Time to implement: <5 mins
Key outcomes?
Every meeting is an opportunity. Most people waste it by showing up unprepared, winging questions, and leaving no impression.
The professionals who consistently win business, build relationships, and close deals all do one thing differently. They walk in already knowing the person's world.
Until now that took 45 minutes of research most people do not have. This recipe does it in 5 mins , with one tool and one prompt.
Ingredients:
Serves: 1 energy investor, founder, or operator with a meeting in the next 24 hours
Tools required: Claude (claude.ai, free tier works)
5 Minutes
TO IMPLEMENT
1 HOUR
TIME SAVED P/W
HOME COOK
DIFFICULTY
🧭 METHODOLOGY
Key steps
Step 1: Open Claude and enable web search (1 minute) Go to claude.ai on your laptop or phone. Sign in. Click on the small + icon in the message before. You will see a small globe icon in the message bar. Click it to enable Claude to research via the web.
Step 2: Paste the master prompt (1 minute) Copy the prompt from the Prompt Kitchen below. Fill in the bracketed fields in the section 1 [Meeting Context] and 2 [ Your background]. This will ensure the prompt is optimised for you. Click enter.
Step 3: Read the brief, pick your two points, practice (3 minutes)
Claude will return a structured brief: background on the person, recent activity, the company's current position, tailored conversation openers, smart questions, and a suggested area of common ground, all oriented around your stated objective.
Read it once. Do not try to memorise it. Pick the two points that feel most natural to you and let the rest go. The value is arriving informed, not performing a briefing you rehearsed.
Before you close your laptop, read your two chosen points out loud. This takes sixty seconds and makes a disproportionate difference.
PROMPT KITCHEN (COPY THIS)
ROLE
You are an expert executive coach and intelligence analyst preparing
[YOUR NAME/ROLE] for a high-stakes professional meeting. Your job is
to make them sound like they've known this person for years.
MEETING CONTEXT
Person: [FULL NAME]
Title / Company: [TITLE, COMPANY]
My relationship to them: [e.g. same firm, cold outreach,
existing contact, client]Meeting format: [e.g. 30-min coffee, formal pitch, internal review]
My objective: [e.g. explore collaboration, land a project,
teach them about X, get their advice on Y]What they likely want from this meeting: [your best guess,
or "unknown — please infer from their role"]
MY BACKGROUND (so you can find genuine common ground)
Role: [YOUR TITLE AND COMPANY]
Key projects / expertise: [2–3 sentences]
SPECIFICITY RULE (read before doing anything else)
Every single insight must trace to something real and verifiable —
a quote, a decision, a publication, a company announcement, a role
change. If a point could appear in a brief about any senior person
in [THEIR INDUSTRY], delete it. Generic observations are worse than
nothing — they create false confidence.
VERIFICATION RULE
If you cannot find real evidence for a section, say so explicitly
rather than filling the gap with plausible-sounding content.
Flag low-confidence findings with [UNVERIFIED].
RESEARCH STEP (do this before writing the brief)
Search for: recent interviews, published articles or reports,
LinkedIn activity, company news, conference appearances, and any
notable public statements by [FULL NAME]. Also research
[THEIR COMPANY]'s current strategic priorities and positioning
in [THEIR SECTOR].
Before writing the brief, state in 2–3 sentences what the most
strategically useful things you found are, and why. This is your
analytical anchor — the brief should flow from it.
OUTPUT: PRE-MEETING BRIEF
Write a tight, specific brief. Target ~400 words total.
Sections and guidance:
1. Who They Are (3 sentences)
Career trajectory — decisions made, pivots taken, what they've
built. Not a LinkedIn summary. End with one sentence on what
seems to drive them professionally.
2. What They're Focused On Right Now (2–3 points)
Recent and specific. Trace each point to a source.
Prioritise things from the last 6 months.
3. Their Company's Position in This Moment (1 short paragraph)
Current strategic priorities, recent moves, or tensions relevant
to [THEIR SECTOR]. Focus on what's relevant to my objective,
not a general company overview.
4. Conversation Openers (3)
Rules: peer-to-peer tone, not journalist-to-subject.
Each opener should do one of: reveal genuine knowledge of their
world, create a two-way exchange, or connect their reality to
my objective.
Good tone: "I've been thinking about X — curious if you're
seeing the same from your side."
Bad tone: "I'd love to hear your thoughts on..." /
"What's your view on..."
Label each with its intent: [Build rapport] / [Open my agenda] /
[Test alignment]
5. Questions That Show I Know Their World (2)
These are not ice-breakers. They should demonstrate that I've
done my homework and thought about their specific challenges.
Each question should be one they can't answer with a yes or no
and that they'd actually find interesting to think about.
6. What They Might Want From This Meeting (1–2 sentences)
Infer from their role, recent focus, and context.
This is what I should be ready to offer, not just receive.
7. Common Ground to Lean Into (1 point)
One specific, genuine overlap between my world and theirs.
Not "we both work in strategy." Something that would make
them think "oh, interesting — tell me more."
