Shanee Moret uses ChatGPT Work to help small-business owners audit their businesses, find deals that stalled and automate recurring jobs, from client follow-ups to invoicing. She is the founder of Growth Academy Global , based in Jupiter, Florida. Alongside teaching owners how to attract customers and use AI, she works directly with them to connect their systems and build agents that carry out tasks for them. Years ago, Moret began building a business online because she needed to work from home. Her daughter had been born premature and kept getting sick at daycare. When one illness put the baby in the hospital for 14 days, Moret was writing part time for a chiropractic staffing firm, earning about $400 a week.
“I need to find something where I can make money from home,” she remembers thinking. At the hospital, she searched for ways to earn money online and found LinkedIn. She offered free blog posts to prospects and landed her first client before leaving the hospital.
She kept finding clients through cold messages, but the calls were frustrating. Prospects failed to show up or tried to bargain her down. Moret started publishing content so people could discover her work and approach her.
By the pandemic, she had built an audience of about 300,000 LinkedIn followers. Business owners began asking her to teach them how to market themselves. She left the healthcare marketing agency she had helped build and turned to education, teaching entrepreneurs how to use LinkedIn and video to attract customers. “I get fueled by teaching,” she says.
When ChatGPT arrived, she began teaching that, too. In early classes, people tried speaking to it and became so absorbed in the conversation that they forgot she was in the room. Many owners could imagine asking it to help answer an email, she says, but did not think to ask whether it could build a website.
Codex made it possible for Moret to build and maintain her own website. Before Codex, that had meant paying a developer and depending on someone else to make changes.
Before her clients can use Codex to examine a whole business, they need to connect the systems that hold its information. Moret can spend two hours in a working session helping a CEO get those connections in place. Some owners do not know where to start. Others cannot remember the passwords they need.
Once connected, Codex can inspect the information and look for places where work is getting stuck. Moret says an audit can take around 30 minutes. In one company, it surfaced a $200,000 contract that had been waiting nine days for a one-line change. The work had stalled between people handing it off to one another.
The audit gives Moret and the CEO specific problems to work on. They decide which agents to build first and begin implementing them. Once the CEO has what they need, they take the same process to the team, looking at the work other employees do and where agents could help.
Moret also helps owners define what an agent can handle and when it needs their approval. She calls these rules human-agent standard operating procedures, or HASOps™. One owner may review every follow-up email, while another permits the agent to send within agreed guidelines. Others start by editing and sending drafts themselves, then authorize the agent to send once they have refined the process.
Moret works with ten clients at a time, often experts running businesses with ten to 25 employees. She keeps the group small so she can dig deep into where they are having trouble.
For one client, the immediate problem was a person leaving. The 65-year-old owner learned that the woman running her accounting department would not return from maternity leave. The owner was on the road and could not take over the work herself.
Moret helped automate the workflow with Codex, from handling requests for quotes to preparing invoices and following up. The owner told Moret that she now felt she could keep running her business into her 70s.
