How Bayley Stuart Got Its Whole Team Building in a Week

A keynote, five days of one-to-one coaching and one working automation per person took Bayley Stuart from installing Claude to running its own workflows inside a week.

Bayley Stuart · Commercial property investment management · Melbourne · One week

The challenge

Bayley Stuart is a ~ten-person Melbourne commercial property investment manager holding an AFSL, running almost entirely on email and documents with no in-house engineering function. The work that consumed them was the work that repeats - monthly and quarterly cycles across funds, asset management and office operations. Leasing hand-offs often took days; a lease summary cost external legal fees; one question relating to the fund model could remain open for days as the analysis was crunched.

In a team of ten, nobody can disappear into a week of training and nobody is spare to maintain something afterwards. Whatever got built had to be built by the people who would use it, and it had to be working by Friday.

Governance first

Bayley Stuart holds an AFSL, so the regulatory floor - ASIC, APRA, AUSTRAC, privacy, cyber resilience - is not optional. Before kick-off the COO was already drafting an AI Framework and Policy with external compliance advisers, built on seven principles including mandatory human oversight, privacy and data protection, and proportionality. We worked to that document: data residency, connector permissions and acceptable-use boundaries were settled with the firm's IT provider in the same week the team was learning to prompt.

The approach: one keynote, then five days side by side

Monday - the whole company in one room. A two-hour kick-off with live demonstrations built on Bayley Stuart's own leases and fund model, not sample data. The afternoon went on licences and connectors.

Tuesday to Friday - desk-side, one person at a time, building a skill against work they genuinely did that week. Two method choices did the work: nobody left their 1:1 without shipping their own first skill, and every question was put to Claude together rather than answered for them - teaching the mindset, not just the answer.

It moved fast because the firm arrived with its operations already in order - disciplined folders, categorised email, genuinely documented processes. Most of the cost of automating knowledge work is archaeology; Bayley Stuart had done that work already, so automations could point at real folders and a real documented sequence from day one.

What was deployed and built

• Claude installed for every member of staff on site, with the Microsoft 365 connector admin-consented at tenant level (governed SharePoint and mail access), plus Cowork, the Office add-ins and a Plaud meeting-recorder integration
• A Heads of Agreement skill - leasing minutes in; updated minutes, a drafted HoA and covering email out, in one pass
• A Lease Review skill - any lease in, a one-page analysis out, flagging early termination rights, incentive clawbacks and pro-rata repayments
• A batch-payment skill turning an Excel schedule into signed PDFs, plus monthly PDF/spreadsheet reconciliation, a newsletter builder and a scheduled email-to-PDF filing pipeline
• A client-owned skill library on SharePoint, filed by business line and indexed in a self-updating, version-controlled reference list, plus a written FAQ and best-practice handbook - both built to outlast the week

The results

• 100% of staff on site built and deployed their own first working automation, start to finish
• 4.75 / 5 overall, NPS +50, no detractors, nothing scored below four
• 5.00 / 5 that the week left people confident using Claude on their own work unaided, and 5.00 / 5 that they'll keep using what was built in their 1:1
• Automations live across funds, asset management and office operations
• Adoption spread with no internal mandate - the team member the firm expected to resist is now leading it internally

Scores from the post-engagement participant survey, four responses.

"It's not to reduce our team. It's to maintain our team - not grow exponentially - keep a good team of people and get a lot more efficient."

Andrew MacGillivray, Managing Director, Bayley Stuart

What happened next

Once we had gone, the firm independently turned the same approach on leasing - loading its own executed leases as reference material and surfacing commercially significant provisions for a decision, with every draft approved by a person. Participants have named further automations unprompted: condition reports, board reporting, and rental reconciliation against a live model. The 1:1 build-your-own-automation method is now Propel's standard delivery model for Claude enablement.

"We're a small team with no IT function, so the risk is that it gets built for you and then sits there. That didn't happen. Everyone built their own thing, which means we can keep going without needing someone from Propel to come back."

Piers Jalland, Head of Funds and Transactions, Bayley Stuart

The pattern that works

Governance before enthusiasm, so nobody has to slow down to ask if they're allowed. Every person builds, because doing it yourself teaches you what to ask for next. Then make that skill or asset part of the firm's IP, not the individual's - the best version promoted into a shared library is what turns a good week into institutional capability. It is repeatable for any document-heavy firm without an engineering team, and it travels at the speed of the operational discipline it lands on.

If that's the journey you're on, talk to us at propelventures.ai/contact. Propel Ventures is a partner in Anthropic's Claude Partner Network.