The Claude skills I actually use to run deals and content.

Why I treat AI like a member of the team

Here's the thing most owners get wrong about AI. They open a chat window, type a question the way they would type it into Google, get an answer that could have come from anyone, and decide the whole thing is overrated. I did the same thing at first. Ask me how I know.

What changed for me was a simple reframe. I stopped asking the model questions and started giving it jobs. A job has inputs, a set of steps, a standard for what good looks like, and an output somebody else can pick up and use. That is exactly what you would hand a new hire, and it turns out a model does far better with a job than with a question.

A skill is a job written down. It is a plain text file, a page or two long, that tells Claude what the task is, when to reach for it, what to ask for, how to do it step by step, and what the finished piece has to look like. Below are the five my team runs most, in the order I would install them. Each one gets a paragraph on what it does and the exact first message to send to start it.

The five skills

1. Call corpus insights

This is the one I built first, and it is the one I am proudest of. The problem it solves is simple to state and brutal in practice: a model cannot read a thousand call transcripts at once, so it reads a handful, generalizes, and sounds confident. This skill refuses to do that. It interviews you about the questions you actually want answered, builds a schema, runs a pilot on a few calls, then processes every single transcript one at a time through a generated script, reconciles the file count against the rows, audits a random sample by hand, and only then answers with computed numbers and denominators. "Thirty four percent of one thousand calls" instead of "about a third." It also ships a dashboard and a briefing mode that tells you what changed since last month. The full plugin, with the question bank, the schema template and the dashboard, is in the download and public on my GitHub.

Start it with:

Use the call corpus insights skill. I have about 400 sales call transcripts in a folder. I run a services firm and I want to know what objections come up, how often we quote price on the first call, and which calls turned into deals. Interview me, build the schema, run the pilot, then process everything.

2. Podcast two voice master

Every episode of my podcast has two people on it, and no two microphones agree. One voice comes in hot, the other sits back, and there is always a little room in the recording. This skill runs a fixed chain with ffmpeg: a gentle high pass, slight neural noise removal, a touch of de essing, a measured level match on the quieter voice only, two to one compression with a soft knee, and a two pass loudness normalize to the podcast standard, strictly last. No adaptive gain riders, because those pump every breath up in the pauses. If you cannot hear what it did except that the episode sounds even, it worked.

Start it with:

Use the podcast two voice master skill on the attached episode. Two speakers, I am the louder one. Slight everything. Target the podcast standard and give me an MP3 for the host and a lossless master for the video.

3. Research brief

This one runs before anything gets written. It sweeps the last ten days for real, sourced events in my territory, buying and selling businesses, and digs past the headline into what the people involved actually said. Then it pairs each story with one of my own positions and runs a test I insist on: delete the event, and does the take still stand? If not, you have a news report, and nobody follows me for news. The output is a scored brief a team can plan a week from, with every number tied to a source.

Start it with:

Use the research brief skill. Territory: buying, selling, and valuing businesses. My positions: structure is often worth more than the headline number; most owners value their business way too high; a business that depends on the founder sells at a discount. Audience: owners doing one to twenty million in revenue. Interest worlds: guitars, wine. Burned list: nothing in the last 90 days. Sweep the last ten days and give me the brief.

4. Voice pass

Most drafts a model writes are accurate and anonymous. This skill rebuilds a draft out of the writer's real building blocks: the phrases they open with, the way they walk through numbers, the examples they reach for. The facts do not move. The sound does. It also strips the tells that make a piece read like a machine wrote it, then reports what changed so I can push back. If there is no voice profile yet, it builds one from transcripts first.

Start it with:

Use the voice pass skill on the draft below. Format: a 150 word LinkedIn post. Voice profile: attached. House rules: no hyphens, no em dashes, no "always." Keep every fact and number exactly as written. Show me the rewrite and then what changed.

5. Clip scorecard

A podcast or a coaching call is full of moments that sound great in context and fall apart as a 60 second clip. This skill reads the whole transcript, pulls twice as many candidates as we need, then verifies each one before anything is rendered: does it start at a real beginning, end on the resolution, and make sense to someone who has never heard of me? Every candidate gets scored and either cut, rescoped, or killed. Nothing ships because it was already picked.

Start it with:

Use the clip scorecard skill. Transcript with timestamps attached. Hero speaker: Roland Frasier. This week's themes: seller financing, earn outs, what a buyer actually pays. Target length 30 to 90 seconds. Privacy: a member's question is fine as setup, names and personal financials are not. Give me scorecards for the best eight, with an edit plan for each.

How to install them

Claude Code. Copy the five folders into the .claude/skills folder inside the project you work from. Put them in the same folder in your home directory if you want them everywhere. Claude finds them on its own. Say "use the voice pass skill on this" and it runs.

Claude app. Open a Project. Paste the text of a SKILL.md into the Project's instructions, or add the file to the Project's knowledge. Then ask for the skill by name. The call corpus skill has reference files next to it; add those to the Project too.

No accounts, no keys, no setup beyond that. They are text files. Edit them. The voice pass in particular gets better the day you replace the generic profile with your own.

One closing thought

A skill carries the process. The opinions, the stories, and the judgment about what to say this week still have to come from you. The positions are the part most people were hoping to skip, and I'll tell you, they are the only part that was ever worth anything. Get the process out of your head and into a file, and you get your head back for the work only you can do.