Hiring Claude is the best recruitment decision I've ever made
How a small training business gave itself the capacity of a bigger business (without hiring a single person)
Presenting Virtually has spent nearly twenty years teaching people in big organisations how to present effectively. It's a small, niche business, just six people, yet its clients are global, multinational organisations.
Nearly all the value it sells is made live, in the room: an expert coach in front of a group, or one to one with an individual. And only a few people in the business can do that work, so their time is, in a real sense, the whole business. Every hour one of them spends writing up who attended a session or formatting a proposal is an hour they're not spending on the thing clients actually pay for, and the thing only they can do.
That's the squeeze, because the admin still has to happen. Attendance reporting was a fiddly, half-manual job nobody enjoyed, so it kept slipping. Proposals took the best part of a week to pull together. And the personalised reports Rob always wanted to send people after a programme? He rarely managed it, because writing them by hand took time he didn't have. None of it was a crisis. It was just a steady drip of hours pulled away from the work that pays.
Claude, built into the business
The change wasn't a clever gadget bolted on the side. Claude became part of how the business runs, day to day.
Now Rob talks to Claude and gets emails, follow-ups and personalised client reports drafted back in his own voice. Every corporate client has a proper knowledge base holding their context, instead of it being scattered across a dozen inboxes. And the course materials, facilitator guides, one-page summaries and slides now all live together in one place, consistent and ready to pick up.
It shows up most clearly in proposals. When Hana, who runs sales, comes back from a discovery call with a client's requirements, they're quickly and easily summarised, and a draft proposal can be ready within the hour.
What it's added up to
Finished proposals now go out in around 48 hours instead of most of a week, and they look better for it: a properly designed web page where there used to be a plain email. The personalised reports finally get sent. Because the materials are organised and ready to run, a new facilitator can pick a programme up and go, so the team can take on more work without taking on more people. And Hana gets to spend her time where she's genuinely brilliant, in front of clients.
The part worth being honest about
It hasn't fixed everything. Freeing up the delivery side simply moved the bottleneck along to the next thing: getting enough of the right leads through the door. Rob's the first to point that out, and it's where the next piece of work is.
"It's like having a new team member who's happy to turn a hand to anything: some finance, some marketing materials, some operations, some data analysis, and make a real difference across all of it. A thousand percent worth doing, especially for a smaller business. Small firms can end up more nimble than the big ones, and there's a real opportunity in that."
Presenting Virtually helps people in large organisations deliver high stakes presentations with confidence and clarity, on camera and on Teams, where most presentation training still assumes everyone is in the same room. Nearly twenty years of expertise, a proven framework of micro skills, and a team small enough to genuinely know the people they are coaching.
If your team presents to boards, investors or clients over video, Rob and the team are worth a conversation.