The Claude Power Move — How Business Owners Are Building Tools with AI
Presented by John Lawson on Jun 18, 2026
On June 18, South Florida marketers and business owners gathered for an energizing evening of learning, inspiration, and community at SFIMA’s latest speaker event. The guest of honor was John Lawson, multiple award-winning AI strategist, ecommerce veteran, and founder of ColderICE Media, who delivered a session that left attendees thinking differently about how they run their businesses.
The South Florida Interactive Marketing Association (SFIMA) has served the local marketing community for over two decades, bringing together professionals from across the digital marketing spectrum, from agency leaders and brand marketers to entrepreneurs and independent consultants. Our events are designed to deliver real, actionable insight from practitioners at the cutting edge of the industry, and John Lawson’s talk was exactly that.
John’s session, titled “The Cheat Code Your Competitors Are Already Using. And You’re Not,” challenged every business owner in the room to stop living with their broken processes and start using AI, specifically Claude, to build custom tools that solve real problems.
Here’s a look back at the key insights, frameworks, and use cases John shared during the evening.
The Real Problem with AI: You’re Not Short on Ideas
Before John got into tactics, he named the elephant in the room: most business owners fall into one of three camps when it comes to AI.
- The Hype Camp: They’ve heard it so many times they’ve tuned it out.
- The Skeptics: AI content doesn’t sound like them. It feels generic and unusable.
- The Middle Ground: They know the tools work, but they’re still waiting for the results people promised.
That third group is where most business owners live, and John’s session was designed to move them out of it.
His core diagnosis: you’re not short on ideas. You’re short on production. The gap isn’t creativity, it’s the ability to execute consistently at the pace the market demands.
You’ve Got Something Broken. And You Know It.
With that context in place, John shifted to the core premise of the evening. He asked the room to raise their hand if something in their business is broken, and they know it. The response was nearly universal.
He named the familiar culprits:
- The form that doesn’t work right
- The manual process that wastes time
- The report you rebuild in three spreadsheets every week
These aren’t abstract problems. They’re the recurring friction points that drain hours from your week, month after month. And most business owners handle them the same way: they price out a developer, hear “$3,000 and six weeks,” and put the problem on the back burner. Then it keeps costing them, every single week.
John’s message was direct: that ends today.
So What Exactly Is Vibe Coding?
The core concept John introduced is “vibe coding”, one of the most empowering reframes for non-technical business owners you’ll encounter.
Vibe coding works in three steps:
- Describe it: Tell the AI what you want in plain English, like you’re explaining a task to an employee.
- AI builds it: You watch it generate the tool in real time. You’re not writing code, you’re reviewing output.
- You refine it: Tell it what to change. Tweak it, test it, and you’re done. In the afternoon.
The key distinction is that you don’t write the code. You direct it.
You already have the core skill. You direct employees, contractors, and vendors every day. Vibe coding is the same skill, now applied to AI instead of a $3,000 developer. The goal is never to build apps for millions of users, Silicon Valley-style. The goal is a tool that solves your problem, in your business, this afternoon, for free.
Taking Claude from a Tool to an Actual Assistant
One of the most important points John shared wasn’t about building, it was about memory.
By default, every new Claude chat starts with a blank slate. You have to re-explain who you are, what you do, and how you work every single time. That’s the tool version of Claude, and most people never move beyond it.
The fix is Claude Projects. By training a project on your brand voice, audience, and content preferences, Claude retains that context across every session. No more repeating yourself, just getting work done.
Claude Projects: The Setup That Runs Forever
John walked us through what makes the difference between AI that sounds like everyone and AI that sounds like you: a properly built Claude Project.
Two things matter most:
- Brand voice: A 15-minute setup investment that runs forever. Once Claude understands how you communicate, it stops producing generic content and starts producing content that actually sounds like your business.
- The execution layer: The specific instructions and rules that tell Claude how to behave for every task inside that project.
When building out your project, think of it as writing a job description for a new content team member. That means covering:
- Your tone, voice, and energy
- Words and phrases native to your brand
- Things Claude should always do and never do
- Formatting preferences (no dashes, no emojis, paragraph length, etc.)
- Your content pillars and key themes
- A detailed picture of your audience: who they are, what they believe, what they fear, and what they want
The more specific you are in setup, the more useful Claude becomes in execution.
A Note on AI’s Built-In Quirks
John gave the audience a candid look at a couple of AI’s common habits. First, its love of dashes. Because AI models are trained on writing from around the world, certain patterns get deeply ingrained. You can reduce them by adding simple instructions like “no dashes” to your project settings.
Second, knowledge cutoffs. AI only knows what was available up to its training date, which is why enabling web search is so valuable. It lets the model pull current information and give more accurate responses.
The Project Setup Demo
John walked through a live demo of building a content project from scratch. The example he used: magnesium supplements for people over 50. He was deliberate about the specificity, being vague and letting AI pick your audience for you is a fast track to generic output. The more precise your topic and audience definition, the more useful the result.
Once the project was set up, he demonstrated asking Claude to “write for the week”, generating a full weekly content breakdown from a single prompt. He also flagged a common mistake: Claude may sometimes drift back toward its original training patterns rather than staying in the topic lane you’ve established. The fix is simple: redirect it. Tell it to pivot back to the subject matter you want.
