Author: cvc2026

Every business has a supplier relationship that eventually turns sour — a contract that reads one way on the cover page and another way in the clause nobody read at the time. The instinct when that happens is to get angry, or to get a solicitor involved straight away. Neither is usually the fastest route to an actual resolution.

Read the contract like you mean it

Most supplier disputes aren’t really about who’s right. They’re about who can point to the exact wording, in the right order, without getting emotional about it. I had a case recently where a termination charge was being applied that didn’t square with what we’d signed — the cover page said one thing, a clause seven pages in said another. I used Claude to go through the whole contract clause by clause against the supplier’s own correspondence, and lay out exactly where the contradiction sat, in plain English, with the clause numbers next to it.

Write the email you’d want to receive

Once you know exactly where the disagreement is, the next job is writing to the supplier in a way that makes the disagreement obvious to them too — not aggressive, just precise. I had Claude draft the escalation email: what we’d agreed to, what they were now charging, and the specific clause that didn’t support it. No adjectives, no threats. Just the facts in the order that makes the other side’s position hard to hold.

Know when to stop doing it yourself

This isn’t a substitute for a solicitor when a dispute is genuinely heading somewhere serious — it’s what you do before that, so that if it does end up with a solicitor, they’re picking up a clean, dated, well-argued file instead of a fortnight of angry emails. Half the cost of a real dispute is the time spent getting the story straight after the fact. Getting it straight from the first email saves that, whichever way the dispute ends up going.

The paper trail is the point

None of this needed anyone to be a lawyer. It needed someone to read the contract properly, hold the two versions of the story next to each other, and write it down clearly enough that it couldn’t be talked around. That’s a couple of hours’ work with Claude instead of a couple of days chasing your tail — and a much better starting position if it does end up in front of someone qualified.

See how the workshops work →

Most of what gets written about AI and business comes from one of two places: hype from people who’ve never run one, or caution from people who are scared of it. I run one. This is what actually happens when Claude is genuinely part of how you work, not a slide in someone else’s strategy deck.

The board pack that tells the truth

When a month goes badly, the instinct in most businesses is to explain it away before anyone asks. What actually works is naming it plainly and putting it in context — one weak month inside a strong underlying trend, not a crisis dressed up as one. I use Claude to help me write that version: the one that respects the board enough to just say what happened and what’s being done about it, without the spin and without over-apologising for a single bad month.

Numbers a shareholder can actually read

Finance teams are brilliant at producing numbers nobody outside finance can follow. I use Claude to turn the underlying data into something a non-specialist shareholder can read in five minutes — a clean, normalised view of how the business is really performing, and an honest tracker of savings that have actually landed rather than been promised. It doesn’t replace the finance function. It makes what they produce usable by the people who have to make decisions on it.

Decisions that don’t have to land on my desk

Every growing business has the same problem: too many decisions still route through the owner, because nobody’s ever written down who’s allowed to decide what. I used Claude to help build a proper decision rights framework — who owns pricing calls, who can approve spend, where the line sits before something needs to come to me. Writing it down is the boring part. Getting it written down properly, in language the team will actually read and use, is where it earned its keep.

Checking someone else’s numbers before they reach the board

A supplier’s report landed on my desk recently with a confident headline and numbers inside that quietly contradicted each other. Rather than take it on trust, or get into a back-and-forth about who was right, I had Claude go through the report against the raw data underneath it, line by line, and show me exactly where the story broke down. That’s now just how I handle any report I didn’t build myself before it goes anywhere near a board pack: check it before you present it, not after someone else spots the hole.

Content in hours, not weeks

Marketing wants three weeks and a brief. Sometimes what you actually need is a landing page and a run of social content by Friday, tied to something happening in the world that won’t wait for a sign-off meeting. Claude gets a first draft — on brand, genuinely usable — done in an afternoon instead of a fortnight. Someone still has to tighten it and make the final call on what goes out. But the blank page stops being the bottleneck.

None of this replaces judgement

This isn’t about replacing anyone or chasing a trend for the sake of it. It’s about getting the boring, load-bearing parts of running a business done faster and more honestly, so there’s more time left for the parts that actually need a person in the room. That’s the whole premise behind the workshops: not the theory of what AI could do for a business, but the practice of what it actually does when an owner-manager uses it every week.

See how the workshops work →