now the second half. Paste this:

CopyNow turn that procedure into a prompt I can paste into AI to do this task. Use clear blanks for the information I'd need to fill in each time.

You'll get something you can reuse. Test it on a real example from last week and see if what comes back matches what you actually did.

Step 6: Save both versions

You now have two things:

• The written procedure — for a person. Put it wherever your team can find it.
• The prompt — for AI. Save it somewhere you'll actually look, or save it as a Skill so it's always available.

Do this five times

One process is useful. Five is the start of an operations manual.

Pick the five things you do most often and work through one a week. In five weeks you'll have written down more of your business than most owners manage in five years.

Gotcha: The AI can only write down what you tell it. If you rush through the questions, you get a checklist that produces average work. The time you spend answering carefully is the whole value here.

What to do next

Hand the written procedure to somebody else and have them try it while you watch. Every place they get confused is a place your procedure has a hole in it. Fix those and you're done.