The 7-Day AI Setup
For founders and small teams who know AI could give them back five hours a week, but do not want to disappear into tool comparisons for a month. Seven days. One working setup. No generic productivity hacks.
Self-serve digital product, launching soon. Built by Growth Intel from the AI setups we run for our own practice and our advisory clients.
The state you are in
You signed up for ChatGPT, maybe Claude, maybe a Notion AI seat. You used them for a week. You stopped. The tools work, but they do not fit your week. You still do the same 11pm Sunday work. You still drop the same small tasks. The bottom twenty per cent of your week is still on your shoulders.
The problem is not the tools. The problem is that nobody set them up around your actual work. Every guide is either enterprise-flavoured (twelve-month transformation programmes) or hobbyist (seventeen browser tabs of prompts you will never use again). Neither fits a founder or operator running a small team.
This kit is the setup we use for our own practice and run for advisory clients in their first month. Seven days. Three foundational layers. One working operating layer at the end.
Inside the kit
Each day is a 45–60 minute setup task with a deliverable you walk away with. Together they cover the three foundational layers: your second brain, your AI assistant, and the workflows that connect them.
Day 01
Before installing anything, map the seven recurring tasks that drain your week. The ones you keep dropping. The ones you do at 11pm on Sunday. This is the actual operating layer AI needs to enter, not a generic productivity hack list.
The Weekly Drain Audit worksheet · PDF + working spreadsheet
Day 02
The honest tool-picker. We name the three foundational tools every founder or operator needs (your second brain, your AI assistant, your connector), and tell you which to skip. Specific to small teams under twenty people, not enterprise-flavoured advice that does not fit your week.
The Tool Decision Tree · PDF
Day 03
Set up the Notion (or Obsidian) backbone that everything else plugs into. The five databases you actually need (meetings, decisions, people, projects, prompts), with templates already wired together. Forty-five minutes of work, your second brain alive by lunch.
The Second Brain Notion template · importable
Day 04
The agent that pays for itself in week one: the meeting-to-action agent. Reads your meeting transcripts, surfaces commitments, drops them into your project tool. You configure it once in 30 minutes. It runs forever.
The Meeting-to-Action agent setup guide · PDF + workflow file
Day 05
The 25 prompts you will reuse weekly. Organised by intent (research, drafting, decision support, customer comms). Each prompt is named, tagged, and stored in your second brain so you find it in two clicks, not five tabs.
The Prompt Library · 25 prompts in your Notion database
Day 06
How the second brain, the AI agent, and the prompt library talk to each other. Three workflows that remove the manual copy-paste from your week. No-code, no Zapier paywall acrobatics, no overengineering.
The Automation Layer · three working automations · setup guide
Day 07
The seven-day review. What is working, what to drop, what to delegate next. Plus a delegation script for handing the running of your AI setup to a team member, so the system survives you taking a holiday.
The Seven-Day Review template + Delegation Script · PDF
Plus two bonuses
+1
When the tool you picked on Day 02 gets replaced by something better in six months (it will), here is how to swap without rebuilding everything from scratch. The three things to lock in, the three things to keep portable.
1,400 words · PDF
+2
Quarterly drop of 25 new prompts as the AI landscape shifts. Delivered to your inbox, ready to paste into your Notion library. Free for the first year. The kit stays alive instead of going stale.
Ongoing · quarterly email drop
The buyer
Founders, operators, and small-team leaders (under twenty people) who want AI to actually carry weight in their week, not just sit in a tab. You are not building an AI strategy for the board. You are trying to get five to ten hours back, every week, in a setup that survives the tools changing.
The operator
Growth Intel is an independent practice built from twenty years of operator roles across financial services, edtech, partnerships, and workforce development. The kit is the AI setup we run for our own practice and the one we hand to advisory clients in the first month of engagement.
The kit is not theoretical. Every component is something we use weekly. The Meeting-to-Action agent runs every meeting we take. The Prompt Library is the library we use. The Automation Layer are the ones running in our own Notion right now.
If it is not working in our own practice, it is not in the kit.
Why this kit
We kept having the same conversation with small-team operators. They were six months into trying to use AI, frustrated, and they could not tell whether the problem was the tool, the prompt, or the workflow. The diagnosis was almost always the same. They had picked the wrong tool for the layer they needed to fix, skipped the second-brain setup, and were trying to use AI as a one-off rather than as an operating layer.
This kit is the version of the conversation we wish they had had in week one. It would have saved them four to six months of trial and error.
If you would rather have the conversation live and have us run the setup with you, the AI Operating Layer Sprint covers the same ground in three sessions over two weeks.
Questions
No. The setup is no-code. If you can use Notion and have copy-pasted a URL into Zapier or Make once, you have the technical floor required. The agents and workflows are pre-configured templates you adapt.
Yes. The methodology is model-agnostic. We recommend starting with the model you already pay for. Where a specific model is meaningfully better at a task, we note it. The setup survives a model swap.
That is the bonus #1 problem and it is real. The kit is designed around three foundational layers (your second brain, your AI assistant, your connectors) that are portable. The specific tools change. The architecture does not. We update the Tool Decision Tree quarterly.
Yes, if you are full-time on it. The seven-day pacing is calibrated for someone with a full week of other work, doing 45–60 minutes per day. If you have a Saturday free, you can compress days 01 through 04 into one sitting.
Both. The templates are the deliverable. The thinking is in the framing: what to install, in what order, for which kind of work. Most AI advice gives you the templates without the order of operations. The order is the kit.
Fourteen-day, no-questions refund. You will know by Day 03 whether the kit is for you.
Begin
The 7-Day AI Setup. Seven daily guides, the Second Brain Notion template, the Meeting-to-Action agent, the Founder Prompt Library, the Automation Layer, and two bonuses.