FAILURE MODES TO AVOID
Do not write biography that reads like a Wikipedia entry
Do not use hedging phrases like "likely", "probably",
"may be interested in" without flagging as [UNVERIFIED]Do not write openers that are just questions with a preamble
Do not pad — if a section has nothing specific to say,
say so and explain why
📡 CHEF’S UPGRADE
Upgrade your recipe
The base recipe requires you to remember to run it and fill in details. These upgrades progressively remove that requirement, first by making the workflow one sentence, then by eliminating your involvement entirely. Set it up once, runs forever.
Two levels. Pick the one that matches your ambition.
Level 1: The Calendar Integration
What it does: One sentence. Fully briefed for all meetings that day. Never leave Claude.
Remembers the prompt: The base recipe requires you to paste the full prompt each time you use it. Level 1 removes that step by saving the prompt permanently inside a dedicated Claude Project.
Scans your calendar: This recipe also connects Claude to your calendar, so it can see your upcoming meetings directly, pull the attendee details itself, and run the full brief without you filling in a single bracket.
Your entire workflow becomes:
"Brief me on my next meeting."
What you need:
Your calendar run on Google Calendar (Drop us a note if you want a tutorial on making this work with other calendar providers - its slightly more complex)
How to set it up:
Step 1: Create a new Project. Go to claude.ai and click "Projects" in the left sidebar. Create a new Project and name it "🤝 The Pre-Meeting Briefer".
Step 2: Add the system prompt. Inside the Project, click "Edit project instructions". This is where Claude stores its standing instructions for every conversation inside this Project. Paste the prompt from the ‘PROMPT KITCHEN’ above, with one small addition
When I ask you to brief me on a meeting, check my calendar using
the connected integration, identify the next external attendee,
and research them using web search.
[Copy the rest of the Prompt highlighted in the Prompt Kitchen section above]
Step 3: Connect your calendar. Still inside the Project, click "Add content" then "Integrations". Connect Google Calendar and grant the necessary permissions. Claude will now have live access to your schedule from within this Project.
Step 4: Enable web search. In the Project settings, confirm that web search is turned on. This allows Claude to research attendees in real time rather than working from training data alone.
Step 5: Test it. Open a new conversation inside the Meeting Prep Project and type: "Brief me on my next meeting." Claude will check your calendar, identify the next external attendee, research them, and return the full structured brief.
From that point, your daily prompt becomes: "What meetings do I have today and brief me on each external attendee."Claude handles the rest.
Note - This is possible with other calendar providers (Outlook, Apple Mail etc) but it is slightly more involved. If you’d like a tutorial for these drop us a message.
Level 2: The Automated Morning Briefing
What it does: Fully hands-off. Brief arrives in your inbox every morning. You never touch anything.
This level removes you from the process entirely. Your calendar becomes the trigger. Every time a new external meeting is detected, Make automatically fires the Claude prompt, researches the attendee, and delivers a formatted brief to your inbox. You don't initiate anything. It just arrives.
What you'll need:
Make (make.com). The automation platform that connects your calendar to Claude. Free tier is sufficient to start.
Claude API access (console.anthropic.com). A developer account that allows Make to talk directly to Claude programmatically. Five minutes to set up. Costs approximately $0.01 per brief generated.
How to build it:
The automation runs as a four-step scenario inside Make:
Step 1: Calendar / Booking Tool Trigger. Connect your calendar and set Make to check every 15 minutes for new external meetings. When it spots one, the scenario fires automatically.
Step 2: Extract meeting details. Make pulls the attendee name, company domain from their email address, and meeting title. These feed directly into your Claude prompt with no manual bracket-filling required.
Step 3: Send to Claude API. Make passes the extracted details into the master prompt from the Prompt Kitchen and sends it to Claude. Claude researches the attendee in real time and returns the complete brief.
Step 4: Deliver to your inbox. Make formats Claude's output as a clean email, timed to arrive 30 minutes before the meeting. Subject line: "Your brief for [Name] at [Company], [meeting time]."
The first time you receive one of these emails unprompted, fully researched, perfectly timed, for a meeting you'd half-forgotten about, it will feel like having a chief of staff.
Getting started: Search Make's template library for "Google Calendar + Claude" or "Outlook + Claude" as your starting point. If you'd rather have it built and working within an hour, this is exactly the kind of workflow we set up inside the ResourceFull community: [link].
🧑🍳 PAIRS WELL WITH
Recipe No. 2: The Daily Digest. Build your general market intelligence each morning so your Claude brief lands on a foundation you already have. You'll spot the relevant details faster.
Recipe No. 3: The Follow-Up Garnish. Close the loop before the momentum fades. The natural next step after every meeting this recipe prepares you for.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways we can help you:
1. AI Academy
Want hands-on support building these workflows into your daily routine? The ResourceFull community is where we implement these recipes together. Once we get to 100+ signups we’ll go live.
2. Partnerships
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📩 Written by Ollie. Feel free to send us deals, announcements, or anything else using the link below or via LinkedIn.
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