One Use Case. Zero Apps.
John shared several examples of vibe coding in action, but this one felt especially relevant for marketers. Each solves a common bottleneck that typically requires expensive software, developer support, or hours of manual work.
Landing Pages & Funnel Components
The Problem: You’re paying a designer, fighting a page builder, or stuck with a template that doesn’t look like you.
The Build: Custom pages to your exact specs, layout, copy, form logic. You describe it, it builds it, you refine it. No developer. No subscription.
The common theme was simple: these aren’t groundbreaking new products. They’re everyday business problems that marketers encounter constantly. Vibe coding makes it possible to create custom solutions quickly, without needing a development team or a large software budget.
A True Story: The PDF-to-PowerPoint Problem
To make the concept tangible, John shared a problem he ran into while building this very presentation. He needed to convert a PDF into a PowerPoint. Simple enough, except it wasn’t.
ChatGPT gave him a six-step manual process. Adobe wanted $19.99 a month for Pro access. Doing it by hand meant rebuilding all 24 slides himself.
So he described the problem to Claude in plain English, under 60 words. Claude built a web app that accepts a PDF upload, converts each page to an image, and packages it into a .pptx file. A few refinements later, John had a fully functional, branded tool live at go.JohnLawson.com/pdf-to-powerpoint.
Free. Built in one session.
Going Further: AI Agents with Marblism
For attendees ready to go beyond one-off tools, John introduced Marblism, a platform that lets you create and deploy multiple AI agents, each assigned to a specific role in your business.
The concept is simple: instead of one AI doing everything, you build a team. Each agent has its own job, its own permissions, and its own automation logic. John gave the example of two agents from his own setup:
- Eva Email Organizer: Every 15 minutes, Eva sorts incoming email. She labels it, categorizes it, flags what’s important, and handles the organizational work that normally eats hours of inbox time.
- Sonny Content Creator: Sonny creates content and can publish it automatically, handling the production and distribution side of marketing without manual intervention.
With Marblism, you can build AI agents for a low price. Each one can be configured to automate a different part of your business, from content creation and publishing, to email management, scheduling, marketing tasks, and more.
The result is less a single tool and more an actual AI department: a set of dedicated agents working in parallel, handling the recurring operational work so you can focus on the decisions that actually require you.
Skills: Teaching AI to Do It Again, Perfectly
John introduced one more concept that clicked for a lot of people in the room: AI Skills.
Here’s how it works: you have AI complete a task from start to finish, a full workflow, a specific output, whatever you need. Once it’s done, you ask it to turn that process into a skill. Now that sequence of steps is saved and reloadable whenever you need it.
Think of it as teaching Claude a repeatable trick. The first time it figures out the steps; after that, the skill is loaded and ready. You don’t have to re-explain, re-prompt, or re-work. You just trigger the skill and it executes.
This is particularly powerful when combined with Projects: a well-built project gives Claude your brand context, and skills give it repeatable execution processes. Together, they turn a general-purpose AI into something that genuinely behaves like a trained team member.
How to Start: Three Things. That’s It.
John closed his instructional portion with a simple framework for getting started. No prerequisites. No technical background required.
- A problem worth solving: Not the biggest thing. Something annoying, manual, small enough to win fast. Momentum is everything early.
- A tool to build in: Claude, Cursor, Bolt, pick one. Free to start. You don’t need to understand it. You just need to open it.
- Willingness to describe it: Out loud, in plain English. If you can explain it to an employee, you can explain it to AI. Same skill.
The starting prompt to write down: “I need a tool that [does X]. My business is [what you do]. My audience is [who uses it]. It needs to [specific function]. Give me a working starting point.”
Fill in the brackets. Hit enter. That’s your first build.
What Not to Do
Don’t start with the hardest problem: You’ll get frustrated and quit. Start small, get a win, then go bigger.
Don’t expect perfection on the first try: Vibe coding is iterative. Describe, review, refine. It gets better every round.
Don’t outsource before you try: Give yourself one afternoon before you call a developer.
The Reframe That Matters Most
John ended the session with a reframe that landed quietly but clearly: You are not a non-technical person who can’t build things. You’re a business owner who knows how to direct AI to build exactly what you need.
The question he left everyone with: So, what are you going to build first?
Continuing the Conversation with SFIMA
One of the recurring themes of John’s talk was that the biggest advantage most business owners have is community, being around people who are a few steps ahead and willing to share what’s working. That’s what SFIMA is built on.
For more than 20 years, the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association has connected marketers, entrepreneurs, and digital professionals across South Florida through monthly events, expert speakers, and a community that genuinely wants to see each other grow. Whether you’re a seasoned marketing director looking to stay ahead of AI, a small business owner exploring new tools, or a professional building your network in a new field, events like John Lawson’s session are exactly the reason our members keep coming back. Practical. Inspiring. Actionable. No fluff, just insight you can use daily.
Thank you to everyone who joined us on June 18 and to John Lawson for an evening that genuinely moved the needle. We look forward to seeing you at our next SFIMA event.