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Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.

This week we're joined by Loren Bartley, founder of Impactiv8, who helps service-based businesses build more profitable marketing systems in partnership with AI. Loren runs the AI Mega Success Academy and AI Mega classes, along with speaking, team training and coaching, and she's built out an AI "marketing team" of around 150 Claude skills that now do the work she used to need a much bigger human team for.

We get into what a skill actually is, and why it's a completely different thing to a prompt: a skill is a saved, self-contained set of instructions for one specific job, built with your standards, your examples and your edge cases already baked in, so you're not explaining yourself from scratch every time you need something done.

We also talk about why narrow, specific skills beat one giant "do everything" skill every time. Cramming every instruction into a single skill means it has more to read, more decisions to make, and a much higher chance of missing something or getting it wrong, not to mention the extra cost of all those unnecessary tokens. A skill that does one small job well, and does it brilliantly, is worth more than one skill trying to do it all.

For anyone starting from scratch, Loren's advice is clear: build your brand voice skill first, because that's what stops your content sounding like generic AI output. From there, look at the repetitive, mundane tasks eating your time, and build skills for the things you already know how to do well before you try to hand over tasks outside your own expertise. She also recommends pacing yourself, building and actually using one skill at a time rather than ten at once, because each new skill needs feedback and refinement, much like training a new team member.

We finish with the practical how-to: turning a chat you were genuinely happy with into a reusable skill, using Claude's record feature to walk it through a process step by step, or asking it to research frameworks for something outside your expertise and turning that into a skill. Loren also explains "coordinator" skills, where one skill knows which of your other skills to call on for each part of a job, and how Claude Projects let the same skills work across multiple businesses or clients, because the business-specific knowledge lives in the project, not baked into every individual skill.

Have you been asking yourself how you're supposed to keep AI output sounding like you without rewriting the same instructions every time? This episode is our answer.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand what actually makes a Claude skill different from a prompt, and why that difference is what saves you real time
• Know which skill to build first (brand voice) and why it lifts the quality of everything that follows
• Learn how to spot the repetitive, mundane tasks in your business that are worth turning into a skill
• Build skills for what you already know before trying to build skills for work outside your expertise
• Understand coordinator skills, and how a "team" of skills can work together to complete one job
• See how Claude Projects let you reuse the same skills across different businesses or clients without rebuilding them

Loren Bartley

Loren Bartley is the founder of Impactiv8, where she helps service-based businesses build more profitable marketing systems in partnership with AI. She runs the AI Mega Success Academy and AI Mega classes, and offers speaking, team training and one-on-one and small group coaching, with a particular focus on helping business owners build their own AI-powered marketing teams using Claude skills.

Connect with Loren Bartley:

Website: https://www.aimegasuccess.com/

Claude skills resource: https://www.aimegasuccess.com/claudeskills

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Disclaimer: The information shared on The Australian Small Business Show is general in nature and does not constitute professional advice, legal or otherwise. We recommend consulting with your advisors on your specific circumstances.