From owner-only to the whole team on HQ.

What was the problem?

On 23 July an audit found the setup was owner-only: 86 skills built in eight days that only Rory could use. That's the most common way HQ stalls. One person gets it and the team doesn't.

What changed?

After we onboarded onto HQ in July 2026, 9 of our 10 people had built their own improvement. Improvements logged on our improvements wall: 7 in June, 18 in July, 53 in August, 90 by the end of September.

Three stories behind the numbers

The 3D creative grid

Connor built a grid that maps every live ad by who it's for, what format it is and which emotion it plays on. It rebuilds itself from Meta, ClickUp and customer surveys, and the empty cells are the brief. The result: 369 ads re-mapped to their correct audience and 173 winners labelled. See the use case.

Ryan, from zero to his own stock system

Ryan runs our warehouse floor. In August, in his own words: "As everyone knows my AI work has been zero." By 28 September he had built a 19-item stock list in ClickUp with a reorder level on each item. When one drops, it flips to ORDER NOW and his manager is pinged. On the way he had Claude read the day's orders and tell him the exact prints needed by sport, so there's no more guessing or wasted ink.

Jude, useful from day one

Jude started on 21 September to take over social media. What his predecessor knew was already in HQ: step-by-step playbooks, a library of winning posts, and one dashboard across every account (13 measures, 306 posts). He spent week one learning the business, not hunting for passwords.

What's running today?

47 skills and 16 agents, including an inbox agent that drafts but never sends, a Friday bookkeeping run, a nightly creative board, meeting notes into HQ, and an agent that audits the other agents. 236 subscribers were paused instead of wrongly charged in one cycle.

What would this look like for you?

If your founder uses HQ and the team doesn't, start with a team day. If nothing is connected yet, a full build.

All figures are Shirt in a Box's own. Your results will differ.