How to Set Up Claude's Free Small Business Plugin

If you pay for Claude and it still doesn’t know your business, start here. Anthropic gives away a plugin called Claude for Small Business. It comes with 44 skills for proposals, follow-ups, invoices, hiring and marketing, and a setup that interviews you about your business so the skills stop guessing. It costs nothing on top of a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise plan, and the setup takes about 15 minutes.

I set Claude up for teams for a living, so I read the plugin the way I’d read a competitor’s: its setup instructions are public on GitHub, so you can see exactly what it asks and where your answers go. Here’s how to set it up well, and the four things it won’t do once more than one person uses it.

Install it

From Anthropic’s tutorial, on the web or in the desktop app:

1. In Claude, select Customize in the left sidebar, then Plugins.
2. Open Discover and select Small Business, then Add.
3. Start a chat and say “get me started”. That runs the setup skill, smb-onboard.

It will offer to connect your tools along the way, like QuickBooks, HubSpot or Google Workspace. Claude never connects one for you: you start each sign-in yourself.

What the setup asks

The setup starts with what’s hardest right now (money, customers, scheduling or getting organized) and which tools you already use for each. Then it runs one real task on your data, so you see something useful before you’ve typed much. After that it asks seven questions, one at a time, about your business and how you want things to look. If you’re short on time, it can get by with three.

It ends by showing you a draft profile of your business and saving it only after you approve it. Then it recommends three to five skills to start with, and tells you what to say to run each one.

Answer it like you’re training a new hire

The interview is only as good as your answers, and most people answer it like a form. Treat it like a new hire’s first day:

• Give real numbers. Your actual prices, your minimum project size and what you charge for a rush. “It depends” teaches it nothing. Say what it depends on.
• Say what never goes out. Discounts you don’t offer, clients you can’t name, promises only you make. This is the part people skip, and it’s the part that saves you.
• Show your voice, don’t describe it. “Friendly but professional” describes everyone. Paste two emails you were proud of instead.
• List the names it will mishear. Clients, products, teammates. Call transcription hears unfamiliar names as common words. Ours once turned a teammate into a software company.

Three skills to try first

Every skill asks for your OK before it sends, posts, pays or writes to your systems, so trying them is low-risk.

• proposal-builder. Paste your notes from a sales call and ask for a proposal. It’s the fastest way to see whether the interview worked: if the prices are wrong, fix them in your profile, not in the draft.
• inbox-manager. Let it go through your email and tell you who’s waiting on you. In our company, that question surfaced 626 threads in four months where someone outside was waiting on a reply (that story).
• monday-brief. A weekly summary of where the business stands. The setup offers a Monday check-in, and it’s worth saying yes.

One honest limit from the plugin’s own README: it doesn’t give financial, tax, legal or HR advice. Have a professional check anything in those areas before you act on it.

What it won’t do for a team

For one owner, this plugin might be all you need. The gaps show up when five or fifteen people use Claude, and they’re the same gaps whether you use this plugin or not.

Your business profile is yours, not your team’s. The setup saves what it learns to your own Claude memory. Anthropic’s pages don’t describe a way to share it, so each teammate runs their own interview, and ten people end up with ten versions of your prices. On Claude Team, the fix is to write the rules down once and put them on every seat. An owner can upload them as a skill that’s on for everyone (organization skills), or ship them as a plugin marked Required, which nobody can remove (organization plugins). The team check walks through the first one.

It works when someone asks. The best work happens before anyone’s awake: drafts from yesterday’s calls, follow-ups for leads that wrote at 11 PM. Cowork can run a task hourly, daily, weekly or on weekdays, even with your computer asleep (scheduled tasks). Someone has to decide which jobs run, and write them so they’re worth reading.

Someone has to decide the rules. Who can let Claude send email without a click, whether feedback can be used for training, what never goes into Claude at all. On Team, those are owner decisions, and they don’t make themselves.

It doesn’t keep itself current. Claude changes fast, and a feature that works one way this month can work differently next month. Your prices change too. A profile written in October is wrong by spring unless someone owns it.

Where to go from here

Install the plugin this week and do the interview properly. If you run a team and want to know which of those gaps you have, the team check takes two minutes: ten boxes, your three biggest gaps, and how to fix each one, with the exact clicks and a template to copy.

If you’d rather not close them yourself, that’s what I set up: standard Claude Team, your company written down once and on every seat, and jobs that draft the work overnight. One job live by day 14 and your team using it weekly by day 30, or your money back.