// AI FOR SMALL BUSINESS · LIVE ONLINE · FROM STAUNTON, VA
Stop reading about AI agents. Leave with one running.
You already know enough to start.
I’m Dan Bates. I run a web studio in Staunton, Virginia and rebuilt how it runs on AI assistants that do real work, not just answer questions. Now I teach small-business owners and fellow makers to set up their own.
8/25 · 11 AM · Free · Online
The chatbox answers. The assistant finishes the job.
Before · the chatbox
You act on the answer.
You ask. It answers. Now the follow-through is yours: copy it out, fix the voice, format it, send it. Every answer a chatbox gives you is homework.
After · the assistant
It acts for you.
You hand it the task. It reads your files, uses your voice, does the work, and brings back the finished thing for your review.
I run my studio on the right side, every day: Claude, custom skills, client pipelines. Not theory. My actual Tuesday.
// THE FREE SESSION
Curious first? Come to the free session.
A live online session where I explain, in plain English, what an AI assistant actually does for a business like yours. I show you the real ones I run in my own studio, and you can ask me anything. No setup, no cost, no sales pitch.
8/25 · 11 AM · Free · Online
Free · live online · no experience needed
// THE WORKSHOP
Set up your first working AI assistant.
Two live sessions on Google Meet, capped at 6. One ticket covers both.
Tuesday, September 15 and Tuesday, September 22, both 1 to 3 PM ET. One ticket covers both.
Session 1
We build the brain.
The knowledge base: plain documents that teach the assistant what you do, who your clients are, and how you sound, including the words it’s never allowed to use.
Between sessions
You feed it your business.
Real pieces of your work go in, and you start asking it questions. This is the homework, and it’s where it clicks.
Session 2
We give it hands.
One skill: a repeatable task it runs against everything it now knows. Plus the review habits that keep you in charge of what goes out the door.
Everything we build lives in plain documents and folders. It’s yours to keep, and it moves with you, even to a different tool later. We do all of it in Claude Desktop, which is free to start.
$150 founding seat. $250 after.
Hands-on · small group · you walk out with it working
// THE STARTER INSTALL
Rather have it built for you?
The Starter Install: I set up one assistant and one working workflow in your business, over two or three sessions, using the same patterns that run my studio. $750 founder rate for the first two clients, then $1,500.
Start with the free 15-minute call: bring me your biggest time-waster and I’ll tell you honestly whether this fits.
Book the free call →// WHY I BUILT THIS
I'm a practitioner, not an AI guru.
I run a one-person web studio in Staunton, Virginia. A couple of years ago I rebuilt how it operates around AI assistants that do real work, not just answer questions, and it changed what a single person can take on.
There is a lot of noise out there, and most of it is hype or slop. I teach the careful version instead: the exact way I work, so a small-business owner gets real help without the mess. That is the whole reason I do this.
Plain English.
If I use a term, I explain it on the spot. If you can describe your work, you can do this.
Every example is real.
Nothing I show you is a demo I don't use myself. It is the actual way I run my own studio.
You stay in charge.
The assistant takes the repetitive assembly. The judgment, the taste, and the relationships stay yours. It replaces the boring part, not you.
Start with the checklist.
Get the slides and a simple AI starter checklist: one task you can hand to an assistant this week. You'll also hear first when the next free session is booked.