Nebo · tutorial 04 · win customers

Brief yourself before every external meeting

A short prep note for each outside meeting, on your phone by seven, short enough to read walking to your desk.

TimeAbout 30 minutes
Rolesexecutive-assistant
Triggerschedule

This is the recipe people keep. It is small, it runs every day, and it removes the specific embarrassment of walking into a call having forgotten what was agreed last time. It is also entirely read-only, which makes it the safest thing to automate first.

Steps

1

Hire and connect, read-only

Install executive-assistant into executive. Connect calendar, mail, and your CRM. In Controls, set every write operation to blocked, not approval. This role never writes anything, so remove the capability rather than gating it.

2

Define what counts as external

Give it your company's email domains explicitly. Everything else is external. Without this it will either brief you on your own standup or skip a meeting with a contractor who uses a personal address.

Our domains are acme.com and acme.co.uk. A meeting is external if any attendee is outside those domains. Skip internal meetings, personal blocks, focus time, and anything marked private.
3

Specify the brief shape exactly

Left unspecified, you get an essay. The value here is entirely in brevity, so constrain it hard.

For each external meeting today, in this order: 1. Who is attending and their role 2. The open deal: stage, value, expected close 3. What changed since we last spoke 4. The one thing this meeting must accomplish Four lines maximum per meeting. No preamble, no summary paragraph. If nothing changed since last contact, say "nothing since [date]" rather than padding.
4

Make it re-read the record

Memory is a convenience, not a source of truth. For anything consequential — deal value, stage, the last commitment made — it must open the record rather than recall it.

Never state a deal value, stage, or date from memory. Open the CRM record and read it. If you cannot reach the record, say so in the brief rather than filling the gap.
This is the failure that embarrasses you

A brief that confidently states last quarter's deal value is worse than no brief, because you will repeat it out loud to the customer. Making the "I could not reach it" case explicit is what stops the model filling silence with something plausible.

5

Schedule it for before you start

"trigger": { "type": "schedule", "cron": "0 7 * * 1-5" }

Seven on weekdays. Have it deliver wherever you actually read things at seven, which for most people is a phone notification and not an email that joins two hundred others.

Verify

  • Run it manually against a day you remember well and check every fact
  • Confirm it skipped internal meetings and included the contractor on a personal address
  • Confirm each brief is genuinely four lines, not four paragraphs
  • Deliberately break the CRM connection and confirm it says so rather than inventing

When it goes wrong

The brief arrives after the first meeting

The timezone input is unset, so the cron ran in a different zone. Set it explicitly on the employee rather than relying on a default.

It briefs on meetings that were cancelled

It read the calendar too early, or is not checking response status. Ask it to skip meetings where you or the organiser have declined.

Briefs are getting longer over time

Length creep usually means the constraint lives in a message rather than the persona. Move "four lines maximum" into the persona where it applies to every future run.