Three businesses. Three completely different worlds.
Three spreadsheets that were never going to get built the way they needed to be built.
All of it happened in the last thirty days. All of it done in under ten minutes. All of it by opening Excel, activating the Claude.ai plugin, and just talking.
Let me start with mine.
When we launched our nighttime operation for our logistics business in June of 2023, everything got more layered. Daytime runs vans. Nighttime runs 26-foot box trucks out to warehouses. Two different sides of one business, two different cost structures, two completely different revenue profiles. Fleet insurance alone runs just over a million dollars a year. If you are going to make real decisions about where to grow and where to pull back, you need to see both sides clearly. Pay bands. Benefits. Revenue by shift. Stacked, clean, and actually comparable.
I knew that. For almost three years I opened the payroll report, saw 130 names listed alphabetically, thought about what it would take to sort them into pay bands, layer in benefits costs, and build something I could actually use, and I found something else to do. Every time.
Then I opened Excel, clicked the Claude plugin, and described what I needed the same way I would explain it to a sharp analyst sitting across from me. The two operations. The pay band structure. What I wanted to be able to compare quarter over quarter. Before the ice in my iced tea melted, I had a brand new spreadsheet. Every employee coded by pay band. Subtotals clean. Revenue stacked against costs on both sides of the operation. A picture I had been putting off for almost three years, done in one conversation.
Here is the thing about the Claude plugin inside Excel. It is not a formula generator. It is not a help menu. It is more like someone who has spent the last twenty years doing nothing but spreadsheets, and has been quietly waiting for you to finally ask. You describe what you are trying to see. It builds the structure, explains what it built, and adjusts when you want something different. Multi-page worksheets. Dropdown cells. Subtotals. Live links. Whatever the job requires.
The week after that, a legal professional reached out. She creates constantly inside Claude. Client-facing documents. Social media content. Internal resources. The problem was that none of it had a home. Things were falling through the cracks. She was spending more time hunting for what she had already built than actually building. We opened Excel, activated the plugin, described the chaos, and asked it to build her an organizational system. Multi-page spreadsheet, dropdown categories, live links directly to her Google Drive files. Everything she creates, organized and findable from one place. Done while we were still talking.
Last week it was a client who is a coach, educator, and facilitator building a new business from the ground up. Powerful story. Profound mission. And a financial picture that was all vision and no numbers yet. We built her a full cost calculator inside Excel. Startup costs. Revenue projections. Breakeven analysis. She walked away with a tool she can use to make real decisions instead of hopeful estimates.
Three businesses. Mine with 130 employees and just over a million dollars in annual fleet costs and several million in payroll. A legal practice drowning in its own output. A coach building her foundation from scratch. The plugin did not care which world it walked into. It showed up for all three the same way. Expertly. Fast. Without making any of us feel like we should have figured it out sooner.
If there is something in your business you have been avoiding because the spreadsheet version of it felt like too much, open Excel this week. Turn on the Claude plugin. Just start talking.
In the arena with you,
Michele