A running account of starting a consulting business from scratch, with Claude driving and me making the calls: the LLC, the banking, the books, a CRM, a brand, a client portal, and what it looks like to do the same work for clients.
September 10, 2026 – October 30, 2026 · Start with Part 1 →
Clarent Consulting LLC exists. New York over Delaware, an Albany address to dodge the Manhattan publication bill, and what Northwest Registered Agent was — and wasn't — worth.
The obvious move was to turn brettchereskin.com into the consulting site. I did the opposite — and set up the business domain, email, and files so the LLC can stand on its own.
Opening the LLC's account took twenty minutes. The surprise was realizing how convoluted my personal money movement had become — and that the fix was the same tool.
No QuickBooks, no bookkeeper, no numbered chart of accounts. A spreadsheet built around Schedule C, a receipts folder that sorts itself, and Claude reconciling against the bank feed.
Three real relationships and no revenue isn't a pipeline. I built the system of record anyway — Attio, fed by Granola and Claude — because the first time you need a CRM is exactly when it's too late to set one up.
The AI-generated emblem was the brief, not the file. Rebuilding it properly taught me more about brand work than the generating did — and the first thing it went on was a golf sign.
Colors, type, spacing and a logo I finally stopped fiddling with, all in Figma, all turned into code, and live on the site the same night. Plus the font I had to give up.
A private place where clients upload what I ask for and pick up what I deliver, built in a day. The best part was asking Claude to review the whole thing afterwards and finding the system had three names for the same idea.
Four versions in three weeks: a placeholder login, a real portal, a draft stage once Claude could publish to clients, and a one-click link to the CRM. The lesson was that the portal's job was never storing files.
Attio was the right first CRM. It just couldn't see the two systems my engagements actually live in, so the CRM moved into the same database as the portal, with four pipelines and three ways to sync mail.
Domain, email, shared drives. Then, more often than not, the fast follow is smarter email rather than a homepage, because email is where a small business meets its customers every week.
The first place a small business's brand shows up isn't its homepage. It's the email it sends next week. My own first client email, with its logo turned to grey dots, taught me to do brand foundations first.
A skill knows how to write the email. A routine knows when. Resend makes it come from the business. How the three fit, the guardrails we started with, and why this beat an email-marketing tool.